Month: July 2017

Martin Landau, the chameleon-like actor who gained fame as the crafty master of disguise in the 1960s TV show “Mission: Impossible,” then capped a long and versatile career with an Oscar for his poignant portrayal of aging horror movie star Bela Lugosi in 1994’s “Ed Wood,” has died. He was 89.

 

Landau died Saturday of unexpected complications during a short stay at UCLA Medical Center, his publicist Dick Guttman said.

 

“Mission: Impossible,” which also starred Landau’s wife, Barbara Bain, became an immediate hit upon its debut in 1966. It remained on the air until 1973, but Landau and Bain left at the end of the show’s third season amid a financial dispute with the producers. They starred in the British-made sci-fi series “Space: 1999” from 1975 to 1977.

 

Landau might have been a superstar but for a role he didn’t play — the pointy-eared starship Enterprise science officer, Mr. Spock. “Star Trek” creator Gene Rodenberry had offered him the half-Vulcan, half-human who attempts to rid his life of all emotion. Landau turned it down.

 

“A character without emotions would have driven me crazy; I would have had to be lobotomized,” he explained in 2001. Instead, he chose “Mission: Impossible,” and Leonard Nimoy went on to everlasting fame as Spock.

 

Ironically, Nimoy replaced Landau on “Mission: Impossible.”

 

After a brief but impressive Broadway career, Landau had made an auspicious film debut in the late 1950s, playing a soldier in “Pork Chop Hill” and a villain in the Alfred Hitchcock classic “North By Northwest.”

 

He enjoyed far less success after “Mission: Impossible,” however, finding he had been typecast as Rollin Hand, the top-secret mission team’s disguise wizard. His film career languished for more than a decade, reaching its nadir with his appearance in the 1981 TV movie “The Harlem Globetrotters on Gilligan’s Island.”

 

He began to find redemption with a sympathetic role in “Tucker: The Man and his Dream,” the 1988 Francis Ford Coppola film that garnered Landau his first Oscar nomination.

 

He was nominated again the next year for his turn as the adulterous husband in Woody Allen’s “Crimes and Misdemeanors.”

 

His third nomination was for “Ed Wood,” director Tim Burton’s affectionate tribute to a man widely viewed as the worst Hollywood filmmaker of all time.

 

“There was a 10-year period when everything I did was bad. I’d like to go back and turn all those films into guitar picks,” Landau said after accepting his Oscar.

 

In “Ed Wood,” he portrayed Lugosi during his final years, when the Hungarian-born actor who had become famous as Count Dracula was ill, addicted to drugs and forced to make films with Ed Wood just to pay his bills. A gifted mimic trained in method acting, Landau had thoroughly researched the role.

 

“I watched about 35 Lugosi movies, including ones that were worse than anything Ed Wood ever made,” he recalled in 2001. “Despite the trash, he had a certain dignity about him, whatever the role.”

 

So did the New York-born Landau, who had studied drawing at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn and worked for a time as a New York Daily News cartoonist before switching careers at age 22.

 

He had dabbled in acting before the switch, making his stage debut in 1951 at a Maine summer theater in “Detective Story” and off-Broadway in “First Love.”

 

In 1955, he was among hundreds who applied to study at the prestigious Actors Studio and one of only two selected. The other was Steve McQueen.

 

On Broadway, Landau won praise for his work in “Middle of the Night,” which starred Edward G. Robinson. He toured with the play until it reached Los Angeles, where he began his film career.

 

Landau and Bain had two daughters, Susan and Juliet. They divorced in 1993.
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Filmmaker Ken Burns views the Vietnam War as a virus that infected Americans with an array of chronic illnesses — alienation, a lack of civil discourse, mistrust of government and each other. And he hopes his new documentary can be part of a cure.

“What if the film was just an attempt at some sort of vaccination, a little bit more of the disease to get you immune to the disunion that it has sponsored?” Burns said in a recent interview. “It’s important for us to begin to have creative but courageous conversations about what took place.”

Burns and co-director Lynn Novick had just finished work on their World War II documentary a decade ago when he turned to her and said, “We have to do Vietnam.” The result is their 10-part, 18-hour series that will air beginning Sept. 17 on PBS.

“For me, it was the sense that Vietnam was the most important event for Americans in the second half of the 20th century, yet we had done almost everything we could in the intervening years to avoid understanding it,” Burns said. “As horrible as they are, wars are incredibly valuable moments to study, and I thought what Vietnam lacked was a willingness to engage in that.”

