January 17, 1990 | It seemed like such a good idea. ''I figured, hey, we could make this movie real cheap and simple,'' says Al Reinert of For All Mankind, which opens Friday in Houston. ''I mean, the government's spent all this money to shoot the film, so there'll be nothing to it. It's like, we thought we had discovered a goldmine!''

Wrong!

After 10 years of indefatigable fund-raising, extended post-production work and international film festival circuit touring, Reinert, a Houston-based magazine journalist, has learned the hard way just how difficult it can be for any filmmaker, especially an untrained novice, to hit the jackpot.

Even when the filmmaker has a goldmine -- or, in Reinert's case, the official NASA film and video archives -- at his disposal.

''It's a crazy business,'' Reinert says. ''I mean, it's absolutely crackers. We showed this film to just about every distributor in Hollywood. And what Michael Eisner of Disney told us is typical of the response we got: 'This is absolutely wonderful. But it will never make any money.'

''And after a while, we were beginning to think he might be right. Because, basically, the take that we've gotten from all the distributors is that documentaries don't make money.''

At long last, however, Reinert and his investors are seeing light at the end of the mine shaft. After receiving rave reviews from national critics, earning a prestigious prize at the 1989 Sundance Film Festival -- the same year that festival launched sex, lies and videotape -- and playing to standing ovations at the 1989 Galveston, Houston and Toronto film festivals, For All Mankind does not yet have a commercial distributor. But that's OK: Reinert and company are going the self-distribution route, insisting on theatrical play rather than settling for a quick direct-to-video deal.

Last November, For All Mankind opened for test engagements in San Francisco, Seattle and Rochester, N.Y. The reviews were great and the box-office was impressive. (''We played seven weeks in San Francisco!'' Reinert crows.) Theater owners in other, larger markets took notice.

''Pacific Theaters offered us 10 screens in Los Angeles,'' Reinert says. ''Including both the Cinerama Dome, and the Westwood Crest, where Batman opened. It's like -- well, terrifying, is what it is.''

It's also great timing: Reinert is offering exhibitors a potentially top-drawing movie at a time when many of the less successful Christmas releases are running out of steam. On Friday, the same day it opens in Houston (at the Spectrum 9 and Meyer Park 14 theaters) and Los Angeles, For All Mankind also blasts off in Dallas and San Antonio.

''Yeah, it's funny -- we got the screens in San Francisco because Fat Man and Little Boy flopped, and they needed something to rush in and replace it. Well, I really feel sorry for Paul Newman, but, you know, the reason why we're in these theaters is, Blaze is a bust. So, like, they're yanking Blaze from the Westwood Crest, and sticking us in there.''

Once you see For All Mankind, you will immediately understand why Reinert and his investors are so insistent that their film be savored on a big screen. Even if you watched every televised detail of the epochal Apollo space program of the 1960s and '70s, you will be amazed and engrossed by the out-of-this-world spectacle that Reinert has artfully assembled.
 
For All Mankind offers a single, composite narrative, culled from NASA archival footage of nine 1968-72 lunar missions. Audiences accustomed to thinking of astronauts as white-bread bland will be delighted by the unexpected hilarity: Frat-house horseplay in the spacecraft, exhilarating joyrides on the lunar surface. (One astronaut bursts into song: ''While strolling on the moon one dayyyyy . . .'') But the movie is more than fun and games: Reinert has balanced the hijinks with images that, despite their familiarity, have an undiminished ability to astonish.

And those images are underscored with haunting music by Brian Eno, and enthralling interviews with Apollo astronauts.

Reinert, 42, a self-described ''ex-hippie'' with an easygoing demeanor, admits he ''never was much of a space buff'' before stumbling across the NASA film-clip treasure trove more than a decade ago. At the time, he was researching a Texas Monthly article about the 10th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. ''But I didn't cover space, I wasn't particularly interested in space.
 
''In fact, the reason I did my first space story when I did was because nothing was going on in space. I went to NASA after Apollo, and before the space shuttle, when NASA was sort of in limbo. And that's what intrigued me about NASA at the time: Like, hey, what are all these people doing down there?''
 
His timing was impeccable.
 
''I met my first astronauts when they weren't busy, and they had time to talk. It was years after they'd gone to the moon, and they weren't being hounded by interviewers like they were when they first came back, when they really had nothing to say. And when everybody -- including me -- was completely convinced that they were boring.

