Mercury Astronauts did not like the Film
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Right_Stuff_(film)
The Mercury Seven astronauts were mostly negative about the film. In an early interview, Deke Slayton said that none of the film "was all that accurate, but it was well done."[46] However, in his memoirs, Slayton described the film as being "as bad as the book was good, just a joke".[47] Wally Schirra liked the book a lot, but expressed disappointment and dislike for the movie, and he never forgave the producers for portraying Gus Grissom as a "bungling sort of coward", which was totally untrue.[48] In an interview, Schirra said: "It was the best book on space, but the movie was distorted and warped... All the astronauts hated [the movie]. We called it Animal House in Space."[49] In another interview, Schirra said: "They insulted the lovely people who talked us through the program - the NASA engineers. They made them like bumbling Germans".[46] Scott Carpenter said that it was a "great movie in all regards".[46] Alan Shepard harshly criticized both the movie and the book: "Neither Tom Wolfe nor [Philip Kaufman] had talked to any of the original seven guys, at any time... The Right Stuff [both the film and the book] is fiction... The movie assumed that Grissom had panicked, which wasn't true at all. The movie made him look like a bad guy for the whole movie. They were very hard on John Glenn's wife, who had a mild speech problem. They made Lyndon Johnson look like a clown. It was just totally fiction."
I enjoyed the film as a young adult in 1984. share