Besides portraying the massive technological achievement of that event, the film places it in some historical context and tries to capture the mood and the feel of the people on Earth when man first walked on another world.

After the film was completed in 1969 there was not much interest in it because the general public had been saturated with the US space program, especially with several other lunar missions which followed Apollo 11 over the next three years.

NASA gave the film a screening in New York City for possible distributors, but it was considered to be too long, and subsequently failed to be picked up.

It received many favorable reviews and was thereafter screened in a selection of theaters nationally, capitalizing on the publicity due to the Whitney program.

In 2009 a 35mm print of the film was telecined, and re-released in a special "Director's Cut" edition under the supervision of Theo Kamecke.

Francis Thompson and his partner Alexander Hammid were at that time generally regarded as the best documentary filmmakers in the USA, having won fame as the creators of the hit of the 1964-65 New York World's Fair To Be Alive!, a multi-screen film which played to overflow crowds and garnered the Academy Award for Documentary Short Subject in 1966.

It was to be a theatrical production of several million dollars at minimum, with funding and distribution supplied by MGM, and would have included a re-enactment of the moonwalk on a sound stage.

The Francis Thompson company even conducted preliminary shooting during one or two of the earlier Apollo missions, but in early 1969 because of reshuffling at MGM, the project lost its backing.

Bill Johnnes came on board as line producer because he had been involved with the ill-fated MGM production and was already familiar with many of the necessary contacts.

In the weeks before the launch Theo Kamecke flew to Washington D.C. to meet the appropriate people at NASA, and get his bearings on the film.

Most of them were on 16mm and were taken at such a high frame rate that they seemed to be hardly moving at all, so it was determined how much to speed them up while still seeming slow motion, and were sent to an optical house to be blown up to 35mm.

The composer selected for Moonwalk One was Charles Morrow, who had developed a reputation for very flexible, avant garde, and stirring compositions by the late 1960s.

By the time Moonwalk One was finished, light-sensitive emulsion film had become much better technically and was much cheaper than the Technicolor process.

[citation needed] Archer Winsten writing in the New York Post in November 1972 declared that it deserved to be a companion piece to Stanley Kubrick's 1968 masterwork 2001: A Space Odyssey.