The film brings together the latest scholarly research on the war and features nearly 80 interviews, including Americans who fought in the war and those who opposed it, Vietnamese civilians and soldiers from both sides. Burns and Novick have been showing excerpts of the film around the country in recent months, most recently at Dartmouth College on Thursday night.

“I think this will be for a general American audience a kind of revelation, a cascade of new facts and new figures, and I don’t mean numeral figures, but biographical figures that will stagger their view of what was, and hopefully get everybody, regardless of political perspective to let go of the baggage of the superficial and the conventional,” Burns said.

Having been blamed for the war itself, many Vietnam War soldiers were understandably reluctant to share their stories, the co-directors said. But compared to his earlier series on World War II and the Civil War, Burns said there was one challenge he didn’t face.

“One of the great tasks for us as filmmakers — amateur historians if you will — was how to cut through all the nostalgia and sentimentality that had attached itself to the Civil War and World War II,” he said. “There’s no such problem with Vietnam.”

After watching the hour-long preview, U.S. Army veteran David Hagerman, of Lyme Center, said he can’t wait to watch the entire series.

“It was powerful,” said Hagerman, who spent his nine months in Vietnam running a treatment center for soldiers addicted to heroin. While strangers now approach him and thank him for his service, he said coming home in 1972 was traumatic.

“I walked into the Seattle airport, and I was in my Army outfit,” he said. “The reception I received was so negative and so powerful that I walked into the nearest men’s room, took my uniform off, threw it in the trash, and put on a T-shirt and a pair of pants.”

Burns said while he doesn’t buy into the notion that history repeats itself, it’s clear that human nature doesn’t change. And he acknowledges that many of the themes his series explores are uncannily relevant to the present.

“If I backed up this conversation and said, ‘OK, I’ve spent the last year working a film about a White House in disarray obsessed with leaks, about a huge document drops into the public of classified information … about a deeply polarized country, about a political campaign accused of reaching out to a foreign power during an election, about mass demonstrations across the country,’ you’d say, ‘Gee, Ken, you stopped doing history, you’re doing the present moment,’” he said.

At Dartmouth, Novick and Burns were joined by U.S. Army veteran Mike Heaney, of Hartland, Vermont, who is shown in the film describing losing fellow platoon members in a 1966 ambush and spending the night paranoid that a dead Viet Cong soldier lying next to him was just faking it and would rise up to kill him.

After the screening, he told the audience about returning to Vietnam in 2008, where he compared war wounds with former enemies turned fellow “grandpas.” He said he’s been able to cope thanks to the support of his family, as well as both Americans and the Vietnamese people.

“I don’t expect to ever get closure on this kind of experience that I had,” he said. “And that’s OK.”
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George Romero, whose classic “Night of the Living Dead” and other horror films turned zombie movies into social commentaries and who saw his flesh-devouring undead spawn countless imitators, remakes and homages, has died. He was 77.

 

Romero died Sunday following a battle with lung cancer, said his family in a statement provided by his manager Chris Roe. Romero’s family said he died while listening to the score of “The Quiet Man,” one of his favorite films, with his wife, Suzanne Desrocher, and daughter, Tina Romero, by this side.

 

Romero is credited with reinventing the movie zombie with his directorial debut, the 1968 cult classic, “Night of the Living Dead.” The movie set the rules imitators lived by: Zombies move slowly, lust for human flesh and can only be killed when shot in the head. If a zombie bites a human, the person dies and returns as a zombie.

 

Romero’s zombies, however, were always more than mere cannibals; they were metaphors for conformity, racism, mall culture, militarism, class differences and other social ills.

 

“The zombies, they could be anything,” Romero told The Associated Press in 2008. “They could be an avalanche, they could be a hurricane. It’s a disaster out there. The stories are about how people fail to respond in the proper way. They fail to address it. They keep trying to stick where they are, instead of recognizing maybe this is too big for us to try to maintain. That’s the part of it that I’ve always enjoyed.”

 

“Night of the Living Dead,” made for about $100,000, featured flesh-hungry ghouls trying to feast on humans holed up in a Pennsylvania house. In 1999, the Library of Congress inducted the black-and-white masterpiece into the National Registry of Films.

 

Romero’s death was immediately felt across a wide spectrum of horror fans and filmmakers. Stephen King called him his favorite collaborator and said, “There will never be another like you.” Guillermo del Toro said, “The loss is so enormous.”

