Dark Side of the Moon (2002) - full transcript

In six days, God created

the heavens and the Earth.

On the 7th day, Stanley Kubric sent everything

back for modifications. So wrote a critic...

One year after the death

of the famous director,

who now rests in peace in the garden

of his home just outside London,

His wife Christiane and Jan Harlan,

his production manager, and Christiane's brother

spoke to us about the

filming of "Barry Lyndon".

Stanley was very much trying to

photograph Barry Lyndon

so that the atmosphere of the 18th

century should be retained on the screen.

He loved those paintings from the period.

And he didn't know exatly how to do it.

There is no camera built for this.

So, he was looking desperately for faster lenses

to shoot the scene at candlelight.

He contacted as many people as possible,

whenever he needed to know something.

And then he hit, because of an article

in a science magazine.

On this Zeiss lens. It turned out, that

NASA was the original customer of Zeiss.

And Stanley then said "Well, let me speak to

them and see whether we could test it.

Let me worry about that!"

And it finally worked!

For 25 years, critics have been asking one question

about the stunning visuals of Barry Lyndon:

Why did NASA's top officials,

and Wernher von Braun,

the father of space conquest,

agree to lend Stanley Kubrick

this famous camera

and it's legendary lens,

The only one of its kind in the world?

This unique lens had been jealously

guarded secret since its conception,

Worth millions of dollars, it was the only lens capable of filming spy satellites in pitch darkness.

On January the 1st 2001, Christiane Kubrick began

looking through the late director's archives.

There, buried under a mountain of documents, she

discovered a file bearing The White House logo.

And stamped "TOP SECRET".

In it was the answer to that question.

I believe that this nation should commit

itself to achieving the goal, before this

decade is out, of landing a man on the

moon and returning him safely to the Earth.

We choose to go to the moon in this

decade and do the other things, not

because they are easy, but because they are hard.

NASA's decision to lend Kubrick this

legendary lens was the culmination

of a story that had began 15 years before.

In 1961, John F. Kennedy, in a famous speech,

made landing on the moon his top priority.

One month earlier, the Russian Yuri Gagarin

had become the first man in space.

The Soviets had won in Korea, Berlin and Cuba.

All that was left was the moon,

and they would do anything to get there first.

The Americans wanted to restore their self-esteem,

it had been dealt a serious blow by Gagarin.

They decided that you can do this best

by creating a objective.

Something that is very tough to reach, but if you

reach it, then you have done the job right.

And there was a lot of discussion inside

and outside the space community

Of what that should be. And clearly

the moon was the winning idea.

The task of putting a man on the moon was

entrusted to the German scientist Wernher von Braun.

Recruited at the end of the 2nd World War,

von Braun had worked for NASA ever since

...with complete impunity.

During the war he'd used prisoners from the Dora

concentration camp to build his V-2 rockets.

20,000 slave workers died constructing

his underground factories.

But the Americans turned a blind eye

to Von Braun's Nazi past.

I don't know if he was a real Nazi, he wasn't with

the Nazis anymore, he was just a ex-German.

I don't think anyone's ever linked him

to NAZI war crimes or anything.

Although the inhabitants of London, who were on the

receiving end of more than a 1000 V-1's might not agree.

But war is war!

The Soviets decided to meet Kennedy's challenge.

They too needed a brain to mastermind their moon program.

They found it in Sergei Korolev, at that time,

residing in one of Stalin's prison camps.

Without compunction, he use Gulag labor

to build the Baikonur base.

The moon race has always been represented as

the more noble facet of the Cold War,

but at that time they were still

a long way from the sea of ​​tranquility.

Towards the end of 1966, the CIA intercepted a memo

indicating that the Soviets were ready to put men on the moon.

Nine cosmonauts had been training for several years.

They'd even landed LUNA-9 on the moon in January 1966.

The secret services of the two superpowers,

began to wage a terrible war.

The mastermind behind the Soviet program,

professor Korolev,

died at the age of 58, following a simple

operation to remove his tonsils.

Korolev? No.

The CIA is forbidden by American law to kill anyone.

There are no exceptions.

The law is absolute.

Sabotage was not necessary. The technical

problems were so great that...uh...

...that's really what caused their problems.

We never killed a Soviet,

and the Soviets never killed an American!

Neither one side nor the other wanted to start something

whose final outcome they couldn't predict.

In January 1967, the three astronauts of Apollo 1,

Grissom, White and Chaffee...

...were burnt to death during a training exercise.

Three months later, the Soviet

Vladimir Komarov was killed returning from space,

When his parachute mysteriously failed to open.

Gagarin, the Space hero, was also

killed while test piloting a plane.

He should have been the first man on the moon.

On July the 3rd 1967, the Soviet rocket intended to fly

to the moon exploded while its tanks were being filled,

destroying the whole launch area.

The Soviets dream of putting a man on

the moon to celebrate the 50th anniversary

of the October Revolution,

had come to an abrupt end.

All the Soviets could do now was

sit back and watch the Americans triumph.

For the White House, putting a man on the moon,

had become the priority of priorities.

It wasn't the priority of priorities,

the priority of priorities was national defense.

The moon race was a completely

different budget: NASA's.

There was a very important philosophy here...

the Apollo program was not really designed to get

men to the moon or to get samples of the moon rocks at all.

It was the Cuban fiasco that was

probably the biggest factor.

The USA was absolutely terrified about the fact that

the Russians would have these enourmous powerful rockets.

It was all part of the missile thing. The propulsion behind the moon rocket and a missile was pretty much the same thing.

There is no question that the military push was very strong.

One would have to be exceptionally naive to believe

that several billions of dollars were spent

Just to get a few pounds of lunar rock.

The Apollo program was, in fact, the early stages

of what was later to become Star Wars,

The missile shield for defending the USA.

But it would have been impossible to make Congress cough up so much money without the suport of the public opinion.

When it came to a moon landing,

everyone said yes, and without hesitation.

That's why the administration paid all of this money,

that's why the congress funding allocated this funds and that's why NASA has been given this mandate so that this must happen.

"We must go to the moon before the Russians do"

The Soviet Union did an absolutely superb

job of developing space

from an industrial base that was

much less advanced than the USA.

They joined in a race that they

absolutely couldn't win.

They had to use a incredible

percentages of their resorces,

in order to sustain their work in space.

And financially, it wiped them out.

The USSR couldn't keep up...

In the States however, the number of people

in aeronautics companies working for the space program

had increased in seven years

from 30.000 to almost 400.000.

The huge cake represented by the space program was shared out according to classic Mafia family rules

Three states: California, Texas and Flórida, monopolized everything.

All the research centers, rocket plants, training bases and launch sites

were set up along the California-Texas-Florida axis.

From Mission Control in Houston, to the launch pads at

Cape Caneveral via the factories in San Diego,

a windfall of several billion dollars...

and this was no coincidence.

Lyndon Johnson had been the governor

of Texas before becoming the American President.

Nixon and Ronald Reagan both proceeded their residency

of the White House with spells as governor of California.

And the Bush family, father and son, were buying up Texas and Florida for years before each took their turn in the Oval Office.

As payback for this Reagal munificence, Boeing aircraft industries and General Motors generously financed the governor's campaigns on their way to the White House.

Unimaginable sums were swallowed up during this race to the moon with the general approval of the public.

The entire enormous machine was at the disposal of the

politicians and financiers. The moon was simply a pretext.

All that remained was to convince the general public that the conquest of space was a peaceful enterprise.

It was Wernher Von Braun who first realized

that the race to the moon must be entertaining

...a show!

After several meetings with Walt Disney,

an idea took shape.

Only Hollywood - the Dream Factory itself -

could transform a dull rocket

launch which no one took any notice of,

... into a mega production.

And Stanley Kubrik was about to convince the last doubters.

The famous director, working closely with NASA,

had started to shoot '2001: A Space Odyssey'.

Filming was expected to take four years.

The shock produced by the rushes when they were shown in the basement of the White House confirmed what NASA already knew:

That a moon landing would drive the public wild.

This film would prepare the public,

already softened up by the Apollo program,

to greet the first trip to the moon with

unbridled enthusiasm.

The film is clearly a tremendous PR exercise for NASA.

The fact that there was an artist coming up with there totally

new and fantastic ideias and visions,

of course stimulated the support for the whole project.

They felt they were made more glamorous.

Yeah.

They became very aware how important the

visual spectacle is going to be.

