Moonwalk One (1970)

Moonwalk One is a 1971 feature-length documentary film about the flight of Apollo 11, which landed the first humans on the Moon. Besides portraying the massive technological achievement of that event, the film places it in some historical context and tries to capture the mood and the feel of the people on Earth when man first walked on another world.

A year and a half before the Apollo 11 flight, NASA had approached Francis Thompson Inc about making a very ambitious film telling the story of the whole Apollo program, culminating with the landing on the Moon. Francis Thompson and his partner Alexander Hammid were at that time generally regarded as the best documentary filmmakers in the USA, having won fame as the creators of the hit of the 1964-65 New York World's Fair To Be Alive!, a multi-screen film which played to overflow crowds and garnered the Academy Award for Documentary Short Subject in 1966. The NASA film had the working title of Man in Space. It was to be a theatrical production of several million dollars at minimum, with funding and distribution supplied by MGM, and would have included a re-enactment of the moonwalk on a sound stage.

The Francis Thompson company even conducted preliminary shooting during one or two of the earlier Apollo missions, but in early 1969 because of reshuffling at MGM, the project lost its backing. Both Francis Thompson and NASA frantically sought funding elsewhere but nothing resulted, and Thompson began to turn his attention to another project. Six weeks before the launch of Apollo 11, NASA called again and said that although the big-budget film was obviously dead, they did not want this event to 'slip through their fingers', nor did they want to make the kind of industrial film which was usually produced after each mission. NASA said they could scrape together $350,000 and wanted to know if Thompson could do anything with that. Already involved with another project, Francis turned to Theo Kamecke, who had edited To Be Alive! and had since gone on to direct other films independently. Bill Johnnes came on board as line producer because he had been involved with the ill-fated MGM production and was already familiar with many of the necessary contacts.

Since the time was so short, Kamecke's immediate challenge was to scout the location, determine what to shoot, and select the several film crews that were going to be necessary for capturing an event happening over a very short period of time. It was during this scouting trip to Cape Canaveral that the idea came to him to begin the film with Stonehenge, which he had seen on a sunless dawn the year before while in England shooting another film. The two efforts, Apollo and Stonehenge, seemed inseparable.[1]

At the moment of the Apollo 11 launch, Kamecke had asked his camera crews to resist the temptation to look at the launch themselves, but instead concentrate on the faces of the people watching. He himself was in Launch Control with a NASA cameraman and was the only civilian ever issued a pass to the Firing Room. During the moonwalk he was in Mission Control MOCR in Houston, Texas. The remainder of the film was researched and planned out after the launch in July, and the treatment written and delivered just a short time before the trip to England to film Stonehenge.

In the weeks before the launch Theo Kamecke flew to Washington D.C. to meet the appropriate people at NASA, and get his bearings on the film. He was hoping that because they had come to Francis Thompson in the first place, they wouldn't be wanting a laundry-list type of film. The man who ran Public Relations for NASA, Julian Shear, had come from a substantial career in television broadcasting, was very savvy, and knew that by the time the film was finished the public would already be saturated with media about Apollo, and that the film would have no box office appeal. He asked Kamecke not to worry about that, but just to make a time capsule.