Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey saw its world premiere on this day, April 2, in 1968 at the Uptown Theater in Washington, D.C. Two days later, it opened in two more theaters, one in Hollywood and one in New York. Kubrick cut nineteen minutes before 2001 rolled out in five more cities in the U.S. and, on the following day, five more overseas. It wouldn’t be until the fall of 1968 that the film would see a wide release with 35 mm prints making their way across the country. But audiences in that first round of cities would have been viewing 70 mm prints and, as you’ll have heard, Christopher Nolan will be in Cannes on May 12 to present a new one, “struck from new printing elements made from the original camera negative,” as the festival’s announced. “This is a true photochemical film recreation. There are no digital tricks, remastered effects, or revisionist edits. The original version will be presented to recreate the cinematic event audiences experienced fifty years ago.”
Good news from Michael Nordine at IndieWire: “You don’t have to go to Cannes to see 2001: A Space Odyssey in all its 70 mm glory. Stanley Kubrick’s sci-fi masterwork will also return to select theaters beginning May 18.” So this entry will gather all things 2001 for as long as this year’s anniversary is being celebrated.
“Kubrick’s project promised the moon and then some, but executives at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer feared they had a disaster on their hands when the picture was finally ready for release,” writes Bruce Handy in a piece for Vanity Fair on the film’s making and reception. During a press screening, “press screening one skeptic was overheard sniping, ‘Well, that’s the end of Stanley Kubrick.’”
You might have thought escapism would be in vogue, and 2001 offered that, but moviegoers in this uneasy but heady era were also in a mood to be provoked and challenged, even baffled, and they had never seen anything like 2001—literally, in terms of the film’s painstakingly realistic portrayal of inter-planetary space travel, with special effects that still hold up, and figuratively, in the sense that 2001’s elliptical storytelling was as confounding to many viewers as, for others, the film’s cosmic scale, mythic reach, and wordless, psychedelic finale were exhilarating (if still confounding). An art film made on a big-boy budget, it became the highest-grossing picture of 1968—“perhaps the most offbeat blockbuster in the history of U.S. pic playoff,” as Variety put it in early 1969.
Handy has followed up on his epic account with “the ‘super-bonus extended director’s cut’ version of my story—featuring a testy Stanley Kubrick, an excellent Lost in Space dismissal, and some wonderfully passive-aggressive telegrams.”
For the BFI, Samuel Wrigley looks back on “five films that influenced Kubrick’s giant leap for sci-fi.”
The Guardian’s Phil Hoad talks with Keir Dullea, who played Dave Bowman: “I felt awed working with him and he picked up that I was tense—which is terrible for an actor. After a week, he took me aside and said: ‘Keir, you’re everything I’m looking for.’” And on the same page, Hoad talks with legendary visual effects supervisor Douglas Trumbull: “He was a genius but even he was right at his limit. He asked IBM to make an algorithm to help with the production process. They analyzed it for two weeks and said: ‘There’s no way, Stanley. There’s too many things changing every day.’”
HAL 9000 “was the film’s most expressive and emotional figure, and made a lasting impression on our collective imagination,” writes Gerry Flahive for the New York Times. “The story of the creation of HAL’s performance—the result of a last-minute collaboration between the idiosyncratic director Stanley Kubrick and the veteran Canadian actor Douglas Rain—has been somewhat lost in the fifty years since the film’s release . . . Mr. Rain’s HAL has become the default reference, not just for the voice, but also for the humanesque qualities of what a sentient machine’s personality should be. Just ask Amazon’s Alexa or Google Home—the cadence, the friendly formality, the pleasant intelligence and sense of calm control in their voices evoke Mr. Rain’s unforgettable performance. As we warily eye a future utterly transformed by A.I. incursions into all aspects of our lives, HAL has been lurking.”
On May 29, the fortieth International Conference on Software Engineering in Gothenburg, Sweden will host a symposium on HAL’s legacy. Meantime, the exhibition Kubrick’s 2001. 50 Years A SPACE ODYSSEY opened a little over a week ago at the Deutsches Filmmuseum in Frankfurt and will remain on view through September 23.
Anyone looking for further reading until the next update should begin at The Kubrick Site, which has indexed, among many other things, essays and articles. The 2001 section begins with Michel Ciment’s “Kubrick & The Fantastic,” excerpted from his 1982 book on Kubrick, and runs for a little over a dozen more articles.
The next deep dive would be Coudal Partners’ “Stuff About Stanley Kubrick,” surely the most fun of these archives to wander through. And then head over to Scraps from the Loft and have a look around in there.
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