When I first went to see 2001,

I was just, I was blown away.

It was a great film, wonderfully done, super special

effects and music and a great story by Arthur C. Clarke.

There is no question,

at all, that the designers and engineers

of the space program had been affected by 2001.

2001: A Space Odyssey was also a

visionary film.

Kubrick's real achievement was the fact that not a

single scene was criticized by NASA engineers

for lack of authenticity.

The images of the space ship discovery on

its way through the solar system

was stupefying!

It was absolutely fascinating.

They look nearly exactly the same.

It had a pointed top it went down like this...

and it had the engine in the back.

The influence of 2001 on the whole space

program would be colossal.

Kubrick's science fiction vision of the cosmos

would speed up space exploration

and give a shot in the arm to the race to the moon.

Fascinated by the early rushes of the film,

NASA technicians modified the astronauts

spacesuits, adding liberal touches of color.

NASA was so impressed by the spacesuits

that they did certain things, that they hadn't done before.

I couldn't tell you what they did,

but I remember at the time Stanley was very flattered.

Some of the ideas were similar,

not because we were imitating

what was done in 2001,

but just because looking for new ideas, people working

at the same time came up with some of the same solutions.

I remember he was very proud when...

when all sorts of people said how

accurate it was.

It affected our thinking and our

processes and the final product.

Stanley and Arthur talked about it and they felt like stars.

On the eve of the moonshot, NASA turned

to Hollywood, the realm of make-believe,

and in particular to Jack Torrance.

Then a young producer at Paramount,

he now lives in New York.

The White House and the Space Administration - NASA - quickly

realized that the race to the moon was really a war of images

between the Russians and the United States

because our facilities were pretty rudimentary

and the space center was really laughable.

So they decided that the space race had to be turned into a

pure Hollywood product to show,

so they came to see us with with one goal:

It had to be absolutely amazing.

Hollywood could do it,

we could create the dream.

All of Hollywood stopped working on

other projects just for this,

I mean it was never seen before.

700 technicians invaded Cape Canaveral.

It was incredible,

like the construction of the pyramids

but bigger, better, more beautiful.

And they made us a promise: They said you do this right and pretty soon, the next election, one of your guys is gonna be President.

And there he was, Ronny Regan was, Reagan was President of the United States. And they gave us carte blanche.

We decided on new spacesuits for the

astronauts, we changed the shape of the rockets,

we redid all the lighting, we added a hundred

more spotlights, we moved the launch pad

so that the Sun would be

behind it at liftoff.

The hypocrisy stretched to coating the rocket engines

with gold leaf, even though it was of absolutely no use.

It was most of all to

show that it was all so expensive.

And this was just for a little film, but it was

gonna be the most expensive film in the history of cinema.

On July the 17th 1969, the President of the United States,

Richard Nixon, gave the go-ahead for the launch of Apollo 11

with Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins onboard.

Two billion TV viewers got ready to

watch man's first steps on the moon.

That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind

Michael Collins never got over the fact that he had been the only one of the three astronauts not to walk on the moon.

He disappeared from sight for good.

Completely disorientated by his sudden

fame, Neil Armstrong withdrew to a monastery.

David Bowman was in the Houston Space Center,

that famous evening of the first steps on the moon,

in permanent radio contact with Armstrong and Aldrin.

Today, half-blind following an

unfortunate accident, he remembers Armstrong.

They gave him the script the

day before in a sealed envelope,

that famous phrase that he would say

when he landed on the moon.

He read the script in front of us:

"One small step for man, one great leap for mankind."

He said, "who wrote that crap?"

His jokes before liftoff, just great.

He asked us where the duty-free shop was,

what the in-flight movie was,

if he was in a smoking section,

if he could have a window seat at the back,

could he have a kosher meal...

He had his car radio under one arm. He was scared

someone would steal it from the NASA parking lot.

On the moon it was worse.

The few words exchanged with all them while they

collectively sampled, so incredible.

So uh, when I got to the cafeteria, that asshole

tells me you got two side orders.

I have to charge you two extra bucks. Two extra bucks for a handful of beans. Can you believe it? How about that.

He forgot completely there were 200 of us sitting

in the mission station hearing every word they said.

