How 'Star City' Reimagined the Space Race With Soviets as the Stars - Universe Today

A female cosmonaut (played by Alice Englert) speaks after landing on the moon in "Star City." (Credit: Apple TV)

How do you capture the mood of the 1960s space race in a fictional universe where the Soviets beat the Americans to the moon?

The American side of the story was told in “For All Mankind,” an Apple TV series that concluded its fifth season in May. Now a spinoff series called “Star City,” which tells the Soviet side of the story, is set to wrap up its critically acclaimed first season.

Reimagining the Soviet space effort — and the Star City cosmonaut training center that served (and still serves) as its epicenter — was a challenge worthy of the Chief Designer himself. But cinematographer Brendan Uegama and the rest of the production team were up to it.

“We set up a really high bar for our standard of what our world was,” Uegama says in the latest episode of the Fiction Science podcast.

“That was not a perfectly beautiful world of photography like you would typically see or experience in a lot of movies,” he says. “We didn’t go to the beauty just for the sake of making a pretty picture. We stuck with our gut and said, no, it’s better if it’s a little uglier, because it feels a little more truthful to what this would be.”

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The production team had to balance several factors as they created the Star City that’s shown in “Star City.” The visual look and feel had to reflect the closed society of the Soviet Union in the 1960s and ’70s, but it also had to accommodate fictional changes in the timeline — including Soviet moon landings and a mission to Venus.

None of the filming took place in Russia. Instead, most of the scenes were shot in the former Soviet republic of Lithuania, where enough of the era’s brutalist architecture remains to provide the foundation for a suitably gray Cold War tale.

Uegama studied old photos and newsreels to sharpen his sense for Soviet-era settings. His main inspiration came from a set of photos taken in the early 1950s by Martin Manhoff, an American diplomat and suspected spy.

“He took just unbelievably fantastic photos of Moscow and everything around that time, and that informed me a lot personally,” Uegama says. “It inspired me a lot … to at least start to go down the road of what I thought this world could look like.”

Brendan Uegama, the director of photography for “Star City,” reviews a scene on video. (Credit: Apple TV / Lukas Šalna)

The story behind Manhoff’s photos and film footage could merit its own TV drama. Manhoff is best known for capturing footage of Josef Stalin’s funeral from a vantage point in the U.S. Embassy in 1953. He was never able to go to Star City. “That was, of course, completely out of bounds in the 1950s,” historian Douglas Smith says. But Manhoff was able to travel around the Soviet Union, chronicling everyday life in cities as well as the countryside.

When Manhoff and several other military attachés were accused of spying, he returned to the U.S., bringing the slides and reels of film back with him. They eventually ended up in cardboard boxes that were stored in a former auto body shop in the Seattle area, but overlooked until after Manhoff’s death in 2005. Smith played a key role in rediscovering and organizing the visual treasure trove.

The cinematography of “Star City” reflects the grainy look of 1960s-era film footage. “I started to lean into this world that felt imperfect and felt a little more handmade and a little more ‘found,’ in a way,” Uegama explains. “It wasn’t about constructing perfect scenes in the sense of traditional cinema…. We wanted to feel like we just walked into this room, and there were the people, and this is what it looked like, and how it was lit, and we photographed it.”

That doesn’t mean that “Star City” lacks the artist’s touch, or the filmmaker’s craft. In an Instagram post, Uegama says he used nearly 30 lenses made by 11 different manufacturers — tools that were selected to reflect “a deliberately imperfect aesthetic from the lens up.”

Check out an Instagram montage of shots from 'Star City'

I had the opportunity to visit Star City myself a quarter-century ago, during a reporting trip tied to the final days of Russia’s Mir space station. So, I can vouch for the retro feel and the imperfections that Uegama picked up on for “Star City.” Back then, I noted that all but one of the toilets in the restroom I had access to were out of order, and the tank on the one toilet that worked was half-disassembled.

In the real world, the Soviets suffered a string of failures during the 1960s that ruined their quest to put cosmonauts on the lunar surface. The space program’s secretive chief designer, Sergei Korolev, died during surgery in 1966. And the Soviets’ massive N1 moon rocket failed spectacularly during an uncrewed test launch that took place just two weeks before...