The Right Stuff (film)

Cafe Society
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I was working at Edwards AFB when The Right Stuff was made. I was even an extra in it. (Alas, not in the final cut.) This is one of my favourite films because, I was there, man! OK, I wasn’t there in the time period depicted in it. (Heck, I wasn’t old enough to drink when I started there!) But I smelled burning kerosene every morning, and was greeted by a large photo of Jack Ridley as I walked into Mission Control. I’d see X-planes sitting on the ramp every day, and sometimes I saw them fly. My badge would get me into NASA when I was on the Space Shuttle Support Team. On the B-1B team I drove by Doug Benefield’s Porsche 924 on the way to the hangar, waiting in the lot for its owner who would never return. The ‘arthritic’ (as described in the book) Joshua trees grew everywhere. (‘You know when you’ve been in the Antelope Valley too long when you think of Joshua trees as real trees.’) I never met Pancho Barnes, but I learned to fly at Barnes Aviation. The heat, the wind, the big ‘M&M’ hangars where the film was shot… all were familiar to me. Plus I got vacation pay and minimum wage and excellent food for being an extra on the film.

What a film! Despite its many inaccuracies and liberties. When Apollo 13 came out, The Right Stuff paled a bit. Apollo 13 was a much more serious film, while The Right Stuff was almost a comedy – was a comedy in several parts. The former took pains to maintain accuracy; the latter, as I said, took liberties. Still the Antelope Valley part of the Mojave Desert is beautiful, both on-screen and in real life. And I was impressed that the makers of The Right Stuff went to the effort of including a very convincing stand-in for the D-558-2. There’s one on a pedestal at the local college.

The book is better, but the film is beautifully shot and well acted. Casting was great. Sorry, Ron Howard. Scott Glenn ]is Alan Shepard; not Ted Levine! And Fred Ward made a great Gus Grissom. Even looked a bit like him. Speaking of whom, this is my One Big Complaint of The Right Stuff. Grissom was slandered. Yes, his hatch blew. Yes, he was suspected of having blown the hatch. But he was officially exonerated. If he really ‘screwed the pooch’, I don’t think it likely he would have commanded the first Gemini flight, nor the tragic first Apollo mission. The film made him out to be a screw-up, and I think it’s an unfair depiction. But back to casting. Pancho Barnes wasn’t so attractive as she was depicted in the film. Not to be unkind to a great aviation pioneer and famed friend to pilots, but she really wasn’t very attractive. I liked Chuck Yeager as ‘Fred’. (‘Y’all want a drink o’ whisky?’) Jeff Goldblum and Harry Shearer were great as the Recruiters, though the scene aboard the aircraft carrier was a bit over the top.

One shot that always bugs me is when Yeager flies the X-1 to break the sound barrier. Barbara Hershey is standing next to a jeep. When Yeager hits mach 1 and the boom is heard, people think he’s ‘bought the farm’. Hershey, her arms crossed, looks down in loss. Only they used another take of that shot before the boom. There was no reason for it. It’s a nitpick, I know, and nobody else noticed it. It’s just that it’s always bugged me.

The Right Stuff is where I first heard ‘pudknocker’. We have woodpeckers up here, and I call them pudknockers. My g/f at the time (well, mid-to-late-'80s) and I would frequently say, ‘There aren’t any snakes here, are there?’ ‘Yeah, in the bushes.’

Living in the area in my mid-teens to mid-20s, flying in the same endless blue bowl of the sky that the test pilots did, working at Edwards and knowing a bit of the culture, and having been young when the film debuted might colour my perception of The Right Stuff. It’s not all whiz-bang like Top Gun and its knock-offs would be, and which excited general viewers. The Right Stuff won critical acclaim and four Academy Awards, but it still lost money on its original release. I guess audiences weren’t ready for a historical drama – even with added comedy – and preferred wait for the red-hot fighter jocks and rock soundtracks. Apollo 13 was more in the vein of The Right Stuff and did very well. I wonder how it would have faired in the early-'80s, or if no one knew Tom Hanks?

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Count me in as a huge fan of that film.

I think it is perhaps too long for our short-attention-span-society-in-general.

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We used to have a Cocker Spaniel named Gordo because of that movie.

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Was he the best cocker spaniel you ever saw?

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Lol…he got my dad in the local paper. It was the anniversary of the Apollo missions or something like that and they were doing interviews at the mall for anecdotes to put in the article. They just happened to stop my dad and asked him about his memories of it and NASA in general. He told them that we named our dog after Gordo Cooper and so they were all over that and featured it in the article.

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I’m sure she’d appreciate your kindness but… um… she was homely. At best (although apparently she took great care with her hands and nails, so those looked great). At one point she traveled through Mexico disguised as a man, and even then was considered [del]ugly[/del] homely.

She wasn’t hideous, and she certainly made the effort to look her best, but no, she wasn’t known for being a beauty. Her personality more than compensated for it, apparently. She certainly never seemed to lack either friends or male attention.

