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When “2001” Beat the Press
2001: A Space Odyssey had its world premiere on the evening of April 2, 1968, in Washington DC’s Uptown Theater. It began with a massive distraction. The big news was made earlier in the day when Lyndon Johnson announced that he wouldn’t run for re-election. Having all of Washington preoccupied and eager to gossip wasn’t the best background for screening a challenging film for a VIP audience.
Official Washington was the home of NASA, and the buying end of the aerospace and defense industries. Many of these companies had given design advice early in 2001’s production, and they sat back expecting to see what Variety would call “a super-Destination Moon”, after the pioneering, hardware-heavy 1950 film that brought space and science fiction onto the Fifties screen. But that’s not what they got.
Kubrick wasn’t at this Washington screening; he was already in New York, ready to attend that premiere the following night. But Arthur C. Clarke was there. Thanks to his correspondence, we now know his private reaction. He was stunned that Kubrick had removed so much dialog, so much explanatory material. Without the promised narration, the film had in his view pushed its luck too far.
(This is the second half of a two-part post about 2001. The first part is here.)
The Manhattan audience was subdued, impressed by the visual spectacle but irritated by the film’s enigmatic refusal to define anything in verbal, literary terms.
Reviews were starting to appear in print, and the word was tepid. Not unrelievedly bad; most writers acknowledged that the film had at the very least a stunning visual sense, and that its dazzling effects were in the service of art. Judith Crist, of New York Magazine and ABC, was then the nation’s most popular film critic. By her caustic standards, she was tactful. “We hope (Kubrick) just sticks to his cameras and stays down to earth—for that is where his true triumph remains.”
They all expected another Dr. Strangelove, the one Kubrick film that top critics adored. Opposition to the Vietnam war, racial conflict, the sexual revolution—those were the subjects that great film directors were supposed to find serious and important. The writers of America’s most self-consciously intellectual city, Stanley Kubrick’s birthplace, were too set in its literal, materialist ways to celebrate a cryptic, mystical, and nonverbal film about a universe that might just be beyond human logic and comprehension.
Stanley Kauffmann, film critic of The New Republic, wasn’t content merely to review the film, but also offered his frank feelings about its subject: “I dislike space travel, and not just on the valid ground that the money and skills are more needed on Earth. I was delighted to read that space appropriations are diminishing and there will apparently be no space program after we land on the Moon, if we do, in the next year or two.”
One of John F. Kennedy’s most famous intellectual advisors, Arthur Schlesinger, writing for Vogue, spoke for 2001 haters everywhere when he huffed, “It is morally pretentious, intellectually obscure, and… too private, or too profound for immediate comprehension.”
One of the nation’s top two highbrow critics, Pauline Kael, dismissed 2001 in Harper’s Magazine: “A monumentally unimaginative movie”.
The other one, Andrew Sarris, of the Village Voice and WBAI Pacifica radio, was baffled why his students valued it over what he thought they should like: “I think there’s a separation between young and old, and I think (Luis Bunuel’s kinky sex drama Belle du Jour) is a film that would better appeal to those who grew up with a certain level of frustration in their lives, and not to the people who’ve grown up with so much erotic affluence in their lives that they’re bored with it…it is impossible for me to reconcile these two reactions, to Belle du Jour, the best film of the year, and to 2001”.
The New York Times’s Renata Adler sniffed, “Three hours of Tolkien without the ring”.
Nor did 2001 get the unanimous approval of SF/fantasy writers. Robert W. Prehoda, associate editor of The Futurist magazine, authoritatively griped that “The drab costumes on both men and women lacked any future inspiration. One might expect that females in the year 2001 would wear a combination of body paint covered by ethereal minidresses, perhaps partly transparent”.
Michaela Williams summed it up best in The Chicago Daily News, “East coast critics came down on the picture almost with a single mind…Nobody liked 2001 but people”.
This all became part of the legend later, when the film was a success, and for years the film’s rough opening was brushed off as mere teething pains, a brief annoyance, no big deal. But Christiane Kubrick, after a half-century of silence about that premiere, admitted that it shook her husband badly. He didn’t show it in public, but in those very first, uncertain days he was devastated. Once he was vindicated, for the rest of his life, with few exceptions, he would treat New York’s film writers resentfully, with an almost Nixonian sense of contempt.
