Space the final frontier…or maybe the always fascinating and enlightening frontier. There’s something breathtaking and exciting about the unknown. While today there’s a plethora of information about the moon, fifty years ago it was so much about the giant rock that we just didn’t know.
In celebration of NASA successfully sending its first astronaut into space and restoring the world’s faith in the U.S. space program, Disney+ ventures back to the very beginning of the high-stakes space race era with the premiere of The Real Right Stuff on Friday, Nov. 20th.
The Real Right Stuff tells the remarkable true story of the nation’s first astronauts, the original Mercury 7, and pulls from hundreds of hours of archival film and radio broadcasts, interviews, home movies, and other rare and never-before-seen material to catapult viewers back to the late 1950s. The two-hour documentary, from National Geographic, complements the Disney+ original scripted series The Right Stuff which will premiere its season finale on the same day.
Directed and produced by Emmy and Peabody Award-winning filmmaker Tom Jennings’ The Real Right Stuff is an archivist delight consisting of historical footage provided directly by NASA as well as from broadcast networks of the time period.
This exciting account takes you directly inside NASA’s Project Mercury program which revolutionized America’s role in human space exploration and inspired future generations of space enthusiasts. It’s free from distracting modern-day narration and interviews.
The Koalition had the opportunity to speak to Jennings about the creation of The Real Right Stuff and his unique approach to documentary filmmaking where during the course of production for Apollo: Missions to the Moon – which came out in 2019 for the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing – Tom Jennings and his production company, 1895 Films, found themselves with an abundance of material not just from the Apollo program, but from the Mercury and Gemini programs as well.
Check out our interview below.
