By Matt Schudel
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, March 12, 2008
Byron Morgan, a NASA filmmaker who created award-winning documentaries that imparted lasting images of the space program, died Feb. 13 of pulmonary failure at Suburban Medical Center in Paramount, Calif. He was 87 and lived in Long Beach, Calif.
Mr. Morgan was the son of a Hollywood screenwriter and served as a naval aviator in World War II and the Korean War. His background proved ideal when he joined the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, the predecessor of NASA, in 1957.
As that agency evolved into NASA in 1958, Mr. Morgan became its director of film and video production and helped invent the way the world would view the drama and heroism of the nation's first astronauts.
He worked at NASA from before the selection of the original seven Mercury astronauts until the age of the space shuttle in the 1980s. His unparalleled access to astronauts, engineers, training programs and launches provided a rich visual record of the nation's space program from its infancy.
"He had as much cooperation as possible from NASA to make these films," said his son, John Morgan.
Many of Mr. Morgan's 44 NASA documentaries, such as "The Astronauts: United States Project Mercury," "Flight of Freedom Seven" and "Project Apollo: Manned Flight to the Moon," depicted astronauts as daring officer-adventurers testing the limits of a dangerous and unproven technology. He also coordinated NASA's official launch films, positioning cameras and microphones to capture raw footage of the moments leading up to liftoff, when fire and smoke billow from the rocket boosters and tense astronauts are poised to be propelled into space.
Mr. Morgan's documentaries, which won 45 international filmmaking awards, were shown on television, in schools, at film festivals and to audiences overseas, often through the auspices of the U.S. Information Agency. They are often used as archival material for modern films and television programs.
Mr. Morgan once estimated that, at the height of the space program in the 1960s, U.S. schoolchildren saw an average of six of his films a year, and that his documentary about the space shuttle had been seen by 200 million people worldwide.
Byron Albert Morgan was born Feb. 3, 1921, in Los Angeles and was the son of Albert Byron Morgan, a screenwriter who was a pilot and helped make early films of Navy aviators.
"My dad was always around planes and around daredevil guys," John Morgan said. "He went into the Navy because he wanted to be a Navy pilot."
During World War II, Mr. Morgan flew long-range bombing missions from Alaska to the Kuril Islands of northern Japan. In 1944, his plane was hit by Japanese fire and forced to land in the eastern Soviet Union.
For five months, Mr. Morgan was held in a Soviet detention camp in Siberia and listed as missing in action. After secret diplomacy, he and other airmen were scheduled to be released until news of their internment was leaked. Mr. Morgan and several other U.S. prisoners escaped but were soon caught and held by the Soviets for two more months. Ultimately, he was released through Iran.
After the war, Mr. Morgan graduated from what is now Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles and considered becoming a Jesuit priest. He wrote a play about his imprisonment in Siberia, "October Days," which was produced in Los Angeles and Portland, Ore.
In the early 1950s, Mr. Morgan made a documentary about Iran. He received a master's degree in drama from UCLA in 1955, then returned to Washington. He lived in Chevy Chase and later in Bethesda until 1985.
In addition to his NASA films, Mr. Morgan made more than 150 other documentaries, training films and television shows for the Army, State Department, U.S. Information Agency, U.S. Forest Service, colleges and Maryland Public Television.
He was a technical adviser on the 1983 feature film "The Right Stuff" and retired from NASA two years later. He moved to California and was a consultant on James Michener's miniseries "Space" in 1985. In the late 1980s, he made a series of four films for the Army about life in Korea.
Mr. Morgan was strongly influenced by his Jesuit training and visited El Salvador with a human rights group after three American nuns and a female lay worker were kidnapped and killed in 1980. He was a member, successively, of the Shrine of the Most Blessed Sacrament Catholic Church in Washington, St. Jane Frances de Chantal in Bethesda and St. Elizabeth Catholic Church in Rockville.
His marriage to Patricia McLaughlin ended in divorce.
In addition to his son, of Los Angeles, survivors include his second wife, Dell Morgan of Long Beach; seven children from his first marriage, Melissa Morgan of Toronto, Marya Morgan of Cape May, N.J., Patricia Hall-Tipping of Rowayton, Conn., Heather Hackett of Sterling, Laura Capaccio of Staunton, Va., Byron Morgan Jr. of Annapolis and Peter Morgan of San Francisco; two stepchildren, Mark Chumley of Santa Monica, Calif., and Jonathan Chumley of Indianapolis; 10 grandchildren; and one great-granddaughter.