For All Mankind

For All Mankind is a 1989 documentary film made of original footage from NASA's Apollo program, which successfully prepared and landed the first humans on the Moon from 1968 to 1972. It was directed by Al Reinert, with music by Brian Eno. The film, consisting of footage from Apollo 7 through Apollo 17, was assembled to depict what seems like a single trip to the Moon, highlighting the beauty and otherworldliness of the images by only using audio from the interviews Reinert conducted with Apollo crew members. Production The idea for this documentary film began in 1979 after Reinert researched a story about the Apollo program for Texas Monthly and learned that huge amounts of high-quality footage had been shot by the astronauts, only to be archived by NASA without ever being seen by the public. Although he initially thought that making a documentary about the missions would be relatively straightforward, it would be ten years before the final film was released. Reinert and editor Susan Korda sifted through six million feet of footage and 80 hours of NASA interviews to create the documentary. To copy the original film held at the Johnson Space Center, Reinert had to take an optical printer and scan each frame from the original 16mm film and enlarge to 35mm. It took him 18 months to copy the 80 minutes of film used in the documentary. Most of the footage used is of the astronauts and mission control during the Apollo program, but Reinert also used some footage from Project Gemini, such as Ed White's spacewalk from Gemini 4 and a shot used to represent Trans Lunar Injection (TLI) that is in fact footage of a Gemini mission re-entry. Thirteen of the original Apollo astronauts were interviewed by Reinert. Among those providing narration are Jim Lovell (Apollo 8 and Apollo 13), Michael Collins (Apollo 11), Charles Conrad (Apollo 12), Jack Swigert (Apollo 13), and Ken Mattingly (Apollo 16).