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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
USA Today gave us terrific coverage. The Washington Post was perfunctory. But the Washington Times gave us tons of ink. Their film critic was the best in the city.
But before we break out the party hats to cheer the Times, four years later I came back to town, this time at the helm of the American Cinema Foundation. We presented the Freedom Film Festival, possibly the most anti-Communist event ever held under the roof of the Kennedy Center. And the conservative Washington Times virtually ignored it, whereas the Post gave us plenty of attention, even running a nice picture of Robert Duvall at the screening.
So the lesson is, don’t count on the conservative press. It’ll break your heart.
“Socialism is our launching pad” USSR, circa 1970
Russians have sporadically expressed admiration for 2001, but it also arouses highbrow scorn, some of it defensive scorn, partly because it was so admired internationally at a time when America was having its greatest space triumphs. They’d loved, loved, loved being seen as scientific and engineering conquerors, from October 4, 1957 through the mid-sixties, and the Apollo landings took the shine off of that source of national pride.
So the Soviet official attitude towards the film was, roughly, “Nice photography. Wish we had the money to do that. But we reject all that quasi-religious mystic mythic nonsense. Above all, aren’t the Americans embarrassed by the shameless parade of advertising of US corporations? As if there’ll still be corporations in the 21st century?” This, in fact, matched the attitude of 2001‘s left wing critics in the US.
So supposedly as a response to 2001, Andrei Tarkovsky made Solaris, later remade by George Clooney. Based on a Stanislaw Lem novel, I’ve felt it was somewhat overrated.
There’s a Howard Johnson’s on the Space Station. Yes, Ivan, there will be corporations, because HoJo can offer 28 flavors and you can’t even muster three without including “Methanol De-Icer Slushee.”
EDIT: To make it clear, for film buffs, Solaris is well worth seeing, and the Soviets had a few valid criticisms of 2001. But in terms of Solaris being the better film, no. It’s a decently written Star Trek: TNG episode with a minimal cast.
To put it another way, Al Martino is worth listening to, but he isn’t Sinatra.
Just like hot chicks.
Thanks for the post, Gary! I love this historical movie stuff.
As a ten year old I remember my father getting his two eldest boys dressed in our communion suits so we could see this “Big Space” movie showing at the Uptown. At the time he worked for Grumman, the company designing and building the world’s first manned extraterrestrial lander. I think it was the premier showing, because we would never get that gussied up for a normal evening movie, and his company had a little pull for employee tickets for those who were based in DC. The original and real Grumman was based in Long Island, and I am sure the bulk of those folks went to see it in NY.
At the time I was too young to appreciate all of the implications, but the big sticking factor was we all wanted to be part of the exciting effort to go into space. At this end of my lifetime’s horn, it is interesting to note that all four of his boys became engineers. Three ended up working directly for NASA, and the youngest does his aerospace part a the Pax River Naval air station on the aviation sector’s cutting edge. There was lot of heady inspiration for these formative high adventures that were in the waters for young Americans at the end of the sixties and early seventies.
I wish I saw something as visionary, sweeping and unifying now as it was in those heady days, rather than just an updated trope that “if we can put men on the moon why can we” (fill in you favorite hobby horse trope here)….
There was a strong conservative and classical liberal movement among science fiction writers around the time 2001 was released, but conservative media like National Review never gave it any support.
It’s just popular trash, the Buckleyites sneered, not part of The Western Canon.
To this day, the conservative press jeers at college courses on science fiction and fantasy.
Conservatives think all cartoons are for kids too
Anybody know what the movie was rated when it was released in 1968? It has no swearing, no sex, and no blood. Could it have been rated G, or did the ape-man beat-down with the jawbone put it into PG territory?
“In the future, mesh shirts will be the height of cosmonaut fashion.”
It was rated G. The Motion Picture Association of America started the ratings system in 1968, the same year 2001 opened.
Trivia fact: In 1968, that second rating was GP (General Patronage). Turning the letters around to make it PG (Parental Guidance) came along later. PG-13 came along in the Eighties to fill the gap between kiddie movies and the R rating.
