That Time JSC PAO Let Fake Student Film Makers Shoot at NASA

The director who fooled NASA into helping make fake moon-landing movie 'Operation Avalanche', Mashable

"After making a name for himself in the independent film world with The Dirties, Canadian director Matt Johnson is back with Operation Avalanche, a faux documentary about four CIA agents who go undercover inside NASA, where they make a startling discovery about the space agency's ability to put a man on the moon. And the way they did it is some real tinfoil-hat stuff: Johnson and his cohorts told NASA they were student filmmakers looking to do a documentary on the Apollo program. NASA was all too happy to oblige, giving them access to NASA officials conversations that were recorded and edited to fit the secret concept and facilities. Operation Avalanche debuted at Sundance earlier this year and has been making the rounds at film festivals. Lionsgate Premiere releases the low-budget thriller (the largely improvised film is presented in grainy 16mm to make it feel more authentic) on Friday, and it's worth a look, if only to see how Johnson and his collaborators talked their way inside the hallowed walls of NASA."

'Operation Avalanche': A Fake Documentary About A Faked Moon Landing, NPR

"To film this adventure, Johnsonwith collaborators Owen Williams and Josh Bolesreally did infiltrate NASA, telling the agency he was a student filmmaker shooting a documentary about the space race. No one at the research-rigorous center bothered to Google him, apparently, or they would have found a man with a history of video pranks. (The candid-camera approach may help explain why no one in the film talks like they're in the 1960s. Johnson and company likely had to keep up appearances in front of present-day NASA staff.)"

Sneaking into NASA and other money-saving strategies from the set of 'Operation Avalanche'

"Think about it: Just from a raw economics point of view, how the hell are we going to rebuild all that [stuff] in a credible way?" he told me. "There's no way that we're going to rebuild the outside of Shepperton Studios or even anything that looked like Shepperton studios. We just would have had to cut it from the script. The same with NASA."

from NASA Watch http://ift.tt/2cJXNay
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