Arthur C Clarke wasn't the only person who was shocked at the premiere of 2001.
Stanley Kubrick commissioned the prominent film composer Alex North -- famous for the scoring of Spartacus -- to write the music for 2001. However, film music is only recorded and added at the final stage of editing; normally all of the video is laid down first so that the music director knows exactly how long each scene will be and the music can be recorded at the right tempo to match up.
During the video editing process, "temp music" is used -- typically classical music because it's widely available -- so that scenes have the right feeling when they're viewed by the director. For this purpose, Kubrick selected the opening fanfare from Also Sprach Zarathustra for the start of 2001, The Blue Danube for "floating through space" scenes, et cetera. However, after viewing the edited scenes with the "temporary" background music, Kubrick decided that he really liked it that way -- and so rather than using the score which North was composing and recording, he re-edited the video to match the tempo of the classical recordings he had used.
Legend has it that Kubrick didn't know how to break the news to North -- but however it happened, North turned up for the premiere expecting to hear the music he had spent six months composing and recording, and was devastated to hear the supposedly "temporary" music used instead.
I heard about this a couple years ago when my orchestra (I'm a violinist) did a "movie music" concert with a guest conductor (Hal Beckett) who worked in the industry. We opened the concert with the fanfare from Also Sprach Zarathustra... then he turned to the audience and explained about temp music, and we played the Alex North fanfare.
I have a feeling that these sorts of stories fall into the category of "well known in the industry but not thought to be interesting enough to write down or relate to outsiders".
In this case the story was printed in a booklet accompanying a recording of the score, though I'm fairly certain it had been reported on before that too:
I've watched 2001 twice in my life. Once on my laptop screen, and once in a theater. Wildly different experiences.
On a laptop, it was maddeningly slow. I couldn't bear that scene where the spaceship docks on the space station while the Blue Danube Waltz played. Excruciating. I wish there was more explanation, as my mind was wandering watching this dull film.
In a theater, I experienced a completely different film.On the big screen, I could imagine the scale of this achievement, of a man-made spaceship landing on a man-made space station, all this coordination, against the Blue Danube waltz, and it was all I could see in my field of vision. Not distracted by other things as I was on my laptop. I didn't need explanation. I just felt it. I finally felt that I had "gotten" the movie. It was an experience. Not just plot and explosions and super heroes, like most movies are today.
A powerful film is expressed in images! Film. It's called a motion picture. The more a film can be expressed in images, the more "pure" it is to its medium! And most of the film was silent.
I'm glad Clarke got the chance to make it a novel, and told it in the form most fitting for him.
Kubrick was a filmmaker and Clarke a writer. I think it is natural that they would disagree on the telling of this story. Different mediums call for different ways to tell the story.
We forget in the age of constant exposure to video that big screen cinema is not the same thing and that some films use the large screen fully as part of the art.
One of my favorite old movies is "The Stunt Man". One of my most disappointing viewing experiences was re-watching "The Stunt Man" on a friends small screen. Most of the emotional and dramatic tension in the film is driven by the sense/fear that the Peter O'Toole character is omniscient, that no matter what the other characters try he will somehow be ahead of them. This works because the viewer also ends up believing this. But a lot of the work to sell this is done in the viewers peripheral vision and on a small screen it simply doesn't happen which leaves the film sadly deflated.
Kubrick shot it using Super Panavision 70 film and it's supposed to be seen in theatre for the immersive experience. Sadly there are only a handful of theaters that can screen 70mm.
Lawrence of Arabia is supposed to be an immersive, "culturally, historically, and aesthetically significant" epic historical drama film which won Best Cinematography. But I couldn't avoid constantly glancing at the time and my notifications, when I watched it on a smart watch screen that also displayed a bar across the top showing the time and my notifications.
I had a similar experience when watching this through the terminal (img to ascii conversion) on my headless server. It was too easy to get distracted by syslog events that were overwriting stdout from the video.
When I watched the movie via a video player made from Redstone, I didn't realize it at first, but the inexact color reproduction really subtracted nuance from the mood, and the fact that I had to run away from monsters every night really prevented me from mentally investing in the movie. This was all really subtle, but later on when I watched the movie in a big theater, I was amazed at the difference!
