William Broyles Jr.

William Broyles Jr. founded Texas Monthly in 1972 and edited Newsweek before turning to screenwriting; he shared an Academy Award nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay with Al Reinert for Apollo 13 (1995), and later wrote Cast Away and Jarhead. The tagline was distilled from a remark by Jerry Bostick, the real Apollo 13 flight dynamics officer, during the writers’ research interviews with Mission Control veterans. By Bostick’s account it was Broyles who seized on the phrase — the words are Hollywood’s, but the attitude they describe was genuinely NASA’s.