Shortly after the three astronauts triumphant

return to earth and their period of quarantine,

carefully observed by President Richard Nixon, Buzz Aldrin,

the second man to walk on the moon, sank into a depression

for no apparent reason.

He became an alcoholic, which was partly

due to his family history.

It had thrown him into a deep depression.

He came back drunk every night.

So I think it may not be a good conclusion

to assume that it was a lunar mission,

he may have had those problems anyway.

He didn't know what to do with himself.

So I think it was like anyone in life,

he found a period where he really didn't know what to do.

Aldrin, like many people, have difficult times

in their lives and one never knows exactly why.

There were some unusual things that happened

that were a bit surprising and influenced my life.

Before we went to the moon, President Nixon had prepared some remarks for a speech to give if we could not leave the moon and come back.

Nixon was prepared for the worst.

On the eve of Apollo 11's launch,

he'd secretly recorded a televised message

announcing the death of the three astronauts.

Yesterday, I laid a wreath at the cemetery

which commemorates the brave people...

When you are faced with that readjustment,

you change or you die.

I think that was the reason he

became very discouraged to life.

So I decided to retire not just from NASA,

but from the Air Force.

You could hear him wandering around

in the streets, stumbling about, raving.

Did we, did people go to the moon or not?

The rumors have been growing for years.

If Nixon was cold-bloodedly prepared to send

these three astronauts to their death,

what credence can we give to those first steps on

the moon which so entranced the whole of humanity?

Christoph wrote in his memoirs, "Have you never wondered why the

President of the United States was not present at the launch of Apollo 11?"

Eve Kendall, Nixon's personal secretary at that time, made it clear that she would not object to stirring up some thirty-year-old memories.

It was Henry Kissinger who first took her on as an

intern in the White House when she was still only 20.

In Washington, Donald Rumsfeld, newly

appointed defense secretary by President George Bush,

celebrates his arrival in the Pentagon.

With him and the ex-Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, Lawrence

Eagleburger, General Alexander Haig and the head of the CIA, Richard Helms.

30 years previously, these five were President Nixon's main advisors.

- Are we through?

- All right, one more drink and then I'm ready.

- There ya go.

- I'm only teasing you.

- You have a great chance to make a fool of me.

- What is going on?

- What in the world? Hello Mel, how are ya?

- I don't know, he looks a little slippery to me.

- Now how are we doing this?

He's...you're asking the questions?

- You're gonna have to translate them be,

so I know for sure what I'm being asked.

- I understand French. I don't speak it

very well but I understand it.

- Ok. - What's your problem?

- Don't worry about it, it's ok.

- Yeah.

- Those are the kind of questions you have on TV every night.

- It's a long and complicated story.

- Only a few people need to know.

- I'll tell you a fascinating story.

- The whole thing? - Are you running?

You're gonna cut it all out of this thing

anyway but...

Let me tell ya, off the record.

Turn that camera off.

It's an incredible story. Newly elected,

Nixon was up to his neck in the Vietnam War.

He needed a big stunt to reverse his

negative image with the American public.

President Nixon was on the telephone,

speculating.

He kept fiddling with the telephone cord. The Oval Office was in

semi-darkness and I found it very difficult to take notes of this meeting.

We had a meeting and talked

and he had made a number of decisions already

basically to try to calm things down.

The Director of the CIA was looking panicked.

He always overestimated the power of the Soviets.

The Russians will put a man on the moon,

it's only a matter of months, maybe even days.

I have very accurate information about that.

We can't wait another year.

We have to launch Apollo 11 as soon as we can.

I was on the telephone constantly and in

meetings in various other ways

trying to promote more energy,

more aggressiveness in this matter.

I said to the president then,

I said you can't let this succeed

and you must do everything necessary

to make sure that it doesn't.

The president turned to his experts

at NASA and said, "are we ready?"

The director of the space agency only

half reassured him.

He said, "we might not be able to send

back films of the first steps on the moon.

Well, President Nixon

refused that idea. No way.

The whole world is waiting to see an

American take the first steps on the moon.

He was very upset about it

and that he felt that something had

gone wrong and maybe he was responsible.

The president of the United States was irate.

The sequence of events I remember as the most tense.

Then one of the presidential advisers, I don't know,

General Alexander Haig or Donald Rumsfeld,

said hesitantly,

"What if we film the first steps on the moon

...in a studio?"

