Kubrick Moon Landing Plans Unearthed In Time For 50th Anniversary Of Apollo 11

    LOS ANGELES, CA, April 02, 2018 /24-7PressRelease/ -- BIG MACHINE, a Hollywood production company in the process of shooting a commercial homage to the Apollo 11 landings,  has unearthed documents which may finally answer questions surrounding the legitimacy of the television coverage of the moon landing on June 20, 1969.

The Burbank, California production company, BIG MACHINE, had hired a consultant with connections to the Apollo 11 mission to help with the authenticity of their shoot. Jakoub Stuhlinger had built a reputation working with Hollywood productions after nearly 40 years in the aerospace industry in both California, Texas and Florida. It was Stuhlinger that stumbled across the documents while doing research for the project.

"I was looking through an old filing cabinet that a former colleague had asked me to keep in storage, when I ran across a series of documents bundled together. The title 'Van Nuys Moon Project. Director Stanley Kubrick' caught my eye," said Stuhlinger. "At first I thought it was a joke, but the more I looked at the papers the more I realized how serious and real these letters and sketches were."

Sean Owolo, an executive producer with the production company, recounts the moment Stuhlinger shared the news with him. "He just calls me in a panic, and I can hardly understand what he's saying, but he keeps repeating that Stanley Kubrick shot the moon landing. I think my first reaction was to start worrying about this guy's mental condition. But he insisted I look at the pictures he was emailing me."

As Owolo recounts the story, Stuhlinger sent over a dozen images showing plans for lighting and staging the Lunar Landing in a sound stage in Van Nuys, CA., nearly 240,000 miles away form the surface of the moon.

"I've always heard these conspiracy theories about faking the landing on the moon, but they've just never been believable," said Steve Petersen, a director with BIG MACHINE. "But sure enough, he had call sheets, storyboards, set plans and even a dinner menu."

Stuhlinger says he spent hours pouring over every detail and matching them back to the actual mission details. After a while he says an entirely new picture of what happened in 1969 began to emerge.

"It started to become clear that this was a backup plan for the actual live coverage in case something went wrong," said Stuhlinger. "I think the video engineers at NASA were worried that the video transmission from the moon wouldn't work. Specifically, they were probably worried that the noise in the transmission would be greater than the signal and that all we'd see would be static. So I think they came up with a plan to recreate what the landing would look like."

Stulhlinger said that the higher-ups in press relations at NASA were probably impressed with the realism that Stanley Kubrick had achieved in 2001: A Space Odyssey, released the year before. Stuhlinger says the documents make clear that this was never going to be passed off as the real thing, but as a hyper-realistic recreation.

"It's pretty interesting how over the years this became a true conspiracy, but the truth is really just as fascinating," said Owolo. "It's really incredible that he found this just a year before the 50th Anniversary of the moon landing. Now maybe we can finally put the faking of the moon landing to rest."

"We got to put this production plan from the 1960s into actual practice, incorporating some of the planned shooting techniques into a new commercial that re-creates the original moon landing but adds a new twist," said Director Steve Petersen.

"We're looking forward to sharing pictures of these documents via social media, including the BIG MACHINE Facebook page (https://www.facebook.com/bigmachinedesign)," said BIG MACHINE Executive Producer Sean Owolo.

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