“I Was a Production Assistant on the Set of the Faked Moon Landing”

The Literate Humor Magazine, May 2021

I remember the 60s like it was yesterday. I had just started out in LA as a young, spry rookie looking for some work in the film industry. I was sure I would make it big someday, but in the beginning I just tried to get myself on sets for your basic productions — a lead paint commercial here, a cigarette ad targeted towards pregnant women there. You know, just some of the basics for the times. Well, my buddy Thomas (we called him Tricky Tommy) had an uncle who was a big time producer and was able to get me a production assistant gig on one of his projects. I knew this was it — this was going to be my big break.

Now, I’m not any kind of science freak. My hobbies at the time almost exclusively consisted of doing cocaine and trading collectible baseball cards with my pal Richard (we called him Smelly Dick Dick). So when I walked on set and saw some moon rocks, I was like, oh boy here’s another one of those progressive snowflake space shows where all races can work together and women have “rights” and “positions of power.” Whoop-dee-fuckin-doo, I thought. As my token female friend Wet Ass Polly used to say, “Feminism is for witches, lesbians, and communists.” We called her Wet Ass Polly because ironically, she had the dryest woohoo in all of California; she said it was medical and that’s why she would never be able to finish by the touch of a man. 

I digress. Well, this was no space lesbian love fest type show, no. To my surprise, the project was headed by Alfred Hitchcock who was directing these guys Buzz and Neil. Hitchcock was cool — I got to help him get into a costume so that he could make his classic cameo. Few people know this, but Hitchcock did in fact play the spaceship that unloads Neil onto the moon. God, our costume design team was a dream. 

As for the stars, Neil and Buzz were your classic sexy idiots. Neil, like, actually believed that the moon was made of cheese. Everyone kept telling him that it was probably just rock, but because no one had ever been to the moon, we couldn’t technically prove it. “What’s with all the holes, then? That’s swiss if I’ve ever seen it. I know my cheese,” he kept saying. He got so serious about “maintaining authenticity,” in fact, that he threatened to leak our production to the papers if we didn’t make the set out of actual swiss cheese. Well, Hitchcock caved and we did it — if you look closely at the moon landing tapes, you can see some particularly melty areas of the ground. It was horrible, a huge health hazard. Seven people from that production would eventually pass from extreme exposure to cheese mold. 

I don’t have much to say about Buzz except that he was a messy eater. We served ribs and grits for lunch and the sight and sounds of that man slathering ranch all over his food and directly into his mouth remain forever burned into my mind. I did end up telling my acquaintance, You’re Genuinely Just a Person That No One Wants to be Around Bart, about the work we did that day, and thirty years later he would become that guy who got punched by Buzz Aldrin for insisting that he faked the moon landing. I still feel bad about that. Bart really is a prick.

Beyond that, I don’t have much else to say. The experience was cool, I guess. Plus, it's the reason I got my nickname — all my friends have called me Moon Fakey Matthew ever since. 

L. Jerse