2001: A Space Odyssey

In my teens, on my birthday, I was always taken to London for the evening by my father, Ron. We would go to have a curry at one of his favourite Indian restaurants, either The Star of India in the Old Brompton Road, or Veeraswamy in Regent Street. Then we would go to see either a Brian Rix farce at the Windmill Theatre, or a D'Oyly Carte production of a Gilbert & Sullivan operetta at the Savoy Theatre.

While I thoroughly enjoyed these trips, I soon realised that these were all the things he loved doing, that my mother had no interest in, that he thought I would enjoy. He had spent some time in Ceylon and loved a curry, but my mother was not a fan. He also loved farces and G&S, which my mother did not care for. So, once a year he could indulge us both. He wasn't completely selfish, he took my brother on trips to see rugby and football matches, which neither my mother or I had any interest in.

In 1968 he asked me what I wanted to do for my birthday. I has happy to accede to the standard curry, but then - with some trepidation - I meekly suggested that we could postpone the outing for a few weeks and go and see the Super Panavision 70mm version of 2001: A Space Odyssey in the Empire Theatre, Leicester Square. I had already read everything that Arthur C Clarke had ever written by then, including The Sentinel, the short story that was the jumping-off point for the story, and the full length book that Clarke and Kubrick had written together on which the film was based. I had also read anything and everything that had been written about the movie in newspapers, magazines etc.

My father was initially somewhat disappointed in my, to him, odd choice - but finally accepted with good grace that it was my birthday after all, and not his, and he demurred.

I was already so familiar with the concept of the film in general, and the story in particular, that - despite it still blowing my mind - it all made some sort of sense to me. Not so much to my Dad - who started to try and get me to explain it. I did start to try and explain it, but then we drifted onto other subjects.

I return to 2001 every couple of years, especially if I can introduce it to someone else who has never seen it, and I can hitch a ride on their renewed sense of enthusiasm and excitement. I have also read a great many books about the making of 2001, and as it happens - the making of Start Trek: Kubrick and Roddenberry being creative geniuses in their own unique way.

A few days ago I read a review of a new book about the movie by Michael Benson - it's full title being Space Odyssey: Stanley Kubrick, Arthur C Clarke and the Making of a Masterpiece (Simon & Schuster) - which, despite lock-down and due to the magic of Kindle, I was able to start reading about five minutes later.

As I say, I've read a lot about 2001, and this book has more information and more detail than anything that I have previously discovered. I am assuming that - if you have got this far - you too are interested in 2001 - so here goes. It is not only interesting as far as the making of the movie itself goes, but also on the innumerable examples of Stanley Kubrick's genius, monomania, persistence and perfectionism in movie-making, and his interesting personality. Kubrick was not an A student, and never went to college but he ascribes key elements of his his character to his early interest, and facility, in chess. This is clearly explained by Kubrick himself in an astonishingly interesting and detailed 76 minute interview conducted by a friend, Jeremy Bernstein, in 1966 - the interview can be found on Soundcloud here. In it he says that playing chess taught him the value of slowly, methodically and exhaustively examining every opportunity; and there are many examples in the book, of his doing that - to the frustration and annoyance of his colleagues and staff.

There are many examples whereby his continual drive for the 'right' answer to a problem, after having driven others to distraction, eventually makes them realise that his determination has caused them to outperform their own expectations of themselves - in a truly gratifying manner. For example, after one long discussion about how they might film aliens with an extraordinarily complicated process:

Reflecting on the man’s tenacity, Richter wrote, “I have come to realize that I cannot judge him by the measure I apply to other men and women. What would be compulsion in others is single-mindedness in Stanley.” Their are also numerous examples where people meeting Kubrick for the first time are astonished at his knowledge and his curiosity and his ability to soak up new information as fast as it can be delivered - and then to use this to achieve something completely novel and unexpected. We hear this from Arthur C Clarke after their first meeting:

One characteristic that struck him almost immediately was “pure intelligence,” Clarke wrote. “Kubrick grasps new ideas, however complex, almost instantly. He also appears to be interested in practically everything.” Their first meeting, which lasted eight hours, covered such topics as science fiction, politics, flying saucers, the space program, and Strangelove. Another particularly good example is from the film's cinematographer, Geoffrey Unsworth. Unsworth, who was 52 at the time (Kubrick was 38), had cut his teeth with Michael Powell on two fabulous and breathtakingly innovative movies; The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp and A Matter of Life and Death. He had already won several BAFTAs and went to on to win two Oscars. Unsworth and Kubrick often disagreed throughout the filming about certain technical aspects, but at one point he said of Kubrick:

