On the Set of October Sky

By Homer Hickam

Used with permission (http://www.homerhickam.com/movies/).

January 1999

"So, how does it feel to have a movie made about your life?" That was the question I heard most often from the film crew when I visited the movie set where Universal Studios was producing a motion picture based  on my book, Rocket Boys: A Memoir. I usually laughed off the question but the truth was, quite often, it felt as if my heart was being torn out. How could it be otherwise when hundreds of talented, dedicated men and women were doing their very best to recreate my family, my friends, and the little town where I grew up? Of course, it wasn't my entire life being acted out, just the part when I was growing up in the West Virginia coal fields and some high school friends and I decided to build rockets. Those events were first chronicled in Air & Space magazine (February, 1994) in a short article I wrote entitled "The Big Creek Missile Agency." After that article was published, people called and wrote me from all over the country to let me know how much they enjoyed it and how they thought it had something important to say to them and their children. Soon afterwards, Hollywood came calling; Chuck Gordon of Field of Dreams fame won the bidding to make the book (only a few chapters completed by then) into a movie. A few months later, the publishers of Delacorte, Random House's premium imprint, won a spirited bidding war for the completed book manuscript. Rocket Boys has since gone on to make number one on the New York Times best-seller list, made into an audio book (read by Beau Bridges), condensed for a Reader's Digest book, and published in Great Britain, Italy, Germany, Japan, China, Korea, Holland, and Spain. In the spring of 1999, Universal Studios released a big-screen film directed by Joe Johnston (Jumanji, Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, The Rocketeer) with the name October Sky, which is an anagram of the letters of Rocket Boys.

In its simplest form, Rocket Boys is the true story of a small group of West Virginia coal miners' sons who, in 1957, wanted desperately to join the great space race going on in the outside world. To do that, they started to build rockets, modest ones at first, then more complex and sophisticated until they were flying miles into the sky. But Rocket Boys is also the story of a young boy's struggle for love amongst a hard and stoic people surrounded by encroaching forces that will inevitably destroy them. I lived it once, wrote about it in my book, but watching it being played before my eyes was still a most remarkable experience.

Filming of October Sky began in February, 1998, in the hills of eastern Tennessee. Although my home town of Coalwood, West Virginia, was briefly considered as the location of the movie, it was passed over in favor of the area around Oak Ridge and Knoxville, Tennessee, principally because of the difficulty of filming in an area lacking the transportation and logistical links so vital to a film production crew. Also, the mountains in that part of Tennessee were similar to those of West Virginia and still had working coal mines, and coal miners that were happy to play the extras. Their presence would lend much to the authenticity of the film.

Before principal photography began, my job was to assist writer Lewis Colick to produce the first draft of his screenplay, then work closely with Barry Robison, the set designer, to make certain that every nuance of the film was accurate to the times, the structures, and the personalities involved. I visited the location of the various sets during the construction phase and offered suggestions for improvements needed for accuracy. As technical consultant on the movie, my principal job during production was to work as a walking memory bank of the events that had happened forty years ago and to provide whatever assistance I could to the technical staff. By the time actual filming got underway, I had made friends with most of the cast and crew.

The making of any movie always has its problems. For October Sky, it was too much rain along with a constant cold, numbing wind in a winter that seemed to hang on forever. Still, Johnston's film crew persevered. "They'll do whatever it takes for this film," Johnston shrugged when I asked him about the hardiness of his people. Most of the crew have done action thrillers until they're sick of them. The Rocket Boys is a film they're going to be proud of for the rest of our lives."

I was naturally most attracted to the Special Effects group. Joey Digaetano, affectionately called Joey Di, headed up the special effects for the movie. In his two vans, he had a complete machine shop, stacks of steel and aluminum bar stock and cylinders, various chemicals, and a group of talented and skilled men and women who loved to fly rockets and blow things up. They were definitely my kind of people.

Joey and his helpers were charged with recreating the rockets we boys built, seeing that they were launched precisely on time and on target, including some that had to gyrate in particular patterns in the sky and one that had to fly into my dad's office. The rockets Joey created for the movie were actually paper tubes with commercial rocket motors inserted, mocked up to look like the steel monsters propelled by the special zinc dust, sulfur, and moonshine propellant that we real rocket boys had constructed. The first time I visited him, Joey showed me how he'd scraped away at the motors to change the thrust vectors to make the rockets perform to the script's specifications. "In every other movie I've been on that called for rockets, the director had them all wired-guided," Joey muttered. "But not on this movie! Joe Johnston wanted our rockets to be free-flying and performing tricks! That meant I had to get creative. I brought him out to the test range, showed him how we'd modified the rockets, and then launched some for him to see. They all worked great and he was jumping and down, he was so excited. Homer, wait until you see them, too. These rockets really go!"

I grinned eagerly. Our rockets back in West Virginia had really gone, too. It was going to be fun to watch them being launched again, even if they were the movie versions.

Joey Di gave me the honor of launching the first rocket during the filming, the same day that Laura Dern (Jurassic Park) arrived to play Miss Riley, our beloved teacher. I confess it was difficult to imagine that something I'd written had brought Miss Dern all the way from Hollywood to East Tennessee. She reassured me. "I loved Miss Riley as soon as I read your book," she said, turning her dazzling smile on me like a thousand-watt bulb. "It's an honor to play her. Did she really come to watch your rockets?"

Indeed she had, I said, and then set off to launch the rocket Joey Di had set up on the pad. He handed me the igniter, waited for the signal from the assistant director, and then counted me down. I pressed the button and the rocket whooshed off the pad. It zipped into the sky, leaving a thin white contrail, but then suddenly did a somersault, came roaring back, ricocheted off a tree, bounced off the slack, jerked back into the air, coughed once, and fell like a dead bird. I laughed out loud. Just like the good old days! I pumped Joey Di's hand. "Great bird, Joey," I exulted.

Joey Di gestured toward his special effects people stampeding out to recover the rocket. "When we're good," he whistled, "we're very good." Then he frowned. "And then sometimes we're lucky, too. Rockets tend to have a mind of their own."

I nodded in agreement. We real rocket boys in West Virginia had been chased around our test range more than once before we'd figured it all out. One of the Coalwood mining engineers who came to watch us back then had shaken his head in wonder after our blockhouse had been pelted by shrapnel. "The army's going to love you guys when you get drafted," he'd said. "You're going to come pre-trained!"

After my initial visit to the set, I returned to my job at NASA, tidying up my work as the payload training manager for the International Space Station at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. As
scheduled, I retired soon afterward. It was difficult to leave the agency and especially all the many colleagues and friends I had there, but I felt I had accomplished my goals with NASA and was ready to begin my new career as a writer. Soon afterward, I inked the contract for my next book, Back to the Moon, with Delacorte, and also agreed to write a sequel to Rocket Boys. It seemed as if I was going to have plenty to do and I needed to do it. But when Joe Johnston called me to consult on a particular scene of the movie, it was difficult to stay away.

When I next visited the production in late March, the movie had gone into high gear and all the actors had settled into their roles. The day started early, most of the cast and crew rolling out at 5 a.m. to journey to the Cape Coalwood set. In real life, and in the book, much of the action took place on a giant field of coal tailings, called a slack dump, which we boys transformed into what we grandly called Cape Coalwood, our rocket range. My father, the mine superintendent, had banished us to the dump after we'd blown up my mother's rose garden fence and bounced one of our rockets off his office and generally gotten the whole town into an uproar. The set for the Cape was a working slack dump near the tiny town of Wartburg, Tennessee. It was the first time I'd seen the entire set and I was astonished at how it had been transformed into what we boys had built four decades before. As I crested a hill of slack, I saw once more our old blockhouse and our concrete launch pad. The flag of the Big Creek Missile Agency flew proudly over the range and on the pad was one of our old Auks, as we
called our rockets (after a bird that couldn't fly). I looked and felt the pain and pride of ancient recognition and half-expected to see the people of Coalwood, the real people, gathering as they did on long-ago weekends to see what wonders their rocket boys might accomplish.

The props crew brought me a box of rocket-building tools they'd fashioned for the upcoming scene and I inspected them. Tin snips, wire, extra nose cones, fuses, matches, it looked to me as if they had it all. I told them so and they went away happy. I was happy, too. I felt I'd earned my presence on the set and it wasn't just curiosity that had me there.

A bitter wind blew through the valley off the surrounding mountains. Most of the cast and crew were decked out in colorful ski jackets or overcoats recently procured from the Oak Ridge Wal-Mart. "We thought it would be cold here," Johnston said, grimacing and clapping his hands together in an attempt to get his blood moving, "and we wanted that because much of the action takes place in the winter. But we never expected it to be this cold."

It was indeed frigid, the kind of icey cold where you can't feel your lips any more and your ears feel like lumps of ice that would fall off if you touched them. Most of us waiting for the scene huddled around propane heaters but the four boys playing the rocket boys, young and spirited lads, stripped off their jackets and raced around the Cape set. Chad Lindbergh, playing Sherman O'Dell (a composite of two of the actual boys), is a dancer and I watched him doing a sort of a hip-hop move around the more serious Chris Owen, the actor playing rocket boy Quentin. Quentin was the brains of the Big Creek Missile Agency and was also from the poorest family. Chris, who was always trying to stay in character, retained a studious calm while Chad danced and cavorted. But then Chad said something that made Chris's demeanor dissolve and he joined the dance, a grin from ear to ear on his impish face. Tow-headed Will Lee Scott, Roy Lee in the movie, trotted off to tell jokes to the grips and gaffers and laughter erupted from them as he reached the punch line. Scott was perfect for the Roy Lee role. Roy Lee was the boy most likely to have a date in our group, mainly because he was the only one of us who owned a car. He was also the most high-spirited, always quick with wink and a joke. When the casting people found Will, they found Roy Lee, too.

Of course, I mostly tended to watch Jake Gyllenhaal when I was on the set. Jake had the role of, well, me - the young Homer Hickam, Jr. Jake is a handsome lad, and has an infectious grin. On the morning of the Cape scene, he joined the other boys for awhile and then strolled over to the blockhouse to peer through its plastic window at the rocket on the pad. A lot of eyes followed him wherever he went. Even though only seventeen at the time, Jake's one of those actors who has charisma by the bucketful. You simply feel it whenever he walks into a room or, in this case, came out of the blockhouse to stroll along the grassy edge of the big slack dump to shake hands with the chilly extras playing Coalwood citizens. Some of the crew flattered me during the filming by saying that the photos of me when I was in high school looked a lot like Jake. I laughed at that presumption. If I'd looked anything like Jake when I was in high school, I told them, the book and this movie would be called Rocket Boys and Girls!

All four boys bonded during the miserable weather and lonely weekends during the three month shoot in Oak Ridge where most of the cast and crew settled for the duration. "We're tight," Will Scott told me during a break in the filming. "We'll be friends forever." Just like the real Rocket Boys, I thought. During the filming, the real O'Dell and Roy Lee joined me once to watch some of the scenes. To my delight, we rediscovered on the set of our movie that we were still tight, too. Some things never change.

The scene being shot was a depiction of the first time we boys hiked to the slack dump which was to be our rocket range. I picked a vantage point on a small hill overlooking the basin and watched Johnston's movie battalion go to war. Johnston, dressed in denim and an old gray coat, pushed through a crowd of technicians to a tent to peruse a video monitor, then ordered a camera attached to a boom to swing through its trajectory. Satisfied, he turned his head to check the light one last time and then yelled, "And... Action!" For most of us, his words had an opposite meaning - inaction, no talking, no movement. Everything on a movie set becomes focused on the actors at those words.

I watched the scene unfold. The boys were gathered at the base of a mound of discarded coal tailings. At Johnston's command, they climbed up it, the boom camera tracking them as they lurched onto a huge plain
of stark blackness, their exile from town. They stopped, admired the expanse, and then Jake raced ahead. "I can see it now," he yelled as he scrambled across the oily waste while the others slouched doubtfully. "Over there, we'll put our blockhouse! And over there, a test stand! The launch pad - there! We'll call it... Cape Coalwood!"

Off to my right, Johnston barked "Cut!" Then, after a quick check of the monitor, "That was perfect." Everyone waited. Then, after a moment of pondering, Johnston said "Let's do it again."

The boys ducked their heads, grinned, and willingly went back down the slack mound to do the scene again. Eight times they'd go up and down that hill, technicians scurrying to reset the scene each time. "Welcome
to the set of The Rocket Boys," someone slyly whispered to me. It's clear Joe Johnston liked to get more than one perfect take in the can. I asked producer Larry Franco about that. "Joe's just being smart," Franco said. "What you think is perfect on location might be loaded with problems when you get to editing. Sometimes it's just the angle of the sun that makes a difference. It's tempting to just move on to the next scene but Joe won't do that. We think this film's going to be an important one and that's why the studio has invested all the money they have into it. Chuck Gordon thinks it's going to be his next Field of Dreams but it's a tricky movie to get down just right. It needed somebody with a sure hand and Joe's got it. That's why we hired him."

