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How 1967 Changed 2001
When MGM signed contracts with Stanley Kubrick, the studio originally expected 2001: A Space Odyssey to be ready for Christmas 1966, but that was soon understood to be unrealistic. A big opening in 70mm Cinerama theaters in April 1967 was the new goal, followed by wider release to mainstream theaters later that year. Towards the end of 1966, Kubrick finally showed a half-hour of clips of the film’s most visually impressive moments to Robert O’Brien, MGM’s CEO, as well as a handful of other MGM executives. They were relieved and reassured. The spaceships, the zero-gravity scenes, and details of the future were the most realistic ever made. As the year ended, MGM already knew they had a spectacular-looking space picture on the way. Crucially, though, they still didn’t really understand what kind of space picture they’d be getting.
To an unusual degree, many of the distinctive things about 2001 we’ve known for more than half a century weren’t yet created during principal production, when the actors were on the set. They came along later, in the laboratories and editing rooms, in 1967.
Kubrick’s message to the studio was, look how close to perfection we’ve come; don’t force me to rush the completion of these elaborate visual effects. Optical and other laboratory effects were being made to unprecedented levels of quality, and this was taking time. Plus, like any film, 2001 still needed to be edited, dialog dubbed, foley (sound effects) tracks done, and final music composed and mixed. Even vastly less elaborate films took a couple of months. With the complexity of 2001’s lab work, it’s understandable that this would push things later. In other words, he couldn’t make an April deadline.
MGM reluctantly accepted that 2001 was going to be released no earlier than fall 1967 in time for the Christmas season. A legend is dispelled here; that Kubrick had absolute authority over the film. That might have been true later in his career, and Kubrick did have an unusual degree of personal trust from Bob O’Brien, but he still had to keep the boss on his side. Which he did.
Arthur C. Clarke had been getting paid, as per contract, but the big payday for him would be the book rights. A promising publishing deal fell through because Kubrick postponed his sign-off. He never admitted it to Clarke’s face, but it was obvious that he didn’t want it in print before the movie opened.
Clarke kept turning up at Elstree Studios. He didn’t realize that most of the crew, possibly including Stanley, regarded him as (to use one crew man’s blunt phrase) “an extra [censored] at a wedding.” But Stanley didn’t really mind having him around if he could be put to work, and for much of Clarke’s 1967 visits to London, he was suggesting and rewriting narration. That was always part of the film’s plan, but the closer they got to finishing it, the less Kubrick liked the idea.
2001 had been okayed for funding and production on the basis of a draft of what was then still a Clarke/Kubrick novel, not a film script. The novel’s ending was both overly specific, taking the mystery out of it, and yet maddeningly vague. Somehow visual magic would spell it out, make it work. This became the unspoken dilemma in the last stages of post-production: would people understand what was going on? By now, Kubrick was aiming at enigmatic. He succeeded, perhaps to a fault.
One of 2001’s most recognized and remembered set of images was the Star Gate sequence, and its highlight was an astonishing effect of parallel planes of dazzling patterns. This was made by a process called slit scan, running translucent artwork sideways past a narrow slit of light, holding the exposure open while a special animation camera pulled back, one frame at a time, stretching the artwork seemingly to infinity. It’s one of the key moments that made the film what it is, and it was a project that Kubrick handed off to a young American, Douglas Trumbull. He took what was a technique of obscure experimental films and greatly improved it. Trumbull benefited from, and suffered through, his boss’s endless patience for retakes and new ideas.
Kubrick viewed a Canadian film called Universe to find potential special effects artists and animators. It featured a shot called “triple occlusion,” where a planet peeked out the side of a moon, and then the sun peeked out beyond that. The 2001 crew experimented with making their own version of that moving image several times, and still weren’t satisfied until special effects man Trumbull had the bright idea of turning it horizontally. Even then, they didn’t at first see the sunrise shot as being a candidate to open the film until Kubrick ran it on a Moviola in improvised sync with Richard Strauss’s Thus Spake Zarathustra.
That connection between image and music started with serendipity—and became a moment that hundreds of millions of people around the world would come to recognize.
2001 had what Variety slang called a “needle drop” soundtrack, completely assembled from pre-existing phono recordings of classical music. For the rest of Kubrick’s career, he’d basically stick to that idea. He commissioned some original music from time to time, but always retaining a core of “found” music. In 1967-’68, this use of prerecorded music was extremely rare in Hollywood, especially for a big-budget release.
