As I mentioned Monday, I was searching Google's Life magazine photo archive for photos by Allan Grant taken in 1949 or 1950. I was hoping to find previously-unrevealed photos from the set of Destination Moon, the classic science fiction movie co-written by Robert Heinlein.

Google limits the search result to 200 images from this archive, even if a larger number satisfy the search condition. So I was trying "allan grant 1950" to turn up a somewhat different set of pictures than those revealed by "destination moon."

Jackpot. I found 86 more pictures of the DM set. They are tagged Preparation "Moon Ballet."

Recall that I previously found a couple of strange pictures of ballet dancers cavorting on the set. Turns out Grant shot many more. They are mysterious.

( More photos here )
It is evident that someone staged an elaborate performance, by people wearing dance costume, on the set of Destination Moon. Part of this performance involved suspending the dancers on wires. It incorporated both the full-size version of the rocket ship Luna (one dancer is seen clinging to rungs of the ladder on its hull) and the smaller model seen in the "distance."

We may reasonably infer that this surreal performance was filmed, probably using the same cameras, lighting, and crew. The film may or may not have used the Technicolor process that DM used.

It seems very probable that this shooting would have taken place after DM wrapped, or anyway after it completed shooting on its lunar set. This suggests sometime after the second week of December 1949. According to the shooting schedule I found among Heinlein's papers, the film was scheduled to complete shooting on Friday, 9 December, the 23rd day of filming. This was also the final day using the Moon set.

The Moon Ballet has not been mentioned in anything I have read about Destination Moon. Bill Patterson has reviewed all the drafts of the screenplay, and has discovered no plans to include ballet scenes.

Who are the dancers? Who directed and choreographed this? For what film (short? feature?) was the performance intended? Was the film ever released? Is it available on video now?

How do we find out?

1. Google "lunar ballet" or "moon ballet" or similar keywords. (Hey! Apollo 17 visited a Ballet Crater!)

2. Find someone who knows a lot about dancers working near Los Angeles in 1949. See if they can identify any of the people in the photos.

3. Run down the credits of Destination Moon's production designer, set decorator, camera operators, lighting people, etc. to see if they are credited with any ballet-type films around 1950.

4. Find someone who was involved in shooting DM, and ask.

5. See if Allan Grant's estate, or Life magazine, has any information about this shoot beyond that which made it into Google.

Destination Moon's production company was Eagle Lion Films. According to Wikipedia, their lot was at 7950 Santa Monica Boulevard; according to the George Pal Productions callsheet of 18 November 1949, DM shot on stages #2 and #3.

Are there good online forums that attract people who know a lot about Hollywood dancing?

Do you know anybody who can help learn more about this mystery? Pass this along.

One thing about Google's Life magazine photo archive, which is both annoying and intriguing, is that the captions and tags don't always reflect a picture's subject very accurately. I keep returning to this collection to find novelties among its millions of images.

I was looking for photos by Allan Grant, who did lots of Hollywood work for Life, and I came across over 200 images labeled cryptically "Beane Tv Act."

I recognized them as portraying the popular (but now-obscure) puppet show Time for Beany, created by Bob Clampett. Clampett was a former Warner Brothers animator and director who seized upon the new medium of television and dragooned two voice actors, Daws Butler and Stan Freberg, into serving as his puppeteers. The program ran from 1949 to 1955.

You will know Daws Butler as the voice of Yogi Bear and about a million other Hanna-Barbera cartoon characters. You will know Stan Freberg as the creator of a long string of hit comedy records, and a longer string of immensely funny TV and radio commercials.

But you can search the archive for Freberg, Butler, and Clampett without turning up any of these pictures. Perhaps Google will eventually incorporate a way of crowdsourcing tags or captions for these images.

Freberg has said that the show was physically demanding because the diminutive Daws was stretched on tippy-toe reaching his puppets above the level of the stage, while Stan hunched his tall frame over to avoid being seen by the camera.

