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.