How 1967 Changed 2001

When MGM signed contracts with Stanley Kubrick, the studio originally expected 2001: A Space Odyssey to be ready for Christmas 1966, but that was soon understood to be unrealistic. A big opening in 70mm Cinerama theaters in April 1967 was the new goal, followed by wider release to mainstream theaters later that year. Towards the end of 1966, Kubrick finally showed a half hour of clips of the film’s most visually impressive moments to Robert O’ Brien, MGM’s CEO, as well as a handful of other MGM executives. They were relieved and reassured. The spaceships, the zero gravity scenes, and details of the future were the most realistic ever made. As the year ended, MGM already knew they had a spectacular looking space picture on the way. Crucially, though, they still didn’t really understand what kind of space picture they’d be getting.

To an unusual degree, many of the distinctive things about the 2001 we’ve known for more than half a century weren’t yet created during principal production, when the actors were on the set. They came along later, in the laboratories and editing rooms, in 1967.

Kubrick’s message to the studio was, look how close to perfection we’ve come; don’t force me to rush the completion of these elaborate visual effects. Optical and other laboratory effects were being made to unprecedented levels of quality, and this was taking time. Plus, like any film, 2001 still needed to be edited, dialog dubbed, Foley (sound effects) tracks done, and final music composed and mixed. Even vastly less elaborate films took a couple of months. With the complexity of 2001’s lab work, it’s understandable that this would push things later. In other words, he couldn’t make an April deadline.

MGM reluctantly accepted that 2001 was going to be released no earlier than fall 1967 in time for the Christmas season. A legend is dispelled here; that Kubrick had absolute authority over the film. That might have been true later in his career, and Kubrick did have an unusual degree of personal trust from Bob O’ Brien, but he still had to keep the boss on his side. Which he did.

Arthur C. Clarke had been getting paid, as per contract, but the big payday for him would be the book rights. A promising publishing deal fell through because Kubrick postponed his sign-off. He never admitted it to Clarke’s face, but it was obvious that he didn’t want it in print before the movie opened.

Clarke kept turning up at Elstree studios. He didn’t realize that most of the crew, possibly including Stanley, regarded him as (to use one crew man’s blunt phrase) “an extra (censored) at a wedding”. But Stanley didn’t really mind having him around if he could be put to work, and for much of Clarke’s 1967 visits to London, he was suggesting and rewriting narration. That was always part of the film’s plan, but the closer they got to finishing it, the less Kubrick liked the idea.

2001 had been okayed for funding and production on the basis of a draft of what was then still a Clarke/Kubrick novel, not a film script. The novel’s ending was both overly specific, taking the mystery out of it, and yet maddeningly vague. Somehow visual magic would spell it out, make it work. This became the unspoken dilemma in the last stages of post-production: would people understand what was going on? By now, Kubrick was aiming at enigmatic. He succeeded, perhaps to a fault.

One of 2001’s most recognized and remembered set of images was the Star Gate sequence, and its highlight was an astonishing effect of parallel planes of dazzling patterns. This was made by a process called slit scan, running translucent artwork sideways past a narrow slit of light, holding the exposure open while a special animation camera pulled back, one frame at a time, stretching the artwork seemingly to infinity. It’s one of the key moments that made the film what it is, and it was a project that Kubrick handed off to a young American, Douglas Trumbull. He took what was a technique of obscure experimental films and greatly improved it. Trumbull benefited from, and suffered through, his boss’s endless patience for retakes and new ideas.

Kubrick viewed a Canadian film called Universe to find potential special effects artists and animators. It featured a shot called “triple occlusion”, where a planet peeked out the side of a moon, and then the sun peeked out beyond that. The 2001 crew experimented with making their own version of that moving image several times, and still weren’t satisfied until special effects man Trumbull had the bright idea of turning it horizontally. Even then, they didn’t at first see the sunrise shot as being a candidate to open the film until Kubrick ran it on a Moviola in improvised sync with Richard Strauss’s Thus Spake Zarathustra.

That connection between image and music started with serendipity—and became a moment that hundreds of millions of people around the world would come to recognize.

2001 had what Variety slang called a “needle drop” soundtrack, completely assembled from pre-existing phono recordings of classical music. For the rest of Kubrick’s career, he’d basically stick to that idea. He commissioned some original music from time to time, but always retaining a core of “found” music. In 1967-’68, this use of prerecorded music was extremely rare in Hollywood, especially for a big budget release.