“(‘Night of the Living Dead’) was so incredibly DIY I realized movies were not something that belonged solely to the elites with multiple millions of dollars but could also be created by US, the people who simply loved them, who lived in Missouri, as I did,” wrote James Gunn, the “Guardians of the Galaxy” director, who penned the 2004 remake of “Dawn of the Dead.”

 

Romero’s influence could be seen across decades of American movies, from John Carpenter to Jordan Peele, the “Get Out” filmmaker. Many considered “Night of the Living Dead” to be a critique on racism in America. The sole black character survives the zombies, but he is fatally shot by rescuers. When Edgar Wright made 2004’s “Shaun of the Dead,” he acknowledged, “What we now think of as zombies are Romero zombies.”

 

Ten years after “Night of the Living Dead,” Romero made “Dawn of the Dead,” where human survivors take refuge from the undead in a mall and then turn on each other as the zombies stumble around the shopping complex.

 

Film critic Roger Ebert called it “one of the best horror films ever made — and, as an inescapable result, one of the most horrifying. It is gruesome, sickening, disgusting, violent, brutal and appalling. It is also … brilliantly crafted, funny, droll, and savagely merciless in its satiric view of the American consumer society.”

Romero had a sometimes combative relationship with the genre he helped create. He called “The Walking Dead” a “soap opera” and said big-budget films like “World War Z” made modest zombie films impossible. Romero maintained that he wouldn’t make horror films he couldn’t fill them with political statements.

 

“People say, ‘You’re trapped in this genre. You’re a horror guy.’ I say, ‘Wait a minute, I’m able to say exactly what I think,” Romero told the AP. “I’m able to talk about, comment about, take snapshots of what’s going on at the time. I don’t feel trapped. I feel this is my way of being able to express myself.”

 

The third in the Romero’s zombie series, 1985’s “Day of the Dead,” was a critical and commercial failure. There wouldn’t be another “Dead” film for two decades.

 

“Land of the Dead” in 2005 was the most star-packed of the bunch — the cast included Dennis Hooper, John Leguizamo, Asia Argento and Simon Baker. Two years later came “Diary of the Dead,” another box-office failure.

 

There were other movies interspersed with the “Dead” films, including “The Crazies” (1973), “Martin” (1977), “Creepshow” (1982), “Monkey Shines” (1988) and “The Dark Half” (1993). There also was 1981’s “Knightriders,” Romero’s take on the Arthurian legend featuring motorcycling jousters. Some were moderately successful, others box-office flops.

 

George Andrew Romero was born on Feb. 4, 1940, in New York City. He grew up in the Bronx, and he was a fan of horror comics and movies in the pre-VCR era.

 

“I grew up at the Loews American in the Bronx,” he wrote in an issue of the British Film Institute’s Sight and Sound magazine in 2002.

 

His favorite film was Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s “The Tales of Hoffman,” based on Jacques Offenbach’s opera. It was, he once wrote, “the one movie that made me want to make movies.”

 

He spoke fondly of traveling to Manhattan to rent a 16mm version of the film from a distribution house. When the film was unavailable, Romero said, it was because another “kid” had rented it — Martin Scorsese.

 

Romero graduated from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh in 1960. He learned the movie business working on the sets of movies and “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood,” which was shot in Pittsburgh.

 

The city became Romero’s home and many of his films were set in western Pennsylvania. “Dawn of the Dead” was filmed in suburban Monroeville Mall, which has since become a popular destination for his fans.

Romero struggled to get films made late in life. The last film he directed was 2009’s “Survival of the Dead,” though other filmmakers continued the series with several sequels, including the recently shot “Day of the Dead.”

 

But Romero held strong to his principles. A movie with zombies just running amok, with no social consciousness, held no appeal, he often said.

“That’s not what I’m about.”
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Swiss tennis star Roger Federer has won a record 8th Wimbledon title, defeating Croatia’s Marin Cilic in straight sets, 6-3, 6-1, 6-4.
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Ray Phiri, a South African jazz musician who founded the band Stimela and became internationally known while performing on Paul Simon’s Graceland tour, died of cancer on Wednesday at age 70.

Phiri, a vocalist and guitarist known for his versatility in jazz fusion, indigenous South African rhythms and other styles, received many music awards in his home country. His death was met with nationwide tributes.

“He was a musical giant. This is indeed a huge loss for South Africa and the music industry as a whole,” President Jacob Zuma said in a statement.

Political parties also expressed condolences, saying Phiri’s songs resonated among many South Africans, particularly during the era of white minority rule that ended in 1994.

“An immensely gifted composer, vocalist and guitarist, he breathed consciousness and agitated thoughts of freedom through his music,” said the ruling African National Congress party, which was the main movement against apartheid until it took power in the country’s first all-race elections.

South Africa’s main opposition party, the Democratic Alliance, said many people grew up with Phiri’s music. “In the 1970s, Phiri’s music spoke to issues that are still affecting our people today,” the party said.

Stimela’s best-known albums include Fire, Passion and Ecstasy and Look, Listen and Decide, and Phiri contributed as a guitarist to Simon’s Graceland album in the 1980s. The album evolved from Simon’s interest in indigenous South African music.
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“Don’t go to the pub tonight,” Irish pop musician Bob Geldof pleaded in the months leading up to Live Aid, the world’s biggest concert that took place on two continents, included 72 rock bands, and raised an estimated $125 million to feed starving Ethiopians caught in a historically severe famine.

“Please, stay in and give us the money,” Geldof said 32 years ago. “There are people dying now, so give me the money.”

The pictures of skeletal and dazed, malnourished children gathering in Ethiopian camps set up by aid agencies were alarming. In a 1984 report, BBC broadcaster Michael Buerk described the scene as “the closest thing to hell on Earth.”

​Geldof went to see for himself. In 1984, he organized “Band Aid,” writing and recording the single “Do They Know It’s Christmas,” and ended up raising about $10 million in famine relief.

The song also became a hit in the United States, prompting “We Are the World,” a song written by Michael Jackson and Lionel Ritchie.

Inspired by the success of Band Aid and with no end in sight to the famine, Geldof decided to expand the project, coming up with a total rethink on charitable giving.

Why not, he asked himself, turn to his circle of wealthy rock ‘n’ roll pop stars to perform in a worldwide fundraising concert?

​It was the 1980s; it was the era of cable music channel MTV; digital entertainment didn’t exist. Given all that, Geldof’s vision was astoundingly ambitious — in fact, seemingly impossible.

The event was held on July 13, 1985, simultaneously in London’s Wembley Stadium and Philadelphia’s JFK Stadium, raising more than $104 million that day. According to Billboard, an unprecedented 1.9 billion people watched the event live on television. Among the acts: Queen, Led Zeppelin, The Who, David Bowie, Madonna, Phil Collins, Sting, U2, Dire Straits, The Cars. The list goes on and on.

​Aftermath

The emotional high of Live Aid — its newness, its success in raising so much money to help the starving in Ethiopia — did not come without criticism.

Several reports, including an investigation by Spin magazine and The Daily Mail newspaper, claimed some of the money intended to feed the hungry ended up in the hands of Ethiopian dictator Mengistu Haile Mariam.

Geldof denied all the accounts.

“Produce one shred of evidence, one iota of evidence, and I promise you I will professionally investigate it,” Geldof is quoted in the Mail report. “I will sue the Ethiopian government, who were the rebels at the time, if there is any money missing, for that money back now.”

 
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A ticking sound runs throughout “Dunkirk” like an omnipresent reminder that time is running out for the 340,000 British and Allied soldiers marooned on the French beach and surrounded by Germans. It’s a tick-tock effect woven into the score that originated, fittingly, from Christopher Nolan’s own stopwatch.

Nolan is cinema’s great watchmaker: a filmmaker of Swiss precision capable of bending and shaping time to suit his grandiose, metronomed movies. Having already reversed time (“Memento”) and warped its fabric (“Interstellar”), Nolan set out to accomplish something different with “Dunkirk,” a movie that crosscuts three story lines (on land, sea and sky) from three different chronologies (one week, one day, one hour) during the famous evacuation. 

“I wanted to experiment with a new rhythm,” said Nolan in a recent interview. “What I wanted to do was take what I call the snowballing effect of the third act of my other films, where parallel story lines start to be more than the sum of their parts, and I wanted to try to make the entire film that way, and strip the film of conventional theatrics.”

When “Dunkirk” hits theaters next Friday, audiences will find a landmark war film but not a traditional one. Shot almost entirely with 70mm IMAX cameras from Nolan’s atypically spare 76-page script, “Dunkirk” is an often wordless, almost purely cinematic experience of dogfights in the air and close scrapes at sea. It’s an all-out assault — of tracking shots and montage — by one of the movies’ most maximal filmmakers. 

“I loved it,” said Nolan of shooting at Dunkirk, where much of the production took place. “The reality of being there, of being in nature, frankly, it frees you up as a filmmaker to just use your eyes, use your ears, and absorb it and try to capture what speaks to you.”

