Film Festival 2012 Closing Night Presented by Puget Sound Energy

The Right Stuff with Director Philip Kaufman
Philip Kaufman in attendance to accept OFF Lifetime Achievement Award

Sunday November 18
4:30 Doors 5:00 Show
$12 Student (With I.D.) / OFS member; $18 Non member
Water Street Cafe is the sponsor of this OFF Lifetime Achievement Award!

Thank you to our event sponsor, Puget Sound Energy

THE RIGHT STUFF

1983/ USA / 193 min / 35mm
Director: Philip Kaufman
Cast: Sam Shepard, Scott Glenn, Ed Harris, Dennis Quaid, Fred Ward, Barbara Hershey, Veronica Cartwright Print Source: Warner Brothers

The Olympia Film Festival ends this year on a liftoff, with Philip Kaufman’s epic adaptation of Tom Wolfe’s classic of new journalism, The Right Stuff. Project Mercury started in 1959 and lasted until 1963. It was the Cold War’s biggest show since the H-bomb. The mission: human spaceflight achieved before the Soviets. The materials: a desert and a bunch of glorified tin cans with fuel strapped underneath them. The men: Alan Shepard, Gus Grissom, John Glenn, Scott Carpenter, Wally Schirra, Gordo Cooper, and Deke Slayton. The result, eventually: one of the great achievements in human history. The winner of four Academy Awards (and nominated for four more, including Best Picture), The Right Stuff holds up incredibly well, standing as both a subversion of the standard hero narrative and a testament to the capacity for wonder. “Preserving the irreverent tone of Tom Wolfe’s juicy, sprawling book, the cinematic adaptation concedes that Glenn and the other Mercury astronauts were heroes, just not the ‘walking apple pies’ … trumpeted by pressops,” writes Scott Tobias of the A.V. Club, while Roger Ebert considers the film “a landmark” that “joins a short list of recent American movies that might be called experimental epics: movies that have an ambitious reach through time and subject matter, that spend freely for locations or special effects, but that consider each scene as intently as an art film.”