Trivia for
The Right Stuff (1983) More at IMDbPro »

• This film contains the first realistic shots of a spacecraft reentry. For long shots, visual effects supervisor Gary Gutierrez used a small model of the Mercury capsule. This was coated with flammable material, ignited, and slid about 100 feet down a wire toward the camera, which was protected with a sheet of Lexan.
  
  
• For close-up shots of the reentry, no actual fire was used. The larger model capsule in these shots had liquid nitrogen pumped into it. This immediately evaporated, producing a fog of condensation, which escaped through a carefully placed ring of vents around the base of the capsule to form a flame-like pattern all around it. Then, to make the color right, the effect was simply filmed in orange light.
  
  
• "Beeman's" is the lucky gum of pilots. See also The Rocketeer (1991).
  
  
• Cameo: [Chuck Yeager] the bartender.
  
  
• Sam Shepard, who played legendary pilot Chuck Yeager, is actually afraid of flying.
  
  
• While several of the lead actors chose to meet their real-life counterparts, Scott Glenn elected not to meet with Alan Shepard. Scott said he wanted to get down Shepard's character and nuances by observation and by hearing others' points of view. After filming, the real Alan Shepard wrote the director and commented on Scott Glenn's "spot-on" performance - except for "not being nearly as good-looking as he was."
  
  
• Some were concerned that when this film was released it would help propel John Glenn, then a popular political figure, into the presidency. "Newsweek" magazine had a cover story about it. In fact, Glenn's presidential aspirations went nowhere.
  
  
• During the weekend of 4 April 1999, Gus Grissom's lost Liberty Bell 7 capsule was located and recovered on the ocean floor 90 miles northeast of the Great Abaco Island in the Bahamas. It underwent a restoration and went on a national tour before being placed in a permanent exhibit. The hatch, which many thought would have proved or disproved Grissom's contention that it blew open on its own, was recovered, intact, just as Grissom said. The craft was pretty much intact, considering it had been in the ocean for 38 years.
  
  
• The "Happy Bottom Riding Club", which was owned and operated by Pancho Barnes, burned down in 1952. The remnants can still be seen today at Edwards Air Force Base.
  
  
• The film plays down the rivalry between pilots, especially civilian (Scott Crossfield) and Air Force (Chuck Yeager). Yeager even writes in his autobiography that he thought Crossfield was arrogant, though a great pilot.
  
  
• William Goldman wrote the first draft of the screenplay. In his book "Adventures in the Screen Trade" he calls his meeting with director Philip Kaufman "a nightmare".
  
  
• The scene where Alan Shepard is about to board the rocket to be the first American in space is archival footage. The scene immediately after he points up to the rocket after exiting the transport trailer shows a man in a suit and tie coming down the stairs of the trailer then following Shepard to the tower elevator. The man is the real Gus Grissom - one of the astronauts that perished in the Apollo 1 fire.
  
  
• Ken Wahl, who previously starred in director Philip Kaufman's The Wanderers (1979), was initially cast as Gordon Cooper. Dennis Quaid replaced Wahl, giving up an undisclosed role in The Outsiders (1983), which was being produced simultaneously.
  
  
• An early press release announced that Ellen Barkin was cast in the film. Her part was eventually recast.
  
  
• The production was beset by 15 mile per hour, dust-laden winds when they were filming at Edwards Air Force Base.
  
  
• Bill Conti was appointed so late in the production, he was actually scoring to the fine cut of the film instead of a first cut which composers are usually given to work to.
  
  
• The role of Annie Glenn was the first film role for Mary Jo Deschanel, the wife of director of photography Caleb Deschanel.
  
  
• The closing narration states that Gordon Cooper was "the last American ever to go into space alone". While true when the film was made, Mike Melvill in June and September 2004 and Brian Binnie in October 2004 went into space alone in Scaled Composites' SpaceShipOne (Not a NASA spaceship or spaceflight). Binnie's flight was the day Gordon Cooper died.
  
  
• To create the space uniforms for the Mercury astronauts, the costume designers used silver fabrics and other materials left over from costumes for singer/actress Cher.
  
  
• Parachute stuntman Joseph Leonard Svec was killed in an accident while filming the scene where Chuck Yeager loses control of an experimental aircraft and bails out. Svec's helmet filled with smoke and he lost consciousness. He never pulled his ripcord and died on impact. During the real-life bailout this scene represented, Yeager collided with his ejection seat, breaking open the face-shield of his helmet. Molten explosive materials struck Yeager in the face, burning him severely and likewise filling his helmet with smoke.
  
  
• During the newsreel segment when President John F. Kennedy gives Alan Shepard (Scott Glenn) a medal for his flight, in the background we can see Charles Frank as Scott Carpenter. When the angle reverses to actual archival footage of President Kennedy dropping the medal, he bends to pick it up, and the real Scott Carpenter and Gus Grissom are in the background.
  
  
• Trudy Cooper did not actually say that she wondered how they would've felt if every time their husband went in to make a deal, there was a one in four chance he wouldn't come out of that meeting." The screenplay writers chose Mrs. Cooper's character to voice statements made by Tom Wolfe, the author. The book describes a 23% chance of a normal pilot dying during the course of a 20-year career. The odds were higher at 53% for a test pilot, but this is still considerably less than was implied by the movie.
  