Then, if we fail, we can always show those pictures to the public.

I talked to the

President and Kissinger supported it.

At first I didn't take it very seriously

and I was told not to take it very seriously.

Then it kept going on and on and on.

The president was prepared to do

so and I was prepared to support that.

And that was decided basically by Henry,

Al Haig, and the Secretary of Defense.

But in the last analysis, the only person who can make the

decision to do A, B, or C is the President the United States under our system.

And he would have to order it done.

Nixon settled back in his chair and

closed his eyes for a few minutes

and then he stood up and said, "Gentlemen,

you have less than two weeks to get

everything prepared."

That was big. That was a big idea,

it was a important thing, and a lot of effort

went into it. It was an anguishing

decision for President Nixon to make.

And I think he made the right decision.

He was the president and he deserves

credit for having had the courage to do it.

He did that on his own.

Sensible thing to do.

Then he came over

to me and picked up all my notes,

ripped them up into little pieces and threw

them in the wastebasket.

No stage in my life could I have

anticipated that this would happen,

...at no stage, not even when I was

made National Security Advisor.

And I think it is...

...a great symptom...

of the strength of America that this was even conceivable.

I thought it was the right thing to do because we have to do

something to show that we're still the United States of America.

We walked out of the room and

President Nixon said, "I've decided to do that,

and I need you to do this job. We're

gonna do it." It was just amazing.

So we were trying to figure out who would

do what when.

He simply has got to have the person he wants in that job,

and it has to be someone who's capable of doing it.

And it has to be somebody he knows well.

I said I'd like to talk to one person, he said "who?"

Donald Rumpsfeld was the first to propose Stanley Kubrick.

The film would have to be perfect, but the

set could never be built in time.

The filming of '2001: A Space Odyssey' was

drawing to a close in a suburb of London.

Why not use the sets there?

Rumsfeld was sure that Kubrick would not refuse.

During the Kennedy administration, the

White House had granted him

special authorization to access

strategic areas of the Pentagon

during the preparations for the film 'Dr. Strangelove'

Kubrick owed them.

I told Mr. Nixon it's very dangerous to

lie in the United States.

You can't pull a con like that in a democracy, too many

people would talk, it would be absurd.

Then he said, almost sadly,

"Go ahead anyway."

Rumpsfeld offered to go and negotiate

personally with Stanley Kubrick.

He and Henry Kissinger flew to England that

same evening.

Kubrick was surprised and amused by the idea,

but began by refusing.

Rumsfeld wouldn't give up.

We're only asking you to do one thing: just leave us

the keys to the studio for one weekend,

just so we can shoot a bit of film and

take a few shots.

Everything will be tidied up again by

Monday morning.

Kissinger flattered him, telling him that

'Dr. Strangelove' was one of Nixon's favorite films.

In the end, Kubrick agreed.

The fake footage would be shot in England in the

MGM studios near Borehamwood,

with a skeleton crew.

The two technicians and two actors would be CIA agents.

To guarantee their trustworthiness,

all had to be single men without family ties.

They would sign a contract committing themselves to

perpetual silence about the whole affair.

Once the filming was over, they would

have to disappear.

But Stanley Kubrick was a perfectionist.

Faced with the CIA crew's lack of professionalism,

he ended up, against his better judgment,

supervising the shooting of the fake moonwalk.

But, he told them, from Monday morning

you're out of my life for good.

My goodness... that is somebody.

He is impressive.

And he is a balanced, rational man.

And he also has some courage to say that;

what he'd said.

And from there on, it played out

exactly as he suggested.

He had very great common sense,

he was very dedicated personality,

and my relations with him were wonderful.

Kissinger was the key person here,

that's right.

And he was very much challenged by this project.

That did take a long time,

but everybody was very interested that it

could be done at all.

I mean we have

never done this like this.

True, yes, we haven't.

So that's one reason to try.

They tried and tried, and it didn't look right.

I remember the thing with the stars,

they had huge sheets of paper

and they were little pinholes.

Everybody should realize

what an achievement it was to do that.

Kissinger was so nervous that he

packed his passport, you know,

in the big suitcase and things like that.

He was very unlike himself.

