It's a hell of a shame you didn't get to talk to Gavin Lyall (who died Feb 2003). Gavin approached me and Frank Hardman in spring 1966 with some speculations about doing a space western.  We responded with great enthusiasm. By this time Gavin had had four very successful thrillers published. The fifth - Venus with Pistol - came out during 1969. The fourth - Shooting Script - was published in 1966 so we must assume that MO2 was filling in a rest period between these two.

By June 66 the basic elements of the plot of MO2 were already emerging from his typewriter. (The 0 in M02 is now a zero, a nought, not an alphabetical letter.  Nice if it had stood for Moon Orbiter but it didn't.)

What you must understand is that Gavin (my oldest school friend from the age of 5) was the author and we were advisers - me mainly on the science (I'd gone to Oxford with a scholarship in physics) but Frank and I were very happy to throw in as many daft space-cowboy ideas as you'd meet anywhere.  But Gavin put together the treatment, his literary agent or he himself got Hammer interested, and he was involved with developing the whole thing with Michael Carreras - but I suspect much less closely than he would have liked to have been involved.

What I would say is that Gavin wrote snappy dialogue and it would be my view that if the film dialogue doesn't come across as snappy it's either because Carreras (and not Gavin) wrote it or because the actors didn't give it the necessary crackle.  Gavin commented at the time that Olson and especially Corri spoke un-variedly and too slowly - especially in the first half, and he thought the director was at fault for not varying the pace more.

Did you think that they were creating what you had envisioned, or was it far different?

 I think you are right in wondering how jokey the whole thing was meant to be and we felt that Roy Ward Baker didn't really have a positive vision of what the end product should be. Gavin/Frank/Martin certainly had in mind something far grittier. Even though it was a fairly preposterous plot we definitely thought of it as being grittier.  Let's say Hammer loved the idea but then ran with it in several directions, not all of them consistent with one another.  I think we all felt that the cartoon titles set the wrong tone for the film - and I'm not sure if the speeding up of the title song was needed simply because the animation didn't last long enough!  

You and your colleague contributors rightly pick out a great many technical and model faults and some general carelessness. I think the plain fact is that it was all done in quite a lot of a hurry. There's always little things that look odd – like the Moon Buggy should have been MB07 rather than MB7 I'd have thought. Gavin and I visited Elstree Studios while they were building the Moon Buggy and that was an impressive piece of work.

You refer on the website to the book John Burke did.  I expect Gavin Lyall could have told you something about that, but I can't. Is Burke still around?  I don't know what he basically worked from, the shooting script or our original treatment?

It is very similar to the 'Final Shooting Script' dated Jan 1969, although there must have been another modified script after that as some characters, sets and dialogue were changed.

It seems a bit strange that Gavin didn’t write the novel?

I'm sure Gavin Lyall would have been offered the chance to write the book and would have turned it down. Mainly I expect because he would have been well into the next thriller "Blame the Dead" and wouldn't want to go back and rework old material. He was a very successful thriller writer and continued as such for many years.  He won the Crime Writers' Association Silver Dagger award for ‘Midnight Plus One’.  Bill Kemp was really very much in line with some of his earlier heroes. I attach a scan of an extremely beaten up book cover of his first thriller "The Wrong Side of the Sky" from 1961.  The artwork on the cover was actually done by Gavin himself, because he thought the cover provided by Hodder and Stoughton was inadequate for the job. 

But the MZ2 novelisation by John Burke does preserve the basic run-down feel as far as I recall.  We all felt the film was overdressed - in Gavin's words "The designers went mad and were allowed to get away with it" - everything was too bright and clean, so there was no contrast between the bright shiny Moon Hilton and the grubby-looking aspect of much of the moon.  Kemp's spacecraft was about to fail its MOT, his space suit was shabby, he was grafting for a bit of income to do essential repairs to keep in business somehow, etc. Somewhere in the back of our minds was a pilot, like Jimmy Cagney flying that old crate of a DC3 across the Andes, or somewhere in the wilds of South America?

I didn’t realise that you wrote the lyrics for the title song.

Yes I wrote the lyrics, working with Don Ellis (US jazz musician extraordinary) who did the music. But I don’t seem to be credited with doing them, possibly because I failed to join the Performing Rights Society. Don and I were both disappointed that the song finished up 20% faster and 50% louder than we had intended it to be. But I read a review saying ‘It hit the listener with a full-on sonic body tackle’ – so I guess it worked for them. Other reviewers were less kind!

Some folk didn't understand the lyrics too well - I wrote to Gavin Lyall July 1969: "Any parallel between the girl singing to her spaceship and a cowboy singing to his horse is entirely deliberate".  

When I looked at your site I noticed a misquote, or two, but that’s because you couldn’t hear exactly what Julie Driscoll was singing as she was going too fast to be clearly audible. I haven’t heard the soundtrack properly for a long time but my lyric is what Don used, as I’d fitted the words precisely to the music he sent me. I’ve got the full lyric here in it’s original form, but of course it may have been edited in the recording studio.

The final lyrics are very close to the original with mostly a few minor word changes in a couple of places, probably to enable the song to flow better at the faster speed. However this speed meant that bars 36 to 39 had to be edited down.

Original lyric –
I’m in space and could be spinning crazy,
Earthbound boys can stand aside,
Man I need I’ll meet in orbit,
Hold on tight and we would ride

And what appears to be used –
I’m in space and ... crazy Earthbound,
Stand aside of me ... In orbit,
Hold on tight and we shall ride

Thank you for taking the time to add to this Moon Zero Two webpage article.

I've looked at your website and I'm very impressed, your enthusiasm is a delight. I was glad you mentioned that bit about the sound effects/music. I remember Don Ellis telling me about the fun he had with that, I think he mentioned his plan to use a trombone to make the sound of a door opening.

I've managed to note a few things down but please remember that it's all 40 years ago and my memories are selective - and dodgy. I remember seeing the film at its press preview - Leicester Square I think - taking the morning off from my then office work.  And then again on ITV but it’s been quite a while. I’m looking forward to seeing it again.

Like you Gavin Lyall was a keen model maker, as was I, and we modelled and then photographed some of the scenes from the movie long before we submitted the script. I did some architectural model making in the 70s, including a model of the whole of the Piccadilly Circus area for the Westminster Council. These days I’m still a musician/songwriter- and currently publishing a collection of 15 of my latest songs/jazz numbers - but mainly spend my time as an oil-painter.

Martin's website, 'Martin Davison Art,' can be viewed - HERE

January - Amber Dean Smith

February - Simone Silvera

March - In Flight Deck of MZ2

April - Standing in the MZ2 Airlock

May - Posing on the Asteroid set

June - At Lunar Customs

July - In the lobby of the Moon Hotel

August - In Hubbards Celler Hotel Suite

September - Farside Five

October - Rentabug and Moonsuits

November - Wally's Igloo set

December - Mining site set