Moon Struck

Tom Hanks remembers the precise moment the moon made his head explode--or at least that's how he describes it. It was December 1972, and Hanks ran home from school to see the transmissions that the Apollo 17 astronauts were beaming back live from the surface of the moon. "There was no lunar module in sight," Hanks says. "All you could see were the astronauts in the distance as the camera panned around this incredibly alien, incredibly desolate place. I was just gone."

A lot of boomers--especially boy boomers--snapped their terrestrial moorings the same way back then. But in the 33 years of space travel that followed--33 years defined by a fallow manned program and two lost shuttle crews--most of them shook off their moon bliss entirely. Not so Hanks.

At 49 years old, the actor, director and producer has made something of a second career out of spreading the lunar word, first with his star turn in 1995's Apollo 13, then with his 1998 HBO series, From the Earth to the Moon. Now Hanks is working the space beat again, preparing for this month's release of Magnificent Desolation: Walking on the Moon 3D, co-produced by IMAX and Hanks' own production company, Playtone. A 3-D, 70-mm, giant-screen spectacle that Hanks co-wrote and narrates, the movie re-creates what it's like to travel to the moon, bound around on the surface and head back home. Conventional movies have given viewers a sense of this before. The IMAX production, Hanks hopes, will swallow them up whole. "The moon landings affected us emotionally, intellectually, spiritually," he says. "I want to make that experience as visceral for people as possible."

What is it about the pull of the moon that holds Hanks fast? Why does a high-powered Hollywood player with the muscle to tackle pretty much any production he wants keep returning to his lunar love?

In the cavernous conference room of the IMAX headquarters in Santa Monica, Calif., Hanks doesn't look like a man consumed by the moon. He looks like a man getting over a cold--coughing, sipping hot tea and racing to get through the last few weeks of postproduction before heading to Europe to begin shooting his next superproject, The Da Vinci Code.

Hanks has good reason to feel worn out. To re-create a flight to the moon, Playtone and IMAX filled a Los Angeles soundstage with Styrofoam, concrete and pulverized roofing tiles--the simulated lunar surface--and borrowed exact replicas of a lunar module and lunar rover from the Kansas Cosmosphere and Space Center. They stitched together spacesuits from the boots up, rolled in a 240-lb. 3-D IMAX camera, in addition to the cameras director of photography Sean Phillips built himself, and rigged the entire set with a harness system to simulate the one-sixth-gravity bunny hop the astronauts would use to bound across the moonscape.