Hyams pulls a neat trick though, by introducing a pair of those conspiracy standbys, the black helicopters. In more accurate conspiratorial fashion, here the villain out to kill the astronauts and Gould remains nameless and faceless, referred to only as “ They,” “ Them,” “ Powerful Forces” and my personal favorite, “ Grown-Ups”. Robert Vaughn was in it and he’s always the villain. But I’ll leave that one to the conspiracists. Strangelove, in one of a few quiet nods to the rumor that Kubrick actually directed the fake moon landing. Among all the other characters he meets, Gould runs into cropduster Telly Savalas, who seems to be recreating Keenan Wynn’s performance from Dr. So at this point the audience has the whole layout and we spend the rest of the picture cutting between the astronauts as they decide to run away and tell the truth and investigative reporter Elliot Gould, who hasn’t seen the first ten minutes, as he tries to figure the story out for himself in his typical loosey-goosey, wisecracking way. That’s when Kellaway mentions that oh and by the way, if they don’t play along, all their families will be blown up. “If the only way to keep something alive is to become everything I hate,” the morality-sodden Brubaker replies, “then maybe it’s not worth keeping alive.” Holbrook gives another great performance as a man who has believed deeply in the program from the beginning and though he hates the idea of a hoax he sees it as the only way to keep the program alive. (For those who bothered to see Hyams’ next picture, Outland, you might recognize Con Amalgamate as the evil corporation in that film, too.) Anyway, since the mission could not be allowed to fail, they decided to fake the whole thing in a big warehouse. Subscribe After giving a beautifully written speech about the history of the manned space program, project director Kellaway (Hal Holbrook) explains that they’d learned some time back that the life support system designed by Con Amalgamate would have failed a few weeks into the mission and they all would have died. ( I was a terrible space-program Geek from the beginning.)
I mean, no wonder they had to fake it! They didn’t have enough fuel to get them there, let alone make a round trip! And second, if they were hoping to use the same Saturn V booster to get them to Mars and back, they were shit outta luck. It seemed odd, for one, that the first manned trip to Mars would still be part of the aging Apollo program.
Puzzle that one over.)Ĭapricorn One opens with a shot of the rocket on the launch pad at dawn as Jerry Goldsmith’s militant, sinister music soars and sitting in the theater I recall noting two things.
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(Interestingly, the film came out a mere eight years after Apollo 11 and was made with NASA’s full cooperation. For most audience members in that pre-Internet age, Capricorn One was their introduction to the very idea that the moon landing might have been a big, fat hoax. Rumors and assorted crazy stories about the ‘69 moon landing had been floating about from the moment Armstrong took that one, small step, but they were mostly restricted to the insular tinfoil hat community. I did find it a little curious though that in the 40 years following his walk on the moon Neil Armstrong never spoke publicly about the mission. All the research I’ve done since has only confirmed that belief. I was never one to doubt the moon landing actually took place exactly as they’ve always said it did. The stories were updated and modernized and clearly fictional, but the events they were portraying were obvious. These were technoparanoid, space-age conspiracy theories.
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In movie theaters Sunn International released a string of low-budget documentaries about the Loch Ness monster, alien visitations and Biblical prophecies about the end of the world, all of it providing a steady slow drip of what Jack Webb called High Strangeness.Īs part of all that, Hollywood, through a series of big-budget all-star productions, introduced a generation of young Geeks to the joys of conspiracy theory.There had been fictionalized accounts of other, real conspiracies in the past (like Executive Action, the first and still the best film about the plot to kill Kennedy), but this new crop was different.
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TV offered up shows like In Search Of and Project UFO, specialty magazines (and even short-run comics) popped up every month. Books about Bigfoot, The Bermuda Triangle and Ancient astronauts topped the bestseller charts. Everyone was interested in strange phenomena. We were in the middle of a second saucer craze, but this time the boundaries had expanded and mainstream culture played along. The later ‘70s were a golden age for the differently-obsessed.
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