When ‘2001’ Beat the Press (1968)

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.

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. Stangelove, 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.

These articles are derived from lectures, talks and web posts. Most have also been posted on Ricochet.com.