MOVIE MASTERWORK
Stanley Kubrick's 2001 secrets
Fifty years ago this month, Stanley Kubrick’s epic 2001: A Space Odyssey opened in the US. The influential 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 film-making generation.
Timed to the anniversary, author Michael Benson’s latest work, Space Odyssey: Stanley Kubrick, Arthur C. Clarke and the Making of a Masterpiece, debuted last week and within Benson’s devotional telling is a wealth of intriguing facts and anecdotes. Here are 12 things you probably don’t know about 2001, according to Benson and other sources.
2001 was originally going to show a precursor to the internet.
Kubrick’s intrepid band of futurists, Benson writes, ‘‘had seemingly already visualised 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.’’
The film-makers also envisioned a world with selfdriving cars.
‘‘In early chapter drafts,’’ Benson writes, ‘‘the character who would become David Bowman is named Bruno,’’ and he rides a ‘‘computerguided Rolls’’ along the ‘‘autohighway’’ bisecting the great ‘‘Washington-New York complex’’, child and dog in tow.
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.
The same year Kubrick began picking Clarke’s scientifically inventive brain, so was Nasa.
Travelling from his home base of Sri Lanka, Clarke went to Washington in May, 1964, to meet top Nasa officials. The Apollo project director solicited the author’s ideas on what the space agency should do after a moon landing was accomplished. Kubrick and Clarke privately titled their would-be semidocumentary How the Solar System Was Won, and then How the Universe Was Won. Other possible titles included Universe: Tunnel to the Stars, The Star Gate, Jupiter Window and Earth Escape.
2001 ran way over schedule and budget.
Kubrick told Clarke in 1964 that the 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 US$5 million. By the time it opened on April 2, 1968, the budget was about $12 million.
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. ‘‘We will sit down and write a novel. We’ll get much more depth.’’ As a result, the screenplay went through almost daily revisions.
HAL was a very gradual creation.
In Clarke’s ‘‘robot sequence’’ in an early chapter draft, the precursor to the eventual HAL-9000 mainframe is named Socrates, who is ambulatory and can be switched to ‘‘independent mode’’. With each draft the IQ of this AI was increased. And before the acronym HAL, the Discovery’s talking computer was named Athena. As for the voice of HAL, Kubrick and Clarke had been influenced by an Oscar-nominated black-and-white short, titled Universe. The 2001 film-makers were struck by Universe’s techniques and hired the movie’s effects collaborator.Yet the casting of HAL’s voice was up in the air throughout the live-action shoot. Kubrick tried such actors as Nigel Davenport and Martin Balsam before hiring Douglas Rain – the narrator he had first heard in Universe.
There was a list of other possible directors.
When MGM was drafting a contract for Kubrick’s production company, one clause provided a shortlist of possible alternate directors, including Alfred Hitchcock, David Lean and Billy Wilder.
The set was 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, 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’’.
The secret to the Dawn of
Man performance: method mime acting.
Kubrick didn’t want his bonewielding simians to look just like ‘‘men in monkey suits’’. So he was introduced to Dan Richter, a rising London performer and American Mime Theater star who had also studied Noh and Kabuki theatre. Richter’s mime philosophy was ‘‘to start with acting values and extend them into purely physical movement’’. (American Mime Theater’s founder studied under Lee Strasberg). Richter arrived at a meeting thinking he might offer a quick consultation, but it turned into an audition after his transformational abilities dazzled Kubrick. Richter would not only play 2001’s murderous Moonwatcher, but also teach his fellow ‘‘man-ape’’ performers how to move and act convincingly.
The film debut in Washington was ‘‘a disaster’’.
2001’s official premiere was at the Uptown theatre in Washington’s Cleveland Park neighbourhood, with stars and MGM brass in attendance. By intermission, attendees were ‘‘streaming out. It was a disaster. No one liked it’’, Benson recounts. Wrote one British journalist: ‘‘There was not a single handclap . ... The audience just rose, stunned and thoughtful, and shuffled out.’’ The next night, after the New York premiere, Clarke reportedly heard MGM suits saying: ‘‘Well, that’s the end of Stanley Kubrick.’’ Within five weeks of opening in only eight theatres, 2001 had grossed more than US$1 million and some critics began to see the light.
– The Washington Post