I love “big” movies…the bigger, the better. Gimme a sprawling epic movie, filmed in Panavision and Technicolor, mix in an all-star cast, containing hundreds, or even thousands of extras riding around on horses, or tanks, or camels, or jet fighters, and you will quickly find me ensconced in a state of bliss for hours. And, ...
The moon has captivated the human imagination since the dawn of time. However there have been surprisingly few Hollywood films set there in the last few decades. This has to do with the fact that the moon simply lost its mystique once Neil Armstrong actually walked on it. That’s not to say that there isn’t ...
When film director Ron Howard set out to make a movie about the Apollo program, the problem he faced was that nearly all of the Apollo expeditions to the Moon had proceeded pretty much perfectly. The exception, of course, was the flight of Apollo 13, which in April of 1970 suffered an explosion in the ...
“Houston, we have a problem.” Forty years ago this month, on April 13, 1970, a radio transmission containing these words crackled sharply back to earth from the tiny Apollo 13 spacecraft, which was carrying three men on a quarter-million mile journey to the moon. Spoken by the spacecraft’s commander, with a deliberate calm inculcated by ...
Ronald William Howard was born on March 1, 1954 in Duncan, Oklahoma. Five years later, the Howard moved to Hollywood. His father, Rance, and his mother, Jean Speegle Howard, were theatrical actors. Ron’s brother Clint, who would later become an actor as well, completed the family. You know him as “Ron Howard” the child actor ...