Capricorn One

Capricorn One (Peter Hyams, 1978) And then came the backlash.

The Moon landings happened between 1969 and 1972, with six landings—more were planned but were scrapped due to budget cuts and general disinterest in "Man's Greatest Adventure"—and one mission (Apollo 13) that had to be scrapped due to equipment malfunctions. In 1976, a book was self-published by a former technical writer for Rocketdyne (who'd manufactured the Saturn 5 rocket engines) that the Moon landings were faked, based on his theories and his Bachelor of Arts in English.

Peter Hyams was working on the CBS broadcasts of the moon landings, which included—in lieu of real pictures from space—video simulations, animations, and staged views of a life-size Lunar Module on a Moon-simulated stage. He wrote a treatment of a Moon landing hoax in 1972 and after the Watergate scandal, began shopping it around where it was eventually sold to Sir Lew Grade in 1975.

The premise for Capricorn One is that NASA discovers—at the last minute—that the environmental system on-board just plain doesn't work, that despite astronauts supposedly testing the suits and spacecraft before launch, or even having test flights, and despite that keeping the astronauts alive during the mission might be "job 1." So, Head of NASA Dr. James Kelloway (Hal Holbrook) has the three man crew (James Brolin, O.J. Simpson, Sam Waterston) taken out of their capsule before launch and flown to a Nevada base where a planned faux-Mars walk will take place five months hence.*

The studio is a humble affair where all the action—all the action—would take place in a 90° arc around the landing craft—forget that a mission to Mars would be a long time affair requiring months of transit time and and a long staying time, a few months at least, to make the trip worth it, and, you know, "distance". Not to mention that the equipment to be used is the 1969 moon landing vintage—the real lunar lander couldn't support its own weight in anything more than the 1/6th lunar gravity (for some unknown reason—but I'll speculate money—NASA cooperated with this project). 

Anyway, the astronauts, for the good of the country, decide to go along with the subterfuge—and there's also the little matter that if they don't, their wives will be blown up on the trip back to Houston after the launch. Given that threat, you would think these pilot-engineers would be able to connect 1 to 1 and realize that if they're threatening to kill the wives (who wouldn't know about the conspiracy), then it's a small step (rather than a giant leap) to kill three of the  people in the know.

The spend the length of the mission in that desert location—not too different from that Rocketydyne writer's premise that the Moon crews spent their missions in Vegas with hookers and showgirls (they weren't recognized and the women didn't talk or brag about it?). But the crew have no such amenities (and being on Earth, neither can they simulate zero-g conditions—a staple of televised crew activities in space—during their broadcasts**), and once their scheduled broadcasts have concluded, they start to realize their vulnerability (they're not needed anymore) and so they plan to make an escape to try to get back to civilization before the execution can take place.

Once the hoax is accomplished, the crew make their escape, hijacking a jet used to carry the would-be assassins to the desert facility and ditching it when it runs out of fuel—there wasn't enough for a return trip (just how well funded is this conspiracy?)—the astronauts split up to make it more difficult to find ALL of them. They are pursued by your standard conspiracy theory "black helicopters" that are not so smart to separate but pair up in their search. In fact, the black helicopters are rather comically imagined and shot. Looking like bugs, at one point they face each other as if talking in a forced perspective shot*** that belies the fact they'd be chopping each others' blades off if they were really facing each other.

Meanwhile, NASA announces that the astronauts were killed during re-entry. While the nation mourns, one of the cap-techs (named Elliott and played by Robert Walden) tips off an intrepid reporter Robert Caulfield (Elliott Gould) that the television signal for the broadcasts beats the telemetry signals from the space-craft. 

Of course, it would. But what did they do with the spacecraft? Did they shoot it into a course for Mars—in which case it would take 21 minutes to reach Earth and that's a lot of difference—or is it in Earth orbits—in which case tracking stations around the globe would be receiving it at a rate once every 90 minutes (the time it takes to orbit) rather than the regular speed of the Earth turning into the signal (See how this gets less and less likely?).

Anyway, Caulfield starts to follow leads and signals and enlists the aid of an eccentric crop-dusting pilot names Albain (Telly Savalas—okay, mock if you want, but Gould and Savalas are the most entertaining thing about this picture) to help find the desert studio and find the astronauts who might've survived—spoiler alert: they have better luck than two "black helicopters").

The unlikely team of Gould and Savalas really are the best thing about the movie. The worst performance is a real surprise—Sam Waterston gives a horribly overly-emotive performance in times of crisis, and I'll put that down to his playing the Command Module pilot because they never get the attention that the other two in the crew get.

The movie is absolute hokum, but it's visuals were tantalizing enough to inspire all sorts of conspiracy theories, to give pictures to the specious theories that were circling like vultures—and shots from the film were used in some garage videos as a basis for likelihood. In this case, those images were more powerful than any logic, as nothing is mentioned in the film about where the actual rocket has gone and no one in the film questions the limited field of view of the faked Mars signals (something you couldn't say about the vistas of the moon missions—even Apollo 11 did a 360° sweep of the landing area with the television camera) or even why the camera couldn't be moved to show the back of the spacecraft (thus showing the stage). Details. For the movie-goer, that's not brought up. Out of sight, out of mind. Plus, if a reporter can figure out a deception is going on—while it's going on—it's not much of a deception. In a post-Watergate world, it was easier to believe a case of malfeasance from the government than it would be to believe that it's easier to actually make the trip than to fake it.

Capricorn One is a mediocre film, but its imagery is compelling enough to charge the imagination...and fool the gullible. In fact, it's just like a conspiracy theory—all surface and no depth and enough holes to fly a Saturn 5 through.

Still, in a 1999 Gallup poll, 6% of Americans believe the Moon landing was faked (Post 9/11, a Pew research poll said that the number had "skyrocketed"...to 7%). 25% of British citizens believe it was a hoax (8 of the 1009 interviewed think Louis Armstrong was the first man to walk on the Moon).

https://news.gallup.com/poll/3712/Landing-Man-Moon-Publics-View.aspx
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/moon-landing-faked-why-people-believe-conspiracy-theories/

The posters for Capricorn One played up the conspiracy angle.

* At one point Kelloway grouses that Apollo 17 started getting complaints that the coverage was pre-empting re-runs of "I Love Lucy." As I remember it, it started with Apollo 12. If we had the same adventurous spirit at the time of Columbus, we'd be speaking Spanish!

** And this is is rich—during the televised Mars-walk, when they have to simulate Mars' lesser gravity, a director snaps his fingers and says "Slo-Mo" and the picture slows down—and if such a thing WERE possible, they'd still have to find some way to make up the time differential the longer "slo-mo" images would take when things go back to normal speed.

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