![]() and Bernard Ross’s was published in the U.K, the latter expanding the Robert Caulfield character. ![]() Two authors wrote novelizations Ron Goulart’s version was published in the U.S. It became the year’s most-successful independent film. It was scheduled to debut in the United States in February, but good preview screenings and delays in Superman caused it to move to June. I’ve said many times: Some people have AFI Lifetime Achievement awards, some people have multiple Oscars, my bit of trivia is that I’ve made films with two leading men who were subsequently tried for the first degree murder of their wives.” The original print had Charles Brubaker opens the emergency rations kit which contains packs of cigarettes, and offer some to the other two this was cut from subsequent prints because it ‘suggested’ that the government condoned smoking. Simpson was in it, and Robert Blake was in Busting. Filming took place at Cinema Center Films in Studio City and in Red Rock Canyon. Candice Bergen was asked to play Judy Drinkwater, but turned it down so was replaced by Karen Black. Lazarus III had a good relationship with the space agency, so the filmmakers were able to obtain government equipment as props despite the negative portrayal of it, including a prototype Apollo Lunar Module. To stay within the budget, NASA’s co-operation was badly needed. TV mogul Lew Grade’s ITC Entertainment had just began branching into film-making, and Grade agreed to finance it after just five minutes. He wrote the script for this in 1972 but nobody was interested until the Watergate Scandal happened in 1974. I hadn’t seen Capricorn One in over three decades, and I don’t know why, because it’s surprisingly successful in combining the political conspiracy angle of the likes of The Parallax View and The Conversation with a conventional action thriller, and does it fairly well, even if the ‘journalist’ side is sometimes better done than the ‘astronaut’ side of things, and a few plot details don’t hold water.ĭirector Peter Hyams is who I would call a journeyman director – but a good one. So, what with certain extreme ideas circulating right now regarding Covid-19, and the way that the authorities seem to be intent on suppressing such ideas, I decided to check out this fairly late entry in the cycle of paranoid thrillers made throughout the ’70s, films that exist in a world of intense fear and political corruption, a world in which we should most definitely Not believe what we’re being told. Whatever your viewpoint on the issue, it’s a particularly interesting conspiracy theory for those such as Yours Truly who are also fascinated by space and space exploration. These ideas were either debunked or had their inconsistencies explained by experts, and eventually photographic evidence of human visitation came back from probes exploring the Moon’s surface much later, though some of course still persevered with their theories, and still do. Conspiracy theorists claimed that it was all staged and pointed out things like inconsistency of shadows suggesting that artificial lights were used, no stars being seen in space, and the flag placed on the surface fluttering despite there being no wind on the Moon. And the only verification we have came from a TV camera.”. Then Whitter vanishes….ĭid we really go to the Moon? The question was on the minds of many when Neil Armstrong took that giant leap for mankind, and then flared up again during the release of this 1978 movie which you can tell was inspired by this issue even if you haven’t read writer/director Peter Hyams’s words on the subject such as, “ There was one event of really enormous importance that had almost no witnesses. However, technician Elliot Whitter sees that something is up and alerts a TV journalist friend, Robert Caulfield. The plan is to fake the Mars landing and keep the astronauts at a remote base until the mission is over, and the astronauts are forced to cooperate with threat of their families’ lives held over them. However, seconds before the launch, the three are pulled from the capsule and the rocket leaves earth unmanned, while NASA official James Kelloway tells them that a faulty life-support system would have killed them in-flight and that NASA can’t afford the publicity of a scratched mission. Starring: Brenda Vaccaro, Elliott Gould, James Brolin, Sam WaterstonĬharles Brubaker, Peter Wallis and John Walker comprise NASA’s first manned mission to Mars.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |