Bumped.
Wanna visit the alien hotel room from the end of the movie? Well, a replica of it at the Natl. Air and Space Museum, anyway:
And since it’s now been bumped again, I’ll draw peoples’ attention to Sir Christopher Frayling’s nice BBC Radio Four anniversary documentary on the film. Available here, though probably geographically restricted to the UK.
Best anecdote. Kubrick phoning Sylvia “Thunderbirds” Anderson and suggesting lunch. “You just want to poach all my special effects guys.” To which Kubrick replies “Well in that case I don’t see any reason for having lunch” and slams the phone down on her.
Cool! It looks like it starts next spring.
I just read and really enjoyed Space Odyssey: Stanley Kubrick, Arthur C. Clarke, and the Making of a Masterpiece by Michael Benson, mentioned upthread. Any fan of *2001 *should read it - lots of great behind-the-scenes stuff. Kubrick comes across as a very gifted asshole; Clarke, desperate for money to pay his debts and finalize his divorce at the end of a loveless marriage, put up with an awful lot.
Some of my favorite bits, for those who are interested:
In pre-production, Clarke and Kubrick consulted with a young Carl Sagan, who really irritated Kubrick.
Clarke and Kubrick saw a UFO over New York City that Clarke, despite calling around to several astronomer friends, could not explain.
Kubrick was very hard-nosed in contract negotiations with Clarke, and several of Clarke’s advisors and friends thought he’d been taken advantage of. He didn’t get an ownership stake in the film, for instance, only a salary. At times, with no other income, Clarke had to borrow money from Kubrick. Later, the director delayed approving the draft of Clarke’s novelization until after the movie’s release. Fortunately, the book was a best-seller and Clarke ended up making out very well from its sales.
Kubrick was good friends with the famous bandleader Artie Shaw and was happy to introduce him to Clarke.
Early drafts of the script had a robot named Socrates and, later, a ship’s computer named Athena.
Clarke, a closeted gay man, came out to Kubrick relatively early on, and Kubrick was totally unconcerned.
Kubrick’s family, traveling to the UK, needed 48 steamer trunks.
Kubrick said he didn’t like the taste of the British water and insisted on bottled water imported from the U.S. After a few days, his British production assistant just refilled the bottles from the tap. Kubrick never noticed the change for the next year and a half of filming.
A plexiglas monolith was built but Kubrick thought it looked fake, hated it and ordered it scrapped. The cost? $400,000, very big money in those days, even for a movie studio.
The actors who played the hominids in the “Dawn of Man” scenes would sometimes watch the dailies in full makeup and costume, happily hooting when they liked a take and screaming in rage when they didn’t.
IBM was consulted closely on computer issues and proved very helpful; both Kubrick and Clarke were later at pains to say that HAL’s name was not a swipe at IBM (one letter “ahead” for each). You can see the IBM logo on Dave Bowman’s spacesuit arm controls. Other product placements, a first for a Hollywood film, included Pan Am (the shuttle from Earth), Hilton Hotels and Bell Telephone (on the space station), and Whirlpool (the food machine aboard the Aries moon shuttle).
Many people developed vertigo and dizziness on the curved floor of the space station set.
William Sylvester (Dr. Floyd) botched his lines so often in the Clavius Base conference-room scene that Kubrick sent a studio aide to say he’d be replaced if he couldn’t get his act together. It worked.
Several takes of the scene where Dr. Floyd and the scientists visit the TMA-1 monolith, the first scene shot for the film, had to be dropped due to flies and a bat, which lived in the large soundstage, flying in-shot, attracted by the lights. Kubrick himself filmed the astronaut’s-POV shot going down the ramp into the pit, using a handheld camera.
Kubrick, Keir Dullea (Bowman) and Gary Lockwood (Poole) all hated flying.
Kubrick was firmly in control of the movie as director, but was open to suggestions from others: Lockwood came up with the idea of the two astronauts climbing into one of the pods to avoid being heard by HAL; associate producer Victor Lyndon, weeks later, suggested having HAL read their lips; Dullea suggested the broken glass in the final alien hotel-room scene.
Kubrick shot 35 (!) takes of the spacepod discussion scene.
The Discovery sets were so brightly-lit that Dullea and Lockwood often wore sunglasses between takes.
The Discovery model was 55 feet long. When it was finally finished, Kubrick was vaguely dissatisfied with it, and told the crew to “do something” with it. The lead modelmaker couldn’t think of what to do, so he did nothing, showed it Kubrick again a few days later, and the director said, “That’s it! Perfect!”
Benson, the author, notes several parallels between Homer’s Odyssey and Kubrick’s: Odysseus overcomes a one-eyed monster, the Cyclops, just as Bowman defeats HAL; Bowman’s name recalls Odysseus’s stringing of a bow to shoot an arrow through twelve axe shafts, a feat of strength that proved his identity; Odysseus is the sole survivor of his ship, just as Bowman is; Bowman has a homecoming, greatly changed as the Star Child, just as Odysseus returns home to Ithaca at the end of his long journey, greatly changed by all he has experienced.
Douglas Rain, a Canadian actor whose voice Kubrick had noticed in an earlier space documentary, Universe, was eventually hired to do HAL’s voice. He recorded his lines in just 8 1/2 hours over two days’ time, including singing or saying the words of “Daisy” 51 times.
