Dark Side of the Moon is a French mockumentary by director William Karel. It originally aired on the Franco-German television network Arte in 2002 with the title Opération Lune. 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. Plot 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. In reality, the Carl Zeiss Planar 50mm f/0.7 lens was designed by Zeiss in 1966 on special request for NASA for the Apollo program, and a batch of ten were made. Kubrick bought three left over lenses from this batch for the filming of Barry Lyndon and had them extensively modified to make them usable on his 35 mm camera. The first part tells of the inception of the NASA's lunar program, emphasizing the issues related to its funding and the necessary public support to the program. NASA regards Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey as the prototype of the show that the space program needs to be in order to gain this support, leading them to design the spacesuits and vessels in a "Hollywood" fashion and even to hire 700 Hollywood technicians, making all of Hollywood stop working on other projects. But the outcome of Apollo 11 is disappointing: although the landing is successful, Neil Armstrong makes a fool of himself and not a single shot of the moonwalk is usable. The incapability of shooting images on the Moon had been anticipated by Richard Nixon and his staff who decided to fake the pictures on the Moon, using the set of 2001 that was still available in London. Kubrick had refused, then accepted and finally directed the fake footage himself, appalled by the lack of skills of the CIA crew. The KGB soon realized that "the whole thing was a hoax", that Apollo 11 had indeed landed but it was physically impossible to make pictures in the lunar environment. Besides, they had found a photo showing a portrait of Kubrick lying on the false lunar soil in the 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