(3 of 4)
Kaufman (whose recent credits include the remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers) was approached to direct after Goldman's first draft was finished. He liked only one scene in it and particularly insisted on restoration of Yeager & Co. He made his case in a 35-page memo that was close to being a treatment for a total revision. He wanted the movie to be "a search film, a quest for a certain quality that may have seen its best days." The results were bad feelings, lawsuits and a Kaufman script that restored the right stuff to The Right Stuff, providing historical motivation— the fight for pilot "dignity"—to the astronauts, whose new bosses, the engineers, scientists and bureaucrats of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration—played mainly as low-comedy bunglers and bullies in the film—did not understand their values. They wanted brave men not to fly the machines but to act essentially as lab animals whose responses to the stresses of spaceflight could be conveniently measured.
It was a job an ape could do, and did on a couple of early flights. The astronauts' fight to gain more control over their craft, to command their own fates, was what eventually earned them the grudging respect of their peers as an assertion of righteous stuff. It is as a result of it that Wolfe, and the movie, is able to reclaim heroic authenticity from publicity.
This ensemble film required a prodigious casting effort, because Kaufman is convinced that the very look of the test-pilot type has, in a generation, been all but bred out of the American bones. "I was looking for an almost obsolete type of '50s guy who was not affected by a modern look," says Kaufman. "I wanted guys who were very rugged, very tough, very honest, open guys with a clean-cut quality." He also thought it a good idea to cast people "who weren't really well known," who would be "totally eager at all times." Kaufman was extremely fortunate in finding Ed Harris, who could project John Glenn's earnestness with a boyish charm; Scott Glenn, who could do Alan Shepard's mad comic streak; Fred Ward, who could convey the inarticulate gruffness and the strange vulnerability of Gus Grissom; and Dennis Quaid, who could capture the innocent braggadocio and sublime (but not misplaced) self-confidence of Gordon Cooper. The other three astronaut impersonators—Scott Paulin, Charles Frank and Lance Henriksen—have less to do, but they do it with quiet persuasiveness.
The astronauts' wives, especially those played by Veronica Cartwright, Pamela Reed and Mary Jo Deschanel, are appealingly poignant, trying to maintain grace under the pressure imposed on them by the Government-Issue squalor of base housing and by the knowledge that their men are engaged in totally preoccupying work that carries a 1-in-4 risk of fatality. Barbara Hershey, as Yeager's wife, has, by contrast, been encouraged to emulate a classic fantasy figure. She has the smoldering spunk of the girls Howard Hawks liked to have hang around his squadrons: sexy, sassy and not as tough as she talks.