There’s a legend that the film was failing at the box office, but “the hippies” saved it. Not true at all; advance ticket sales had been strong, and from its first days in release, long lines formed at the box office. But Kubrick knew better than to trust to fate. Instead, he engaged in five days of frantic cutting, using a Moviola in the MGM building on Sixth Avenue. This was always known, but like the bad initial screenings in Washington and New York, it was played down—sure, the picture got tightened up here and there. It happens. No biggie. However, the drama behind the scenes had to have been intense, as was the massive personal pressure on Kubrick to do something, anything to save Metro’s investment. It beggars the imagination that Stanley the perfectionist, who’d spent weeks puzzling over the tiniest of edits, was suddenly ready to dump 19 minutes of them in less than a week.
Remembering that famed perfectionism, it’s amazing to read that Kubrick and MGM were so desperate to make changes that they couldn’t even wait to have the negative cut, the soundtrack duly adjusted, and new copies made. That would take weeks. Instead, on April 9 they sent telegrams to each of the eight theaters that had already opened the film, with exact instructions where to make cuts in the existing 70mm prints.
He dropped minutes from the early scenes on Discovery; having seen Gary Lockwood run around the centrifuge for four minutes, we didn’t need to see Keir Dullea do the same. Conversely, after having seen how Dullea strapped himself into a pod and left the ship, there was no need to see Lockwood dutifully repeat every step. It was an extraordinarily hasty thing to do, and one witness spells out the obvious: with nothing but splices at his disposal, the edit points were compromised: not where they were most needed, but where the transition was easiest and least obtrusive as a simple cut.
Several other small changes couldn’t be done with just a splicer, and had to await the arrival of newly made prints. They were all sensible additions for clarity’s sake: during the Dawn of Man breakthrough scene, a brief memory flash of the monolith; and two superimposed titles, “JUPITER MISSION. 18 Months Later” and “JUPITER. And Beyond the Infinite.” Not much in the way of explanation, but just enough not to lose the audience.
Film critic Joseph Gelmis, of Long Island’s Newsday, led off what would become a parade of critics with second, more favorable thoughts about 2001: A Space Odyssey. Gelmis declared that far from ruining the film, the new cuts actually “made” the film, making it comprehensible and less of a slog. Not surprisingly, Gelmis instantly became one of Kubrick’s favorite critics.
Famed SF novelist Lester Del Rey, in Galaxy Magazine, tried his luck as a film forecaster: “It’s probably going to be a box office disaster, and thus set science fiction movie making back another ten years. It’s a great pity”. But by the second week, to the amazement of most of show business, 2001 was becoming a box office phenomenon. Following the usual release pattern of big films in those days, it stayed exclusive in a handful of big-city theaters for months, before finally reaching neighborhood theaters in November. It could have kept running well into 1969, making higher ticket prices in Cinerama houses, but MGM needed those screens for its next big-budget 70mm extravaganza, Ice Station Zebra.
2001: A Space Odyssey has been associated with the Sixties counterculture for so long that it’s sometimes forgotten that the film’s initial appeal to the public was the realism of the film’s conception of the near future. It debuted just as the Apollo program was approaching its climax. Most of the earliest articles in non-film journals and magazines were based on the elaborate spacecraft and the promise of advanced technology. The film got major, multi-page coverage in Life Magazine, Popular Science, and had an unlikely defender in the editorial page of the New York Daily News, when it was still the city’s blue-collar tabloid voice and the best-selling newspaper in the country. Several times in the summer of ’68, the Daily News urged readers to see its “incredible vision of man’s future”. They didn’t seem to regard it as too mystical to enjoy.
Arthur C. Clarke’s seemingly endless wait for approval to publish the novel finally ended that summer, and in the end, Kubrick’s optimistic reassurance turned out to be correct. Clarke’s money worries were gone forever. Not just 2001, but all of Clarke’s other books soared in sales as well, because of the association.
In April 1993, for the 25th anniversary of 2001’s premiere screening, the American Film Institute brought the film back to the deeply curved Cinerama screen of the Uptown Theater in Washington, DC. The screening was packed; 1100 people, every seat sold out. Hundreds of film fans outnumbered politicians, including six congressmen, 20 ambassadors, and D.C. journalists, not to mention John R. Pierce, the father of the communications satellite, and Nobel Prize winner Arno Penzias. This time, the audience knew what to expect, and they were up for it. The crowd cheered a recorded message from Arthur C. Clarke, the opening of the curtains, the first appearance of Stanley Kubrick’s name, and even the film’s title.