A definite gamble: using Johann Strauss’s On the Beautiful Blue Danube, which Kubrick admitted was either an inspired or an insane idea. Most of his collaborators leaned towards “insane.” But he took the chance, and more than a half-century on, the waltz is now indelibly associated with the grace and beauty of space travel.
Three musical works by then-unknown Hungarian composer Gyorgy Ligeti have long been connected to the images of the film. Most especially, Requiem, used as the theme of the monolith, of imminent transformation, of the cryptic, cosmic mystery at the heart of 2001. Yet as of the early summer of 1967, less than a year before the movie and the soundtrack album would be minting money all over the world, Kubrick had never heard of Ligeti. His wife and a friend heard some of Requiem on BBC radio and said, “Boy, Stanley should hear this.” It was another lucky, unpredictable moment.
It’s still unclear why it took until mid-1967 to film The Dawn of Man, a full year after all of the other studio live-action scenes were done filming. It has to be said that the actors and costumers did a superb job. I suspect it was to give Kubrick an excuse to miss his new Christmastime ’67 release slot. “Hey, I haven’t even had a chance to finish up the first scene yet.”
When it became clear, several months in advance, that 2001 would not meet the agreed-on postponed release date in late 1967 after all, Kubrick lost much of his negotiating leverage with MGM. By that late point in the production process, the studio was getting mighty antsy, and for all of film history up through then, movies, especially the biggest ones, had original scores. So Kubrick went ahead and paid to have composer Alex North flown over to London, and a film orchestra was hired to record North’s score. None of it was used.
How did Stanley Kubrick’s grand gambles of 1967 work out?
The Dawn of Man, a film opening with no dialog or even a brief narration, was a bold gamble that succeeded, generally accepted as the prelude to a movie of the future, even if joked about, then and now. Most people understood the metaphor of the ape man getting an inspiration that will lead to tools, and weapons. They correctly thought that the movie was about the evolution of man, as we would have put it then. Stanley and Arthur won that bet.
The ride to orbit and then to the Moon picked up more clues about the story. The jump to the Jupiter mission is too abrupt even with a terse introductory title, but is gradually explained. By the time David Bowman’s pod enters the Star Gate, the plot, for all its mystery, is understandable. He’s encountered one of these cryptic slabs that mean some stage of momentous evolution is imminent. He’s being pulled through some kind of wormhole/hyperspace corridor, being sent unimaginable distances by whoever or whatever has been leaving these monoliths around. That much is actually pretty clear to audiences.
The 17-minute Star Gate sequence is made up of three basic types of shot. The infinite corridors of light are Trumbull’s slit scan; the microscope shots of slow-motion explosions of stars, expanding galaxies and their tendrils were filmed by Kubrick himself, in Manhattan before he left for England; and the flights over strangely colored landscapes of water and rocks was a separate project. When Bowman enters the Star Gate walls of light, it’s clearly his first-person perspective. But the exploding galaxies shots are seen from whose perspective? It can’t be Bowman’s, so whose is it? They don’t convey a sense of the character being transported, and there’s no sense of arriving at a destination. It’s just a straight cut to Bowman staring out the pod window at the White Room.
Sometime in 1967, Kubrick gave up on his sporadic, but persistent attempts to come up with satisfyingly enigmatic, ghostly, suggested ETs beyond those artificial White Room walls, observing Bowman’s aging and rebirth. When he did, he made it much harder for audiences to understand what was going on. It’s one of the riskiest moments in the film, and 2001 loses a lot of people right there.
Most audiences didn’t understand or even intuit where he was or how he got there. It’s hard to see this as a scene, as Clarke suggested, made up of an alien’s study of our TV images, not far from what Carl Sagan would later use in Contact; or, as Kubrick suggested, of dreamlike projections of the astronaut’s own mind, rather like Ray Bradbury’s Mars, or Solaris, not to mention several Star Treks. The screens in the pod are flickering, “NON FUNCTION,” which doesn’t sound like it’s all in his imagination. A problem with the White Room is there’s nothing in astronaut David Bowman’s background, at least based on the few clues to his character, that would connect him to that kind of this strangely 17th-18th Century European conception of an idealized room.
For all that those minutes begin too cryptically, Keir Dullea does an underestimated job of acting, making the film’s final minutes meaningful. You see his stunned reactions to his own aging, like moments in a dream. Bowman’s death and rebirth, taking mankind to the next unimaginable level of evolution, is one of the best known, most thunderous conclusions in film history.
