Word: lunar
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...precise moment the moon made his head explode--or at least that's how he describes it. It was December 1972, and Hanks ran home from school to see the transmissions that the Apollo 17 astronauts were beaming back live from the surface of the moon. "There was no lunar module in sight," Hanks says. "All you could see were the astronauts in the distance as the camera panned around this incredibly alien, incredibly desolate place. I was just gone...
...years old, the actor, director and producer has made something of a second career out of spreading the lunar word, first with his star turn in 1995's Apollo 13, then with his 1998 HBO series, From the Earth to the Moon. Now Hanks is working the space beat again, preparing for this month's release of Magnificent Desolation: Walking on the Moon 3D, co-produced by IMAX and Hanks' own production company, Playtone. A 3-D, 70-mm, giant-screen spectacle that Hanks co-wrote and narrates, the movie re-creates what it's like to travel...
What is it about the pull of the moon that holds Hanks fast? Why does a high-powered Hollywood player with the muscle to tackle pretty much any production he wants keep returning to his lunar love...
Hanks has good reason to feel worn out. To re-create a flight to the moon, Playtone and IMAX filled a Los Angeles soundstage with Styrofoam, concrete and pulverized roofing tiles--the simulated lunar surface--and borrowed exact replicas of a lunar module and lunar rover from the Kansas Cosmosphere and Space Center. They stitched together spacesuits from the boots up, rolled in a 240-lb. 3-D IMAX camera, in addition to the cameras director of photography Sean Phillips built himself, and rigged the entire set with a harness system to simulate the one-sixth-gravity bunny...
They began losing games in ways that even the Cubs hadn't invented. Why, they blew one game on a walk-off balk. Now, any kind of balk is as improbable as a lunar eclipse. But to have your newly acquired veteran, Mike Stanton, come on to relief pitch in the bottom of the 10th, a man on first and third, and have him lose the game with some imperceptible twitch of a muscle, spotted only by a man in blue 70 ft. away who then waves home the winning run without the benefit of a single batted ball...