I grew up around Washington DC which had some fine large screen theaters. One had a curved screen (the Uptown, IIRC, movies were all in 70mm format) so if you sat in the first few rows, the screen almost wrapped around you. IMHO, the only way to appreciate some of these great movies (2001, Lawrence of Arabia, How the West Was Won) is to see them on a large screen. IMHO, you just don't get to see how spectacular the cinematography is when you watch on a TV or a small screen theater. Unfortunately, most of the large screen theaters have disappeared.
I can't blame Kubrick for cutting all the voice-overs, which probably would have made the movie unbearable to watch. At the same time, it's maddening in its ambiguity. Seeing it as a product of this enormous gulf between creative approaches explains a lot.
A simple film, a dumb film, a useless film is one that wraps everything up in a tidy little bow with a neat little moral at the end. A smart film, an impactful film is one that raises questions without simple answers. A film that makes you dwell on those questions, a film that makes you think about and come up with answers to those questions yourself. That's a life altering film. That's a film that sticks with you for life. That's a film that colors your whole perception of life and the Universe.
And that's what 2001 is. It's not a morsel to consume, be done with, and move on from. It's a piece of sand, an irritant, that will stick with you forever and will grow (as a pearl does) as you think about it and delve the depths of the questions it raises. That, in my opinion, is the highest form of art.
I think I mostly agree with you on the philosophy. Maybe I just missed it in 2001, but for an unanswered question to be interesting, I need to have some evidence, some way of getting traction on it. If I don't have a way to move forward with a question, I put it in the same bucket as simulationism and move on to something productive. The star child thing seemed like weirdness without a method, and the main question it raised in my mind was how it connected to anything at all.
Maybe if I watched it again I would get more of it.
It would be fascinating to watch the Clarke cut. The spartan ambiguity of Kubrick's cut almost certainly makes it the better film, but to see A Space Odyssey from such a different creative perspective would nonetheless be a revelation.
I wonder if prints of it still exist in a vault somewhere.
You can get a flavour for it in 2010, which had several production advantages and generally better acting from better-known actors. Roy Scheider as Heywood Floyd (compare him to William Sylvester's Heywood Floyd in 2001) does several voice-overs and there is a lot of unrealistic dialogue for expository purposes. There was plenty of discussion about what went wrong with HAL 9000 and whether HAL 9000 was fixable, although some of the details of the experiments with the SAL computer were cut short. David Shire did the music.
Peter Hyams essentially made 2010 much more along the "Clarkeian" lines suggested by Moorcock in the article, but even still some of the talky bits around Bowman's various appearances did not make it into the final cut.
It's a good enough film, but you would be hard pressed to find anyone who honestly prefers it to 2001, or who thinks adding in more talky bits would have helped. Indeed, compare the Soviet vs American "stand-offs" in the hotel lobby and in orbit around Jupiter respectively, and you can see Kubrick's subtle treatment of the cold war as a much more savage commentary on geopolitics than the overt on-the-verge-of-hot-war geopolitics in 2010. The climax of 2001 was the result of the cold war paranoia, whereas the climax of 2010 were events that overturn the less-cold war paranoia of the sequel.
2001's Kubrick-ness is reflected in that sort of subtle political satire that was one of the recurring themes in his films; Clarke by contrast favours an optimism based in technological leaps, which we see in full in 2010, but also in the novelization's elucidation of the film's ending.
Maybe the most famous transition in film history -- the bone thrown into the air -- exemplifies the difference: Kubrick takes a "you can take a violent ape out of the savannah and dress it up in business clothes, uniforms and space suits, but..." view while Clarke thinks the new environment transforms humans for the better.
As you say, it would be fascinating to have fuller documentation of the film-making processes for 2001, to at least the level of detail that we get for major films made in this millennium so far. However, as with 2001 itself, we have a large vacuum to speculate about.
I’ve always had a soft spot for 2010 and thought it could benefit tremendously from a Blade Runner-esque recut: Drop the voiceovers and make the ending much more ambiguous.
It still wouldn’t be 2001; in has the bones of a very different film. But as a rare example of a hard SF movie with a terrific cast and largely excellent writing, it could certainly stand on its own.
This discussion is reminding me of how much of an impact 2010 had on me in elementary school. For me it fostered sci-fi fantasy in the same way that I think Star Wars and Star Trek have for lots of kids.
To me, the universe of 2010 was just barely within stretching distance for society in some forseeable future, whereas Star Wars and Star Trek were unreachable. That somehow increased its appeal to me as a child, as I could envision living in the world of 2010 in a way I could not with other sci-fi universes. The universe of 2010 was my universe, in other words.
