Space Shuttle Sally

‘Sally’ is streaming on Hulu.

Sally Ride was the first American woman in space. When she was selected to be on the 1983 Challenger mission, NASA scientists developed a makeup kit for her, and asked her if 100 tampons would be enough for her mission. Her battles with sexism became part of her legacy. But it was only after her death in 2012, when her obituary mentioned Tam O’Shaughnessy, her longtime partner, that Ride became a queer icon. Thirteen years on, filmmaker Cristina Costantini’s “Sally” looks back at Ride’s legacy through O’Shaughnessy’s eyes. For a story that unfolds through the 1980s and ’90s, its lessons are remarkably timely.

I caught up with Constantini to chat about Sally Ride, her partner of 27 years and sexism at NASA. Our conversation has been edited for brevity and clarity. 

Truthdig: What did you know about Sally Ride before making this film?

Cristina Costantini: I’ve been obsessed with Sally my whole life. I have memories of looking her up on Encarta 97. I would print out pictures of her, stories about her or the Challenger explosion. But I really think it was a very simple equation. If a girl can go to space and she looks “sporty” — it was like the same appeal of Sporty Spice, kind of — if a girl can be brave and athletic and do all the things that she’s not supposed to do, maybe I can do big things too. And I think she expanded the definition of what girls can do and what women can do, and that made me excited. I painted a mural of her on the outside of my elementary school wall.

Every astronaut from the beginning of time — the Mercury astronauts, the Apollo astronauts — they were always pictured with their wives. When I learned with the rest of the world that Sally Ride was survived by a life partner who no one ever had heard of, I thought, “What an interesting story!” If NASA was barely ready for women, they definitely weren’t ready for that. What would that have been like? 

TD: It’s releasing at a time when science, women, queer people, diversity, pretty much anything progressive is under attack. 

CC: When we started making the film, we didn’t know it would be coming out at a time when diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives would be under attack. The same for women and science, NASA. We didn’t know entrepreneurs were trying to get into space, that they were doing these all-women space flights. It’s crazy, but I think the film is really for anyone who has ever had to hide part of themselves to follow their dream. You see people going back into the closet. You see NASA being asked to take down their pride flags or their trans visibility flags, and removing their pronouns from their emails. They’ve walked back promises that the next person on the moon would be a woman. It really comes at a time when I think it matters, and I think Sally is a great reminder that we’ve come a long way, but that we have a long way to go.

TD: You don’t show NASA in a very kind light, with its sexism. What was it like working with the agency?

CC: We worked with NASA under a different administration, and truthfully, they were great partners. They were very eager to tell the story of a flawed past. NASA reflected the rest of the society at the time. You see it in the press corps, and you see it in the sexist questions that those women were being asked/ Tom Brokaw telling Judy Resnik she was too cute to be an astronaut. We’ve changed a lot as a society and we still have a long way to go, and it feels like we’re taking steps backward, but I do hope that the absurdity of that time period, at least, will give us some optimism that progress has been made over the past 50 years.

TD: There’s so much of Sally Ride’s voice in this film. Where is that from?

CC: From everywhere you can imagine. We took every single interview of her that she’s ever done in public, and we took private audio journals that she made when she came back from space, and we lined them up in one document. I think it’s 16 hours long. It became a master document that would come into play whenever we would get to a point where we would just be like “What did Sally think about that?,” “How did Sally do this?,” “Did she ever say something like this?” And so on. But, yeah, that’s from a zillion-trillion different sources.

TD: What was the archival process like?

CC: The film was two different stories. One is the public story of this icon that we know as Sally, and that story was so incredibly well documented, it was a problem. We brought in 5,000 reels from NASA’s archives, and just had a mountain of footage to sort through. It seemed like a blessing and a curse, because somebody had sorted through it and none of it was sound synced. So, we had to sound sync it from a different archive. 

TD: And the other story is?

CC: The private story, the arguably more interesting one, the one that hasn’t been told, that wasn’t archived at all. We had like five pictures of Sally and Tam in total, we were telling a love story without any archive of the two people in love. We had to construct a visual language around those feelings of being in love, of having a secret, of the first time you realize that this is more than a friendship. So that was one of the great challenges, but also one of the great joys of the film, inventing that language.

TD: Yes, you use some very artful re-creations by actors. What kind of film did you set out to make?

CC: I think Sally’s story has been very well documented, the public side of Sally. I didn’t feel the pressure to do another “Sally accomplished a lot of things” movie. I really wanted to do a movie that explored the untold side of who she really was, and to me, that was Tam, and the fact that they had met when they were young girls and knew each other really well since childhood, helped in that kind of storytelling. It benefits from being able to be a completely chronological story, because Tam was there from Day 1, and I loved their meeting story of her walking on her little tippy toes. And there were all these amazing moments that Tam told us about in her interview that were so visual, and I just kept thinking about … like feeling a hand on your back and being like, well, that’s not what a friend does. Or being in a dark cave-like biology lab, all these things were so visual. And I was like, “Oh, we don’t have any visuals,” so we had to make our own. But yeah, I wanted to tell the untold part of who this hero is, because that was more exciting for me.

TD: If you take away all the bells and whistles, what is the film about, to you?

CC: The film is about bravery. I think the film is about people, like Tam, who are brave enough to be who they really are during a time when it’s not popular. And I think Sally is a person who holds power to account when it’s really hard at NASA, for example. There are lots of different kinds of bravery in this film. And I think right now, we all need to be very brave, and we all need to speak the truth. I think a lot of good people have gone quiet during this time and we have to understand that this is a fight and that we’re in a fight for our lives. I hope Sally and Tam will give people a little bit of inspiration and courage to continue the fight. 

TD: Were you prepared for it to be seen as a controversial film?

CC: I didn’t think this was going to be very controversial. It was like a little gay love story. I didn’t think queerness would be under attack or women would be under attack in the way that they are. I mean, we lived through the first Trump presidency, but this feels different to me. 

TD: You’ve made “Mucho Mucho Amor,” about the Puerto Rican astrologer and psychic Walter Mercado, and “Science Fair,” which is about kids participating in a science fair, and now this. Is there a through line?

CC: There’s a weird through line. A lot of it is stories from my childhood, stories that gave me inspiration or hope as a little kid. Ideas like people just deserve to be people and the stories of the trailblazers who were born 50 or 100 years too early, and how they handled their struggles. I was an investigative journalist before, so there’s such a high-low of happy and sad stories. An astrophysicist to an astrologer is a funny step, but I think a lot of them are stories that I hope give people hope. And life is hard, the world is hard, but things have improved, and they will continue to improve. And the arc of justice spins in ways. I like stories that help give people stamina to continue.