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Jim met Tom Hanks in a small conference room at the studio. He walked in with a grin on his face that only grew wider when Jim rose to shake his hand.
"Commander Lovell, it's so good to finally meet you." He gave Jim's hand a hearty shake.
"The pleasure's all mine," said Jim with an answering smile. "And please, call me Jim." Part of him still couldn't believe this was happening. The book had only come out a few months ago and already the movie was taking off like a firestorm.
Jim retook the chair he'd claimed in the small coffee clutch off to the side. Against the back wall was a couch, and another chair finished off the horseshoe around a low coffee table where his script rested. He'd been paging through it in anticipation of this meeting and of the next with Ron Howard and the rest of the production team. He'd been surprised when Hanks had asked for his own meeting, and continued to wonder how it would play out as Hanks made himself comfortable in the other chair. Then he noticed the book in Hanks's hand.
"Is that . . ."
Hanks nodded, still grinning, and held it out to him. Lost Moon, Jim Lovell and Jeffery Kluger. It was the hardback edition and the jacket was creased with wear already.
"I was wondering," Hanks glanced down at the cover before gesturing for Jim to take it, "if you wouldn't mind signing it?"
Jim couldn't help the chuckle as he accepted the book and fished out a pen. "I think we're going about this backwards."
"Nah," said Hanks cheerfully. "The way I see it, this is the way it ought to be. I'm just an actor." Jim raised his eyebrows at that comment, but Hanks held up a finger. "What you guys did, what NASA did. The most amazing thing humans have ever done. And don't even try to deny it."
Knowing it and hearing it were two different things, and after so many years, it warmed Jim to hear it again. He handed Hanks his book back. "And now you're going to make a movie out of it," he said, grinning.
"And now we are going to make a movie out of it."
As he listened to Hanks continue, telling him what he remembered of each Apollo mission and warning that he planned to pick Jim's brain about everything, Jim felt his smile settle in his bones. He had a feeling that making this movie was going to be its own reward.
The script was good but in a funny way Jim found it harder to read than the last draft of the book. While the book was more detailed and had a lot of the conversations that had taken place, the script felt more immediate in a way that Jim couldn't quite put his finger on.
At first he thought it was having the dialogue right in front of him, blocked out. Then he thought it must be the inconsistencies. Condensing four days into a two hour movie was no mean feat, especially as full of problems as those four days had been. The script writers had done a good job but there were still things that weren't quite right.
"That never happened," he commented to Tom in the third week of shooting. He'd come to Florida to check in and see how it was going. Marilyn joked she was going to get him his own video camera for Christmas so he would stop bothering the professionals. The process was fascinating - almost as complicated as actually sending men to the moon - but there was more to it than that. Jim would call it nostalgia if he had to put a name to it, although he wouldn't say he wanted to go back thirty years ago and live through the four most stressful days of his life again. It just brought back a lot of memories.
"The thing between Haise and Swigart?" Tom asked. They were at dinner, a rare night out for him in the midst of shooting. Today they had gone up in the vomit comet to film Haise confronting Swigart about the gage reading before he stirred the O2 tanks.
"Freddo never lost his cool and none of us ever doubted Jack."
"That's one of the problems of film sometimes." Tom broke his breadstick in two. "You were up there, heart racing, terrified you're going to die in space, but completely professional on the surface. We've got to externalize all of that for the audience. But hey," he added when Jim's frown didn't quite ease. "At least we didn't add any secret affairs coming to light just to make things really interesting." He waggled his brows.
Jim had to laugh, and raised his glass. "Thank goodness for small mercies."
"So what happened afterward?" Tom handed Jim a glass of wine. "Big party I bet?"
"Very big party," Jim agreed, looking around at the hundreds of cast and crew milling around the hotel ballroom. The wrap party here was in full swing. "But the three of us were whisked away to do an international goodwill tour of gratitude."
"Anything that sticks out?"
Jim shrugged. "We did a lot of goodwill tours in those days. We had a little time at home but the rest is mostly a blur. Until we got back. Then it was back to work."
"You talked about the investigation at the end of the book. We're you involved in any of that?"
"No," said Jim, mind wandering back to those months after 13. "Not officially. Our job then was to be heroes, but I did get a chance to see some of the enlarged photos we took."
Jim remembered that day well. He'd been home for two weeks from the tour, just back at Houston for work. Things had settled considerably at the complex, back to business as usual, the astronauts gearing up for Apollo 14 while the engineers overhauled the command module. Jim had run into Ken in the cafeteria and he caught Jim up on everything going on.
"Ken took me to one of the engineering conference rooms," Jim told Tom. "There were copies of the pictures and reports from the investigation for the design engineers to use for improvements. They had the photos taped to the wall."
Ken had let Jim just look for a good ten minutes. They'd taken a whole bunch of pictures but only two stood out with the angle they needed to see the blown panel on the service module. Jim still remembers the moment in space when he saw where O2 tank 2 should have been, like a kick to the gut. Seeing again, in stark black and white it sunk in just how close they were to never coming back at all.
An emergency in space is always life threatening, but the pilots were test pilots and in the moment - even a moment drawn out over four days - there was no room for doubt. Safe on the ground, there was room for plenty retroactively. The photos showed not only the loss of tank 2 but the damage to both the valves and the tubing on tank 1 which had caused it to leak the remaining oxygen so quickly, and the impact damage to the fuel cell casing, just barely visible behind the O2 tanks, shadowed remains of the explosion.
"I had to sit down after a while," said Jim after he described some of the damage. "It was like it the enormity of what we survived hit me all at once." Tom listened patiently, and Jim found himself adding, "I had nightmares for weeks after I saw those pictures."
Marilyn had still had her own nightmares after he returned, the two of them a sorry pair, spending half the night talking to keep the dreams at bay. That's when Jim knew he wouldn't be returning to space. Marilyn had watched him leave Earth four times. It was time to keep his feet on the ground.
Tom lifted his glass. "To the successful failure," he said quietly. Jim raised his glass and drank.
The theater was dark and crowded for the premiere. Jim held Marilyn's hand through the whole movie. He wasn't sure he breathed.
If reading the script had been hard, seeing the movie spin his story was harder. When Tom said, "Gentlemen, we just lost the moon," it was as if he were there, 200,000 miles from Earth shutting down the fuel cells all over again.
The movie was amazing, as Jim knew it would be. Living through it again, seeing all the men at mission control work around the clock to keep them alive and get them home, watching Marilyn cope in front of the television alone among a sea of friends. It was a miracle they made it home, a miracle fought for and won by the most amazing, capable team Jim had ever had the privilege of being a part of.
Yet Jim couldn't help watching the shots of the moon and feeling his failure etched deep inside. He had one regret in life, and that was not walking on the moon. He'd made peace with it. Time and life and a beautiful family eased that loss, but it was still a missing puzzle piece to his life that would never be found, lost a couple hundred thousand miles from earth, never to be realized.
The closing credits were met with a standing ovation. Jim took his first real breath and swallowed the bittersweet regret and followed Marilyn to the aisle. He shook a lot of hands of filmmakers and actors, old friends and fellow astronauts. When Tom found him later at the after-party, Jim said, "That was one hell of a movie," meaning every word and then some.
Tom grinned. "Don't think you're off the hook yet. I've an idea for a project that I want to run by you."
Jim didn't have a chance to say no and as Tom talked, excited as a little kid, he marveled at the twist his life had taken and found he couldn't begrudge his loss if this was the course it set for him.