"Robert A. Heinlein - Shooting Destination Moon (Article)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Heinlein Robert A)

This was not the end of the control room tricks. Some of the dodges were
obvious, such as making dial needles go around, lights blink on and off,
television and radar screens light upтАФobvious, but tedious and sometimes
difficult. Producing the effect of a ship blasting off at six gravities requires
something more than sound track of a
rocket blast, as the men each weigh over a thousand pounds during blast.
Lee Zavitz and his crew built large inflated bladders into each acceleration
couch. Whenever the jet was тАЬfiredтАЭ these blaaders would be suddenly
deflated and the actors would be тАЬcrushedтАЭ down into their cushions.
A thousand pounds weight compresses the man as well as his mattress,
which will show, of course, in his features. The makeup man fitted each actor
with a thin membrane, glued to his face, to which a yoke could be rigged
back of his neck. From the yoke a lever sequence reaching out of the scene
permitted the manтАЩs features to be drawn back by the тАЬterribleтАЭ acceleration.
Part of what you see is acting by some fine actors, Dick Wesson, Warner
AndersOn, Tom Powers, John Archer, part was a Rube Goldberg trick.
The air suddenly escaping from the bladders produced a sound like that of a
mournful cow, thus requiring more dubbing of sound tr~ck. The air had to be
returned to the bladders with equal suddenness when the jet cut off, which
required a compressed air system more complicated than that used by a
service station.
The sets abounded in compressed air and hydraulic and electrical systems to
make vai~ious gadgets workтАФ to cycle the air lock doors, to rig out the exit
ladder, to make the instrument board workтАФall designed by Zavitz. Lee
Zavitz is the man who тАЬburned AtlantaтАЭ in Gone With The Wind, forty acres of
real fire, hundreds of actors and not a man hurt. I saw him stumped just once
in this film, through no fault of his. He was controlling an explosion following a
rocket crash. It was being done full size, out on the Mojave Desert, and the
camera angle stretched over miles of real desert. From a jeep back of the
camera Zavitz was cuing the special effects by radio. In the middle of the
explosions the radio тАШdecided to blow a tubeтАФand the action stopped, ruining
an afternoonтАЩs work. We had to come back and do it over the next day, after
a sleepless night of rebuilding by the special effects
crew. Such things are why making motion pictures produces stomach ulcers
but not boredom.
The greatest single difficulty we encountered in trying to fake realistically the
conditions of space flight was in producing the brilliant starry sky of empty
space. In the first place nobody knows what stars look like out in space; it is
not even known for sure whether twinkling takes place in the eye or in the

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atmosphere. There is plausible theory each way. In- the second place the
eye is incredibly more sensitive than is Technicolor film; the lights had to be
brighter than stars to be picked up at all. In the third place, film, whether used
at Palomar or in a Technicolor camera, reports a point light source as a circle
of light, with diameter dependent on intensity. On that score alone we were
whipped as to complete realism; there is no way to avoid the peculiarities
inherent in an artificial optical system.
We fiddled around with several dodges and finally settled on automobile
headlight bulbs. They can be burned white, if you donтАЩt mipd burning out a