#CAPRICORN ONE MOVIE LENGTH TV#

In the movie, Sam Waterston, James Brolin and O.J. Chicago Tribune film critic Gene Siskel called it “a surprisingly good thriller” while another critic Harry Themal said it was a “somewhat feeble effort at an adventure film.” Variety was even less complimentary calling it “underdeveloped” and the cast “scattershot.” “Would you be shocked to find out the greatest moment of our recent history may not have happened at all?” the movie posters read. “Capricorn One” was released in the Summer of 1977. In 1976, Hyams was given the green light to make his movie as part of deal with ITC Entertainment to produce films with a conspiracy bent. Interest in a story like a fake moon landing (in the movie’s case, the first manned mission to Mars) had appeal. Watergate broke and America was thrown into a government scandal at its highest levels. Hyams shopped the script around but got no takers. That was in 1972, four years before Kaysing’s book was released. So he wrote a story based on the concept. “I wondered what would happen if someone faked a whole story.” For him, he admits, it was the same with television. “I grew up in the generation where my parents basically believed if it was in the newspaper it was true,” Hyams said in an interview with a film trade magazine.

#CAPRICORN ONE MOVIE LENGTH TV#

A former TV news anchor, Hyams was more interested in how such a thing could actually be pulled off? Peter Hyams Whether you believed Kaysing or not was a moot point for American screenwriter and director Peter Hyams. Kaysing’s theories were technical and persuasive and soon a movement of nonbelievers, inspired by the book, was born. Kaysing believes NASA couldn’t safely put a man on the moon by the end of the 1960’s (a promise made by President Kennedy) so they staged it instead. We Never Went to the Moon: America’s Thirty Million Dollar Swindle was written by Bill Kaysing, a Navy midshipman and rocket specialist, who claimed to have inside knowledge of a government conspiracy to fake the moon landing. In 1976, a controversial new book was released that contended the Apollo 11 moon mission never happened. Send a letter to the editor about this story.‘Capricorn One’ – The Movie That Helped Shape a Conspiracy Extras include commentary by Hyams and a short feature about the making and reception of the film.Ĭlick Here to Talk About Movies at Metro's New Blog Lots of cameos: Telly Savalas, Robert Walden (Joe Rossi from Lou Grant), Karen Black and Barbara Bosson ( Hill Street Blues). But detail about the conspiracy is skimped while Gould and his assignment editor (David Doyle, who played Bosley on Charlie's Angels) bicker like characters out of His Girl Friday. Done before digital special effects, the acrobatics are genuinely scary. Even better is a vertigo-inducing aerial chase as two military helicopters swoop through steep canyons in pursuit of a crop-dusting biplane with Brolin hanging on the wing like one of the chorus girls from Flying Down to Rio.

Some scenes unfold like a bad play with much wrestling over moral dilemmas the three space jockeys locked away in their fake-Mars studio sound like low-rent Beckett characters elsewhere, Hyams, a polished action director ( Outland, The Presidio, The Relic), delivers a sensational sequence of a brakeless car (the method of choice for eliminating pesky snoops in the 1970s) tearing uncontrollably through traffic until it vaults off the ascending ramp of a drawbridge. The detailed launch sequence anticipates The Right Stuff-too bad the astronauts have all the credibility that Josh Brolin, Sam Waterston and O.J. When the empty capsule inconveniently burns up on re-entry, the space jockeys must be eliminated before a nosy reporter (Elliot Gould) uncovers the truth. To keep the manned-space program from suffering a potentially crippling blow to its credibility, NASA honcho Hal Holbrook delivers an impassioned, almost Shakespearean (at least in length) monologue about the greater good of big-budget science and then sends the three astronauts to a deserted military base where they will fake the landing on a sound stage while the capsule goes up without them. Taking off from a popular urban legend/conspiracy theory about the moon landing, director/writer Peter Hyams' film posited a Mars flight gone wrong at the last minute.

Not exactly The Parallax View or Three Days of the Condor, 1978's Capricorn One mined the same rich vein of post-Watergate cynicism and generalized distrust of government.

Capricorn one movie length