For anyone even vaguely familiar with today’s Hollywood, it’s obvious enough that a silent-movie-inspired epic about the 1940 evacuation of Dunkirk — a seminal moment of retreat and survival for the British but an event not as dearly remembered outside the U.K. — isn’t your standard summer popcorn fare. But Nolan, the “Dark Knight” director, enjoys a rarified position in the industry, and the story of Dunkirk is one he’s wanted to tell since a dramatic sailing excursion across the English Channel in the ’90s .

“We’ve been talking about Dunkirk as a story for a very long time,” said Emma Thomas, Nolan’s wife and producer. “After `Interstellar,’ we were thinking about what we might do next and I think I reminded him of it and pointed him in the direction of a few books on the subject. He had a number of things that he was entertaining but then he came back to me and said, `I think I see a way into this story.”‘

Nolan acknowledges he feels “a massive responsibility” to use his stature to make something unique. Having grown up in awe of big, bold films like “Lawrence of Arabia” and “2001: A Space Odyssey,” Nolan believes that “cinema is working at its absolute best is when it’s a grand-scale film that really works and does something you haven’t seen before. That for me is always the brass ring.”

“Dunkirk” is certainly that, especially when imposingly projected on IMAX screens. But such scale today is usually reserved only for supposedly more bankable franchise films. Such a path no longer holds much interest for Nolan. Though the 46-year-old director grew up a major “Star Wars” devotee, directing one doesn’t interest him. 

“Um, I’m very happy to go watch them,” he said, laughing. “The cinematic landscape has changed since I started making Batman films. When we were doing the `Dark Knight’ trilogy, I think it was easier for a filmmaker in the position I was in to express a more personal vision of what they wanted to do in a franchise property.”

“Dunkirk” might not be an American story, but, Nolan said, “It needed to be made with an American studio budget.” One of the first things he did to prepare was borrow Steven Spielberg’s personal print of “Saving Private Ryan.”   

“You look at the horror that’s presented in that film, and as a filmmaker you go: OK, we don’t want to chase that in any way because he’s done it definitively. You also say to yourself: The tension that I’m feeling watching `Saving Private Ryan’ is not the tension I want for `Dunkirk.’ You say: We need this story to be about survival and suspense. What defines suspense is you can’t take your eyes off the screen. But what horror gives you is an aversion. You want to look away.”

Instead, Nolan’s model for sustained suspense was Henri-Georges Clouzet’s “Wages of Fear,” in which four penniless men drive trucks loaded with nitroglycerin through the mountains. George Miller’s “Mad Max: Fury Road,” a virtually perpetual car chase, also strengthened his resolve. “I was in the middle of writing the script when I saw that film and I took confidence from it,” said Nolan. “It’s not dissimilar in terms of the modulation I’m talking about.”

Other things went into making what Nolan called, “a relentlessly suspenseful experience.” He used a Shepard tone, in which ascending notes are subtly cycled to give the impression of a never-ending rise in pitch. He inserted the 50 pound-plus IMAX camera into the cockpit of a fighter plane, and controlled the camera from the ground.

“We just had the idea that we would put cameras where people wouldn’t normally put them,” said cinematographer Hoyt van Hoytema. “Chris always reminds me of some kind of a weird Renaissance genius. He knows so many things so much better than the people who are supposed to know better. He knows everything about film technology, lab technology. He would know your lenses better than you do.”

Viewers may find themselves breathless from the heart-stopping opening sequence only to find that it essentially doesn’t abate until the end credits. The clock — Nolan’s watch — keeps ticking.

“The films I’ve made, I’ve tried to grab ahold of what in most films is a subtlety,” says Nolan of time, which he calls an underappreciated element of the medium. “I’ve tried to take it and use it for the tool that it is.”

And in “Dunkirk,” time flies.
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A Spanish court has given permission for the remains of famed surrealist painter Salvador Dali to be exhumed as part of a paternity test.

The judge in Catalonia ruled the body will be dug up July 20.

A woman claims Dali was her father. She has given a saliva sample that will be used to compare her DNA with that of Dali’s.

Maria Pilar Abel, 61, alleges her mother and Dali had an affair in the fishing village where he lived.

Abel said she only wants to be recognized as the artist’s daughter and has no interest in collecting any money.

The Salvador Dali Foundation is appealing the exhumation order.

Dali, who died in 1989, is the world’s most renown surrealist painter. His picture melting watches, The Persistence of Memory, is an icon of surrealism.