The show also gave rise to a vogue for propeller beanies among Fifties children.

In the following decade, Clampett produced a cel-animated Saturday morning show using the same characters, and recycling many of the same puns.

Daws Butler and Stan Freberg, puppeteers on Time for Beany. Left to right: Beany, Daws Butler, Captain Huffenpuff, Dishonest John ("NYAH-ha-ha!"), Stan Freberg, Cecil.


Cecil gets soaked in the face, and Stan and Daws try to avoid getting caught in the crossfire, as unidentified man operates seltzer bottle.

Rummaging again through the Google archive of Life, whl and I have found over two hundred photos depicting the filming of Destination Moon, the 1950 film for which Robert Heinlein collaborated on the screenplay, and served as technical advisor.

You may recall the expository cartoon, explaining the principles of spaceflight, embedded within the film. In it, Woody Woodpecker encounters an issue of Life covering the movie he is in. In reality, the April 24, 1950 issue carried a Destination Moon feature, though the cover showed a girl, not a Moon rocket.




Life sent Allan Grant to shoot the production. A few of the photos have captions (I presume these are the ones which appeared in the magazine story) but most of them do not. Fortunately-- though these were the days before DVD extras and "making-of" documentaries were commonplace-- Heinlein wrote a magazine article about the production, which helps in understanding some of Grant's photos. The full text of "Shooting Destination Moon" is not online, but you can find it in the book Requiem, among other places.

Checking the callsheets in the UC Santa Cruz archive of Heinlein's papers, I believe Grant shot these during the first two weeks of December 1949.

A few gag shots crept in. Some are just bizarre.



I'm afraid I can't tell you who these people are. They don't appear in the movie.

( Click here for more photos )

If you're wondering about some of the sets, special effects, props, and costumes shown in these photos, William Max Miller has a good discussion on "The Filming of Destination Moon."

A few more behind-the-scenes photos illustrate an article on Moon rockets in Popular Mechanics, May 1950.


Full-page ad in PopMech for the movie, September 1950.

Wow.

Spotted this on BoingBoing.

If you are cruising, and you find something cool that's been put out at the curb, and you don't want to scrounge it yourself, you can assist fellow trashpickers. Shoot a photo of it. Then post it to the site where phonecam pictures are pinned to Google Maps of their street locations.

Never has "the street finds its own uses for things, uses the manufacturers never imagined" been more true...

I propose to meet the jetlagged tlunquist and her chauffeur grey_lensman immediately after he collects her at O'Hare this coming Saturday. There we will be the first in North America to hear an account of her whirlwind trip through the institutions of Korea.

11:45 AM Saturday the 25th, at Panera Bread, 500 E. Touhy Ave. in Des Plaines, Illinois. The free Wifi there gives us the option of blogging the occasion. Google Maps tells me it's west of Mannheim, west of Lee, just about where Wolf Road passes beneath I-90, and east of Elmhurst Road.

Anyone game?

The beta of Google Scholar is now online.

I like their slogan: "Stand on the shoulders of giants." Robert K. Merton, master of otsoggery, would have approved.

The first thing to do with such a tool is to egogoogle. Unfortunately, my one genuine scholarly publication doesn't seem to be in there. (Nor, ironically, is IAF-92-0494, "Compiling Answers to Frequently Asked Questions about Space on Computer Networks," online anywhere. I could put it up, but I doubt anyone would actually care.)

Haven't found my internal Fermilab publications, but I haven't looked very hard.

Before anyone asks, the Twinkie Experiment was a hoax scholarly publication, and did not appear in a real journal. Nevertheless, it appears to be the one piece of scientific work I will be best remembered for when I am dead.

I was demonstrating Dead Sea Googling in comments on another blog recently, and realized that I haven't seen anybody else talk about it.

( How to Dead Sea Google, limitations thereof, and suggestions for a couple of new sports )