Right Stuff, The

Flight Journal, Aug 2004 by Farmer, James H

The Right Stuff

DVD available at Tower Records; $26.99.

Warner Brothers has issued a two-disc special-edition to mark the 20th anniversary of the release of what some film critics have called one of the "top 10 American films released during the the 1980s." Perhaps. Incredibly (for many of those serious aviation buffs among us), "The Right Stuff" actually earned four Academy Awards. Really!

American audiences, however, did not agree with the Academy, and the 3-hour, 13-minute epic proved a major box office disappointment. I must confess that although I loved Tom Wolfe's best-selling book, I hated the movie; my opinion has mellowed somewhat over the intervening years.

So why get the two-disc DVD set now? Aside from the marvelous wide-screen rendition of the film on disc one, the second disc is a veritable treasure trove of recent interviews, reflections and screen commentary by the cast and crew, including screenwriter/ director Phil Kaufman. Also featured in the bonus material are technical advisor/film actor Gen. Chuck Yeager and three of the seven Mercury astronauts: Scott Carpenter, Wally Schirra and an ailing Gordon Cooper. This is in addition to some rewarding, behind-the-scenes footage of how the miniature special effects were created on a limited budget.

But my biggest reason for viewing this DVD set was to hear Yeager's view of the film; more specifically, to see his explanation of it in light of his technical-advisor role on the project. He reflected, "If you look at the Air Force test pilots and people who worked in the Air Force, [the picture] was very, very accurate, and as a technical advisor, I made sure it was ...."

Say what?

When first seen two decades ago, my serious dislike of this picture began within 90 seconds of the lights going down in the theater. After only moments of that opening prologue about "the demon that lived at Mach 1," delivered in that famed Yeageresque, West Virginia drawl, we view a generic X-1 pilot diving to his death. This is soon followed by the Yeager character, on horseback, who rides to and then past an X-1 sitting alone without another human in sight; all four rocket motors are blasting away amid the sagebrush without so much as a wheel chock in sight.

Later, at Pancho's, recruiters reject test pilot "Slick" Goodlin because he's asking for $150,000 to attempt to fly the X-1 past the speed of sound. Yeager, they decide, is the cheaper route to go because he'll make the try on Air Force pay. He can try it the next morning, too, even though, he apparently has no previous experience in the type. Cut to the Edwards ramp at dawn. The X-1 is being fueled-sitting alone on its landing gear on the ramp. Although the test flight is secret, saloonkeeper Pancho Barnes and Yeager's wife are on hand to watch the B-29 mothership taxi out without the X-1 in its belly. Cut to a takeoff sequence from the 1950/1957 RKO feature "Jet Pilot" of an unmarked B-50 lifting off with the actual X-1. We won't even mention the later "unauthorized" flight of Yeager in the rocket-boosted NF-104A without the rocket!

Beirne Lay, the screen-writer of the classic "Twelve O'clock High," once told this reviewer, to paraphase, "The audience is not made of fools; take one false step in your story, and you've lost them."

Is "The Right Stuff" movie a case in point? The viewer must be the judge. Filmmakers have called the film "off-beat" and "a stylization." The classic filmmaker's retort comes to mind: "I'm not interested in the facts; I'm only interested in the 'truth.'"