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Cites:
http://www.e-adventure.net/sky/aviation/images/barnes01.jpg
http://womenaviators.org/wiki/images/6/6a/Panchobarnes1.jpg
http://www.airportjournals.com/Photos/0711/X/0711008_1.jpg

She was not unattractive when she was younger:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/5/5e/02_PanchoBarnes.jpg/220px-02_PanchoBarnes.jpg
http://www.colapublib.org/history/gifs/antelopevalley/thumbs/29.gif

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Jane Dornacker, who played the nerdy nurse, had some sad aviation history of her own.

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Yep. I didn’t know who she was at the time, but I remember the songs.

I can’t believe the operator would even think of using unapproved parts.

.

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The movie took liberties with the book, and the book took liberties with reality. Hell of a story, and well told, though. It’s still one of my favorites.

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IIRC, the book said that the only question about her was whether she was one of the ugliest women they guys had ever seen, or THE ugliest…

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I don’t remember if it was in The Right Stuff (book), or in Yeager’s autobiography, but Yeager said she ‘had a face like a can full of worms.’ I wouldn’t go that far. When she was younger and when she made an effort, she was not especially unattractive. And as Broomstick said, she was certainly not lacking for male companionship.

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I worked at a frame shop under the tutelage of Benny Habloe, who had previously worked at NASA framing the many, many grip-&-grin photos that were a vital part of its PR. When Gus Grissom was killed, his widow gave away all sorts of his things, and so our shop was using Grissom’s staple gun 20 years later.

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I love the movie, and re-watch it every year or two. Some of the inaccuracies crossed the ‘forgivable’ line, though. The scene where they recruit Yeager never happened, and the assumption that Yeager was just picked at random to fly the X-1 the next day is crazy.

But what really bothered me was the implication that the ‘fireflies’ were some sort of mystical apparition created by aborigines. Mysticism is the very antithesis of the hard-headed engineering that was the test-pilots credo and which created the space program. The notion that aborigines also flew into space and did it casually was filmed as almost a put-down of the ‘hard way’ of doing it through engineering.

And the show implied that the fireflies were a huge mystery that was never solved, when in fact all they were was particles of frost from the spaceship floating along with it in orbit and reflecting the sun. When the spaceship went into darkness, the skin temperature dropped and residual moisture on the skin froze into a layer of frost. Then when it came into the sun, the frost detached from the skin and floated around the ship, and the outgassing from melting caused it to dart around randomly a bit. No mystical explanation required, and the nature of the fireflies was known long before the movie was filmed.

The injection of a whole side-theme of mysticism into a movie that is essentially about the bravery of pilots and the triumph of engineering and science was a real disappointment to me.

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I don’t interpret the movie as suggesting that they were actually related. It’s an impressionistic thing; you’re taking it too literally.

So all the pilots’ mythology should have been left out? The “demon,” the concept of a sound “barrier” itself?

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Never seen it all the way through, which is surprising as these were my heroes and role models when I was a kid. What comic parts I saw made sense if you spent any time around pilots, who are fuck-offs. Especially fighter jocks.

What’s amazing is that a couple are still alive and most of the rest died in bed. Probably surprised the hell out of them.

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A Jimp, What the hell is a jimp?!?!

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Really? The aborigine says “we do that too” when Gordo says they’re flying in space, then the shot cuts to the old mystic guy staring into space, then to the embers flying out of the fire up into the sky, and then we cut to Glenn seeing what looks like exactly the same thing around his spaceship? And you don’t think there’s any connection?

Mythology != mysticism. The ‘sound barrier’ wasn’t mysticism. It was a physical problem that had yet to be solved. The ‘demon’ was just a representation of the danger pilots faced when pushing the envelope. “Chasing the demon” just meant pushing way out into the danger zone in order to expand the envelope of aeronautic knowledge.

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My all-time favorite movie! I think it was the first movie we ever rented when my family got our first ever VCR and got a membership at the video rental store that had just opened in town, circa 1984.

I really love the wit of the screenplay and the style with which this movie is directed, and I’ve always been a little disappointed that Philip Kaufman has only directed a handful of movies since The Right Stuff, and none of them have been as ambitious nor reached the same heights.

My favorite “comical” part of the movie is LBJ (as played by the great Donald Moffat) throwing a fit in the back of the limo.

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After sneaking into Edwards AFB for the second Shuttle landing, my co-conspirators and I were walking around after the big event looking at the various machines in the hanger. On the way back, I noticed that an old Brigadier General was walking by with his left arm wrapped around a cute blonde telling her that “she did a great job.” The accent was distinctly Appalachian.

I did a double take and realized it was Chuck Yeager.

If you look at the original VHS release box, you’ll see a publicity still of Gordo standing in front of a F-86 Sabre. You never see it in the film and I didn’t understand why. Until a co-worker of mine told me he went to a test screening in Palm Springs, CA a month or so before the release. The original release runs 193 minutes; at the test screening he told me it was about 30 minutes longer. The main part cut was a sub-plot involving the ongoing rivalry between Gordon Cooper and Gus Grissom. In the film, this hinted at when Gordo meets up with Gus at Happy Bottom Riding Club, and mentions “…I waxed your tail.”