“if anyone had told me six months ago that I had anything of any substance to learn about my profession at this stage of the game, I would have told them they were mad. I have been a top British cinematographer, a top man, for twenty-five years. In fact, though, I have learned more about my profession from that boy in there in the last six months than I have in the previous twenty-five years. He is an absolute genius. He knows more about the mechanics of optics and the chemistry of photography than anyone who’s ever lived.” Manifestly, he was a genius, but on several occasions his pursuit of perfection (although he hated being described as a perfectionist) caused sever discomfort, danger and - once - a near fatality on set. This included the apes nearly suffocating in one scene, a stunt man in a space costume nearly suffocating in another scene, and people being hit by camera and lighting equipment falling from the enormously high and complex space vehicle sets.

Nothing demonstrates his single-minded pursuit of verisimilitude, than the lengths to which he repeatedly drove the make-up artist, Stuart Freeborn, and the lead mime artist Dan Richter (who plays Moonwatcher) in his demand for more realistic man-apes. Over 100 pages describes this painstaking development from apes that looked realistic, to masks that opened and closed, to the ability to convey facial expressions through the masks and lastly, (through a complete redesign of everything they had done before) to allow the actors to lick their ape-lips to demonstrate their thirst. Then there are the lengths that Dan Richer went to to get the movements of the ape-men, which included taking a hand-held movie camera to London Zoo every day for months to film and study the apes in general and Guy the Gorilla in particular. In the end Dan Richter nailed it so completely that my father - and many others - was convinced that the 'apes' were, in fact, highly trained, apes. As Freeborn says in the book:

But the reward came to me after I’d done another picture, and we went to New York, and I hadn’t seen 2001 at that point, and it was showing at Times Square. And I thought, “I’ll sneak in there all on my own and see it.” After all, I was trying to get it out of my system . . . And I went in there, and up came the Dawn of Man sequence and the monkeys, and I thought, “Oh, it doesn’t look too bad, you know.” And then there was this American family behind me, and Ma says to Dad, “Are those real monkeys?” And, of course, my ears pricked up, and Dad says, “Hmm. Yes, dear.” “How do they get them to act like that?” “Well, you see, dear, they’re specially trained.” And that for me, that one moment of hearing this going on behind me, that was worth anything else. That made it for me. I thought, “Well, that’s it! I did it. That’s great.” So that was reward enough. Richter did all this acting, by the way - as the book reveals - while under treatment as a registered drug addict, regularly consuming a combination 'highball' of prescribed cocaine and heroin. As the book says:

The mixture, which he injected up to seven times a day, was designed not to get him high but to provide a highly medicated form of stability, with the cocaine countering the heroin to produce a simulacrum of normalcy. “Lady Frankau [his doctor] is convinced that addicts need to be stabilized with a constant and controlled supply of heroin and cocaine so that they do not go through the up and down cycle that most constantly experience with withdrawal symptom followed by being high again,” he wrote. Whenever Dan’s regular blend didn’t do the trick and the coke wasn’t keeping him “bright and alert,” he also always had some state-supplied methamphetamine on hand—crystal meth.

In fact, that was the only reason why the American was in the UK at all - to take advantage of this unique UK drug regime. At some point Kubrick found out about this state of affairs, and was considering throwing him off the movie, which would have been very inconvenient, but when he found out that Dan was 'legal' it gave him enough moral 'wiggle' room, in his own mind, to let it slide. However, for whatever reason - maybe to maintain the mystique of the directorial prowess of himself as enfant terrible :

...Kubrick had insisted on absolute secrecy, Freeborn was under no illusions that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences would recognize his work. And indeed, it wasn’t even nominated when Oscar time rolled around. Adding considerable insult to that injury, in 1969 a special award for makeup was given to John Chambers for his work on Planet of the Apes—a 20th Century Fox production that had conducted an espionage operation into Freeborn’s man-apes at Borehamwood, and had then quietly tried to hire him instead of Chambers to make its man-sized gorillas and apes. Their headhunt had been unsuccessful because Kubrick’s extended shooting schedule conflicted with Planet of the Apes star Charlton Heston’s—and Freeborn wouldn’t even consider leaving 2001 before it was completed. In any case, following Chambers’s Oscar, Clarke and others were vocal in their suspicions that Freeborn had been a victim of his own success—that his collaboration with Richter had produced man-apes so convincing, it was simply assumed they were real. Another episode that fascinated me was the dinner held in Kubrick's Manhattan apartment - in the very early stages of pre-production - between Kubrick, Arthur C Clarke and Carl Sagan. Apparently Kubrick and Clarke were unable to agree on whether they should assume that any extra-terrestrials would be humanoid, and whether to attempt to represent them in the movie at all - Kubrick being for it, and Clarke against it. On Clarke's suggestion they invited Sagan down from Harvard to adjudicate and on Friday June 5th 1964 they all sat down to dinner.

