The Right Stuff - Trivia, Questions and Fun Facts

[discussimdb]

Fan of The Right Stuff or just want to share your movie knowledge? This topic is dedicated to all trivia and questions related to The Right Stuff

[francisco]

Scott Wilson who played Scott Crossfield who was not chosen for the astronaut program because he was a civilian pilot played military characaters in Pearl Harbor released in 2001( General George C Marshal 2001) and Navy Seal Commanding Officer Salem in G.I. Jane (1997).

[ronnie]

The aircraft carrier, used in the scene to introduce Alan Shepard, was the U.S.S. Coral Sea CV-43.

[jesse]

The music accompanying John Glenn's orbit of the Earth is actually a song written by an Inuit woman on the set of Philip Kaufman's The White Dawn (1974) that was orchestrated by Henry Mancini for that film.

[tom]

American Airlines flight 1 crashed shortly after take off from Idlewild airport (now JFK) during the New York City ticker tape parade for John Glenn after his space flight.

[melinda]

Alan Shepard's space flight was on May 5th, 1961. Gus Grissom's space flight was on July 21st, 1961. John Glenn's space flight was on February 20th, 1962. Gordon Cooper's space flight was on May 15th, 1963.

[jim]

Last theatrical film of Kim Stanley.

[kenneth]

Bill Conti composed two pieces of music for the scene where Chuck Yeager attempts to break the sound barrier. The first piece - Breaking the Sound Barrier - is performed by a traditional orchestra with strings and horns, and plays up to the moment when the sonic boom is heard. The second piece - Mach 1 - plays when it is revealed that Yeager has indeed broken the sound barrier. It repeats the same theme - but this time it is played on a synthesizer. This shift from traditional to electronic instruments symbolizes the beginning of the space age.

[addison]

William Goldman was hired by Producers Robert Chartoff and Irwin Winkler to write the first draft of the screenplay. However, when Philip Kaufman came on as director, he disagreed with Goldman's adaptation, which discarded the story of Chuck Yeager, and concentrated on the Mercury 7 astronauts. Kaufman said, "I didn't want to make a film entirely about astronauts. I thought Yeager was the one who truly had 'the right stuff.'" (In his book "Adventures in the Screen Trade," Goldman calls his meeting with Kaufman "a nightmare.") Kaufman discarded Goldman's script, and wrote his own script. Goldman later said he disliked the final film, because he thought Kaufman portrayed Yeager as the only hero, while the rest of the astronauts only got lucky and didn't match up to him in any way.

[kylie]

In the cookout scene at Edwards Air Force Base, Sam Shepard is seen playing catch with his son. Chuck Yeager's real life nephew, Steve, played Major League baseball as a catcher for the Los Angeles Dodgers.

[veronica]

When the astronauts are inspecting the space capsule (or "space craft") with Wernher von Braun and his team, Gus Grissom (Fred Ward) is quite insistent that the hatch have "explosive bolts". The purpose of explosive hatches is to allow the occupants of the capsule to escape easily. In 1967, while doing a routine test of the Apollo 1 capsule, Grissom and his two companions died when a fire broke out in the cabin. The men died mainly due to the fact that the hatch was not designed with explosive bolts.

[lynn]

The tune that Gordon Cooper was whistling while trying to masturbate, is the official anthem of the United States Air Force, simply titled: "The Air Force Song". He was attempting to drown out the man in the next stall, who was humming "The Marines' Hymn" (presumably, John Glenn, as Cooper guessed).

[sara]

As of March 2019, Chuck Yeager and Annie Glenn (nee Castor) are the last surviving real characters.

[terry]

The production was beset by fifteen mile per hour, dust-laden winds when they were filming at Edwards Air Force Base.

[nora]

An early press release announced that Ellen Barkin was cast in the film. Her part was eventually recast.

[kristina]

The closing narration states that Gordon Cooper was "the last American ever to go into space alone". While true when the film was made, Mike Melvill in June and September 2004 and Brian Binnie in October 2004 went into space alone in Scaled Composites' SpaceShipOne (Not a N.A.S.A. spaceship or spaceflight). Binnie's flight was the day Gordon Cooper died.

[victoria]

While filming the lung-capacity sequence - in which the seven original Mercury astronauts need to blow into individual tubes to keep toy balls suspended in a beaker and end up in a competition of physical stamina - the seven actors portraying the astronauts actually competed with each other for the same reason. Gordon Cooper was third, John Glenn was second and Scott Carpenter won (in the movie). In reality, Cooper - the astronaut portrayed by Dennis Quaid - was the only non-smoker among the seven original astronauts, and therefore possessed a far-greater lung capacity than any of the others.

[phyllis]

According to Chuck Yeager, in his autobiography, it was not known that he broke the sound barrier until after they checked the Bell X-1 recording panel, and not when they heard the sonic boom, as shown in the movie. He still got his steak dinner for being the first to break the sound barrier though.

[beth]

In a scene deleted from the original release but restored in a later DVD version, Chuck Yeager (Sam Shepard) scolds the liaison man (David Clennon) for suggesting that an astronaut is doing the same thing as a monkey. Yeager points out that a monkey does not know that he is sitting atop high explosives. The sentiment is put in Yeager's mouth but comes from Tom Wolf's book, "The Right Stuff". This scene was filmed at Hamilton AFB, Novato, California.

[wesley]

Allegedly, Bill Conti wrote about three different scores for this film, the first consisting of his own original work, the second one featuring Gustav Holst's "The Planets" as inspiration. The third score written by Conti purely copied the film's temp track. which primarily used "The Planets" piece, under the condition that if Philip Kaufman used that portion of the score, he would have to credit Gustav Holst as the real composer. In the end, Kaufman and Conti compromised, using Conti's second score as the final score. In addition to "The Planets", the music score features other classical music pieces favored by Kaufman, such as Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky's Violin Concerto in D major, Opus35. It also features the Air Force song, "Wild Blue Yonder", heard during the "Yeager's Triumph" sequence, and music composed by Henry Mancini for Kaufman's earlier film, The White Dawn (1974). In spite of the film's heavy use of music from various sources, Conti would go on to win the Oscar for Best Original Score.