The Hollywood Reporter talked to Apple TV+ “For All Mankind” creator Ron Moore who says that Apple CEO Tim Cook came to the set, sat at the Mission Control consoles, and enjoyed himself by getting “lost in the consoles the keyboards.”
Lesley Goldberg and Daniel Fienberg for The Hollywood Reporter:
You spent a decade with an overall deal at Sony TV and reunited with former studio chiefs Jamie Erlicht and Zack Van Amburg at Apple. What has it been like working with them and for a platform like Apple?
Zack called me and wanted to talk about the NASA show [he’d been pitching] and suddenly we have a new series. The working relationship was already established, and then there was a good chunk of people beyond Zack and Jamie that want from Sony over to Apple as well. There was a certain familiarity of how things would get done. That said, then all those people were adjusting to a completely different corporate environment. It’s a tech company that is getting into entertainment and there were growing pains to figure out. As I started working with Apple, I’m not used to people saying things like, “Well, Cupertino hasn’t weighed in on that.” The first year was a lot of growing pains of any company setting out to do something for the first time but it was greatly aided by the fact that I knew so many of the people who were in the Apple TV+ division.
What were the notes you got from Cupertino?
They were interested how we were portraying technology, how fast is the technology going to evolve in the show. [Apple CEO] Tim Cook came to the set and sat at the Mission Control consoles and enjoyed himself. He got lost in the consoles the keyboards: “Oh yeah, I remember this kind of CRT.” I would go to Cupertino for various things and was always [warmly received]: “For All Mankind, I love that show! I was a huge fan of the space program.” I’d walk down the corridors and you would just see pictures of astronauts and space and it was clear that there is a great fondness and love within the tech world for the space program and for NASA. We were doing something that not only interested them on a business sense but it was also appealing to something that touched them all emotionally and very personally as well.
MacDailyNews Take: You can listen to the full interview which discusses Tim Cook visiting the set of Apple TV+’s “For All Mankind” and much, much Moore (wink) TV’s Top 5 below:
Really am I to this series, last week I was just studying some of the tech and background stuff for starship on YouTube and up came further vids on the Russian N1 and the Sea Dragon which I knew nothing about. A few hours later I watch an episode of FAMK and low and behold both those rockets were mentioned. Absolutely fascinating for a historical tech guy like me.
Pretty sure there’s an anachronism in the first episode of season 2. Somebody used the word frikkin and I’m pretty sure that word was not a part of the vocabulary yet in the 80s
There are printed examples of “freakin’,” pronounced “frikkin,” at least as early as 1968. See, e.g. William Malliol, A Sense of Dark. Oral use probably preceded literary use.