INTRODUCTION
Setting the Stage

It seemed that man would be setting foot on the Moon and Mars very soon, building space stations, planetary bases and re-useable orbital transport vehicles.  The engineers working in the U.S. could look forward to secure jobs, unlimited government project budgets, and raising children who would all graduate from the college of their choice.  Those who yearned for adventure would soon find outlets in the rapidly opening frontiers offered by space exploration.  All U.S. citizens could rest assured that, after a rocky start, their space program would surpass in capability and reliability any effort of the morally inferior Soviet Union.  This was the feeling of many and perhaps most of the professionals in the middle '60s and there truly seemed to be nothing to stop them, short of all-out war with the communists.

This is the environment in which the movie Planet of the Apes was created and it accurately displays many of these conceits.  Though some in the youth culture were busy protesting a war they could not condone, most people in the U.S. carried on their daily lives as if the above "truths" were self-evident, with only an occasional pale nod to the fears of nuclear war.

This was also the last years of the great "Studio System" in which writers, directors and actors could work for a major studio and be guaranteed upward careers, propelled by studio promotion departments and budgets, as long as the audiences demanded their products.  The major studios had evolved into motion picture factories with rigid systems for developing new talent, in-house.  Contract employees would begin at the bottom with "B" movies of limited budget.  Each year the studios would set aside a certain percentage of budget for "B" movies, some for "A" movies, some for "prestige" films (usually grand-scale epics) and a small amount for "art films".  Newcomers would begin with "B" films and move on to the others based on the studios assessment of their abilities.  In earlier years "talent" would work exclusively for the studio who signed them, only rarely being "loaned out" to other companies but by the middle sixties "independents" were becoming more common, though still not considered the norm.  When 20th Century Fox decided to commit money to "Planet of the Apes" the idea had been well traveled by just such an independent.  Arthur P. Jacobs had tried to get the backing of every major studio in Hollywood but they just could not see where it fit into the scheme of things.  Not small enough to be made as a "B" movie, not main-stream enough to be a commercially successful "A" movie and it was certainly not a "prestige" or "art" film.  After all, it was about apes!  People go to see movies about people, not animals.  Cartoons were the media for animal characters (except at Disney which used live action and animation for animal stories).

The point of crossover would come with the realization by the studio executives that there was an increasing audience for technology or space-based science fiction.  The audiences were composed more and more of people who worked with high technology daily and who had windows on what the future could hold.  Because science fiction was becoming reality every day, main stream audiences were becoming better prepared for films depicting events that actually seemed visible on the horizon.  Meanwhile Arthur Jacobs was coming to the realization that he would have to present a "package" to the studio that included a "name" director and lead actor if he was going to get this project off the ground.   He would go on to successfully recruit Franklin J. Schaffner as director and Academy Award winning actor Charlton Heston as provisional lead.  With their support he finally pitched the film successfully, in a manner that would become industry standard in later years.  Planet of the Apes would finally be made and it would be made by a studio which still processed a fully developed in-house creative staff in nearly every department.

Creating a Mission to Another Star System

By 1967 the NASA two-man Gemini program was in full swing and three-man Apollo was close on its heels.  Every major aerospace contractor was pitching follow-on projects, new vehicles and ways to utilize mankind's occupation of space.  Hypersonic atmospheric transports, orbital transports, space stations, lunar transports, lunar bases, and Mars bases were being worked on by teams at every company.  It was against this backdrop that William Creber and his staff in the Fox Art Department would begin developing the concepts for their "ANSA" interstellar mission to Orions belt.  Drawing heavily from McDonnell Aircraft Corporation development proposals for the Gemini capsule, they would create a vehicle design that was both conservative and at the same time, elegant.  Simple to build yet suggestive of a sophisticated space program effort.  The ship in Planet of the Apes would never have an official name, in fact it never had a known mission.  Beyond the brief acknowledgment that theirs is a one-way trip, we never do learn any details of the mission from any of the crews.  One ship crash-lands in a lake and the other appears to be a tail-lander which crashes in the desert.  Not much to go on for fans trying to ascertain details of the spaceflight portions of the films or the configuration of spacecraft designs which were never completely realized.  These elements were meant to be representational only, simply a means to propel the characters from our time into the distant future and yet, many in the audience seemed to responded instinctively to designs which suggested a greater depth of thought.  Sleek designs which hinted at hidden considerations and fully developed rationales, as if there were unspoken elements of the film that might be explored.  Simply put, it left us wanting more and that is the definition of good art direction!

Where is the MORE?

Well, there isn't more.  The primary considerations met by the designers were believability and cost effectiveness.  Why design and build an entire spaceship when you can get away with just showing the cockpit and its nose section sticking out of the water?  Why design a set piece with compound curves when straight lines will suffice?   Ease of construction and minimal exposure were the main design criteria, not ultimate realism or fidelity to known spacecraft engineering.  Yet they achieved a design that not only meets the former criterion but goes a long way towards convincing us of the latter.   This is why we are fans of this ship and the fact that it teases us with promises of a greater story, hidden from view, is why we look for more.  In the rest of this web site you will not only learn more about what lies below the waterline "as designed" but you will also learn that there is quite a bit that can be inferred from those few elements shown.  The "Apes Ship" is far from minimal and it provides a vast fertile arena for exercising ones imagination, all you need to do is pay attention.