Unusual for a weeknight show, almost the entire audience stayed after intermission. The enigmatic “Starchild” ending, set to the thunderous tones of “Thus Spake Zarathustra”, got a rousing, standing ovation that wouldn’t stop. Unlike 1968’s audience, 1993’s knew they were celebrating part of history. It was the reception the film deserved and didn’t get the first time.
In 1968 Kubrick was perceptive about why. “Perhaps there is some element of the lumpen literati that is so dogmatically atheist and materialist and Earthbound that it finds the grandeur of space and the myriad mysteries of cosmic intelligence anathema”.
Christiane Kubrick’s interviews, many years later, revealed many details of those weeks and months when the fortunes of 2001, and the endless painstaking work of four years, turned around dramatically. The family had rented a house for the summer on the north shore of Long Island, a mansion that was said to be the imagined model for The Great Gatsby. The main house was so large it had a target range in the cellar. Kubrick’s old friend Roger Caras, who’d been in on the start of the project, brought his guns and the two men whiled away summer evenings blasting away half the night, while the very European Mrs. Kubrick wrinkled her nose and sighed at the smell and the noise.
That’s probably not the end of the saga that many Kubrick fans would have imagined. But then, a totally unexpected ending has never been something that’s outside of 2001’s universe.
Published in General
Thanks for another excellent post. Bill Anders from Apollo 8 attended an early showing and said that they were training so hard that he fell asleep once the lights were out and missed the movie. Jim Lovell considered saying, when they reacquired the signal from Houston in Lunar orbit, that he’d seen an obelisk on the far side. Many years later he graciously held my book.
I immediately heard the repeated thumping of people hitting fainting couches. Good gracious, there would have been no XIII for him if he’d said that.
Some folks said Neil Armstrong could have made a fortune if the first words he spoke after stepping on the moon’s surface were “Coca-Cola.”
I never had any problem understanding 2001: A Space Odyssey, even when I watched it as a kid. Maybe you need to see it as a kid to really get it, or maybe already being familiar with movies like The Black Hole, Star Wars, TRON, etc. the idea of a wormhole/stargate and/or a virtual space where time works differently (i.e. Dave’s “hotel room” at the end) wasn’t nearly as much a mind-bender for me as it was for 1968 faux-intellectuals?
Thank you Gary for another wonderful post.
Fascinating story, Gary. Thank you for taking us through the history!
I remember standing in the lobby as a geeky teanager during the intermission explaining the movie (to that point) to a bunch of other folks(most were very confused adults) also getting popcorn. As a long term (for being about 14) SF fan I knew what was going on and what to expect(I had been a Clarke fan for years…and Azimov, Heinlein, Piper and others).
I cannot imagine seeing it without the book.
Clarke was right it needed the narration.
I saw it at the Uptown. The lines were long and smokey. I believe it was the first time I understood the term “contact high.” The old-time Italian restaurant across the street sold a lot of pizza.
I saw it for the first time on New Year’s Eve 1980, at the Institute for Living, a high class insane asylum in Hartford CT. I was staff, not a patient. The patients all got it just fine, it was a lot of fun to watch it with them hooting and hollering.
Alexi Leonov, the first spacewalker, saw it at the Moscow Film Festival in 1968 and said, “Now I feel I’ve been in space twice”.
Thanks as always, Richard!
Same here. I saw it the month it opened. I was sixteen and didn’t find it all that hard to follow. Admittedly, you find out what’s going on only gradually, and some people just couldn’t make the connection.
Then again, it was 54 years ago. When Mission: Impossible debuted on TV in 1966, TV Guide and others reported that many older viewers simply found it too difficult to follow; you had to remember plot points whose significance was only revealed later, and that was more of a challenge than most TV shows demanded.
Here’s the VIP invitation. In my career, I don’t think I ever had such a lucky alignment with event sponsors. AT&T was obsessed with delivering multimedia to the home, so they were a big donor, with much of their government affairs and federal systems staff on board. With Arthur C. Clarke, John R. Pierce, and Arno Penzias on the program, INTELSAT donated the reception at their ultra-futuristic headquarters, as close to the control room of a James Bond villain as I’m ever likely to see. Then Warner Bros, Turner, and even Tiffany & Co. opened their wallets.
