From the Earth to the Moon: The Miniseries Companion

Contents

Introduction

An Interview with Andrew Chaikin

From the Earth  to the Moon

Episode 1 Can We Do This?

Episode 2 Apollo One

Episode 3 We Have Cleared the Tower

Episode 4 1968

Episode 5 Spider

Episode 6 Mare Tranquilitatis

Episode 7 That’s All There Is

Episode 8 We Interrupt This Program

Episode 9 For Miles and Miles

Episode 10 Galileo Was Right

Episode 11 The Original Wives’ Club

Episode 12 Le Voyage dans la Lune

Introduction

It’s the late 1990s, and cable-TV audiences around the country sit glued to their screens, transfixed by a fascinating and vivid account of America’s race to the moon.

HBO’s twelve-part miniseries From the Earth to the Moon stands out as one of the most comprehensive, serious, and definitive attempts to discuss and portray NASA’s Apollo space program. Viewers were treated to double, back-to-back episodes each prime-time Sunday night for six weeks.

Captivating audiences with its big budget, high production quality, all-star cast, and vivid re-enactments, the 1998 docudrama paralleled Andrew Chaikin’s 1994 book A Man on the Moon.

Producers Brian Grazer, Ron Howard, and Tom Hanks had already created the 1995 smash-hit movie Apollo 13. With a renewed public interest in NASA and space exploration and their own interest piqued by the Apollo program, the three scratched an itch to learn more by retelling this epic story in From the Earth to the Moon.

So why are we reviewing a twenty-year-old TV show? Well, there aren’t too many miniseries about the Apollo program out there, or about space in general. We also host the movie podcast Popcorn Drink Combo, and since we fell in love with this miniseries when it first came out, it’s never been too far from our minds. We thought we’d do a dedicated, stand-alone podcast about this epic TV event. The podcast was a tremendous amount of fun for us to do, and got a lot of listens, so that was nice all around. From that source material, we have created the book-length version that you now hold in your hand. Our aim is to produce a comprehensive episode guide with associated discussion to a truly landmark television miniseries.

So let’s jump right in.

An Interview with

Andrew Chaikin

On June 16, 2020, Doug was fortunate to have the chance to talk to none other than Mr. Andrew Chaikin, whose book A Man on the Moon served as the central basis for the miniseries From the Earth to the Moon.

Doug. Thanks for doing this. You know, before we go any further, I just want to say I really appreciate it. We’ve emailed back and forth before. I’ve really enjoyed your books—I think I’ve read, if not everything you’ve written, almost everything.

Andrew Chaikin. Well, I won’t make you go through the list.

Doug. The pleasure’s all mine. So my first question is the most obvious one: How did the miniseries first come to be?

Andrew Chaikin. Well, as far as I knew, it came to be in the spring of 1995. Let me just take you back a little further. While they were making the Apollo 13 movie, I got to visit the set a couple of times. I had a screenwriter friend in Hollywood who knew the production designer. And so, through her and her production designer friend, I was able to go to the set a couple of times. I met Tom Hanks, and I met the other actors, and I met Ron Howard, and I got to talk to them a little bit. And they were all reading A Man on the Moon. A Man on the Moon had come out in the spring of 1994. And so I was very happy to see that they all had a book. At one point I was with Tom Hanks, in his trailer with him, and he had the book, and it had clearly been gone through very thoroughly with lots of marginal notes and things like that. So that was cool. I got to see them film a couple of scenes for Apollo 13. That was really cool. The second time I was there was when they were shooting in the big freezer, which you probably know about. It was just really fun. So, to this day, I relish being able to say to people that my Kevin Bacon index is now one! But anyhow, that was in ’94. I think the movie came out in ’94.

Doug. Apollo 13 came out in ’95.

Andrew Chaikin. Came out in ’95. Okay, but it finished production, I guess, sometime in late ’94. Flash forward to spring of ’95. I am, at this point, working on my second book, which was a history of flight for the National Air and Space Museum that I was asked to do by the publisher. That was kind of my alma mater, in a way, after college. It was kind of like coming home to do that book, and that was a lot of fun. One afternoon, I had been working at the museum, I’d been doing interviews with the curators and so forth, and I called my answering machine at home, and there was an answering machine message from Tom Hanks. Basically, he said, Andy Chaikin, this is Tom Hanks. I don’t know how I got your number, but I did. I want to talk to you about something, so please give me a call. This is my private number; please don’t give it out. And I hung up the phone in, in kind of a state of amazement. I must have called him right back—after informing a good friend of mine who was also a space writer. My memory is that it was in early May of ’95.