I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall for that event. You have three men at the top, or near the top, of their respective games: Clarke was 47 years old, Kubrick was 35 and Sagan a mere 30. However, we are talking about three major sized egos here. It seems that each one remembers that evening slightly differently, and Kubrick did not take to Sagan:

"Throughout the meal, Kubrick had been solicitous of Sagan, asking for his views and listening politely. He even agreed to the suggestion that they reconvene the following day to resume the discussion. But actually, he’d been irritated by what he saw as the young astronomer’s supercilious, patronizing manner. After seeing his guests to the door, he waited an hour and then called Clarke at the Chelsea. “Get rid of him,” he said. “Make any excuse, take him anywhere you like. I don’t want to see him again.”

On the issue of the meeting, whether and how to represent extra-terrestrials, Sagan was against it:

Kubrick proceeded to ignore Sagan’s opinion by engaging in multiple attempts over the next four years to depict extra-terrestrials in the film, just as Clarke wrote thousands of words describing them. If they ultimately settled on ambiguity—on something both black and featureless—it was a decision arrived at over time and through their own efforts, and can’t be ascribed to Sagan’s views, however correct they may have been at the time." This did not stop Sagan from claiming 10 years later that he had significantly influenced the development of the eventual plot:

“I suggested that any explicit representation of an advanced extra-terrestrial being was bound to have at least an element of falseness about it, and that the best solution would be to suggest, rather than explicitly to display, the extra-terrestrials. The film . . . opened three years later. At the premiere, I was pleased to see that I had been of some help.” Sagan was no flake, however; this is the man that - prior to Prof Brian Cox - probably did more than any scientist to popularize the subject over the last 50 years; wrote the sci-fi book Contact that was made into a movie; and was asked by NASA to chair the committee which selected the contents of the Golden Record that was despatched into space in the deep space Voyager space probe in 1977.

The evolution of the Golden Record was a fascinating exercise in its own right; its objective was to collect a range of artistic and other human achievements such as to represent the entire planet to a race of intelligent extra-terrestrials somewhere in the galaxy at some point in the future, who had not yet invented the CD, and who, therefore might happen to have a record player handy. The story of the year-long selection process is very interesting in its own right, and worth its own Blog, here are some highlights:

- 115 images and a variety of natural sounds, such as those made by surf, wind, thunder and animals (including the songs of birds and whales)

- musical selections from different cultures and eras

spoken greetings in 55 ancient and modern languages including a spoken greeting in English by UN Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim

- other human sounds, like footsteps and laughter (Sagan's own)

- a printed message from US president Jimmy Carter

- the inspirational message per aspera ad astra in Morse Code

- a greeting from "the children of Planet Earth"

- a collection of images includes many photographs and diagrams both in black and white, and colour

- a very varied selection of music.

Much of the broader ethnic music was selected by the famous - but not nearly famous enough - ethnomusicologist and song collector Alan Lomax. A man whose single handed influence on the development of popular music over the last 70 years is as extensive as his unwarranted anonymity. he will assuredly have his own Blog item as well.

Anyway, we digress - or at least I do. 2001: A Space Odyssey was so innovative and ahead of its time that it is worth remembering that Samsung referenced the movie as a key part of its 'prior art' defence of its alleged breach of Apples iPad-related intellectual property rights:

"In a clip from that film lasting about one minute, two astronauts are eating and at the same time using personal tablet computers. ... As with the design claimed by the D’889 Patent, the tablet disclosed in the clip has an overall rectangular shape with a dominant display screen, narrow borders, a predominately flat front surface, a flat back surface (which is evident because the tablets are lying flat on the table’s surface), and a thin form factor."

I haven't finished the book yet, and my progress towards that end had been delayed by - inevitably - having to watch the move again. However, this Blog has gone on long enough for the moment. I hope you found it interesting...

PS. Not from the book, but I discovered while Googling all this stuff that there are number of homage-style 'nods' to 2001 in the Star Wars movies. Here is an 'old' 2001 Discovery Pod languishing in the junkyard of Ars Watto on Mos Espa.