A Trip to the Moon

"A Trip to the Moon" is a 1964 television science fiction comedy film, produced as an episode of the CBS series Chronicle. The script was written by Jonathan Miller and Robert Goldman, based on Jules Verne's 1865 novel From the Earth to the Moon. All characters are portrayed by Alan Bennett, Peter Cook, Miller, and Dudley Moore, who had first worked together in the revue Beyond the Fringe. The hour-long show adapts the plot of Verne's novel to comment satirically on the Moon race then underway between the United States and the Soviet Union, juxtaposing Victorian ideas and aesthetics with contemporary themes of space travel. It received mixed reviews, and Miller later dismissed it as a failure. Plot In 1865, six months after the Battle of Appomattox, the "artillery intellectuals" at the Baltimore Gun Club are bored and eager for a new project. They decide to send a rocket to the Moon. After building the largest gun in the world to fire off the rocket, members of the Club set off inside the capsule, furnished in plush Victorian taste and stocked with fine wines. Production Miller, following his success in the revue Beyond the Fringe, was hired as a film and television journalist for The New Yorker. Criticizing the programming he saw as "shuddering fluorescent jelly," and inspired by Newton Minow's famous "Wasteland Speech" in 1961, Miller decided to move from reviewing into television production, hoping to provide innovative and intellectual content for the medium. Because the United States and the Soviet Union were vying to achieve a Moon landing, Miller conceived the idea of a satire based on Jules Verne's From the Earth to the Moon, as he explained to The New York Times: