The Right Stuff

I'm Hanging Tough with the threadjack.

 

You know, photos like this make it hard for me to defend the '80s from charges it was the Decade of Suck.

 

Fantastic.

And BYH, Gangsta Donnie don't want to hear you talkin' no junk.

 

Don't you have some stats from 1822 to look up, jerk?

 

Dude in the middle back must be 60 by now.

 

Girl on the right must have had two kids by now...

 

Let's stay on topic and have a Successful Launch Day.

 

?

 

So anyway, : , one of those movies I stop everything to watch, over and over. Just a phenomenal story.

But still, the book is even better.

 

Sequence in the film, Slap. If you haven't seen it, you should. At least once, anyway. Here's the scene ...

 

Tom Wolfe hated the movie Hollywood made out of his novel. Kaufman, who both wrote and directed, felt that only Chuck Yeager had "the right stuff" and that the Mercury 7 astronauts were a bunch of schlubs who got lucky, so he made changes accordingly as he wrote the script. And the Mercury 7 themselves thought the film unfairly made Gus Grissom look bad and didn't accurately reflect the outcome of NASA's investigation into the Liberty Bell 7 accident (that it was caused by mechanical failure rather than Grissom panicking).

 

what she said.