‘The Right Stuff’ turns 40: Celebrating the space race movie classic

The legendary test pilot Chuck Yeager took Philip Kaufman, the writer/director of the lauded 1983 space race epic “The Right Stuff,” for a ride in his plane during production. And at one point the man who broke the sound barrier in 1947 turned over the controls to Kaufman as he also turned off the engine. “He thought it would scare me being one of the ‘Hollywood’ guys,” Kaufman told me in a 2003 L.A. Times interview. “I just sort of looked at him and smiled, because I knew there was something blessed about this man. The funny thing about Yeager is that he would drive out to the sets, particularly in the high desert, and he would not go above the speed limit. He was the fastest man alive, but he wouldn’t go over 55 because he knew how dangerous it was on the highway”

Barbara Hershey, who played Yeager’s wife Glennis, recalled in 2003 her time in the air with him. “It was the one time in my life I felt if I crashed, I almost didn’t mind because I would be crashing with Chuck Yeager. Chuck had utter confidence.” And he was stupendous to Hershey during the production “He would call me Glennis and his son was there who was older than me would call me mom. I felt so welcomed.”

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“The Right Stuff” opened Oct. 21 four decades ago, the same date as “Under Fire,” David Cronenberg’s “The Dead Zone” and the Tom Cruise high school drama “All the Right Moves,” which was produced by Lucille Ball and her husband Gary Morton.

.Based on Tom Wolfe’s best-seller, “The Right Stuff” was far from a by-the-numbers look at the Mercury astronauts and space race with the Soviet Union in the 1960s. The three-hour plus film compared the publicity and hype surrounding the Mercury men with the bravery of the death-defying test pilots who worked in near obscurity. “The Right Stuff” turned Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Sam Shepard into a movie star and sex symbol as Yeager. And he certainly knew how to wear a leather jacket.

Ironically, Yeager and the other test pilots weren’t featured in the original script by William Goldman. Kaufman told me in 2019 that the Oscar-winning writer wanted to make a film about patriotism. “It was right after the Iran hostage crisis. He wanted to write something about American patriotism. He thought putting Yeager in and saying something about a time that had passed was negative. But it wasn’t. It was about an enduring American spirit that we really needed to get back.” Goldman would end up leaving the project.

The film also boosted the career of several of the cast including Ed Harris as John Glenn; Scott Glenn as Alan Shepard, Dennis Quaid as Gordon Cooper and Fred Ward as Gus Grissom. Kim Stanley also starred as the famed pioneering aviator Pancho Barnes.

Harris told me in 2003  that he found Kaufman to be a very meticulous and thorough director especially because “the time it takes him to decide on something, the years in between movies and all the projects he has developed and not done. You know this was something I think he thought long and hard about and had real specific ideas about and had a certain vision. So,  he translated that to us pretty well. The one thing I remember him telling me all the time was to smile more. He kind of maybe said that a few too many times, but that’s what he wanted me to do, so I tried to accommodate him.”

A real camaraderie developed among the cast while on such locations at Edwards Air Force. “It was a very special time,” said Harris. “For a lot of us, it was kind of the first big film we were in, so there was, at least among the guys, a friendly sense of competition.”

Despite strong reviews, “The Right Stuff” was a box office disappointment, earning just $21.1 million; the movie eventually found an audience on home video. “The Right Stuff’ earned eight Oscar nominations including best film, winning four for Bill Conti’s rousing score; editing, sound and best effects, sound effects editing. Over the decades, “The Right Stuff” has only grown in stature.

Kaufman told me the reason the movie stalled at the box office was both “a mystery and obvious. I think the way the film was promoted and conceived of was a problem; I don’t think that some people understood the movie we were making. The publicity had to be exactly right to attract people and I think it was presented in a way as sort of academic and a history of the space program. I wanted to emphasize I did in the movie-a lot more the image of what Sam Shepard plays of Chuck Yeager, the man in the leather jacket.”

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