Originally published at: http://boingboing.net/2016/08/17/trailer-hidden-figures-te.html
…
Trailer: 'Hidden Figures' tells true story of black women at NASA who launched John Glenn into orbit
9 Likes
I can’t wait to hear what Scott Adams thinks of this movie. /s
“This diminishes the achievements of men in science! I don’t understand why the womens don’t like me!”
19 Likes
Don’t speak it’s name. You may trigger its google alert.
9 Likes
I play the Hollywood Stock Exchange and have been looking forward to this film for a while. The subject has been long overdue for some kind of treatment, too bad it took so long.
4 Likes
I’m just delighted for Janelle Monae that she gets to work on a film about space.
3 Likes
Assuming this is the story of Katherine Johnson…Glenn didn’t trust the orbital calculations done by machine and asked Johnson to work them out by hand.
7 Likes
If you want to see actual research papers (insted of the hype) co-written by one of the women, Katherine Johnson, you can find part of them like this:
I’m waiting to see this, you rarely see this kind of nerdy behind the scenes stuff in movies take center stage. I’m just hoping Hollywood can present as cool a picture of triple checking orbital trajectory computations as that hacking scene in Swordfish.
I would also enjoy a movie about Operation Paperclip (‘the brains behind NASA’) made in the same vein, an empowering tale of the trials and tribulations of genuine Nazis trying to fight prejudice and bigotry while doing rocket science.
5 Likes
That is kind of annoying where the first comment is outrage to something that may or may not even happen yet.
3 Likes
There are a ton of great behind-the-scenes stories for the space race!
One of my favorites is the women workers (I believe at companies like Playtex, who were used to working with fragile fibers), to weave the code needed for rope core memory. I’d really like some of this stuff some day.
4 Likes
Now I’m imagining a space-age “John Henry” scene in which a hero sacrifices her life in the process of out-calculating an IBM 7090.
Katherine Johnson told her supervisor
Lord a woman ain’t noth’ but a wo-man
But before I let that mainframe
beat me down
I’m gonna die with a slide rule
in my hand, Lord, Lord
I’ll die with a slide rule in my hand
6 Likes
When I first saw the trailer a few days ago, I had never heard of Katherine Johnson, who appears to be a superhuman brainiac. I also found the entry about NACA and their recruiting policies interesting - “They especially wanted African American women for their Guidance and Navigation Department”, which seems very progressive for 1953. Anyway, she seems like a great role model, in the fashion of Grace Hopper. And it is extremely impressive to have a place like the “Katherine G. Johnson Computational Research Facility” named after her.
2 Likes
There is probably a greater chance that it will happen…
1 Like
Honestly?
It looks like one of those “Make white America feel better about the current state of systemic racism because obviously it was worse in the 50s and 60s” movies that Hollywood tosses out every few Oscar seasons.
1 Like
Yeah. I can see that. But it still looks like a good movie and I’m glad it’s getting a boost into the public consciousness. it shows that our history of organizations like NASA have been kind of white washed.
7 Likes
Well, there’s “Look how far we’ve come, and you should feel inspired that change can happen rapidly.”
And there’s, “Look how far we’ve come, so stop complaining.”
The latter category has films like The Butler. Trailers can’t, but time will tell what kind of a movie this is.
5 Likes
This topic was automatically closed after 5 days. New replies are no longer allowed.