  
• In the cookout scene at Edwards AFB, Sam Shepard is seen playing catch with his son. Chuck Yeager's real life nephew, Steve, played Major League baseball as a catcher for the Los Angeles Dodgers.
  
  
• In the bar scene before Gus Grissom's flight, Deke Slayton is underwater swimming with some girls. Gordo says. "Go get 'em Deke!". In reality Deke couldn't swim and never told anyone. When the astronauts started underwater training at Scott Carpenter's suggestion, Deke sank to the bottom and had to be rescued. He subsequently practiced holding his breath underwater in his kitchen sink, according to his wife Marge.
  
  
• The music accompanying John Glenn's orbit of the Earth is actually a song written by an Inuit woman on the set of Philip Kaufman's The White Dawn (1974) that was orchestrated by Henry Mancini for that film.
  
  
• Original composer John Barry left the film because he found it impossible to understand what Philip Kaufman wanted from the score, citing a meeting where the director described his ideal score as "sounding like you're walking in the desert and you see a cactus, and you put your foot on it, but it just starts growing up through your foot."
  
  
• The B-29 mother ship for the Chuck Yeager/X-1 scenes was played by the Commemorative Air Force's "FIFI," the only B-29 in flyable condition. She was painted up to match the actual mother ship used in the late 40's, complete with a dark under-belly so she would be more visible to ground personnel tracking her in the Mojave sky, and "stork delivering a baby" nose art. She appeared again, in the same paint job and nose art, in the Disney movie The Last Flight of Noah's Ark (1980). In the early 90's she went back to Boeing in Everett, WA, where she received a complete overhaul, new windows, doors and seals, and a fresh new paint job better matched to her role as a WWII bomber. FIFI is still flying today.
  
  
• The gum, Beeman's, is a pepsin flavored gum (the same flavor as candy cigarettes) and is still available for purchase online.
  
  
• The tune that Gordon Cooper was whistling while trying to produce a semen sample, is the official anthem of the United States Air Force, simply titled: "The Air Force Song". He was attempting to drown out the man in the next stall, who was humming "The Marines' Hymn" (presumably, John Glenn, as Cooper guessed).
  
  
• The Permanent Press Corps are all played by members of Fratelli Bologna, a San Francisco theater troupe.
  
  
• The film's music temp track consisted of music from Holst's The Planets, Henry Mancini's score for The White Dawn and various other classical pieces which were favorites of Director 'Philip Kaufman'.
  
  
• Allegedly composer Bill Conti wrote about three different scores for this film. The first consisting of his own original work. The second one being one that featured Holst's The Planets as inspiration. The final score purely copied the film's temp track which was primarily The Planet's peace under the condition that if 'Philip Kaufman' used that portion of the score he would've had to credit Gustav Holst, the real composer of the music knowing that he was plagiarizing it for Kaufman's benefit and did not want to take credit for something that was written by someone else. They had a compromise in the end, using the middle score that Conti wrote inspired by Holst, and the incorporation of "Wild Blue Yonder" during the Yeagher's Triumph sequence and Henry Mancini's White Dawn track stayed in the film. Conti would go on to win for Best Original score despite the fact that it was somewhat of an adaptation of The Planets.
  
  
• The film eschewed the use of visual effects done in the lab. The decision was made to use methods pioneered by Republic Pictures special effects team Howard & Theodore Lydecker, and used in such Republic theatrical serials as "Radar Men of the Moon" and "Commando Cody: Sky Marshal of the Universe.". The shots of the Bell X-1 were accomplished using a model 'flown' on a long wire rapidly passing by the camera utilizing a natural sky background enhanced by clouds created using special chemicals. They are flawless in their execution.
  
  
• While filming the lung-capacity sequence - in which the seven original Mercury astronauts need to blow into individual tubes to keep toy balls suspended in a beaker and end up in a competition of physical stamina - the seven actors portraying the astronauts actually competed with each other for the same reason. Dennis Quaid won. In reality, Gordon Cooper - the astronaut portrayed by Quaid - was the only non-smoker among the seven original astronauts, and therefore possessed a far-greater lung capacity than any of the others.
  
  
• Ed Harris had to audition twice for the role of John Glenn. It was in fact Harris who insisted on the second audition because he felt his first reading of the part wasn't good enough. After the second reading, he got the part.
  
  
• On Roger Ebert's list of Great Movies.
  
  
• Tom Wolfe, was unhappy with the film because he felt it made too many changes to the book. William Goldman, the original screenwriter before he left the project also disliked it because he didn't like the way Philip Kaufman portrayed Chuck Yeager as the only hero in the film, while the rest of the astronauts only got lucky and didn't match up to him in any way.
  
  
• When Ed Harris appeared in Apollo 13 (1995), it gave him the unique distinction of appearing with some of the same characters from The Right Stuff (1983) but played by different actors. Like Deke Slayton. Others are mentioned but never seen like Alan Shepard and the late Gus Grissom.
  
  
• Last cinema film of Kim Stanley
  
  

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