It finally worked and Kissinger was very

very very pleased with the result.

It looked fantastic.

Hipedie hop hipedie hop hipedie hop over hill...

Sidda la folie, this is stupid.

There is no reason, not the...

you know people come out with

crazy ideas about anything.

I know about these stories

about... the pictures

from rehearsals or pictures

that are made in a lab or fictions

like this because of the sunlight and whatnot,

but indeed it's not.

Ask the Soviets whether it's true or not;

they had the means to find out.

Dimitri Muffley had worked for the

Soviet secret services for fifteen years

before being exchanged for another

renegade when the Berlin Wall fell.

What really surprised us was a

number of mistakes the White House made.

They wouldn't have fooled a kid of ten.

We soon realized the whole thing was a hoax.

It took us less than two hours to figure

out the photographs.

Take the American flag, which is shown

suspended in midair and waving this way and that,

but there's no wind on the moon.

NASA might say

that they retouched the photographs to bring up

the Stars and Stripes to make them more patriotic.

That's nonsense.

The same lack of atmosphere on the moon is the

cause of extreme temperature changes on the surface.

The camera used

on the moon was a Hasselblad 500,

of excellent design and quality,

but with no special modifications or cover.

But in two hours, the temperature went from plus

130 degrees to minus 150 degrees.

Yet everyone knows that above 50 degrees,

heat causes chemical changes in the photographic emulsions.

It makes the mechanical parts of the camera expand

and loosens the lens.

Extreme cold would render the batteries

and the exposure meter useless

and freeze the film, which

shatters like glass at minus 80 degrees.

The X rays from the Sun would fog the film

and ultraviolet rays would distort the colors.

Yet the colors are perfect.

Gravity on the moon is one-sixth of that

of the earth.

This means that a fully equipped astronaut in his spacesuit

who weighs 184 kg on the earth would

weigh only about 30 on the moon.

Have you seen the depth of that footprint in the sand of

an astronaut weighing only a sixth of his normal weight?

On the moon, there is no water.

You couldn't get a footprint

like that even if you were walking on talc.

Finally, in all the photographs,

there was no flash.

You'd have seen it because the

astronaut taking the photograph

is reflected in the visor of

the helmet of the other astronaut.

The astronauts are lit from behind,

but the smallest details of their

spacesuits are perfectly visible.

The very first thing you learn in photography

is not to shoot against the light.

You've got to have your back

to the Sun to get the best shots.

One shot, salvaged before NASA cropped it,

reveals the source of the light for

those long horizontal shadows.

Two spotlights in the studio!

On the Apollo 11 mission, Muffley pointed out,

everything went perfectly according to plan,

except for one thing:

There were no pictures.

The film was unusable and

none of the photos came out.

But everything depended on these pictures,

eagerly awaited all around the world.

Muffley showed us two photos from the end of a

reel of film which had never been developed.

They had been slumbering away in NASA's archives.

On the first, the shadows make no sense,

spreading in all directions.

On the second, a photograph of Stanley Kubrick,

taken during the filming of 2001,

can be seen left abandoned on

the studio's fake lunar surface.

Ambrose Chappel, ex-CIA agent, refused to

take part in the mission.

He retired from the service and later

became a pastor in Baltimore.

30 years later I think it's

time to bring an end to this story.

Kubrick is no longer with us and I think it's

all right to tell, to reveal this secret.

The men who participated in this project

were all paid very well.

They promised secrecy and

they promised to disappear forever.

They were given new identities and new faces

and new lives in some

remote place in the world.

But then Nixon and his advisors got scared, and they

began to think that "disappear forever"

should mean just that.

In the White House, Nixon

had been unable to sleep for months.

He seemed distracted, unable to concentrate.

"What if one of the witnesses to the filming

decides to talk? We can't take the risk,"

he kept repeating to his advisors.

Nixon asked his National Security Advisor,

Colonel George Kaplan, for advice.

"Let's send one of our best

CIA guys and get rid of him."

The President was determined to do something

and I said to him, "look, you're gonna do what you want to do,

but I think it's too late. I think you should have done that a year ago,

it is not a good thing to do."

And I said, "Are you out of your mind?"

I said this is going to turn into the biggest

scandal that this country has ever seen.

He was in bed, it was late at night,

whether he had been drinking or not I don't know.