I've been afraid to rewatch 2010 as an adult, because I know I will see it differently.
I wouldn’t worry. The voiceovers to lead the audience through the plot are unfortunate, and the ending is much too literal, but as a kid who wore out his bootleg VHS copy I can confirm it’s just as enjoyable as an adult.
The hot dog scene by itself is a classic bit of screenwriting.
There wasn't better acting in 2010, there was simply a lot more acting, much more dialog, and very different direction. I'm not sure how different 2001 could possibly have been if Kubrick had directed Charlton Heston as Heywood Floyd, for example.
I think the maddening ambiguity you mention, along with the general aesthetic and ambition of the film all stem from a pretty fascinating synthesis.
On one hand, you have a filmmaker who is really hitting his stride as an artist. Kubrick in the late 1960's not only had developed a solid command of his medium, but he was also a serious commercial proposition for Warner and was granted every resource at his hand.
On the other hand, culture still had quite a modernist sensibility around space. We hadn't entered into the cynicism of the 70s that continues to color our perceptions today. 'Space' was this gigantic cultural construct that really captured people's imaginations. Perhaps a fair parallel may have been the romanticized expansion to the Old West.
So I've always thought that this very fertile material, paired with peak-Kubrick, was always going to result in something ambitious and confounding for audiences.
The technical limitations of the time were a factor as well. They originally planned to have some aliens on screen but were unable to come up with a way to do it convincingly, which led to the more ambiguous ending they ended up with. Interesting to think how the film would have turned out if it were made today...
It certainly does.
Being much, much more Clarke than Kubrick, I watch the thing in awe up till and including "My God, it's full of stars", and then usually switch off, as I know from then on the masterpiece will be descending into lava lamps and nonsense.
The last time I saw my grandmother was the last time I saw 2001. It was a few years ago. She was bedridden but living at home with a full-time caregiver. Hospice care had been initiated. Her bed, a full-size hospital bed, was located in the room that used to be the den. There was a large TV in the room that she spent most the day watching. It was early afternoon.
When I walked in, for reasons both mysterious and comical to me, the TV was tuned to a cable channel showing 2001. It was the start of the psychedelic wormhole scene.
The room was decorated, as it had been since I was a kid, in a style I'll call organic American kitsch. Her caregiver and my aunt were in the room. My grandmother was half-sleeping. She smiled when she saw me. Then she fell back to sleep. The others left the room. Standing next to her bed, I watched the movie to the end as my grandmother snored lightly beside me. I don't remember if there were commercial breaks. When it was over, I said goodbye to my grandmother and left her sleeping.
I still can't figure out who turned on 2001. The caregiver usually turned the channel to Fox News. I think my aunt preferred to turn the TV off. If my dad had been there, it might have made sense. He hadn't. It was a very uncanny experience.
I was very let down when I watched it some years ago--I was like, 'where's the climax?' But I've watched a few more arty ambiguous movies lately ('Under the Skin', 'The Neon Demon', 'Mother!') and recently liked 'Annihilation' despite its slow pacing and ambiguity, so I've been thinking maybe I'll like '2001' better this time if I check it out again...
Something I've noticed about '2001' in the meanwhile is that its aesthetics seem very future-proof. It doesn't seem dated or plastic-y like other stuff from that era.
I see I'm getting hammered for my negativity, but I certainly meant it when I said in awe about the first part. It's magnificent, never mind the lunar gravity problem, which I've never seen well done on film.
It's only a couple of months since I last tried - and gave up on - watching 2001 to the end. Probably my own shortcoming entirely - I see nothing but pretentious late sixties posing from the stargate and onwards.
I tried to watch 2001 again about 8 years ago and had to put it on fast forward, at 10X speed, and even then I was still falling asleep through most of it
> I watch the thing in awe up till and including "My God, it's full of stars"
Interestingly, this isn't actually said in 2001. It is in the novelization but its only said in the sequel 2010. It surprised me re-watching 2001 in the cinema a few years ago to not see it said, so I thought I might be watching a weird recut, but no. How the mind plays tricks.
And 2010, the sequel, is pretty unwatchable. It is a bad movie.
The worst part about the movie is Roy Scheider's fatherly internal monologue narration, which tediously explains-like-i'm-five for half the movie.
So maybe that gives us a hint, about what Clark's narration would have done to 2001.
That little sound bite also chimes in over and over again, sounding forced, poorly performed and with a corny distortion effect layered on top, in some presumptive attempt to resonate an idea with the audience. Maybe to remind you once more that the movie is supposed to be a sequel, despite an almost total discontinuity with 2001.
