Jack Black Reminisces About 'School of Rock' and His Personal Connection to 'Apollo 10 1/2' (Exclusive)

etonline.com:

Jack Black's new animated Netflix film, , is about the Apollo 11 moon landing, but hits surprisingly close to home for the actor and musician, who has a personal connection to the historical moment.Black's late mother, Judith Love Cohen, was an aerospace engineer who worked on the Apollo space program in the 1960s and is credited with helping to develop the Abort-Guidance System in the Apollo Lunar Module. «She worked on an Apollo mission at that time, but the stuff that she did wasn't used until Apollo 13, a few years later, when the astronauts were in an emergency situation and her Abort-Guidance System that she worked on as a programmer helped save some astronauts' lives,» Black explained when chatting about his upcoming film with ET's Matt Cohen.In fact, Cohen was such a devoted worker, that her son recounted, «There is the legend of how when she went to the hospital to give birth to me [on Aug.

28, 1969, just one month after the Apollo 11 moon landing], that she had some paperwork, she was still working on a problem.

And after she delivered the baby, she called into work and they said, 'Hey, congratulations, you just had a baby! How are you?' And she goes, 'Fine, fine, I'm faxing you over the papers, the mathematical equations.'»Black and his mother at the 2013 Golden Globe Awards.«She was much smarter than me, I did not inherit those mathematic genes,» Black added with a laugh, «but there's a sense of pride and connection to telling this story, 'cause I know my mom was in there working on it too.»In which was shot in live action by writer and director Richard Linklater, and later animated in a process similar to his early 2000s films and, Black narrates the story of an elementary-aged boy growing up in Houston.