Robert W. Sullivan IV

The Apotheosis of Chance: Being There (1979), a parable that reveals the Illuminati at its conclusion, also alludes to Stanley Kubrick (1928-1999) filming the 1969 moon landing in a NASA studio. When Chauncey Gardiner (Peter Sellers, 1925-1980) horses around in front of the television store, its shop windows are the lunar surface, complete with a video camera that projects his image onto a monitor on the moon’s surface. A jazz-rock cover of Richard Strauss’ (1864-1949) Also sprach Zarathustra (1896) booms over the scene, which immediately recalls Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and its theme song, arguably one of the most recognizable signature tunes in cinema history. The tone poem, coupled with the storefront and Sellers, who starred in Kubrick’s Lolita (1962) and Dr. Strangelove (1964), suggests the legendary director shot the moon-landing footage, which must have been one of the worst-kept secrets in Hollywood.