If you don’t know what’s going on, stop and listen. Is it a solo flute playing the theme? Okay, they’re sneaking around and Landau is probably in disguise. Full orchestra? Exfiltration time (aka the chase scenes).
“There’s a legend that the film was failing at the box office, but “the hippies” saved it.”
I was 14 when I saw it on its first night’s showing on the big, curved Cinerama screen at Century 21 in Silicon Valley. I thought it was wonderfully mysterious. Still do.
I also distinctly remember one guy in his twenties, in fringe, headband and tie-dye, sitting alone in the center seat in the otherwise empty front row. He was still there long after the rest of us in the audience left the theater. He must have had the acid trip of his life . . .
Wow, Michael S. Malone! Honored to have you with us. The overlaps between art and technology are nothing new to you, but even as “late” as 1993, it was only beginning to be a phenomenon in Hollywood.
Technology was understood to be a way to make parts of movies, like realistic looking dinosaurs, but the idea that computers would deliver the experience to the home was still hard for studio executives to grasp.
It also produced a brief period of interest in classical music among the “hippie” set.
“That was ‘Time Has Come Today’ by the Chambers Brothers. Before that, ‘Also Sprach Zarathustra.’”
I always enjoy reading your stuff, Gary. This one was especially good . . . and enlightening.
Thank you very much for posting this, Gary.
Thanks, Hartmann! And there’s a Bavarian connection. Kubrick’s favorite film camera was the Arriflex, made by Arnold and Richter GmbH. For decades they also sponsored a cinema in Munich, the Arri Kino. The Arriflex started out as Germany’s WWII combat newsreel camera, and by the Sixties it came to Hollywood as a novelty that was unusually good for hand-held, up close cinematography. Gradually, it supplanted Hollywood’s favorite, the Mitchell BNC, which had been used to film nearly every American feature film and filmed TV show.
I saw it as a kid too, and I can still remember the hair standing up on the back of my neck when Hal said “I’m sorry, Dave, I can’t do that” in that soothing voice. It always comes back to me with all this talk of AI taking over. I loved his post, Gary! You always have the inside info.
I think “Beat the Press” should be a TV show where contestants get to pummel media types with those inflatable fist bags we had as kids. Though not James. I think he could hold his own.
“Stump the Stars” was an early Sixties quiz show, sort of the “Dancing with the Stars” of its day. Mad Magazine offered the TV guide listing of its version, consisting of various Hollywood stars being pulverized by angry audiences wielding tree stumps.
Even as a long-haired college kid in 1969, I was hoping for “We claim this Moon for the United States of America.”
Excellent, Gary! This is “usable history”, as in something a writer could use in a fictional piece. 1968 had a lot of this, because so many turning points were coinciding.
As for 2001: A Space Odyssey, maybe not atop the “hippie movie” pantheon with Easy Rider, Billy Jack, and Monterey Pop, but certainly appreciated as far out, a real trip man, and like totally awesome.
You could say (would you?) that it paved the way for Star Wars proving our generation’s preference for space settings to replace Westerns as Hollywood’s box office staple.
Destination Moon certainly filled the bill for that.
I’ve always been partial to Eddie Izzard’s suggestion:
“Ew. It’s all sticky.”
It certainly paved the way for Star Wars. 2001 may have attracted more people on LSD, but Star Wars, coming along nine years later, certainly outpaced it for stoned audiences. In 1968, pot use was still relatively rare. By 1977, it was widespread and chronic. Er, so to speak.
I agree with your (generous!) comment, although I’d suggest the westerns of the late Sixties and the Seventies were the cop pictures, everything from The French Connection to Coogan’s Bluff to The New Centurions.
Absolutely true, and I never thought of it like that. I got to meet Peter Graves and later, Martin Landau. My wife got to meet Barbara Bain. No luck meeting Peter Lupus or Greg Morris, though.
Only because of the frequent supply shortages due to unprecedented demand at college campuses and rock venues, and poor growing conditions in the Northeast.
Hippiedom, welcome to market economics 101
You went to NYU, right? I should think the cloud cover from the Fillmore East, Washington Square Park and Macdougal Street would have kept the dorms there pretty lit up.