A definite gamble: using Johann Strauss’s On the Beautiful Blue Danube, which Kubrick admitted was either an inspired or an insane idea. Most of his collaborators leaned towards “insane”. But he took the chance, and more than a half century on, the waltz is now indelibly associated with the grace and beauty of space travel.

Three musical works by then-unknown Hungarian composer Gyorgy Ligeti have long been connected to the images of the film. Most especially, Requiem, used as the theme of the monolith, of imminent transformation, of the cryptic, cosmic mystery at the heart of 2001. Yet as of the early summer of 1967, less than a year before the movie and the soundtrack album would be minting money all over the world, Kubrick had never heard of Ligeti. His wife and a friend heard some of Requiem on BBC radio and said, “Boy, Stanley should hear this”. It was another lucky, unpredictable moment.

It's still unclear why it took until mid-1967 to film The Dawn of Man, a full year after all of the other studio live action scenes were done filming. It has to be said that the actors and costumers did a superb job. I suspect it was to give Kubrick an excuse to miss his new Christmastime ’67 release slot. “Hey, I haven’t even had a chance to finish up the first scene yet”.

When it became clear, several months in advance, that 2001 would not meet the agreed-on postponed release date in late 1967 after all, Kubrick lost much of his negotiating leverage with MGM. By that late point in the production process, the studio was getting mighty antsy, and for all of film history up through then, movies, especially the biggest ones, had original scores. So Kubrick went ahead and paid to have composer Alex North flown over to London, and a film orchestra was hired to record North’s score. None of it was used.

How did Stanley Kubrick’s grand gambles of 1967 work out?

The Dawn of Man, a film opening with no dialog or even a brief narration, was a bold gamble that succeeded, generally accepted as the prelude to a movie of the future, even if joked about, then and now. Most people understood the metaphor of the ape man getting an inspiration that will lead to tools, and weapons. They correctly thought that the movie was about the evolution of man, as we would have put it then. Stanley and Arthur won that bet.

The ride to orbit and then to the Moon picked up more clues about the story. The jump to the Jupiter mission is too abrupt even with a terse introductory title, but is gradually explained. By the time David Bowman’s pod enters the Star Gate, the plot, for all its mystery, is understandable. He’s encountered one of these cryptic slabs that mean some stage of momentous evolution is imminent. He’s being pulled through some kind of wormhole/hyperspace corridor, being sent unimaginable distances by whoever or whatever has been leaving these monoliths around. That much is actually pretty clear to audiences.

The seventeen minute Star Gate sequence is made up of three basic types of shot. The infinite corridors of light are Trumbull’s slit scan; the microscope shots of slow motion explosions of stars, expanding galaxies and their tendrils were filmed by Kubrick himself, in Manhattan before he left for England; and the flights over strangely colored landscapes of water and rocks was a separate project. When Bowman enters the Star Gate walls of light, it’s clearly his first person perspective. But the exploding galaxies shots are seen from whose perspective? It can’t be Bowman’s, so whose is it? They don’t convey a sense of the character being transported, and there’s no sense of arriving at a destination. It’s just a straight cut to Bowman staring out the pod window at the White Room.

Sometime in 1967, Kubrick gave up on his sporadic, but persistent attempts to come up with satisfyingly enigmatic, ghostly, suggested ETs beyond those artificial White Room walls, observing Bowman’s aging and rebirth. When he did, he made it much harder for audiences to understand what was going on. It’s one of the riskiest moments in the film, and 2001 loses a lot of people right there.

Most audiences didn’t understand or even intuit where he was or how he got there. It’s hard to see this as a scene, as Clarke suggested, made up of an alien’s study of our TV images, not far from what Carl Sagan would later use in Contact; or, as Kubrick suggested, of dreamlike projections of the astronaut’s own mind, rather like Ray Bradbury’s Mars, or Solaris, not to mention several Star Treks. The screens in the pod are flickering, “NON FUNCTION”, which doesn’t sound like it’s all in his imagination. A problem with the White Room is there’s nothing in astronaut David Bowman’s background, at least based on the few clues to his character, that would connect him to that kind of this strangely 17^th-18^th Century European conception of an idealized room.

For all that those minutes begin too cryptically, Keir Dullea does an underestimated job of acting, making the film’s final minutes meaningful. You see his stunned reactions to his own aging, like moments in a dream. Bowman’s death and rebirth, taking mankind to the next unimaginable level of evolution, is one of the best known, most thunderous conclusions in film history.