He is also known for a long pencil-thin moustache and eccentric behavior.
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With peeling paint and crumbling plasterwork, an abandoned picture house and its renovation in the northern Lebanese town of Tripoli is more than a dream for Qassem Istanbouli.

The 31-year-old has reopened three such cinemas, two in his home city of Tyre in southern Lebanon, and another in Nabatiyeh, and has transformed them into hubs for film, art and theater.

“When I embarked on this journey, I felt I shared this dream with people in my city who are eager to have a cultural life restored,” said Istanbouli, who shows films by directors such as Woody Allen, Pedro Almodovar, David Lynch and Lars Von Trier.

Istanbouli, who was born in Tyre and studied fine arts and directing at the Lebanese University, initially relied on a bank loan and donations from the public for his projects but now gets financial support from the Lebanese ministry of culture, a Dutch NGO and the United Nations force in Lebanon.

Istanbouli’s dream is also driven by a family connection, his father used to repair cinema projectors, while his grandfather screened movies from Greece and the Palestinian territories, projecting them on a wall.

“This is a way to achieve my father’s dream,” he said.
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Before America put the first men on the moon in 1969, NASA astronauts prepared for their lunar missions on the volcanic terrain at a national park.

Lunar landscape

National parks traveler Mikah Meyer says he now knows why those astronauts visited Craters of the Moon National Monument and Preserve in south-central Idaho.

“The area was the site of immense volcanic activity in the past,” he explained, so what’s left “is a kind of a ruins of volcanic rock…” — which, with its vast ocean of lava flows and islands of cinder cones, resembles the surface of the moon.

Mikah got a great 360-degree view of the surreal landscape after hiking to the top of the Inferno Cone – a massive mound of cinder that rises out of the ground like a black mountain.

“It looks like a mountain but it’s a cinder cone with this really loud, crunchy, sharp volcanic rock,” he said. “All throughout the park, whether it’s the big Inferno Cone or smaller volcanoes, you’re basically walking around on this black volcanic lava that was once magma and is now hard rock.”

Otherworldly encounters

Since much of the moon’s surface is also covered by volcanic materials, in 1969, NASA sent astronauts Eugene Cernan, Joe Engle, Alan Shepard and Edgar Mitchell to Craters of the Moon to learn the basics of volcanic geology before their lunar missions.

Becoming familiar with the materials would help them when collecting samples of different rocks on the moon, and, since only a limited amount of material (385 kilos total in 6 moon landings) could be brought back, it was important that they know enough geology to pick up the most scientifically valuable specimens and be able to describe the surface features they were exploring to geologists back on Earth.

In 1999, astronauts Mitchell, Engle and Cernan returned to Craters of the Moon to help celebrate the site’s 75th Anniversary, 30 years after training there. Alan Shepard had passed away in 1998.

A window into the past

Apollo 14 lunar module pilot Edgar Mitchell said their purpose and training “was to sample virtually all types of volcanic activity and the processes that go along with volcanism, because we had to be the eyes of the geological community on the moon and be able to accurately describe the various types of flows.”

He noted that the surreal lunar landscape was also quite beautiful. “It has this peculiar, eerie beauty, like these flows do here, that are magnificent. I mean, they excite your imagination.”  

Shuttle astronaut Joe Engle noted that it wasn’t known before the Apollo missions what kind of rocks were on the lunar surface, “so Craters of the Moon was one of the really valuable places to come and look at and study lava flows.”

Apollo 17 commander Eugene Cernan, the last man to walk on the moon, in December, 1972, described Craters of the Moon as “a spectacular place… an ideal place to study a high, broad range of the geologic impact.”

“The volcanic activity that occurred on the moon is not dissimilar to the kind of thing we have seen here… the geology that’s exposed here, it’s just an open window into the past and this is what we were looking for in trying to learn something about geology… and this is the kind of place where we were able to do something like that.”

Ancient rocks, new grass

Craters of the Moon formed during eight major eruptive periods between 15,000 and 2,000 years ago. Today its lava field covers 1600 square kilometers.

The site continues to be an important setting for space science research. In 2014, two research projects — FINESSE and BASALT — were launched at the park.

In the meantime, the lunar-like landscape continues to inspire visitors like Mikah. Looking out from the top of the Inferno Cone, he said, “You see the majestic contrast between the black dirt, the snow-capped mountains, and the older cinder cone which now have sagebrush and other grass and greens growing on them… it’s quite the beautiful juxtaposition.”

Mikah, who’s on a mission to visit all 417 units within the National Park Service, invites you to learn more about his travels across America by visiting him on his website, Facebook and Instagram.
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