Next week: Kubrick went over the heads of dismissive film critics, directly to 1968’s audiences, who gave it the biggest box office of its time. But it wouldn’t be easy.
This post is part of the Group Writing Project, a member-created regular feature of Ricochet, administered by Clifford A. Brown. The theme for January 2022 was “The Time When Life Changed”. Member participation is not only welcome, but encouraged.
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Actually, the sound effects was the bit that impressed me the most about 2001. Bowman is trapped outside the spaceship, he pulls the pod up alongside and, taking a desperate chance, he blows the hatch. The air in his pod pushes him out violently into the side of the spaceship. If he can’t catch ahold he’s dead. If he can’t get into the airlock in scant seconds he’s dead. But it’s the only chance he’s got.
We watch this unfold from space; the pod hatch blows and we hear … absolutely nothing. I jerk forward in my seat; my eyes bug out. “They got it right!”
I adore the story, but you should not have to have cliff notes to understand a movie.
Gary, I really enjoy these inside Hollywood posts of yours. I always learn a great deal from them. I used to review movies for a small town newspaper, but my knowledge of movie history and film techniques was embarrassingly shallow next to yours.
A couple of days before 2001 made it to the 2nd or 3rd-run Bijou in Skinnerville, August ‘69, I believe, one of my close cousins died in a farm accident. The Star Gate sequence grabbed me and took on a religious flavor, about the infinite, and how a finite creature, perhaps a small-town boy going into Jr High, might be seeing infinity, and transformation. I couldn’t explain it then, but it was my favorite part, and has been since.
I wish the whole project had never involved Arthur C. Clarke. Every one of his stories is 1) weird things happen, 2) characters respond with semi-rational actions and flat dialog, then 3) something really weird happens and the book ends.
Kubrick impresses and exasperates me. I’ve always regarded 2001 as deeply flawed, but I recently rewatched it, and I realized you just can’t write it off.
I regard it as roughly two-thirds of a great movie. The Dawn of Man sequence has an intriguing premise, but I find it too slow and boring. And the whole last part of the movie, starting with the Star Gate sequence, is incomprehensible and (also) boring. I’m sure it was mind-blowing in 1968, especially if you were on drugs, but now it’s just frustrating. I can accept the basic idea that Dave Bowman was experiencing things that his mind was not capable of making sense of, but I think that could have been communicated in much less time.
But despite those flaws, the whole middle part of the movie — starting with the space-station docking sequence and continuing through the Discovery mission — is just astounding. Surely it was unlike anything that had ever been on the movie screen before 1968. It’s amazing how well Kubrick’s depiction of spaceflight holds up even in 2022; if you can accept the 1960s aesthetic in all of the industrial designs, it all looks very believable. The utter brilliance of the middle part of the movie vastly outweighs the flaws of the beginning and end, and I think on balance it still comes out as a great movie.
I enjoyed the sequel “2010: The Year We Make Contact” much better than Kubrick’s original.
The novel by Clarke made it pretty clear what was going on. The movie did not, at least at the end, and this led lots of reviewers and fans to interpret the movie in philosophical and even religious ways. (Remember the monolith forming a cross with the line of planets?) I remember reading an interpretation that God had decided humanity had advanced too far…possibly by its ability to create self conscious computers like HAL…and returned humanity to its original infant state, represented by the star child. And you couldn’t point to anything in the movie to refute that type of interpretation. It was completely open-ended.
This seems to be a habit of Kubrick. In the Shining there are references to things in the book that aren’t really explained in the movie, like the woman in the tub.
I’ve only read a couple of Clarke’s novels and several short stories. Based on that limited sampling, I concluded that he did a great job of explaining technology but his characters are paper thin. He would have done well to have had a co-writer to give his characters some personality.
Another great post Gary! The inside story here is fascinating.
I have always like the movie, even if Mrs. C finds it too tedious. I’d go farther than Bartholomew above and say that the film doesn’t lose me until the Star Gate sequence. I’d also agree that the sequence where Dave blasts himself into the emergency air lock was done extraordinarily well. (“I think you will find that difficult Dave, without your space helmet.”)
I was in grade school and living in Washington D.C. when it came out and it played at the theater at the corner of Ordway and Connecticut for over a year. My older brother took me to see it. I was amazed, although I admit I did not appreciate the movie until I was in my teens.