So I went to New York and met him [Hanks] in his hotel. He had rented out an extra room or an extra suite for us to have our meeting, which lasted several hours. By that time, had already cooked up the concept of the miniseries. I vividly remember that he pulled out these little cards, these sorts of narrow, vertical cards almost shaped like a bookmark but maybe a little bigger than that. Each card was for one of the episodes. My memory is that he already had titles of most of the episodes. He had already decided that the first episode would show Shepard’s suborbital flight in its entirety. I mean, he had really thought this thing through, even by this early time, and he was basically offering me the chance to get in on the ground floor, and I said, Yep, yeah!

Doug. I’ll bet you did.

Andrew Chaikin. Yeah, the answer is yes, of course. So that’s when my journey began. And again, I’d have to go back, to refresh my memory on more details. But at that point, I want to say HBO had not been firmly gotten. They had not signed a firm deal yet. I think that was a little later with HBO. Then I remember going to LA and having a business meeting at Imagine [Ron Howard and Brian Grazer’s production company]. I can’t remember where they, again, you probably know more than I do about this now at this point, but they were somewhere in the hierarchy of how this thing got made. I remember having a meeting there. I remember arguing very strongly with one of the executives, not from Imagine, but I think it was one of the HBO people, about whether or not the geology episode would appeal to a broad audience. I think they were worried about women. My memory is they were worried about women not connecting with that subject matter.

Doug. Geologist Lee Silver was not a heartthrob.

Andrew Chaikin. Well, I don’t know why they would think that [women not enjoying geology], you know? Somehow that kind of discovery story wouldn’t appeal to a broad audience? I don’t think it was ever in any real danger of being not included. But I remember that came up at a meeting. I stated my opinion very strongly that that was a key part of the story and had to be included. So that was all going on in ’95. Then scripts were starting to get written. Tom Hanks very nicely, graciously, let me read them and give some feedback, kind of a little bit under the table. I was not officially empowered to do that stuff.

Doug. You weren’t a member of the Screenwriter’s Guild, I imagine.

Andrew Chaikin. No, I was not. I was a consultant on the series. So, you know, within my role as consultant on the series, that certainly made sense for me to be looking at the scripts. But in any case, I do remember reading the scripts and giving some feedback. I’d have to look at my old calendars, but I think we must have started filming by ’97. We had to because it came out in 1998. So Tom did the filming in ’97. I saw the filming of much of episode 1. I was there for that. That’s when I did my cameo. I still say to people when I give talks, If you see that cameo, you’ll understand why no one pays me to act.

Doug. I actually have a question here for later on about the cameo, but just since we’re talking about it now, can you say how the cameo came about?

Andrew Chaikin. Well, I’m perfectly willing to admit that I asked for it. I asked Tom’s assistant, Do you think there’s any way I might get a teeny little cameo in it? She came back, and she said, Yes, Tom says he’s got the perfect role for you. It was to be the host of Meet the Press. I remember the evening that we filmed it. We filmed it in the evening, and I went to the makeup trailer, and they cut my hair shorter than it had been since I was about eight. Actually, probably before then because, by the time I was eight, The Beatles had hit. Back then, I wasn’t letting anybody cut my hair that short. Anyway, they kept my hair real short and gave me fake glasses and a skinny tie. I came out, and I said, Tom, look what they did to me! And he said, Can we say, ’babe magnet’? It was all good fun. I really enjoyed being on set. I really enjoyed meeting the actors. The thing that struck me about being there, and it kind of dawned on me over time and in retrospect as well, was that they were recreating the spirit of Apollo. They all were passionate about the project, and they wanted to do it justice. I’m not just talking about how, obviously, Tom Hanks felt that way. To this day, I just thank my lucky stars that it was Tom Hanks who wanted to do this because he was so devoted to telling the real story.

Doug. Hanks was also a real power broker in Hollywood. He could marshal the forces to make this enormous project happen.

Andrew Chaikin. Absolutely. Right. But everybody involved seemed to have that same feeling. They wanted to do it justice: the set designers, the costume people, the special effects people, the production people, the directors and assistant directors, and, of course, all of the actors. They just all had that same spirit. It was really wonderful.

Doug. Did you have a favorite episode or episodes?

