The Artist & The Astronaut

A full time teacher and basketball coach, at the urging of his wife, decides to make a documentary on a local Vermont couple. He embarked on this journey with no plan or budget.  In the next six years, he travelled to nine states, interviewed numerous Apollo Astronauts, their wives, award-winning authors, artists, art historians, and NASA directors of mission control, teamed with music legend Todd Hobin, to provide a story that otherwise would have never been told. The unlikely meeting and incredible life journeys of artist Pat Musick and astronaut Jerry Carr.

Pat and Jerry would grow up in the same neighborhood and go to the same schools. Pat would travel thousands of miles and Jerry would travel millions of miles before they would eventually meet each other in Houston Texas. This film centers around a uniquely American couple’s captivating story during the pinnacle of American exploration and social change. Although this film is in essence a love story, Pat and Jerry lived entire lives before they even met each other in 1976. Pat was a 1950s housewife with three daughters married to a football coach. Jerry was an astronaut with six children of his own. The experiences that each of them went through in the 1960s and 1970s prepared them to create art that would address the very important social issues of woman’s rights, race relations, issues of the native Americans, environmental sustainability and war.

A Q&A with the director Bill Muench follows the film.

Official selection, Fort Lauderdale International Film Festival, 2022; Omaha Film Festival, 2023; Woods Hole Film Festival, 2023