The mockumentary's basic premise is that the television footage from the Apollo 11 Moon landing was faked and recorded in a studio by the CIA with help from director Stanley Kubrick.

The mockumentary begins with the premise that NASA loaned a unique and secret lens to Kubrick for the purpose of creating a faked Moon landing in a studio.

After the success of the fake footage, Nixon gets scared that the truth might be discovered, and in a drunken state asks CIA Colonel George Kaplan to dispose of the whole film crew.

The death squad goes to Vietnam where the film crew has sought refuge, but is immediately caught by the villagers: despite a perfect accent and disguise, their commanding officer was black.

It is finally revealed that this is a mockumentary as the end credits roll over a montage of blooper reels, with the main participants laughing over their lines or over their inability to remember them.

William Karel had just completed Hollywood, a film based on lying, when he and the documentary unit of Arte had the idea of making a mockumentary, to play with the serious tonality of Arte but also for pleasure, and to make a funny film based on the idea that one must not believe everything that one is told, that witnesses can lie, archives can be tricked, and that any subject can be twisted by misleading subtitling or dubbing.

[6] In addition to the increasingly incredible claims made as the film progresses, several factual errors of note are introduced by the narrator: Most of the fictitious witnesses are named after characters from movies directed by Stanley Kubrick or Alfred Hitchcock.

The soundtrack also includes the song "The American Dream" from Wag the Dog by Barry Levinson, a fiction feature about a secretly government-commissioned Hollywood production of a fake war.

The giveaway also appears in the closing credits with blooper reels showing the characters, real and fictitious alike, laughing over their lines or over their inability to remember them.

[5] In fact at least one of these "jokes" - Kissinger saying that he would do it all over again - appears in Les hommes de la Maison Blanche [7] where he turns out to be actually talking quite seriously about the war in Vietnam.

"He was great as our James Bond, getting us in and out secretly, even giving us code names," said Winston Lord, former president of the Council on Foreign Relations, who accompanied Mr. Kissinger to the secret talks with the Vietnamese.Whereas the paper shown in the film says: General Walters' last known public appearance was on a French Television documentary in which he talked about the White House's involvment [sic] with the Apollo program in the late 1960s.

[6] William Karel indicated that he found inspiration in Orson Welles' radio broadcast The War of the Worlds, Capricorn One, and the docudramas by Peter Watkins.