I’ll respond in a post of my own — too far from the topic at hand. Loved this post, Gary!
Annnnnd it’s here: https://ricochet.com/1130043/ricochet-middle-brow-film-club/
Nine years later, when George Lucas had star cruisers roaring past us, he preemptively told early interviewers that he knew it was wrong, but he was making a different kind of picture. “We will go in Stanley’s ships, but hopefully with my laser sword at our sides”.
Kubrick was always good on ambient sound. On board the Discovery, you hear a faint rumble of the ventilation system, and everything that moves has a faint activation sound, like a servo motor.
Huh, that checks out pretty well.
I am sorry to hear of the tragic circumstances of that long-ago week, Muleskinner.
It might seem puzzling to younger R> readers why so many of 2001’s fans mention religion. It was a real phenomenon; I was in Catholic high school at the time, and lots of people talked about it. The national Catholic Office for Motion Pictures gave 2001 its highest rating, even though there’s nothing explicitly Catholic or Christian about it.
The reason was stark: By 1968, a lot of intellectuals had given up on God. Modern movies were supposed to be about relevant stuff, like the Vietnam war, or race relations, or sex. Then the year’s biggest hit turns out to be nothing about that, but a quest to find out if the universe is something more than materialism can tell us.
Kubrick kept the weird things and dropped the dialog. Seriously, until 2001, the idea of a smart movie about space would have had aliens speak like they did in Childhood’s End: “My dear Rikki, it is only by not taking the human race seriously that I have been able to preserve some elements of my once considerable intellect”. That’s what people expected 2001 to be like, and Kubrick avoided it.
Like diehard 2001 fans will tend to say, I don’t agree, but 2010 is, in effect, a great fan tribute film. It has a couple of great moments that make it worth seeing. I especially like Keir Dullea’s magical-seeming presence. Heywood Floyd is at the control panel when HAL tells him he’s received a message. Floyd asks who it’s from. “It reads, ‘I was David Bowman”, which has more punch when you’re watching it than I can describe here. Floyd says he can’t accept that attribution without proof. HAL continues reading this third party message. “I understand. Turn around“. And there Bowman is, standing there in his space suit, looking as if he hadn’t aged a day since we last saw him.
Thanks, Ball. I look forward to your post!
I remember people leaving early saying, “I thought this was a space film.”
I remember reading about the original Star Trek, and how Gene R. decided to add sound because no one would believe a space ship whooshing by without the “whoosh.”
OTOH, the movie Gravity also was faithful to realism, with one exception. Can anyone point out what I’m thinking about?
Not within the Code of Conduct, no.
Sir, you refer to the First Engineer as an “ape man?”
Not a program manager in sight. Those were the days.
Hmm…not sure this is what you meant, but the deadly cloud of orbital debris, which intersects their orbit every ninety minutes, wouldn’t be visible to an observer because it would be moving so fast. It’s not crossing their path at what looks like 60 to 90 miles an hour, but at 17,400 miles an hour. Literally, you’d never know what hit you.
Universe is here. Very impressive but black & white.
This part of the dialog always was greeted with cheers down at school.
That’s good too. However, I was thinking about the scene where Bullock and Clooney are tethered, and she has to grab onto a passing space station to stop them. As the tether stretches, it reaches a breaking point but continues to pull while Clooney does his “Hey, I’m sacrificing myself here!” thing.
The truth is, one of three things would happen:
I can see why Hollywood would ignore the physics and go for the drama . . .
When Heywood Floyd is being transported via lunar “bus” to the monolith excavation site, he and two other men have a lunch of sandwiches made on the Moon, presumably of algae or other organics made into textured protein, which was much discussed in the Sixties. Floyd asks for a ham sandwich and notes, “It tastes like the real thing, doesn’t it?”, to which one of the others replies, “They’re getting better at it all the time”.
So–Stanley Kubrick invented the first Kosher ham sandwich.
You’re very kind, Kent. Too kind, but ah hell, I’ll take it gratefully!
You mean that idiocy of “you have to let me go?” I worked a little at figuring that out, didn’t come up with a plausible geometry.
You went to school at UIUC in Urbana?
@garymcvey closes out January’s group writing project on the theme “The Time When Life Changed.” We would hate to miss you in February, when our theme will be “Love, Hate, and other Feelings.”
2001 got iPads right.
bummer about Pan Am.
Still, we should be on the moon!