''When I hit 'em, eight years later, not only had all this percolated a lot, and they had a lot of things to say -- when I hit 'em, nobody had asked them anything about this in years. So I dragged my tape recorder down there, and I'd just sit around for hours with these guys. Nobody would interrupt us, and they had nothing better to do.''

Reinert accumulated over 80 hours of taped interviews, in which the Apollo astronauts spoke of their in-flight impressions, their on-the-moon memories, and their post-mission dreams. (The tapes, Reinert says, will eventually go to Smithsonian Institution.) Among his favorite anecdotes: ''Ken Mattingly (of the Apollo 12 mission) went to see 2001: A Space Odyssey eight times in the six months before he blasted off, just to get himself psyched up.''

On a hunch, Reinert visited the NASA film and video archive, to view footage of an incident described by one of the astronauts.

The underworked archivists were more than willing to find the footage Reinert requested.

"I looked at it, and I said, 'Hey, that's great!' And they said, 'Yeah? Well, we got a lot more, you know.' ''

Lots and lots more, as it turned out. The footage was freely available to anyone -- TV news directors, documentary filmmakers, anyone -- willing to pay the fee for 16mm or videotape copies. But hardly anybody has taken the time to view as much of it, over extended periods, as Al Reinert.
 
''NASA really has very little to say about it,'' Reinert says. ''Anybody can walk in there and order footage. I mean, people can use it in porno movies. In fact, they have used it in porno movies.
 
 ''The trick is, knowing what you want. You can't just walk in and say, oh, I want to order 2,000 hours' worth of film. Because that will cost you hundreds of millions of dollars. The trick is knowing what you want out of those 2,000 hours.''
 
Reinert made his first visit to the NASA archives ''two or three years before the shuttle really got going,'' and made repeated visits during the next few years, ''driving down there whenever I had nothing else to do.''

''And I found myself thinking, 'Why has this never been seen on the big screen? Why haven't I seen this movie?'
 
''And I just stupidly thought -- well, it was the Judy Garland syndrome of, 'Hey, let's put on a show.' Only with me, it was, 'Hey, I can make this! I'm a writer -- so how hard can this be?' ''
 
The hardest part -- harder than blowing up the scratchy 16mm copies to clean 35mm prints, harder even than coaxing money from investors -- was creating the illusion of a continuous narrative.
 
''Because, essentially, it was random film,'' Reinert says. ''It was never designed to be cut together. I mean, like, in the movie, we'll cut from Apollo 13 straight to Apollo 14 to Apollo 16, all in one scene.

''Like the bathroom scene -- that came from an astronaut's description of going to the bathroom in space. I thought, 'That's funny!' But, OK, then the task was to go find pictures of it.

''In the film, the scene consists of three pictures, one of which is printed backwards -- and it's cut in the middle to the picture of the guys putting on their gasmasks.'' It's a funny image, Reinert says, ''but it's really a test of the emergency oxygen system.''
 
For All Mankind was, quite literally, years in the making, as Reinert frequently returned to free-lance magazine writing to support himself through lean times. He plans to return to journalism, and to complete a novel he has long considered writing, once For All Mankind has completed its theatrical release.

''See, a theatrical release will be what sets us apart from all the space documentaries that PBS has done for 20 years,'' Reinert says. And, yes, Reinert admits, a theatrical release ''will elevate the value of a video sale beyond, say, $150,000, which is all a TV production will get you.'' A respectable theatrical run, and a seven-figure video sale, will enable Reinert to finally repay his patient investors.

''I'm going back to being a writer,'' Reinert says, ''because, at rock bottom, I'm more of a writer than I am a filmmaker… I made more money 10 years ago than I ever have made in the course of making this silly movie.''

 But Al Reinert smiles when he says this. Because he knows all the time, struggle and financial sacrifice have been worth it. And that knowledge has kept him going for more than a decade.

''I knew,'' he says, ''that if we did it right, we would be making the movie that -- well, 500 years from now, if anybody wants to know what it was like when human beings first left the planet Earth, they'd dust off this movie and look at it. Because I don't think that this story's ever been told well. It's never been told well with the footage cleaned up, prettied up, blown up to 35mm, recorded in Dolby Stereo, all of that. Nobody ever interviewed the astronauts as much as I did.

''And it's still amazing to me that nobody did this before me.''