![]() Something about the character wasn’t working for him, and it wasn’t until Melfi confided that he hadn’t secured the life story rights to the three NASA managers, so he’d blended them all into a not-quite-convincingly single guy. So, for me, the first emotion was anger, but then the second emotion is pride and wanting to be a part of the telling of their story.”Ĭostner liked the story, too, but initially declined to take the Harrison role. ![]() Russia was beating us to space, there was a need to know what was going on up there, and necessity is the mother of all invention. “But then, when you put it in context, NASA was much more progressive than the rest of our society because they did integrate the workplace, they did allow black engineers to work alongside their white counterparts. “I was angry, at first, that we didn’t know about these women, black and white,” says the Oscar-winning (and currently Golden Globe-nominated) actress. When nature called, she had to hurry to the other side of the sprawling facility to use the one designated for Vaughan’s group until, in the movie anyway, Harrison found out exactly why he couldn’t find her several times a day. Soon after math genius Johnson transferred to Harrison’s all-white male operation, she realized that there were no “colored” bathrooms in that building. Vaughan, a mechanical engineer who could disassemble and reassemble a car, was NASA’s first black manager and in charge of the African-Americans’ computing room but constantly passed over for title and pay-grade promotions by her high-hatting boss (played by Kirsten Dunst in the film). “I didn’t even know that people were referred to as computers long before we had computers,” Costner adds about how things were back in the early 1960s.īeing called computers was the least of the indignities the “Hidden Figures’ ” principals endured during the last gasp of the Jim Crow South. It’s he who eventually discovers that Johnson, who’s been sent over from the other side of the Hampton, Virginia research campus where both black and white women compute figures all day (in separate, segregated rooms), has the right stuff to work it all out. “I didn’t know about them,” adds Kevin Costner, who plays the film’s fictionalized composite figure, Al Harrison, who heads the NASA division that’s trying to figure out how to put John Glenn into orbit. ![]() There have been so many accounts of the space race, but very little attention has been paid to these women.” ![]() “I had just done ‘The Help,’ and that was historical fiction. Henson and Janelle Monae play three of the many African-American math whizzes - Dorothy Vaughan, Katherine Johnson and Mary Jackson, respectively - that performed vital work for NASA in the early days of the space race with the Soviet Union. “The truth is that I thought it was historical fiction,” says Octavia Spencer, who with Taraji P. NASA announced in May that it plans to land Americans back on the moon by 2024 with the Artemis initiative, named after Apollo's twin sister who was goddess of the hunt and the moon.įor the first time, a female astronaut will walk on the moon, NASA said.Movie awards season may still be in the question mark stage, but “Hidden Figures” already owns the Who Knew? trophy of the year. July 20 marks the 50th anniversary of the first moonwalk by NASA astronauts, one of 11 flights in the Apollo space program of the 1960s and '70s, named after the Greek sun god. Johnson is now 100 and is the last of the three still living. See more □ - #HiddenFigures /UcGJCd4Oky- 2016 book details the women's struggles as they crunched numbers at the NASA Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va., in the pre-computer age. Administrator DC Council Chair and “Hidden Figures” author unveil the “Hidden Figures Way” street sign at a dedication ceremony this morning.
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