The Right Stuff (film) - Production

Production

In 1979, independent producers Robert Chartoff and Irwin Winkler outbid Universal Pictures for the movie rights to Tom Wolfe's book, hiring William Goldman to write the screenplay. Goldman's adaptation focused on the astronauts, entirely ignoring Chuck Yeager. United Artists agreed to finance the film but the producers were not satisfied with Goldman's take on the book. They approached director Philip Kaufman who shared their dissatisfaction with the existing script. Kaufman began working on the film as early as 1980 and Goldman quit the project. When Wolfe showed no interest in adapting his own book, Kaufman wrote a draft in eight weeks. His draft restored Yeager to the story because "if you're tracing how the future began, the future in space travel, it began really with Yeager and the world of the test pilots. The astronauts descended from them".

After the financial failure of Heaven's Gate, the studio put The Right Stuff in turnaround and The Ladd Company stepped in with an estimated $17 million. According to Alan Ladd, Jr., the final budget was closer to $27 million. Actor Ed Harris auditioned twice in 1981 for the role of John Glenn. The first time was in an office with Chartoff and Kaufman and the actor felt that he did not do a good job. A month later, he auditioned again on videotape. Originally, Kaufman wanted to use a troupe of contortionists to portray the press corps, but settled on the improvisational comedy troupe Fratelli Bologna, known for its sponsorship of "St. Stupid's Day" in San Francisco. The director created a snake-like hiss to accompany the press corps whenever they appear, which was achieved through a sound combination of (among other things) motorized Nikon cameras and clicking beetles.

Shot between March and October 1982, with additional filming continuing into January 1983, most of the film was shot in and around San Francisco, where a waterfront warehouse was transformed into a studio. Location shooting took place primarily at the abandoned Hamilton Air Force Base north of San Francisco which was converted into a sound stage for the numerous interior sets. No location could substitute for the distinctive Edwards Air Force Base landscape which necessitated the entire production crew move to the Mojave Desert for the opening sequences that framed the story of the test pilots at Edwards.

Yeager was hired as a technical consultant on the film. He took the actors flying, studied the storyboards and special effects, and pointed out the errors. To prepare for their roles, Kaufman gave the actors playing the seven astronauts an extensive videotape collection to study.

The efforts at making an authentic feature led to the use of many full size aircraft, scale models and special effects to replicate the scenes at Edwards Air Force Base and Cape Canaveral. According to special visual effects supervisor Gary Gutierrez, the first special effects were too clean and they wanted a "dirty, funky, early NASA look." Kaufman was unhappy with the results and shut down work and fired many of the effects crew. Gutierrez and his team started from scratch, employing unconventional techniques—like going up a hill with model airplanes on wires and fog machines to create clouds, or shooting model F-104s from a crossbow device and capturing their flight with up to four cameras. Avant garde filmmaker Jordan Belson created the background of the Earth as seen from high-flying planes and from orbiting spacecraft.

Kaufman gave his five editors a list of documentary images the film required and they searched the country for film from NASA, the Air Force, and Bell Aircraft vaults. They also discovered Russian stock footage not viewed in 30 years. During the course of the production, Kaufman met with resistance from the Ladd Company and threatened to quit several times. In December 1982, 8,000 feet of film portraying John Glenn's trip in orbit and return to Earth disappeared or was stolen from Kaufman's editing facility in Berkeley, California. The missing footage was never found but the footage was reconstructed from copies.