Next up was a rocket-launching scene. Laura Dern appeared, a hair dresser fluttering around her, and waved at me. I waved back, of course. Laura Dern is a lovely woman, evident even under the heavy woolen coat she was wearing in character as Miss Riley. Previously, I'd sat with Laura in her trailer, talking with her about Miss Riley, our beloved teacher who was stricken by Hodgkin's Disease just as her rocket boys began to win national recognition and honors. In the upcoming scene, Miss Riley had come to the Cape again to see one of our rockets launched. Joey Di checked the rocket, then backed off, holding the igniter. When Johnston nodded to him, he pressed the button and the movie Auk jumped off the pad, veered out of control, and then flew off over the slack to crash ignobly, its nose cone shattered into dust. Just as the real Miss Riley had done, Dern still clapped and cheered at the sight. "As soon as I heard about Miss Riley, I wanted this part," Dern had told me earlier. "But I thought the script needed some work, to bring out her strength and resolve more." I'd agreed and had as a result gotten into some trouble. Representatives of Universal Studios pulled me aside the next time I was on the set to tell me that every time Dern talked about her part, the first words out of her mouth was "Well, Homer said..." They suggested that perhaps I might refrain from offering such insight in the future. I had just shrugged and laughed. Laura Dern was pulling the tail of authority just as Miss Riley had done for us boys those many years ago. "Good for her," had been my reply to the studio men.

After the morning scenes at the Cape were done, it was time to hit the road for the next location at the little town of Petros, subbing for Coalwood. I'd visited the set a number of times but every time I returned I could only shake my head in wonder. Petros had been turned into my home town. The houses on the main street had been transformed to look like a line of old Coalwood houses. There was even a coal mine tipple erected on one end of the town, a replica of the one I could see from my bedroom window when I was a teen-ager. Before the afternoon scenes, I admired the set once more, noticing especially the sign that arched over the street, announcing Olga Coal Company, Coalwood, West Virginia. I had looked at the sign a hundred times and I still couldn't believe it. When the extras, dressed in grimy coveralls and miner's helmets, moved across the grounds, Coalwood, as if in a dream, came alive for me again.

The scene being shot after lunch included Natalie Canerday (Slingblade) as my mother, and Chris Cooper (American Beauty, Horse Whisperer, Lone Star) playing my father. It was to show what happened back in Coalwood when my rocket display was stolen at the National Science Fair in Indianapolis. In the book and in real life, I'd made my first long distance telephone call ever, to my mother begging for her intercession in a bitter labor strike in Coalwood. In this scene, Canerday as Elsie Hickam must stride through a crowd of angry, placard-waving miners to get to her husband, my father, to insist he settle the strike so her boy can get what he needs for the all-important competition. "God, I'm crazy about Elsie," Canerday had told me. "She stuck up for everything and everybody she loved - you, your father, all the rocket boys. She just by God did what was right. I love being her for awhile!" When Joe yelled action again, Canerday showed the Elsie Hickam spirit, striding purposefully with her jaw set down the main street of town through the hooting miners toward the coal tipple. In the next scene, she barged into my father's office, plunked her fists down on his desk, and told him what he was going to do. I felt like cheering. It was a bravado performance.

Joe moved the cameras in for a close up as Cooper, an actor of incredible range, reacted to Canerday, his scowl dissolving into a succession of pain, pride, and impending joy. Suddenly, he is my father, a man who tried so desperately but clumsily to do the right thing for his mine, his town, and his family. Before the hushed gathering of film-makers, Cooper looked searchingly into his wife's eyes, begging for understanding. That was when I stopped watching. It was too real. When I looked around, I saw I wasn't the only one with tears in my eyes. Johnston called a halt to the proceedings. Everybody had had enough. Cooper wandered away to lean alone against the tipple set. Canerday went to her chair marked Elsie and bowed her head. For a few minutes, the hundreds of cast and crew and extras moved quietly, their conversations in hushed tones. Something wonderful had just happened. Everyone was trying to absorb it.

Finally, the long shooting day ended, the big tractor trailers holding all the lights and sound equipment and cameras rolling to the next location to prepare for the next day's shoot. I stayed behind while the actors and crew scattered to their hotels. Alone, I walked the muddy road of Coalwood again as I once did so long, long ago. A dog barked in the distance and, overhead, the stars blinked on, one by one. For just a moment, I was home again, in that old place where once there were rockets that leapt into the air, propelled not by physics but by the vibrant love of an honorable people, and the instruction of a dear teacher, and the dreams of boys.

NOTE: After marketing surveys by Universal Studios indicated that Rocket Boys as a movie title would not attract the female over age thirty demographic, the film was retitled and released as October Sky. Interestingly, October Sky is an anagram of the book name Rocket Boys, the same letters just moved around. This was discovered by director Joe Johnston using an anagram program on his computer. Since he had just recently completed editing the scene where we boys watched Sputnik arc through the October sky, he thought the title to be cosmically inspired!