It draws a lot of parallels with Stephen King and The Shining, which had provoked Stephen King to exert more creative control over movie adaptations, often with laughable (or maybe unintentionally comedic) b-movie results.
For sure its no 2001 but I don't find it bad - it has many quality scifi moments I enjoy e.g. Heywood and Russian comforting each other during aerobraking, the brutally tense traversal between the spacecraft and the interactions between Chandra and Hal are interesting if uncomfortable.
I know I am supposed to find it deep and like it to the bitter end. And boy have I tried.
There'a lot of Kubrick I don't get. I have actually read A Clockwork Orange, the novel, and liked it despite its Burgessian lapsed catholic babble, but I intensely dislike the movie.
Conflicted, actually, as I would have to aggree with the American expurgation of the last chapter from the novel, but I sort of feel I have to take the author's view as canonical - and Burgess famously disliked the redaction.
Anyway, I gave up on deeper meaning in Burgess' work a long, long time ago. I still read him with great pleasure, but that's for the linguistic fireworks and his steamrolling, gutpunching flair for telling a story so you hear the sounds and smell the smells.
It certainly does. Being much, much more Clarke than Kubrick, I watch the thing in awe up till and including "My God, it's full of stars", and then usually switch off, as I know from then on the masterpiece will be descending into lava lamps and nonsense.
I envy you the progress you'll make when you get around to re-examining some of your faulty assumptions (as we all eventually must, or at least should). Most of us don't have that much room left for personal growth and discovery in our lives.
Personal attacks? What personal attacks? I'm on record (although it would require a pretty exhaustive Google News search to find it) as saying pretty much the same thing as the OP, right after I watched 2001 for the first time.
In that case, other people on rec.movies were patient enough to give me some good advice, which was to set the Clarke book aside for the moment, give the film another try in a better viewing environment, and move past my prejudices and knee-jerk first impressions.
It sounds like HN's goal is somehow to create an even less open-minded environment than 1990s-era Usenet, which will be quite a trick. But if anyone can pull it off, it'll be you guys.
I read your comment as saying that another user's personal growth level falls short of your own and "most of us". Putting someone else down like that isn't ok here, regardless of what they think about a movie.
I've always loved 2001 since I saw it as a kid on opening night. I was just a little guy, but I couldn't get enough space stuff, so my dad took me to 2001. He and I were both so excited about the experience it gave us of our future in space even though neither of us had any idea what the movie was actually about.
And that's a legitimate problem for many people. I have lots of friends (and family) who find it unbearable. Even today, my dad and I will watch it together, but everyone else will leave. "BOOORING!"
(I read the book as a kid so I could figure out what was going on and explain it to my dad. No one else wanted to know.)
I think it could have given me all the things I loved about it AND been less artsy about lack of explanation, but I wouldn't have wanted to spend less time enthralled by a slow, graceful docking maneuver or observing daily life on the centrifugal deck, or witnessing the full interaction between HAL and Dave. Lots of people get very bored by these and want to see more forward movement in the plot, more action, but I just sit there fascinated. (Less so today, but that's only because the content is now somewhat dated, and I'd rather watch an updated equivalent.)
I suspect the kind of movie that appeals to people like me may not get made again.
Most people seem to want movies to give them a theme park ride - which is why many movies now are just an excuse for wild camera vertigo through CGI, gun play, explosions, and cliched “heroic” dialog.
2001 doesn’t do that. More than anything Kubrick was a photographer, and it’s possible to enjoy 2001 just for the visuals - the colour, the composition, the geometry and perspective.
It’s like a moving coffee table book that happens to be making a point about the far future of humanity.
This is so true about Kubrick as a photographer. He’s able to create these big immersive worlds where the pallet of emotions I experience as a viewer is just so... wide.
I’ve probably failed to explain that very well so here’s a well known example.
The story about the shooting of Barry Lyndon has been covered on HN before. In short Kubric got the fastest lenses he could and had old camera specially adapted so that he could film by candle light. Of course he also knew that such a wide aperture would give him a tiny depth of field, conveniently rendering the scene like a flat period painting come to life.
I suspect he may have worked backwards from that simple idea to the rest of the film but that just speculation on my part.
His use of newly invented steadycam in the Shinning for dream like scenes with the kids is another example.
