Editing The Right Stuff (film) (section)

===Filming===
Most of the film was shot in and around San Francisco between March and October 1982, with additional filming continuing into January 1983. A waterfront warehouse there was transformed into a studio.<ref name="Ansen" />{{refn|Downtown San Francisco doubled for [[Lower Manhattan]] in the [[ticker-tape parade]] scene after John Glenn's return to Earth. The scene was shot at the intersection of California and Montgomery Streets, in the [[Financial District, San Francisco|District]], and the [[Pacific Stock Exchange]], on the corner of Sansome and Pine Streets can be spotted doubling for the [[New York Stock Exchange]] in the final part of the scene.<ref name= "Ansen"/>|group = Note}} Location shooting took place primarily at the abandoned [[Hamilton Air Force Base]], north of San Francisco, which was converted into a sound stage for the numerous interior sets.<ref>Farmer 1984, p. 34.</ref> No location could substitute for the distinctive [[Edwards Air Force Base]] landscape and so the entire production crew moved to the [[Mojave Desert]] to shoot the opening sequences that framed the story of the test pilots at Muroc Army Air Field, later Edwards AFB.<ref>Farmer 1984, p. 41.</ref> Additional shooting took place in [[California City, California|California City]] in early 1983. During the filming of a sequence portraying Chuck Yeager's ejection from an NF-104,<ref>Note that Yeager's ejection was from the highly-specialized [[NF-104]] rocket jet, but the movie used a common unmodified F-104.</ref> stuntman Joseph Svec, a former [[Special Forces (United States Army)|Green Beret]], was killed when he failed to open his parachute because he may have been unconscious from smoke.<ref>{{Cite web |url=http://www.check-six.com/Crash_Sites/TheRightStuff-Svec.htm |title=Svec's Freefall, Check-Six.com |access-date=2016-08-14 |archive-date=2016-08-18 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160818000901/http://www.check-six.com/Crash_Sites/TheRightStuff-Svec.htm |url-status=live }}</ref>

In 1982, the scene of the wives of the astronauts watching the television broadcast was filmed on military housing in [[Novato, California]].

Yeager was hired as a technical consultant on the film. He took the actors flying, studied the storyboards and special effects, and pointed out the errors. To prepare for their roles, Kaufman gave the actors playing the seven astronauts an extensive videotape collection to study.<ref name="Ansen" />

The effort to make an authentic feature led to the use of many full-size aircraft, scale models and special effects to replicate the scenes at Edwards Air Force Base and [[Cape Canaveral Air Force Station]].<ref>Farmer 1983, p. 47.</ref> Special visual effects supervisor Gary Gutierrez said the first special effects were too clean for the desired "dirty, funky, early NASA look."<ref name="Ansen" /> That amde Gutierrez and his team start from scratch and employ unconventional techniques like going up a hill with model airplanes on wires and fog machines to create clouds or shooting model F-104s from a crossbow device and capturing their flight with up to four cameras.<ref name="Ansen" /> Avant-garde filmmaker [[Jordan Belson]] created the background of the Earth as seen from high-flying planes and from orbiting spacecraft.<ref name="Wilford" />

Kaufman gave his five editors a list of documentary images that he needed, and he sent them off to search for film from [[NASA]], the [[Air force|Air Force]] and [[Bell Aircraft]] vaults.<ref name="Ansen" /> They also discovered Russian stock footage not viewed in 30 years. During production, Kaufman met with resistance from the Ladd Company and threatened to quit several times. In December 1982, one reel of cut workprint of the film that included portions of John Glenn's flight disappeared from Kaufman's editing facility in San Francisco's Dogpatch neighborhood. The missing reel of cut workprint was never found but was reconstructed by using a black-and-white duplicate copy of the reel as a guide and by reprinting new workprint from the original negative, which was always safely in storage at the film lab.