Part of the reason for the industry's change of heart may have been that Mr. The BritishAmerican production company ITC Entertainments snapped it up, and Warner Brothers promptly agreed to distribute it. “It wasn't an’ Isn't this interesting, let's discuss it.’ It was ‘Get your car out of the parking lot.’ “īut things were very different when he tentatively sent out the manuscript again four years later. “But the reaction was adamantly no,’ he recalls. Eventually, he wrote the screenplay and hawked it around the studios. Hyams didn't (and doesn't) actually believe that the Apollo missions were faked, but he found himself more and more obsessed with fantasies of astronauts excitedly describing moonrocks to a rapt nation in between restsessions at some Holiday Inn in Phoenix. My idea was peanuts beside that, much smaller in scope and scale and probability.” Think of all the planes involved, all the barracks that had to be built, all the beds that had to be made, all the meals that had to be cooked. And the only verification we have that anyone reached the surface of the moonĪnd was a fraudulent space‐shot, he asked himself, really so very implausible? Didn't the long‐unacknowledged part the United States played in the early days of the Vietnam War indicate that such an undertaking could easily be sanctioned and organized? “Think of it-a country bombing another country for eight months without anyone knowing about it. But there was one event of really enormous importance that had almost no witnesses. All right, you couldn't invent the Olympics, because there would be too many people watching. One evening he was presenting a news item dealing with the Apollo program when the idea struck him: “I was thinking how easy it would be to manipulate an event in a television age. The plot of the film sounds as if it must have been custom‐built for an America still tense with post‐Watergate paranoia but, oddly enough, its young writer‐director, Peter Hyams, put together the script back in 1972, when he was a reporter with CBS‐TV in New York and that fateful burglary had yet to take place. Such skeptics can take heart from a new movie, “Capricorn One,” which involves a fanciful Mars landing foisted on a credulous public by astronauts no more than a microsecond's rocket ride from mission control in Houston. And NASA's mail reportedly suggests that in America a much more substantial minority suspects that the moon program was all a gigantic hoax. LONDON In Britain, there is a vociferous organization that calls itself the Flat Earth Society and is dedicated to exposing all astronomers since Galileo as dupes or frauds, collectively propagating the lie that the planet is round.
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