Oscar Goes to the Five Corners of the Globe

This year’s best picture nominees represent an unprecedented sweep of the world, with each one having been set or filmed in a different country: “The Postman (Il Postino)” in Italy, “Babe” in Australia, “Braveheart” in Scotland, “Sense and Sensibility” in England and “Apollo 13” in the United States. So we dispatched correspondents to each site to find out how filming affected the area, how the finished film touched the locals--and who everyone will be rooting for on Monday night.

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Residents of Clear Lake, Texas, are used to rubbing shoulders with professional extraterrestrials. After all, their Houston suburb is home for the Johnson Space Center. So they know that, quite possibly, the couple picking out baby clothes next to them at the shopping mall may be astronauts. And that middle-aged fellow at the grocery store may have walked on the moon.

Of course, when it comes to an invasion of Hollywood, the folks in Clear Lake can get as starry-eyed as anyone else. Throughout the summer of 1994, Tom Hanks, Ron Howard and other notables associated with “Apollo 13” made frequent visits to the area, doing research for their drama about the near-disastrous 1970 NASA mission. And just about everywhere they went, they were greeted with open autograph books and flashing Instamatics.

But when Hanks and Howard paid their first visit to Flight Control Room 1 of the JSC Mission Control Center, they generated considerably less excitement. The scientists and engineers in charge of monitoring NASA space shuttle flights have too much on their minds to be easily star-struck.

“Look, we’ve even had the queen of England in there,” said James Hartsfield, JSC public information specialist. “And they didn’t stop work for her, either.”

Which isn’t to say that Howard and other members of the “Apollo 13” production team were unwelcome. Indeed, the more detailed questions they asked, the more they earned the respect of the NASA professionals.

“We appreciated their determination to be as accurate as possible,” Hartsfield said. Even Jim Lovell, the Apollo 13 commander portrayed by Hanks, was impressed by the depth of their knowledge.

“Hanks is what I would call a ‘closet astronaut,’ ” Lovell said. “When I first met him, he knew all the names of all the astronauts who had ever flown and knew the details about all of their flights.

“At first, a couple of people kidded me about the fact that Forrest Gump was going to play me. But as soon as I started talking to him, I knew I had nothing to worry about.”

Unlike a mid-’70s ABC potboiler, “Houston: We’ve Got a Problem,” which threw in “marital problems or child-support troubles or heart attacks or relatives dying,” Lovell said derisively, Howard and his team seemed fanatical about getting everything right.

“They even got hold of old pictures that were taken in the Control Room during the Apollo 13 mission,” Hartsfield said, “so they could have the same data on the computer monitors that was there during the flight.”

The NASA personnel also appreciated the relative lack of dramatic embellishment in the “Apollo 13” screenplay. Much of that credit goes to co-screenwriter Al Reinert, who spent nearly a decade restoring NASA flight films to assemble his 1989 Oscar-nominated documentary “For All Mankind.” During the long production process, Reinert, a former magazine journalist, taped hours of interviews with Lovell, Fred W. Haise Jr. and the late John L. Swigert Jr., the Apollo 13 crewmen who nearly were lost to the unforgiving blackness of space.

“As soon as he read our second draft,” Reinert said, “Ron Howard realized that real life was better than anything they could have made up.

“The only place where the movie strays from historical reality is the Jim Lovell that emerges in the movie is a kinder, gentler Jim Lovell than the real person. I mean, we had a much edgier, more hard-ass Jim Lovell in [the early versions of] our script.”

There’s not much doubt about what film Lovell and the folks at the Johnson Space Center will be rooting for Monday night.

By coincidence, Hartsfield said, the NASA flight controllers were scheduled to monitor an Atlantis space shuttle mission during the Academy Awards telecast. And during the program, Hartsfield said, ground control will “definitely” beam progress reports to the astronauts in space. OK, Oscar--over and out.