N.C. planetarium has starring role in upcoming TV movie

The area’s only planetarium, a regular place to go out of this world, will go coast to coast Sunday night as part of a Hallmark Hall of Fame movie.

A scene was filmed in the Sky Theater inside Ingram Planetarium of Sunset Beach, N.C., for “A Smile as Big as the Moon,” a true story based on the book by Mike Kersies. The plot follows a teacher and football coach who finally scores in gaining admission for special education students into Space Camp.

The made-for-TV production premieres Sunday on ABC.

Officials from the Ocean Isle Museum Foundation Inc., which owns and operates the planetarium and the Museum of Coastal Carolina in Ocean Isle Beach, N.C., welcomed a film production crew Sept. 28 from Wilmington for the day. Equipment inside the Sky Theater was transformed to a setting of a planetarium in 1988. Filming also took place in Wilmington and Alabama.

Mark Jankowski, planetarium director, recalled the rush of the experience of entertaining filmmakers, which he summed up as amazing and “something I’ll never forget.”

Question | Just how out of the ordinary was that one day at the planetarium, which marks its 10th anniversary in May?

Answer | We were going to have a small group, probably about 20 kids, that day for a show. Instead, we had about 200 people, with only 10 to 12 people in the cast and 10 to 15 extras hanging around. Everyone else was part of the crew. It was well-orchestrated. ... It was organized chaos. Everybody knew what they were supposed to be doing. It was like a colony of ants, just crawling all over the place, getting the job done. And at the end of the day, it took only an hour to clean up. ...

The next day, they came in with construction crews, and put everything back together, they put the seats back in and made sure there was no tape on the floor. After probably two hours, you never know they were here. Everybody from the production crew was as nice as could be.

Q. | Just how was the planetarium’s Sky Theater transformed by crews for use in the movie?

A. | They had to convert the planetarium. We’ve spent money to upgrade it to be a high-tech, modern planetarium, but they wanted to make it look like it was from the 1980s. They retrofitted it to make it look like an older planetarium. ... We met their needs; we were just a little too updated for what they needed, so I helped them to retrofit it.

Q. | How much advance work took place to line up things for filming on Sept. 28?

A. | They came quite often. They came with a scouting group to check over everything, then they brought people from Hollywood. ... Then they started making site plans, what they couldn’t touch, what they couldn’t move ... a lot of legal stuff like that. That went on for ... the six to eight times they were here. ... From phone conversations and from them coming out, I took some measures and made a small-scale rendering of the facility.

Q. | What other efficiencies were observed in the whole process of that day of production?

A. | It was all tractor-trailers for the dressing rooms and other stuff. One tractor-trailer was nothing but a generator; they used their own electricity. ... When I pulled up at 6 in the morning, they were all here; they were set up in our parking lot.

Q. | And what was the return to normalcy like for the next day of business, the usual routine, at the planetarium, after the production crews had moved on?

A. | It felt really quiet, from that much of a rush for two days to the regular September-October crowds. It was strange. You get back into the routine really quick, but you kind of miss the excitement from the day before.

Q. | So how eagerly are you awaiting Sunday to see the final results on national TV, to watch it again and again?

A. | My daughter will TiVo it. ... I want to watch it just to see how the planetarium looks in the movie.