Though MPAA hates to admit it, a lot of their classification system was a watered-down version of what the National Catholic Office for Motion Pictures had been doing since the days when it was called the Legion of Decency.
The Legion of Decency! Rise and take the oath in Church! In those heady days of mass Catholicism, the weekly movie breakdown in The Catholic News was popular bathroom reading in families like ours.
Kids and parents were encouraged to scrutinize the “Condemned” movie list, so as to avoid anything playing downtown deemed a near occasion of sin.
I was 8 in 1957 when the Legion awarded its attention-getting Condemned rating to the Elia Kazan / Tennessee Williams sin flic Baby Doll. I think it was the following summer when the tall home next to our family’s little beach cottage was rented to the movie’s star, Carol Baker. Our village was famous for strictly enforcing its ordinances, including that trash cans must be retrieved shortly after the biweekly morning pickups. Which our neighbor did, once while wearing the film’s eponymous nightie.
Not sure which year it was, but during a subsequent summer thunderstorm we heard a scarifying crash next door. There had been a direct lightning hit on the chimney top of our neighbor’s house. Heavenly retribution or mere coincidence?
As the years went by, I enjoyed Never on Sunday, Breathless, Jules and Jim and 8 1/2, all condemned by the Legion/NCOMP. Banning European art films seemed awfully petty and provincial coming from an outfit based in Rome. (Fellini handled the payback beautifully.)
How much of the 1960’s rebellions and decentralized notions of decency and propriety trace back to the decline of the Church’s dirty movie list?
My interpretation of Tarkovsky’s reaction to 2001 was that it was too sterile and sanitary. He wanted something more earthy in space. Those were not his exact words, though, and maybe I’m reading too much into the hero’s soiled sweatshirt.
I think your interpretation of his opinion is sound. Europeans, especially Russians, are also prone (especially back then) to marvel at prim American touches like plastic wrappers on hotel drinking glasses to prove they were clean, and safety instructions on things like coffee mugs (“contents may be hot”). Of course, in many ways the EU has more than caught up, but this was 54 years ago.
Much science fiction was been written on the theme that no matter how far we travel, the fundamental questions of human-to-human relationships will always be what counts. Memory, conflict, devotion, jealousy–that’s what we’ll find at the end of the solar system, or galaxy. It makes for writable drama. But that isn’t what 2001 cared about.
Solaris was a low-budget response, no doubt. The crew got rare permission (and money) to go to Japan and film, and came back with nothing useful to the plot, but managed to shoehorn the scenes of modern city freeways into Solaris to make it look like a city of the future. Russia had no highway system like it at the time, so it would look futuristic to Russian audiences. And besides after spending the money on a Japan junket Tarkovsky had to have something in the movie to show for it, even if it did exactly nothing for the story. And there wasn’t enough color film to shoot the entire movie, so some ended up being black and white. They tried to pretend the switches between color and black-and-white had some symbolic meaning.
Someone in your previous post on 2001 referred to the religious meanings some people extracted from it. The film had just come to the Twin Cities when a friend of mine delivered an evening chapel message full of excited references to it. I couldn’t make any sense out of what he was saying; neither could anyone else that I knew. (Students could sign up to give the sermon-like message for evening chapel, but I never did.) Later I saw the movie for myself. It was about this time of year in 1969. I didn’t bother trying to figure out what my friend had been talking about. It was not the movie my future wife and I saw on our first date, but it was maybe the 2nd or 3rd. The friend who had worked 2001 into his chapel sermonette stood up at our wedding.
I met my wife in the spring of 1968. We were both 16. She’d already gone to see 2001 and told me that she could barely make sense of it. But she’s sitting across the kitchen table as I type, so I guess it all worked out after all.
That’s really nice. If I’d met my future wife any time before I was 26, she wouldn’t have liked me. Thankfully, at least for me, we met when I had settled down a bit. She’s been a great influence on me.