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Changing stars with the High Frontier: Spotlight on Princeton native Will Henry’s new film

Princeton High School alumnus Will Henry

From the imaginative greenhouse at the center of 1972’s “Silent Running” to the more recent “Elysium”, with its futuristic class warfare writ large via a man-made space station solely for the über-wealthy, sci-fi cinema has tackled the concept of colonizing space with a futuristic eye toward what could be. And yet, as depicted in filmmaker Will Henry’s documentary “The High Frontier: The Untold Story of Gerard K. O’Neill”, there is far more relevant science than fantastical fiction associated with the notion of man breaking the boundaries of Earth and settling in among the stars.

Born and bred in Princeton, Henry brings his film home for a special screening this Thursday night at the Garden Theatre on Nassau Street, not far from where he grew up and attended school at Riverside Elementary. “I was fortunate enough to have two incredibly supportive parents growing up,” Henry said. And after receiving a digital video recorder as a gift one year, he continues, “I began filming every day. Anything and everything I could.”

But before one thinks that a career in film was a foregone conclusion for the Princeton High grad, Henry cautions that a subsequent move to Los Angeles to chase his dreams left him frustrated by a competitive and often unforgiving film industry. So how does a former athlete and self-proclaimed film geek end up on a three-year journey to tell the story of a relatively unknown physicist who passed away when Henry was little more than a year old?

In a last-ditch effort to, as he puts it, “change my stars”, and breathe new life into his intended career, Henry answered a job posting for a production assistant that ultimately connected him with Dylan Taylor, a former real estate wizard with a serious yen for space. Taylor’s passion project became Henry’s day job, as the budding filmmaker transitioned from assistant to eventually both writer and director of “The High Frontier”, beginning with a deep dive into O’Neill’s practical view of humanity and its future.

Not merely a deep thinker, O’Neill, a Princeton physicist and space visionary, invented the earliest form of GPS technology, not to mention particle storage rings, a precursor to the massive particle accelerators that have long helped scientists delve into more profound questions regarding physics, matter, and the dimensions of space of time. But beyond his landmark discoveries here on Earth, O’Neill began to ponder the future of the planet and whether there was a need for man to embrace its transient nature, to keep moving. So much so that, one day in class, he posed an off-hand question meant to stimulate his physics students, a question that went something like “Is a planetary surface the right place for an expanding industrial civilization?”

Made in tandem with the O’Neill estate with financial backing from Taylor’s Voyager Space Holdings, the film examines how that one question and his students’ surprising answer – “No!” – led the formidable scientist down the path of envisioning a new frontier, where man would live not on another planet, as more commonly shown in sci-fi fare, but on self-sustaining rotating habitats, or “O’Neill cylinders”, out in free space. It may seem “far out”, to use the vernacular of his era, but it was a notion born of an overwhelming and collective concern for a home planet with overpopulation woes, dwindling resources, the shadow of war, and the prospect of an energy shortage.

Sound familiar?

While the film boasts a notable list of the professor’s own creative peers – Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Ray Bradbury – advocating on behalf of his vision, the O’Neill fandom – dubbed “Gerry’s kids” – now extends, according to Henry, “to a generation so much more invested and passionate not only about the STEAM industry (science, technology, engineering, arts, mathematics) but also about the ever-evolving Earth’s own fate, its depleted resources, etc.” The promising thing about O’Neill’s idea is that nothing new needs be invented to realize his vision. The science aspect from a physics standpoint, experts assert, already exists. And while the price tag for O’Neill’s dreamscape may have seemed unattainable and daunting in his heyday, his acolytes are now in a position to make his vision a reality, as evidenced by Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin efforts, among other privately-funded space endeavors.

