Jason Clarke wears an Omega Speedmaster

In First Man (2018), Ed White is the neighbor. Damien Chazelle's film follows Neil Armstrong from the X-15 to the Sea of Tranquility, and Jason Clarke plays White as the fellow astronaut who becomes Armstrong's friend next door in the Houston neighborhoods where the corps lived. On his wrist is an Omega Speedmaster, reference ST 105.003, and the prop is a small act of horological casting: collectors call that reference the Ed White.

The nickname comes from June 3, 1965, when White made the first American spacewalk on Gemini IV. Hodinkee's piece on the film repeats the popular version, that White was famous for wearing "his own personal Speedy before it became an officially issued watch." The documented record is stranger and better. NASA had tested three 105.003s and flight-qualified the model in 1965, months before the walk, then ordered two dozen more, and Omega has confirmed that both watches White wore over his spacesuit that day were 105.003-63s: his NASA training watch, which the agency's watch engineer James Ragan called "one of the first Speedmasters to be delivered after the tests performed by NASA," and a second issued piece carrying NASA serial number 5. One ran Gemini IV mission time. The other ran Houston time. The film never stages that spacewalk; it keeps White on the ground, where he tells Armstrong he has been selected for Apollo 1 with Gus Grissom and Roger Chaffee. On January 27, 1967, a fire during a launch rehearsal killed all three men, and Armstrong, in the film as in life, got the news while representing NASA at the White House. The issued 105.003 was on White's wrist in the capsule and was destroyed with him.

The production's watches came from the source. Worn & Wound reported that Omega gave the film four distinct models, "some of them period-correct recreations you'll only ever see in the film, and others pulled directly from Omega's archives," with more than ten Speedmasters made across two references for the Apollo cast. The 105.003 was the last Speedmaster built at 38 millimeters, running the manual-wind caliber 321; Ryan Gosling's Armstrong wears one during Apollo training, alongside an everyday 1954 Omega CK 2605 and the 42-millimeter 105.012 that flew to the Moon. Josh Singer wrote the screenplay from James R. Hansen's 2005 biography of Armstrong. The film opened on October 12, 2018, took 105.7 million dollars, and won the Academy Award for visual effects.