Watching his films seems to be about more than just the plot and the story. I lack the vocabulary to adiquately explain myself, I’m just a fan, but it’s kind of like watching an art installation that happens to be a block buster film.
I’m not the person you’re asking, but I was born in the early seventies and found 2001 to be incredibly boring when I finally saw it for the first time. Which was on the big screen, in my teens.
In some circles, admitting that you find anything by Kubrick "boring" is considered uncool, so nobody will admit to it. It's like Blade Runner (also mentioned in Moorcock's essay, not coincidentally): their cultural and historical significance for genre development means that cinematographical critique will always be forced to take a back seat.
Personally, I'm a child of the late '70s and I just cannot watch 2001 without falling asleep. Sure, I admire the photography and the realism; the second half of the movie is occasionally exciting; but among Kubrick's work, it's definitely not one I'd rewatch. Part of the reason is even willfully acknowledged: Kubrick actually meant to show how space-travel was very boring, Moorcock mentions it. So there is no shame in admitting that the message was efficiently driven home.
It sounds odd but Kubrick wasn’t afraid to bore his audience if he wanted to. It’s like dead air in a radio show most broadcasters would be scared to include that.
Have revisited 2001 recently. Particularly the scene just before Intermission. Where HAL is reading the lips of the astronauts in the pod. It just really holds up. Apart from the genius editing and sound design. It feels even more a cautionary moment for modern minds on AI. As it must have been to American audiences during the height of the Vietnam War era.
Ridley Scott's original Alien and Blade Runner remain immensely watchable 30+ years on. Perhaps even more so. Which makes it high time not to just complete Clark's monoliith films. But write the next chapter in "Dystopian AI" cinema. One in which a super-intelligence doesn't merely write off the necessity of humanity. But actively yet surreptitiously nudges us to produce more powerful versions of itself ;)
> But write the next chapter in "Dystopian AI" cinema.
I think Person of Interest is the most interesting exploration of Dystopian AI to hit popular culture in a while. I thought it was fascinating how they turned the gimmick of a standard episodic procedural crime solving TV show into the all encompassing theme of a serialized TV epic.
Person of Interest starts pretty slow, but his ability to progress the show without losing his audience is the reason why Jonathen Nolen was trusted to produce as ambitious a TV show as Westworld for his next project.
The "crime of the week" never really gets any better, and since it was an ABC drama it needed to hew pretty closely to that formula. From S02 onwards they start building a mythology about the machine and where it comes from etc, but since it's a 22-episode season it'a _really_ slow burn.
Season 3. Especially season 4 and 5 are almost entirely about battling super intelligence while avoiding super surveilence. The crime of the week mostly subsides and it is all about super intelligence battles.
I recently watched the original Blade Runner with a bunch of friends; none of us had seen it before. Immensely watchable was certainly not the general opinion. A few of us decided it was worth watching only because it set the background for the new Blade Runner. We're probably missing some cultural element that meant it didn't elicit quite the same reaction as it did for you and I'm very curious what that might have been.
Stand Blade Runner next to nearly any action, super hero, or "science fiction" movie made after 1999, and Blade Runner wins or ties, every time. For several reasons.
But it's not enough to just be better than the cotton candy fluff of recent movies, since that's not a real competition. It's a solid movie that stands on its own, even despite some quirky flaws in the delivery and editing of the performances.
It's not Rocky Horror Picture Show, where you and your friends have a party, and participate. It's more of a sleepy, quiet time movie like Taxi Driver. Like Taxi Driver, and any other classic movie, it gets better with repeated viewing, as more details tie together.
It's not a mind blowing movie, but for it's time, it dealt with a lot of new themes in extremely subtle ways, without excessive treatment. The future was cast as a recognizable, ordinary reality, taking on a tone that really only draws a cult following, but warrants substantial appreciation.
Movies like this don't get made anymore because risking a budget on cult appreciation doesn't land well in a pitch, especially amid the modern environment of implicit piracy, if it's fair to label shared viewing as such.
Whether it was the first movie to feel vaguely cyberpunk-ish or not, doesn't matter much anymore, but Blade Runner had a deep gravitational pull that influenced visual concepts of the near future well into the late nineties.
Without a sequel, all of the open-ended background trivia that was never elaborated upon, left open a whole universe to imagine, and this is where the cultural resonance ties in. The people who enjoyed the movie were left free to speculate about what really went on in the off world colonies, given the curiousities revealed by film.