The same stuntman played both Bowman and Poole for the EVA scenes. The sound of their breathing was done by Kubrick himself, wearing one of the spacesuit helmets fitted with a microphone.
Kubrick struggled with the music of the movie, even briefly considering asking the Beatles to do the score, but eventually decided to go with classical music he liked. A score written by well-known film composer Frank Cordell was never used; Cordell had a nervous breakdown after the film came out.
Less than one-third of the movie has dialogue.
The film premiered in Washington, D.C. and there were many walkouts. The NYC premiere was just about as bad. Scathing reviews followed. Kubrick decided to cut the film by what turned out to be 12%, including a scene of Bowman exercising that he decided was duplicative of the Poole workout scene. Despite poor early reviews, the recut film became a hit, and was ultimately the highest-grossing film of 1968.
Kubrick put himself in for the Oscar nomination for the film’s sfx, and won, shutting out those who’d done the actual work. Douglas Trumbull, among others on the sfx crew, was pissed.
Clarke was concerned that the movie would be too hard for most people to understand, but Kubrick encouraged the author to be just as clear and specific as he wanted to be in his novel.
Kubrick later said that the film was about “nothing less than the origins and destiny of Man.”
I just finished Frayling’s The 2001 File: Harry Lange and the Design of the Landmark Science Fiction Film, a big, lavishly-illustrated coffeetable book about a key production designer on the film. Good stuff, and highly recommended.
Must find, purchase, absorb!!
Someone else using Benson as the lead on the bits of the 2001 literature one had hitherto missed? In the case of Frayling, I’m angling for it to be bought as a Xmas present this year.
The cheaper one I’ve picked up via Benson is Frewin’s Are We Alone?: The Stanley Kubrick Extraterrestrial-Intelligence Interviews, which was reissued this year for the anniversary. Granted this really is one for completists only. It’s the set of transcripts of the interviews that were filmed with a view to preceding the film with a “talking heads” prologue of eminent scientists flagging up the issues involved as important. Universally seen as one of Kubrick’s dumbest ideas, it was rightly ditched.
Bits of the interviews have appeared in the likes of Agel, but this is the full set of transcripts. (The footage hasn’t been found, which is a bit weird given Kubrick’s archival hoarding.) Nothing terribly revelatory - it’s essentially a set of the obvious authorities trotting out the received opinions of the day about alien life and the possibilities of AI.
Here’s the 1960 Canadian astronomy documentary Universe, narrated by an uncredited Douglas Rain. Kubrick watched it several times, was impressed by the sfx, and later cast Rain as HAL.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universe_(1960_film)“Please read carefully as our options have changed recently.” (more seriously, since a mistake might cause a real mess, a passenger is wise to doublecheck that he hasn’t forgotten a step)
Pg 115 in my edition, Borehamwood:
Earlier in the year, they’d decided that astronaut Frank Poole, Bowman’s sidekick, would need to die in an accident. …the finality of his death was sometimes in question; one Clarke journal entry had him “fighting hard to stop Stan from bringing Dr. Poole back from the dead. I’m afraid his obsession with immortality has overcome his artistic instincts.”
What does that say about you and 3001: The Final Odyssey, Arthur?
I think this a classic example of judging something from a bygone era by the standards of the present era. These days, plots involving evil super computers are ho-hum. We’ve had a ton of movies reworking that same theme.
Back in 1970, however, that plot and story line were very compelling, and the slowly developing story line was designed so that the super computer slowly revealed its quirks and, eventually, its psychosis.
A great movie in its time, it’s simply not going to deeply impress people in the year 2018.
In early drafts of the script, Athena the ship’s computer was wise and helpful. As Kubrick and Clarke gradually decided that the computer would go seriously awry as part of the plot, they assured IBM, which was very helpful throughout the production of the film, that the computer would clearly not be an IBM product. You can still see the IBM logo on the forearm control panel of Bowman’s spacesuit, though, and on his and Poole’s flatscreen computer tablets.
It impresses me every time I see it!
I got news for you Evil Supercomputers were pretty much par for the course in 1968. Star Trek had already featured an episode with that in it. It provides the climax of the 1957 movie The Invisible Boy. The wonderful Gold Key comic Magnus Robot Fighter was filled with Evil Robots (If it weren’t, Magnus wouldn’t have anybody to fight), including computers. D.F. Jones’ novel Colossus and its sequels were about an Evil Computer taking over the world (It would be turned into a movie, too, but not until 1970). Heck, one reason Asimov and Campbell came up with the Three Laws of Robotics was to have an excuse to move robot (and computer) stories away from the Robot Takeover (Asimov called it “The Frankenstein Complex”) and on towards fresh ground – not because they thought this was How Things Would Work Out.
In short, Evil Supercomputers weren’t exactly some zippo clever new twist in 1968. It was Old Hat. Ho Hum, even. Have a look at Ambrose Bierce’s Moxon’s Master. from 1899
Of course, that said, Hal was an evil supercomputer that was done really well.
I’m Sorry, Cartoon, I’m afraid I can’t allow that.
There is no time travel in 2001: A Space Odyssey. There is FTL travel, but only through wormholes, and that can avoid temporal paradox if done correctly (which I’m sure Clarke knew). None of this is paranormal; just speculative science fiction that hasn’t been ruled out yet as a possibility.
No time travel? How do you explain the multiple changes in phase of the Earth during the landing on the Moon and again later on the “bus” to Clavius and in the monolith hole? 
Unexpected delays on route. perhaps.