Trailer
Plot summary
Jim Pruett, Clayton Stone and Buzz Lloyd crew an experimental space station, five months into a mission planned to run seven. When the crew's performance slips, NASA's Charles Keith orders the stay cut short. Oriented for retrofire, their ship Ironman One will not fire its main engine, and Mission Control finds the fuel left cannot carry them into the atmosphere or back to the station. Keith resists a rescue attempt: no backup rockets wait at Kennedy Space Center, and the experimental Air Force X-RV lifting body and its Titan booster were never man-rated. Colonel Ted Dougherty, the chief astronaut, argues for the attempt and volunteers to fly it. The President sides with him. A hurricane threatens Cape Canaveral.
Cast
- Craig Huebingas Flight Director
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Marooned (1969)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- NASA's head of public affairs, Julian Scheer, tried to prevent the agency from helping the filmmakers, writing in an internal memorandum that "It would be better for the agency's standpoint if this picture was never made" because of the spacecraft failure and threat of death in space it would portray.
- Capra heavily revised the script of an earlier version of the film to cut the budget, but when Columbia Pictures' M. J. Frankovich offered him $3 million to make it, he abandoned development; it was eventually produced with John Sturges as director and Mayo Simon as screenwriter, at a budget of $8 million.
- Astronaut Jim Lovell and his wife Marilyn Lovell recalled the film in a special interview, saying it gave Marilyn nightmares; their recollection appears as a feature on the DVD release of Apollo 13, the 1995 film directed by Ron Howard.
- During preliminary discussions for the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project, the film was discussed as a means of alleviating Soviet suspicion, and one stated purpose of the mission was to develop and test capabilities for international space rescue.
- The film had no traditional score: sound engineer Arthur Piantadosi built its soundscape from samples he recorded and manipulated on a quarter-inch Nagra tape machine, work that High Fidelity called the 1969 "score of the year".
- The interior of the film's Apollo spacecraft set was constructed using an actual "boilerplate" Block I Apollo command module as a model, a version that never flew with a crew, largely because the Apollo 1 fire exposed over a thousand defects.