Those of us who worked with Nixon knew not to take seriously

everything he said when he was under stress.

I don't know that he was thinking

about or not, but he didn't do it.

He said some awful things, but they were never

done, they were never even attempted.

And I said, "Mr. President,

let's sleep on this"

because that's the job of a

White House Chief of Staff.

It is not something I want to do,

and so I left.

The next morning I went in, he said,

"you know Al, you were right."

Nixon decided to cancel the operation,

and he told Kissinger and Alexander Haig.

But the Machine was about to go out of control.

During the night, Colonel Kaplan sent one

of his CIA deputies to the Oval Office

to get the list of those to be eliminated.

It was already too late.

NIXON: Hello, George, on that thing we were

discussing this morning,

I wanted to be sure that you got off of a

telephone call preferably, a message if necessary.

The first time we heard that there was a

problem was on Tuesday morning.

He said that the CIA should not be doing these

covert action operations.

As a matter of fact, he signed the

document to permit him to do that.

Nixon was highly intelligent and he

knew when his orders were not carried out.

So I went in to Nixon, I said, "Mr.

President, we've got a problem."

Colonel George Kaplan, who had now gone insane,

decided unilaterally to continue the operation.

He changed the secret codes, cut off all

contact with the White House and the CIA,

and gave his men their orders before disappearing.

No one could stop him now.

I can't speak for any of the others, but I know where I was.

From the very first I thought this was going to happen.

It was a total surprise to me.

I assume it was a total surprise to Henry.

When I became aware of it I said,

"what do you think happened here?"

and he said, "some damn fool went into the Oval

Office and did what he was told."

This had never happened before, and I said,

"well who are they?"

It wasn't the head of the CIA, it was head

of the operational element of the CIA.

Other people had to step forward and

take responsibility, and they did.

And of course Nixon was uneasy about that.

But it never crossed my mind...

that it would fall apart so fast.

I mean they planned that all pretty pathetically.

The operation was taken over by a secret

subsection of the CIA.

The members of the

film crew had begun their careers in Hanoi.

This was where they came to hole up.

Trained by the Pentagon's money launderer,

who came from Saigon,

the CIA's elite unit started to learn the local

language before heading off in pursuit of the fugitives.

Experts in guerrilla warfare, these specialists in the

art of disguise knew all the techniques for blending in with the locals.

This was sort of amateur CIA if there ever was one.

Some of this was not done very well,

and who planned it I never inquired.

I just stayed away from it.

I must say...

It was a very poorly run show.

The Secretary General called me

and said, "What's going on?"

In the White House, Nixon celebrated

his birthday with a few friends.

Later in the evening, as he was dining with his wife

in a Chinese restaurant,

the President was given a note informing

him of the operation's failure.

He now decided to change his methods.

We have people who know how to do those things.

Presidents under the pressure of office have

to do a lot of dumb things sometimes.

Nixon drank,

and not a lot, but he was one

of these people that one drink and...

Nixon used all the means at his disposal.

A hundred and fifty thousand men and half the

Sixth Fleet were sent in search of the four fugitives.

Twice what was used during the

Gulf War to try to capture Sadam Hussein.

The CIA asked the Pentagon to show

a little more discretion

and use a method which had been tried

and tested in Asia and Latin America

of dressing up murders to look like accidents.

It was ending in a somewhat ignominious fashion.

The soundman, Andy Rogers,

was burned alive in a car crash.

Jim Gow, the assistant director, was found

drowned in a swimming pool in his backyard.

Vince Brown was found in Patagonia,

cut up in little pieces.

But the police claimed it was a suicide.

Vince Brown, the assistant director, was

tracked down and killed in the Kerguelen Islands.

The CIA cynicism was such that

they even filmed his murder.

Bob Stein, the set designer, figured out what was happening

and hid in a yeshiva in Brooklyn for ten years until they

caught up with him.

It was in this yeshiva in a Jewish neighborhood of New

York that Rabbi Konigsberg protected Bob Stein for many years,

at the same time teaching him Yiddish.

The two of them scoured the Bible

for answers to their questions.

But the rabbi soon began to

have doubts about Bob Stein,

who not only didn't believe in God, but even had

trouble believing in his own existence.

We spent our nights discussing.