Andrew Chaikin. I haven’t watched it all in quite a while. My wife is a huge space fan and is very knowledgeable at this point. In fact, we’ve done a number of projects together. If you’ve seen [the book] Voices from the Moon, you know, Vicki and I did that together. My book A Passion for Mars, Vicki was the editor—she really functioned as the editor on that book. She’s helped me in everything I’ve done since we got together. We met because she read A Man on the Moon. The reason she bought her copy of A Man on the Moon was probably the miniseries because the miniseries kind of helped spur a reissue of the book.

Doug. The one with the orange band on the cover—that’s the version that ties into the miniseries, I think.

Andrew Chaikin. That’s right. The ’98 edition. So she read A Man on the Moon, and she likes to tell people that she also read most of the books in the bibliography. After reading A Man on the Moon, she even read parts of Don Wilhelms’s book To a Rocky Moon [To a Rocky Moon: A Geologist’s History of Lunar Exploration (1993)]. So every once in a while, Vicki will say to me, I feel the miniseries coming on. I’m not always in the mood to watch it again. But she’s really always happy to watch it.

I have a special feeling, I won’t call the favorite, but I have a special feeling for the Apollo 8 episode. It’s the one I saw the most because every premiere that we did that was the episode we showed, including the one at the White House, which was an amazing evening, as you might imagine.

Doug. I can imagine! That episode is titled 1968.

Andrew Chaikin. Yes. I really like the way that one feels. I really liked the direction. I’m not casting judgment, or relative judgment, on any of the others. I’m just saying that that one has a special place for me. Because I just think it has a power to it—that by connecting it with the events of 1968, it gave it a real power, and I think the direction, the editing of it, enhanced that power. And that’s, that’s number one, number two, or maybe not in numerical order. The other thing that I have to say is that David Andrews did a superb job as Frank Borman. I told Tom Hanks that, when it was all said and done and I’d seen the entire miniseries, that I felt David Andrews was the series’ MVP.

Doug. On our end, in the book and the podcast, we go on at length about David Andrews’ performance. I think we were similarly struck by not just how he looked like Frank Borman, but he also conveys the real Frank Borman as well.

Andrew Chaikin. Yes, you’re right. I agree. So that’s the one that has this special place in my heart, off the top of my head.

Doug. How about favorite scenes? I almost hate to ask because they are all your children.

Andrew Chaikin. Well, they’re really Tom’s children, but they’re sort of my relations—stepchildren, perhaps?

Doug. The favorite scenes can be from any episode.

Andrew Chaikin. Boy, you know you’re catching me here because I haven’t sat down with it for some time. I also like episode 1 [Can We Do This?] a lot. I was there for the filming of it. So that, maybe, is part of it. Episode 2 [Apollo One] is very powerful. For me, the sleeper was Spider. I never thought that people would connect with what is basically a story of how engineers work. But it turned out that that really touched a lot of people, and I am one of those people. Because I really have come to feel that Spider is one of the more affecting episodes because of the story, the engineering story, that it tells. I love a lot of the scenes in that one; the scenes where they’re building the little wooden [lunar module] model and they’re fooling around with the seats or no seats and where the windows are and the size of the windows. All of those scenes, you know, are great.

Doug. Matt Craven does a fantastic job as Tom Kelly. So I just have to tell you that Peter and I, we both grew up on Long Island, a stone’s throw from Bethpage.

Andrew Chaikin. Okay. Did you ever go to Bethpage as a kid?

Doug. We went on school trips.

Andrew Chaikin. Ha!

Doug. We were talking about Spider and the montage of the lunar module model development and other favorite scenes.

Andrew Chaikin. I’m just going through them in my mind. The launch scene of Apollo 8 I like a lot. This one moment where they’re playing audio of Lyndon Johnson along with the liftoff, and then it gets quiet, and you just see the Saturn on this pillar of flame; I love that. That’s one that that sticks with me. Let’s see. I keep thinking of the one of David Foley [as Alan Bean] looking at Pete Conrad going out the hatch. Yeah, that was a fun experience, by the way, because Jon Turtletaub, who directed that episode, told me that he just basically went to my book and was, you know, lifting paragraphs out of my chapter. He was so taken with the chapter that he just used it as inspiration, which was nice to hear.

Doug. We go on at length that That’s All There Is, the Apollo 12 episode, is our personal favorite.

Andrew Chaikin. It’s a lot of people’s personal favorite, and that makes me feel good too. Because, you know, when I was writing the book, the thing that I realized was that I had to make each mission stand out. The aspect of Apollo 12 that made it stand out was the friendship between those three guys.

Doug. In stark contrast to many of the