Our intern has made a professional career out of interning to the glee of various businesses all too ready to employ an unpaid worker. These are his stories.
The Cold War was still going strong and my girlfriend had cheated on me, I told her I just needed space so that’s what I did, joined NASA, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. It was 1967, I was a big fan of the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey which hadn’t come out yet and it turned out they didn’t need any more astronauts so I convinced them to give me an internship. Of course, this was all very hush hush. With no need to pay me there was no paper trail proving I was even there.
I had one suggestion to shoot two otters outside of earth’s atmosphere on a rocketship. The way I looked at it, if there were otters out there holding hands for eternity in the great unknowable void, well then the Russians would have to change every single textbook to say otter space instead of outer space and that would have really stuck it to ‘em. That idea was declined.
But a couple years later when we needed a place to stage a fake moon landing I suggested Stanley Kubrick’s unfinished basement and that was accepted with hearty approval.
We got to work carving a realistically cratered moon using malleable cheese. That’s why we had to shoot in black and white, otherwise the public would have known the set was bright yellow.
To simulate the harsh environments of space we made the room airtight and sucked out all the oxygen. The problem was, we only had the two spacesuits for Neil and Buzz but someone had to be in there with them filming. Of course, as the intern I was forced to volunteer.
We would shoot film for a minute or two while I held my breathe and then quickly had to dive out of the room gasping for air. Neil kept messing up his line saying things like one small skip for man and one giant somersault for me. I can’t tell you how many takes that took.
Buzz thought it was funny to keep putting his butt in the way of the camera while I was holding my breathe and shooting. This is where the term “mooning” originated.
I passed out a couple times from lack of oxygen but as you know we eventually finished filming. They deleted my end credits scene. They even deleted the credits too. The public watched our footage in awe and well the rest is history.
September 1969 saw the end of my internship with NASA. I shook hands and tentacles with everyone there and that fall got an internship with the CIA. They needed help in Dallas, Texas that November. They kept telling me my name was now Lee Harvey Oswald which was weird because that is definitely not my name.