Al Reinert

Reinert's interest in space exploration led to the ambitious project For All Mankind. Although he had no film experience, his goal was to bring images previously seen only on television to film. It would take Reinert eight years to finish the documentary. He spent hundreds of hours interviewing former astronauts and culled through thousands of hours of NASA footage. To scale up the space agency's images, Reinert had to use an optical printer to scan each individual frame of the original 16mm film and enlarge it to 35mm. Brian Eno was commissioned to provide a soundtrack, which was combined with sound bites from the astronauts in a narration-free film.[9]

The documentary received high praise. New York Post critic David Edelstein wrote, "It amounts to an ode to space travel, and it's awesomely beautiful." For All Mankind received an Academy Award nomination for Best Documentary Feature.[9] It won the Grand Jury Prize for Best Documentary at the Sundance Film Festival.[10]

In the mid-1990s, Reinert teamed up with his former editor Bill Broyles to write the screenplay for the space docudrama Apollo 13. Directed by Ron Howard and starring Tom Hanks, the movie dramatizes the aborted 1970 lunar mission. In 1996, the film was nominated for nine Oscars, including Best Adapted Screenplay, but Broyles' and Reinert's effort lost to Emma Thompson's work on Sense and Sensibility.

Reinert eventually moved to Los Angeles to continue his screen writing career. He would spend 15 years there. Projects included a two-year stint on an unrealized James Cameron movie about Mars, an uncredited rewrite on the 1998 film Armageddon and preliminary work on the 2013 film Gravity.[11] He co-wrote and shared an Emmy Award for the 1998 HBO miniseries From the Earth to the Moon.[12] During this time frame, Reinert also traveled to Japan, where he co-wrote the screenplay for the video game-to-film Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within.[3]

Tired of Los Angeles' "dehumanizing" film industry,[11] Reinert sought a project that would take him back to Texas.[3] The result was his first feature documentary since For All Mankind. The 2013 film, An Unreal Dream: The Michael Morton Story, told the tale of the wrongful conviction of a Williamson County man charged with murdering his wife. Morton spent nearly 25 years in prison before he was exonerated through DNA evidence. The documentary debuted at the SXSW Festival, where it won the Documentary Spotlight Audience Award.[13] It was later picked up by CNN Films.[14]

In 2016, Reinert's film Audubon was released. Also known as Rara Avis: John James Audubon and the Birds of America, the documentary tells the story of John James Audubon, the 19th century ornithologist, naturalist and self-taught painter. It shows various locations in Audubon's life and interviews experts about his contributions to ornithology and the impact his art had on how nature was viewed. Reinert took the film across the U.S. where he showed it in private screenings at Audubon Society meetings and museums. The Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) has since aired the documentary several times and sells it in DVD format through the PBS website.[15][16]

At the time of his death, Reinert was working on another space-based documentary, Above It All, about the International Space Station. A sponsored project of the International Documentary Association, the yet-to-be-finished film is described as a "profound example of human cooperation...circling our planet every day. Men and women from 24 countries have flown on the International Space Station, living together in outer space for months at a time. Not only peacefully but constructively, resolutely pursuing a shared dream. It is the model for a hopeful human future, and Above It All is an effort to tell the story."[17]