SPACE ODDITIES
10 things you probably didn’t know about Stanley Kubrick’s epic film
Fifty years ago this week, Stanley Kubrick’s epic 2001: A Space Odyssey opened. The film, which won an Oscar for its pioneering special effects, has been called Kubrick’s “crowning, confounding achievement” and a “quantum leap” in technological achievement by film critic James Verniere, who notes that Steven Spielberg called 2001 the Big Bang of his filmmaking generation.
Timed to the anniversary is author Michael Benson’s latest work, Space Odyssey: Stanley Kubrick, Arthur C. Clarke, and the Making of a Masterpiece (Simon & Schuster). Here are 10 things you probably don’t know about 2001, from Benson and other sources:
1
2001 was originally going to show a precursor to the internet.
Kubrick’s intrepid band of futurists, Benson writes, “had seemingly already visualized important aspects of (a) new technology’s implications.”
The film’s props would include a “2001 newspaper to be read on some kind of television screen.” And if the prop, which had a New York Times logo, had appeared in the film, it would have been “read by an astronaut on the iPad-type tablet computers” aboard the ship Discovery.
“Had Kubrick followed through and actually presented the newspaper in this way,” the author writes, “there’s no doubt that 2001: A Space Odyssey would be remembered today as an important harbinger of the internet.”
2
The filmmakers also envisioned a world with self-driving cars.
“In early chapter drafts,” Benson writes, “the character who would become David Bowman is named Bruno,” and he rides a “computer-guided Rolls” along the “auto-highway” bisecting the great “Washington-New York complex,” child and dog in tow.
3
Neither Kubrick nor collaborator-author Arthur C. Clarke believed they had ever seen a great sci-fi film.
Kubrick’s two-page introductory letter to Clarke teases the “possibility of doing the proverbial ‘really good’ science fiction movie.” Clarke’s reply: “The ‘really good’ science fiction movie is a great many years overdue.”
4
The creation of the iconic monolith was a years-long process.
Early on, Clarke pointed Kubrick to his story The Sentinel, in which a survey team discovers a “diamond-hard crystal pyramid of alien origin, which has clearly been on the lunar surface for millions of years,” Benson notes.
Plus, Kubrick initially wanted the “alien object” — what became the monolith — to be clear, like a “transparent tetrahedron.” Kubrick urged that it be made of Plexiglas, but the material didn’t create the desired effect and the immense, expensive, clear monolith was trashed, replaced by a black monolith that reflected every smudge and flaw.
5
The same year Kubrick began picking Clarke’s scientifically inventive brain, so was NASA.
Travelling from his home base of Ceylon/Sri Lanka, Clarke went to Washington in May of 1964 to meet with top NASA officials. The Apollo project director, Benson writes, solicited the author’s ideas on what the space agency should do after a moon landing was accomplished.
6
2001 has many working titles.
Kubrick and Clarke, having seen MGM’s big Cinerama production How the West Was Won, privately titled their would-be semi-documentary How the Solar System Was Won, and then How the Universe Was Won, Benson writes. Other possible titles included Universe: Tunnel to the Stars, The Star Gate, Jupiter Window and Earth Escape.
7
2001 ran was over schedule and over budget.
Kubrick told Clarke in 1964 that he was set to work on a film that would take “about two years to complete,” and a later deal eyed a late 1966 or early 1967 release with an initial budget of $5 million. By the time the film opened April 2, 1968, the budget was about $12 million, according to Box Office Mojo.
8 It was Kubrick’s idea to create a simultaneous novel and film.
“We will not sit down and write a screenplay,” Kubrick said in the summer of 1964, according to Benson. “We will sit down and write a novel. We’ll get much more depth.” As a result, the screenplay went through almost daily revisions during the shoot.
9
The movie began in a bra factory.
The first frames of 2001 were shot in early 1965, in an abandoned brassiere factory in New York. Inspired partly by Universe, Kubrick used paints, inks, paint thinner and high-intensity lights to create surreal spacey effects.
10
The set was sometimes quite dangerous.
MIT artificial intelligence expert Marvin Minsky said he “could have been killed” during a set visit, when a mechanical accident close to him caused a “livid” Kubrick to fire a stage hand. Coincidentally, Benson writes, it was Minsky who had told Kubrick that computers in the year 2001 “might be advanced enough to suffer breakdowns when faced with apparently irresolvable conflicts.”