![]() ![]() As if to cinch the connection between presidential dishonesty and his own sci-fi premise-which raised the stakes from a moon mission to a Mars landing-Hyams reached back to the cast of All the President’s Men for his villain. ![]() Hyams may not have invented the idea that the moon landing was a fake, but he was smart enough to translate it into a feature-film script in the late 1970s, at which point the ordeal of Watergate had made such machinations seem entirely plausible. ![]() ![]() My generation was brought up to believe television was true, and that was bullshit too.” His amazement at the footage of the moon landing stemmed from the fact the “only verification we have that anyone reached the surface of the moon came from one camera.” This in turn led him to imagine a scenario where such a broadcast was stage-managed by sinister forces, either to hide the fact of real-life failure or to capitalize on the unifying patriotism of the space race in a moment when American life was more fractured and factionalized than ever before. “I grew up in the generation where my parents basically believed if it was in the newspaper it was true,” he told Empire. But while Johnson was working with the benefit of 40 years of wild-eyed hindsight-and drawing on the anxious style of vintage ’70s movies to do so-the original cover-up classic is Peter Hyams’s 1978 thriller Capricorn One, a striking hybrid of The Manchurian Candidate, All the President’s Men, and Planet of the Apes (with a bit of North by Northwest thrown in), that doubles subtextually as one of the era’s most damning Vietnam parables and makes First Man’s dead-eyed credulousness look even less interesting by comparison.Ī former war correspondent who also worked as an anchorman for a local Boston television station (where, shades of Ron Burgundy, he was considered a “glamour type”), Hyams was around when televised coverage of the Apollo missions was a monocultural event, drawing huge ratings-a phenomenon that he viewed with a mix of cynicism of frustration. (A shot where his character shakes hands with the great director radiates with more hubris than humility, but that’s Johnson’s brand.)Ĭontrasted with the sober, bristling authenticity of Damien Chazelle’s First Man-which has had a bit of a rough takeoff into the fall’s Oscar race, with mixed reviews and middling box office returns- Operation Avalanche reps the same skepticism as “Man on the Moon,” with its implied suggestion that the space race was just so much sleight of hand-that “if you believe there’s nothing up his sleeve,” well, shame on you. Rodney Ascher’s terrific essay film Room 237 references these accusations as part of a larger consideration of obsessive Kubrick fandom, while the clever Canadian writer-director Matt Johnson satirized the same bit of crypto-film-historical lore in 2016’s very funny Operation Avalanche, in which the filmmaker cast himself as the actual auteur behind the hoax, with Kubrick reduced to a CGI cameo. Why ‘Invasion of the Body Snatchers’ Is the Other Scariest Movie of the 1970sīy the time Stanley Kubrick made 2001 in 1968, special effects had gotten so advanced that the images of futuristic interstellar travel were as convincing as anything on the evening news-to the point that within a few years, the director would be accused of partnering with NASA to fake the moon landing on an Alabama soundstage. A decade later, rumors of a UFO crash in Roswell, New Mexico, circulated in off-the-grid publications and infected the next 60 years of science fiction from Invasion of the Body Snatchers to The X-Files. In 1938, Orson Welles inverted the Great Moon Hoax by staging The War of the Worlds as a live radio news broadcast, cheerfully illustrating the principle that a lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes. Kaufman is the soul of “Man on the Moon,” but Stipe’s lyrics also refer to a larger bit of American counter-mythology-namely, the culturally embedded suspicion that the 1969 Apollo 11 mission (and the triumphal media narrative that ended with Neil Armstrong’s “one giant leap for mankind”) was nothing more than fake news.Įver since the Great Moon Hoax of 1835, the relationship between official accounts of outer space and hysterical, earthbound conspiracy theories has been inextricable. “If you believed they put a man on the moon,” sang Michael Stipe, evincing uncertainty in honor of Andy Kaufman, a peerless put-on artist whose love of masquerade-everything from off-the-clock alter egos to pro wrestling villainy-made him a true icon of untrustworthiness. ![]()
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