He said he was orthodox,

but disputed what the Bible says about pork.

He defended that the Torah was only intended to avoid some restaurant.

His humor was rather cynical.

He was a "sour" jew.

One night, he was stopped by some hooligans in the Bronx

and when they saw he was Jew,

they forced him to make some adjustments to his outfit.

Then they beat him and left him dead.

He was in a coma for 6 months at 'Mount Sinai Hospital'

... and died one morning.

Henry Kissinger, Donald Rumsfeld, the White House, and the CIA

had promised Stanley Kubrick he would never hear from them again.

They kept their word.

But five years after the fake footage had been shot,

Kubrick was imprudent enough to

contact the White House, and then NASA,

to ask to borrow a special lens for the

filming of 'Barry Lyndon'.

NASA agreed in exchange for services rendered.

Or perhaps it capitulated to the barely veiled threat of revelations about

Armstrong and Aldrin's first steps on the moon.

Nixon had resigned following Watergate,

but his successor, urged on by the CIA's new director,

got the machine up and running again.

After all, Stanley Kubrick was the

last direct witness of the hoax still living.

His telephone was bugged and his mail was intercepted.

Kubrick decided to disappear.

He made all his films on or near his property,

whether the setting was Vietnam or New York.

He locked himself away with his wife and children

and never went out again until his death.

He was accusing Nixon of colluding with the CIA

to have him assassinated.

He would try to think what they would do,

and how the troops would go in,

and at what point and how long it would take.

He was very accurate and at the same time,

he also was horrified.

I don't know what you're talking about.

The guy who ran CIA was Dick Walters.

General Dick Walters.

One of my best friends.

And I know what was going on.

Only general Walters could reveal the

whole truth about this.

The whole truth about what? Listen to me now and believe me,

because I'm going to tell you the truth.

I'm positive that Mr. Nixon knew nothing in advance.

Helms, as deputy, said to him,

"I don't know what's gonna happen,

but whatever goes down will be with you till the end."

That was six months before. When the people who did it were trapped, they hurried to Nixon to say protect us.

Instead, and I said this to Mr. Nixon and

he agreed with me when I told him...

General Walters was willing to go on talking,

but in private, without being filmed.

The elimination of all those who had

taken part in the filming,

and he insisted on the word 'all',

was still too sensitive a subject.

Before tackling the subject of Stanley Kubrick's sudden

demise, he asked us to switch off our camera.

Which we half did.

Are you still filming?

Because this could mean people's lives.

General Walters, visibly disturbed, suggested

carrying on our conversation the following day,

but he died suddenly

during the night of a stroke.

He had agreed to break one of the CIA's

explicit rules; that of silence and anonymity.

Vernon Walters death only

warranted a few lines in Le Parisien,

but the New York Herald Tribune devoted

a long article to him.

Part of it read, "General Walters last known public

appearance was on a French television documentary,

in which he talked about the White House's

involvement with the Apollo program in the late 1960s.

Both the producer and the director noted

that Walters was in perfect shape."

To STANLEY KUBRICK and VERNON WALTERS

It took less than two hours... goddamn!

You will learn when you get a little bit older

that your mind begins to be fuzzier about details.

When he was a teenager, he slyly...

oh no, I'm sorry, I'm very sorry.

They went back to some old training films from New Mexico

and Iceland, and a place... I gotta start over.

I don't think you can attach too much

significance to what people say.

I want you to believe me, because this is the truth.

I never had any relationship with that woman!

- Sometimes the media takes it out of proportion in order to write a story.

- Do you have it now?

One step for mankind, one great step for... For man.

The past is only causing trouble.

Let him go for God's sake.

I just ask it, because no one told me I needed to know it by heart.

The 'acidic' joke does not work in Yiddish...

We start again and if it does not work ...

No, no, I have but 11 hours

are Boulogne, which is not so far!

I will repeat this. Where was I?

We soon realized the whole thing was a hoax.

Dammit!

We soon realized the whole thing was a hoax.

Ok, let me try that...

That was much better.

Okay let me try it. (mumbles)

We're in deep shit.

Was that okay...?

You told me this was a high-class program!

I thought this was a serious program!

That everything is, if you ask me would I do it

over again, most of it I would do over again.

That was good fun.