Chesley Bonestell: A Brush with the Future

"Chesley Bonestell: A Brush with the Future" won a prestigious "Audience Award" at the 2018 Newport Beach Film Festival and went on to be named "Best Documentary" at both COMIC-CON 2018 and the 2019 Boston Science Fiction Film Festival.

“No artist had more impact on the emerging popular culture of space in America than Chesley Bonestell. Through his visual images, he stimulated the interest of a generation of Americans and showed how space travel would be accomplished.” - Howard E. McCurdy, Author, Space and the American Imagination, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001.

THE REVIEWS ARE IN! "Remarkable! Fascinating! Informative! Entertaining! Inspiring! A Terrific Documentary! Enthusiastically Recommended!"

“The documentary Chesley Bonestell: A Brush with the Future by Douglass M. Stewart Jr., is both remarkable and fascinating... and the enthusiasm of the participants is infectious, not static at all, with excellent work from the Director, Editor, and Director of Photography.” - KPFK (90.7FM) Radio Film Club Review, July 15, 2019.

“If you’ve never heard of Bonestell, you’ll come away from the film wondering why not. And if, like me, you knew something of Bonestell’s life and work, you’ll be astonished to discover how much more you didn’t know... informative, entertaining, and inspiring." - “Meet Chesley Bonestell, The Most Important Space Artist You’ve Probably Never Heard Of”- Richard Tresch Fienberg, Astronomy Magazine, March 15, 2019.

Long before satellites would journey to planets and deep-space telescopes would photograph distant galaxies, there was an artist whose dazzling visions of planets and stars would capture the imagination of all who beheld them. Before that, he was an architect working on projects like the Chrysler Building and the Golden Gate Bridge. He would later become a matte painter in Hollywood working on films like Citizen Kane and Destination Moon. Who was this remarkable man? His name was Chesley Bonestell (1888-1986).

"I didn't know what other worlds looked like until I saw Bonestell's paintings of the solar system." - Famed astronomer and astrophysicist Carl Sagan.

Chesley Bonestell’s mesmerizing depiction of “Saturn As Seen From Titan” became known as “the painting that launched a thousand careers.” Told by the many people who were influenced by Chesley Bonestell or knew him personally and punctuated with rare interview footage of the artist himself, the documentary compellingly chronicles the life of a quiet, artistic visionary, whose architecture and space art continue to inspire us to reach for the stars.

“There isn’t an artist that’s painting today in the science fiction fantasy field who didn’t start with Chesley Bonestell,” says legendary science fiction author Ray Bradbury in the first film ever made about the man dubbed “The Father of Space Art.”