9 Out-of-This-World Secrets Revealed in 'The Right Stuff' Oral History

From left: Scott Glenn as astronaut Alan Shepherd, Charles Frank as Scott Carpenter, Fred Ward as Gus Grissom, Ed Harris as John Glenn and Dennis Quaid as Gordon Cooper in The Right Stuff

As part of the Christopher Nolan-edited issue of Wired, the magazine commissioned an oral history of the classic astronaut film, The Right Stuff.

Phillip Kaufman’s decades-spanning movie was adapted from Tom Wolfe’s history of the space race and NASA. Released in 1983, it was chock full of future stars — including Ed Harris, Jeff Goldblum, Harry Shearer and Sam Shepard — and clocked in at over three hours long. As such, Wired’s oral history is equally epic, filled with little-known facts and anecdotes about the film, which Interstellar director calls “almost perfect.”

Here are a few highlights from the story, which you can read over at Wired.

1. Ed Harris thought he failed his audition to play John Glenn, and punched a wall in anger. But producer Robert Chartoff and director Phil Kaufman were thrilled. “Please, don’t let this guy get hit by a car,” Chartoff told Kaufman. “At least, not until after the picture is made.”

2. Jeff Goldblum and Harry Shearer, who played NASA recruiters, didn’t have any lines in the script. Shearer remembered, “Phil basically just said, ‘You and Jeff improvise. Hopefully it’ll be a little funny.’”

Sam Shepard as test pilot Chuck Yeager

3. Sam Shepard (above), meanwhile, didn’t want to play heroic test pilot Chuck Yeager at all, and it took meeting several theater actors who were in the cast to convince him. “Phil offered the part to me a few times, and I refused,” he said. “I felt like it was ridiculous to play a living person."

4. The effects team pioneered the art of placing characters into historical footage. “We combined footage of the real Alan Shepard being loaded into the capsule with Scott Glenn doing it on the stage,” Kaufman said. “We had Scott Glenn shaking hands with Kennedy; they did the same thing in Forrest Gump and made a big thing out of spending a million dollars to do it.”

5. They also used some old-school tricks to simulate supersonic flights. "We had giant sheets of butcher paper with desert scenes painted on them and somebody was pulling the paper very slowly underneath the model so it would feel like you were at 20,000 feet with the Earth moving below,” cinematographer Caleb Deschanel said.

Ed Harris as Mercury astronaut John Glenn

6. Glenn, an astronaut featured in the film, was a U.S. senator from Ohio mulling a presidential run in 1983. He didn’t like the way he was portrayed in the book, and tried to thwart the production. “He tried to stop the government from giving us cooperation. He went to the Pentagon and told them not to give us permission,” producer Irwin Winkler said. Added Chartoff: “A month before we began, NASA withdrew their permission for us to shoot at their facilities.” Eventually, the government relented and permitted on-site production.

7. Dennis Quaid puked during one high-velocity flight… and tried to cover it up. But the evidence was coating the sound recorder. “In the dailies, you see Dennis smiling, and then the pilot starts doing barrel rolls, and Dennis disappears from the frame,” Deschanel said. “We asked Dennis about it and he said, ‘Oh, I had my script on the floor and I was just checking my lines.’ It was total bullshit.”

8. But eventually, Quaid embraced the skies. “We were shooting at Van Nuys and somehow Caleb and I found ourselves sitting with Dennis in a little airplane,” Kaufman said. “Suddenly we noticed Dennis was talking to the control tower and the plane was moving! We said, ‘What the fuck’s going on here!?’”

9. Ronald Reagan procured an unauthorized copy of the film before its Washington, D.C., premiere. “I was very fussy about nobody seeing the movie before it premiered at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C.,” Kaufman remembered. “There were one or two prints of it. We were setting up for the screening and some friends went on a White House tour. As they were passing through, they saw some film cans with The Right Stuff stenciled on. Reagan had gotten a copy, secretly.”

Watch the trailer for The Right Stuff below:

Photos: AP Photo/Library of Congress, Courtesy of Warner Bros.; Everett