For his part, Henry hoped and thought “The High Frontier” documentary – named after O’Neill’s 1977 book of the same name – would come to fruition much faster than it turned out. But in a not-so-strange plot twist, he points out that “with everything going on in the world since I first answered that random job search listing, despite the protracted time frame from start to finish, the film has become far more relevant than I originally imagined.” Henry equates the team’s eagerness to finish and release the film at a time when the space industry was in the spotlight and issues like climate change were hitting the front page once again with seeing “the mountaintop above the treeline.” With the mountain being the space industry, Henry and company “wanted to be on top of the mountain at that moment so people could notice us, thinking it might be out of sight soon.”

It doesn’t hurt that the documentary art form no longer carries with it the stigma that existed back in the days of Maysles and Pennebaker, when even the most groundbreaking of documentaries were relegated to art house cinemas largely in big cities, far beyond the reach of the average person. There is “new reverence”, Henry said, for documentaries, which, in 2021, he says, “frankly, are better made and far more accessible.” Streaming services, ESPN 30 for 30, and surely Ken Burns have contributed to a seismic shift in the general public’s desire for more documentary consumption and the chance that “The High Frontier”, its main premise, and O’Neill himself will reach a larger audience, be more visible. It’s not just the mountaintop, using Henry’s metaphor, that can now be seen, but “half the mountain”.

To that end, the film, which has garnered awards at some 15 film festivals over the last year, is now available for purchase on Apple TV. And Henry isn’t leaving space anytime soon, as his next project, an 8-part TV documentary series produced in association with NASA (a rarity), surely will attest.

“Beyond the thrill of Apollo and the space shuttle and all that,” Henry said, “I have a much deeper respect now for the practical elements of space travel, the experiments they conduct up there that are instrumental to what we learn and can apply to life at home.”

Meanwhile, back on Earth, as much as he hopes his film finds its audience, Henry said something beautiful and quite unexpected began to dawn on him as he was working on this project. Poring over tens of thousands of photos, hundreds of recordings, TV appearances as wide-ranging as the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson as part of the archive development and licensing for the movie, the filmmaker began to uncover a far more personal story.

“Virtually every photo or piece of footage or newspaper article I came across had some sort of connection to my own life growing up in Princeton, whether it was the building where O’Neill first posed that famous question years ago or the pond where I used to fish with my dad being just outside the office window during an interview with professor Freeman Dyson,” Henry said. But this personal element isn’t just about the coincidence of revisiting Henry’s old Princeton haunts like Lake Carnegie, the Princeton University campus, or even the Garden Theatre itself. Henry said when he first received some materials from O’Neill’s widow, he was taken aback when noticing her return address. “It was only then that I realized I grew up just three blocks away from the O’Neill residence.,” he said. “It was absolutely surreal.”

Separated by decades, yet nearly neighbors, the filmmaker maintains that “in a more profound way, it felt like I was both crossing paths and being guided by the spirit of O’Neill.”

Perhaps there is more to Henry’s three-year journey to tell O’Neill’s story than just the peculiar convergence of fate and science. Something that can give us all hope that we, too, can change our stars.

A special screening of “The High Frontier” will be held Thursday, Oct. 7 at 7:30 p.m. at the Princeton Garden Theatre, 160 Nassau Street. Tickets are available at https://princetongardentheatre.org/films/high-frontier.

Gerard K. O’Neill. Photo courtesy of Will Henry.
A poster for the new film. Photo courtesy of Will Henry.

2 Comments

  1. We already have a space settlement, it’s called earth. Who is going to foot the bill for these massive space colonies? I am not against setting up a space settlement, it would be neat. However, it would be much more vulnerable to the vagaries and negative aspects of outer space. One small piece of space junk traveling at 18,000 MPH would be a catastrophe for such a space colony.

  2. This is off topic but Princeton used to have two movie theaters (theatres). The Princeton Playhouse was on 29 Huffish Street. It was one of these vast and grand movie palaces with all the architectural bells, whistles, filigrees and flourishes of the that time. It was much larger and more distinctive than the Garden Theatre. I and many others were quite sad when it was torn down decades ago.

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