Blast off: Disney releases the first trailer for the dramatic series The Right Stuff

A team of elite military test pilots finds themselves hired as astronauts for Project Mercury, the first human spaceflight program in the United States, in The right stuff, a new eight-episode dramatic series that debuted at Disney + in October. Like Philip Kaufman’s 1983 Oscar-winning film of the same name, the series is based on Tom Wolfe’s bestselling 1979 book.

Wolfe became interested in the US space program, while he was commissioned by Rolling Stone to cover the launch of Apollo 17, NASA’s last Moon mission. The next seven years he has spent The right stuff, intention to capture the drive and ethos of those early astronauts. (In a preview of the 1983 edition, he thought “What makes a man ready to sit on top of an enormous Roman candle … and wait for someone to light the fuse.”) Wolfe spent a lot of time discussing with General Chuck Yeager, who was dropped from the astronaut program and portrayed as a contrasting character to the college-relegated Project Mercury team featured in the book. The right stuff won widespread critical acclaim, as well as the National Book Award for Nonfiction.

When United Artists decided to fund a film adaptation, the studio hired William Goldman (The Princess Bride) to adapt the play, but his vision was very different from that of director Philip Kaufman, and Goldman put the project off. Kaufman wrote his own draft script in eight weeks, making Yeager more of a central figure; Goldman’s script completely ignored Yeager. Goldman later wrote that “Phil [Kaufman]The heart was with Yeager. And not only that, he felt that the astronauts, instead of being heroic, were really little liars, mechanical men of no particular quality, no great pilots at all, just the product of hype. “

The film bombed at the box office, grossing $ 21 million against its $ 27 million budget, but it was a critical success and went on to win four Oscars. Wolfe himself did not like Kaufman’s film, and there were some objections to historically inaccurate details. The most egregious example was a scene when the Liberty Bell 7 spaceship drops after splashdown. The film shows a panicked Gus Grissom who deliberately detonated the explosive bolts of the hatch – something that, in fact, NASA later determined was a mechanical failure. (Grissom was tragically killed in the Apollo 1 launch pad fire in January 1967.)

Produced for National Geographic by Appian Way (production company Leonardo DiCaprio) and Warner Bros. Television, the new series also draws heavily on Wolfe’s book as a source material. “The right stuff evokes the wonder and the fear of the moment we first escaped the confines of our only home and wanted to be in the unknown, “showrunner Mark Lafferty told Deadline Hollywood in May.” But the show is as much about who we are today as it is about our historical achievements. At a time when the world is facing important challenges, this story reminds us that what seems impossible today may become the triumph of tomorrow. “

From the official point of view, the series will be a “creepy, anti-nostalgic look at what would become America’s first reality show if the obsessive original Mercury Seven astronauts and their families were immediately named in a competition that would kill them. or make them immortal.The one-hour drama will follow the protagonists from the Mojave Desert to the edges of space, with future seasons to the greatest achievement of mankind: the landing of the moon. ‘

The show opened in 1959, at the height of the Cold War, when the Soviet Union took the lead in the space race, and a subsequent NASA is accused of placing a man in space within two years during the rubric Project Mercury. NASA Engineers Bob Gilruth (Patrick Fischler, Mad Men en Mulholland Drive) and Chris Kraft (Eric Ladin, Mad Men, Bosch) handpick a crew of seven astronauts from a pool of military test pilots. The focal characters are Major John Glenn (Patrick J. Adams, Suits) and Lt. Commander Alan Shepard (Jake McDorman, Restricted) – two very different men, both professionally and personally. The rest of Mercury 7 included Captain Gordo Cooper (Colin O’Donoghue, Once), Wally Schirra (Aaron Staton, Mad Men), Scott Carpenter (James Lafferty, One Tree Hill), Deke Slayton (Micah Stock, Brittany runs a marathon), and Gus Grissom (Michael Trotter, Inhumans).

Liftoff

Their mission will have a profound impact on the families of men, particularly Annie Glenn (Nora Zehetner, The Astronaut Wives Club), who struggles with a speech impediment and is not uncomfortable to be in the pubic eye, like Louise Shepard (Shannon Lucio, Bosch, True blood), who turns a blind eye to her husband’s wandering eye for the sake of her children. Eloise Mumford (Lone Star) plays Trudy Cooper, a accomplished pilot in her own right who sacrifices her own ambitions for the cause. The cast also includes Sacha Seberg (The Americans) as rocket scientist Wernher von Braun; Danny Strong (The billion) as John “Shorty” Powers, the NASA PR man; and Josh Cooke (Manhattan, Castle Rock) as LIFE star reporter Loudon Wainwright Jr. (Strikingly absent from the cast of characters, at least for S1: test pilot Chuck Yeager.)

The trailer opens with a shot of expectant crowds on a launch day, followed by a montage of everything that went into preparation for that launch: physical tests, prototype capsules, stints on the Multi-Axis Trainer (basically a human gyroscope), and the sometimes tragic impact, all done under the glittering light of national media coverage. “Americans love stories,” Wainwright of Cooke says in the voiceover that sets the tone of the series. “This story ends with a climax in space, and [it] begins here on earth. Money, fame, immortality. People will feel like they know you. They will want you to be. Astronauts. ‘Astro’ means ‘star’ – ‘naut,’ ‘voyager.’ No one has ever seen anything like your men – until now. A few things live forever in the soul of a country. You’re heroes. “

The first two episodes of The right stuff will premiere on Disney + on October 9, 2020.

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