Published: July 16, 2009 11:06 pm      

SPACE: Long-lost film resurfaces in time for 40th anniversary of man on moon

For nearly four decades, an eastern New York man has been sitting on a documentary that contains some of the rarest footage in existence of the process that put man on the moon for the first time.

What might be more amazing is the fact that, for years after Apollo 11 landed on the moon, no one was interested in this historic film.

Theo Kamecke was commissioned by NASA to film everything going on behind the scenes in the weeks prior to the launch of Apollo 11, which on Monday celebrates its 40th anniversary of man’s first landing on the moon.

For six weeks prior to the flight, Kamecke was the only civilian granted access to NASA property. He shot hours of footage of the flight’s preparations, which he later combined with film shot around the globe that conveyed what man’s first steps on the moon would mean to everyone.

“NASA kept their hands off,” Kamecke said during a phone interview from his home in East Durham, which is southwest of Albany. “Anything I wanted access to, I got it.”

That access included Kamecke’s being able to obtain some of the footage shot by the flight’s crew — Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins and Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin — as well as external material shot by cameras that were mounted on various spacecraft. Combined with that are various drawings depicting technical aspects of the flight such as craft trajectories; due to the high cost of computer animation at the time, producers found it far cheaper to have such diagrams hand-drawn, Kamecke said.

Realizing the historical impact of what he was charged with filming, Kamecke said his goal was to give future generations a judicious look at the world at that time.

“In my head, I saw the film, and I wanted to make it something that people could look at 50 years afterward or 100 years afterward and understand what was going on, what was going on in people’s heads back on Earth. I wanted to make a film that had kind of an epic quality that captured the sense of life on Earth as our species stepped off the Earth,” he said, citing an example of having his film crews focus on people’s reaction to the rocket launch as opposed to the launch itself. “I wanted people to enjoy it like you would enjoy stories around the campfire.”

Culling all of this film, Kamecke completed his documentary in 1970 — but to his surprise, no one was interested in distributing the film, which was called “Moonwalk One.”

“The public was fed up with anything to do with space at the time,” he said. “Imagine if there were cameras around when Columbus landed in America. I think people were fascinated by it now, but I don’t think people in his time would have cared that much.”

The film was screened at a couple festivals and special events, but it otherwise was never seen by the public. Only two copies were created — one was kept by Kamecke, while the other went to the company that did some of the post-production work on the product, Technicolor. That firm closed down within a few years of the film’s completion, though, and somewhere in that time either Technicolor or NASA lost that second copy.

“I always knew it was there under my desk,” he said of the film. “I was just waiting for a time when someone would track me down and say they wanted to do something with it.”

That time finally came a couple years ago when Chris Riley with the British production firm The Attic Room called Kamecke to inquire about the film. Riley and two other producers got their hands on the film, transferring the 35 mm print into the final product that Kamecke had always envisioned; he even made a few additional edits before the DVD was closed out.

Some of the footage was pirated and has been seen elsewhere. Much of the material, though, hasn’t been viewed in more than 35 years, and Kamecke hopes that the gap in time might actually increase the film’s impact.

“Everybody who watched the walk on the moon didn’t think of it as an American event. They thought of it as a world event,” he said. “(Viewers of the film) are going to experience something that everyone will be interested in now and in the future — the first time man left this world and walked on another world.

“(The film) is what I wanted it to be. I’m glad that it worked out the way it did.”

The director’s cut of the film is available at moonwalkone.com and includes a making-of feature.

Contact Paul Lane at 693-1000, ext. 116.