The problem was never one of vision, As far as humans can see,
they have imagined even further. So, when the Government called,
we did was any good Americans would do: we truly imagined
how much money we could make here. When the Big Call came
from President Johnson for "something to amaze the whole world,
especially the Russians!" Talk about your big dreams come true,
he asked us to fake a manned moon-landing. What he asked for
was men walking on the Moon, but, read between the lines, right?
For this to work, everyone has to believe it. The Soviets beat us
out into space, we had to show that American Know-How still ruled.
Here at Universe World Studios, we are the magic makers of dreams,
craftsmen of the real. If we were going to do this for country, we were
going to do it right. We sat through meeting after meeting, bad-pitch
after worse. This is why we don't make movies to tell the stories of
real people: their storiess suck, they're boring. Too real, "won't sell
in the fly-over states" as we say. No, if we were going to do this,
we would do it right. We needed props-- a working Russian R-7 rocket
(do NOT ask how us how we got it) and then we sent a scouting team
to the moon, to bring us back sketches, some rocks, a bag of moon
dust, reference photos. My God, it all looked like so much crap
on film. Not the "Right Stuff" if you get my meaning. Film Rules
are like Retail: location, location, location. I knew, to pull this off,
you would need an idea so simple, but so right, that people like me
get paid obscene amounts of money to think them up: we needed
was a film studio... on the moon. Once we sent our tech people up
to build it, we sectioned off a big area of the moon's surface,
and we made it look just like the moon, We spared no expense,
after all-- we weren't paying for it. We got actors from the CIA
experiments with LSD. Believe me, those people came through
for us: very realistic interpretive dance that made it look just like
they were walking around in thin gravity and the crackly noise
before and after their dialogue, just like static-y transmissions:
"One small *zzzzzt* step for mankind *skzzzt*, one giant leap
for the mankind... and the technicolor bats !" It was ok, we edited it
out in post-production. But we made sure to put all kinds of things
in there for the conspiracy buffs: flags flapping in the impossible
breeze, bad shadows; we left that footage of the alien fleet hovering
on the dark side of the moon on the cutting-room floor... kidding!
Or am I? Fact is, we pulled "Apollo 11" off SO successfully,
we were invited back to make five sequels. Then, via shell companies,
we hired Bill Kaysing to pen We Never Went to the Moon: America's
$30 Billion Dollar Scandal, by telling him that he was right, Disney
was in on it, and Kubrick directed it and Arthur C. Clarke wrote
the whole thing. I gave him a real fake moon rock and told him
it was real. I almost told him the world was flat, but he's not an idiot
and I didn't want to be mean. So that, as they say, is it in a nutshell:
we faked the moon landings and that never would have been possible
if we hadn't gone to the moon, in order to fake it right. If that is not
worth $30 Billion, then I'm sorry you're not a fan of Science Fiction.
What are you, a Communist or something? That was quality cinema,
and that-- more than anything else-- is where the American Dream
lives, baby. 600 Million viewers around the whole damn world! All
those people, looking in the same direction at once: the television.
All those people buyin' the same ticket, taking home a piece of the moon.