I wish more movies were like Blade Runner. It's a rare item. It's not a movie you watch once. It's not a blockbuster. It's not a movie you turn off, when it finds it's way onto your TV, however that manages to happen.
It might be because you've seen so many imitations of its aesthetic at this point that it looks old. When it came out it was shocking in both its violence and its pessimistic vision of the future.
As others here have mentioned, there are a few different versions, but that's a vast understatement. There exist seven[1] different versions of this film. The differences range from the removal of Deckard's 13 explanatory narrations to a complete change of the ending.
The real question is, what film called Blade Runner did you see?
The film, especially the original theatrical release that has the voiceover, echoes Film Noir and 1940s cop movies that you may not have seen, but many people in the 1980s would have had in memory.
The sequel follows the visual style of the original, but it doesn't have the film noir feel. It's tone is much harsher. In the original the characters are able to find some meaning in their lives, and even find love or redemption, but the sequel shows the future as much less forgiving.
>The sequel does the same at the end, isn't it? Father and daughter are reunited, and K finds meaning in the struggle.
I should have said 'escape' rather than 'meaning'. In the original Deckard and Rachael escape the dystopia. In the sequel it feels like there's no escape from the confines of the film. Even the daughter is still in her cage at the end.
I'm not sure if it's a film to watch with friends, at least not at home. It's a very visceral film, which needs close attention. Like the new Blade Runner, there are long periods without dialogue, slowly planning shots, and a lot of purposefully left out explanation of what is happening.
There's a whole universe in there. It's best watched alone in the dark.
I recommend Psycho Pass, a Japanese animation set in a future were an AI assigns a score to each citizen that determines how likely they are to become criminals. If the score gets too high they are... removed (or in some cases secured and put to use).
>Explanations were his forte. He was uncomfortable with most forms of ambiguity.
One can enjoy good explanations without necessarily enjoying them in movies. I think it's more fun like to try to explain what's going on by oneself from the few clues available. It seems to me that many works of art are polysemic. For example, a passage of Shakespeare can light up several different ideas in one's head thereby creating a stimulating, almost psychedelic experience. It makes the bare plot worthwhile (and worth explaining).
It's nice that you were able to put into words some things I like about classic books and poetry. Kafka was also a master of this.
That said, I don't enjoy it as much at all in films. Don't know why. I try to, for sure. It can be stimulating. But it's not on the level of "almost psychedelic" as you so aptly describe what I can experience with books.
This is funny. I read the book before I watched the film and didn't know that the movie was released before the book was published. I was amazed of how well the movie put images to what I had read in the book, and having read it, I didn't find it difficult to understand the movie, I just thought it was one of the best adaptations of a book I'd ever seen!
Yes, having read the book makes a huge difference. I tried watching the film first, but I failed and stopped watching a short way into it. Then at some point I read the book, which I really enjoyed. I thought I'd give the film a second chance and I'm glad I did because it was brilliant, having read the book.
Strongly recommend treating them as two integral parts of one work of art -- consuming either one and not the other will leave you much less satisfied.
I think that may be true for several other longer adaptations including STALKER (from A Roadside Picnic) and Apocalypse Now (from A Heart of Darkness).
Stalker is interesting in that Tarkovsky originally used the Strugatskys' screenplay, but went back and changed it.
Tarkovsky had become increasingly disillusioned about the whole project as he entered into production — he had fights with his cinematographer and had doubts about the story. At one point, they had filmed 6 months of material when they discovered the film negatives were unusable, for reasons nobody has been able to figure out (they used Kodak stock imported from the US, which Soviet labs were unfamiliar with, and it may have been out of date; Tarkovsky himself suspected it was sabotage). As a result, the project went into hiatus while Tarkovsky considered his next steps and sought new funding from the Soviet film board to reshoot. It was actually Arkady Strugatsky, after many discussions and drafts, who suggested a compromise, where most of the sci-fi elements would be stripped from the film, and he encouraged Tarkovsky to build up the screenplay again based on his own ideas.
It's fascinating to think what Stalker might have been, if Tarkovsky hadn't deviated from the original script. Roadside Picnic is certainly a novel that could work as a film or miniseries. (WGN considered producing a TV show based on Roadside Picnic last year, with Matthew Goode as the lead, but the pilot was rejected.)
Heart of Darkness/Apocalypse Now also has a pretty remarkable adaptation in video game format called Spec Ops: The Line. It's the same story premise cast as a modern military shooter. The gameplay is a fairly generic (some say this is an intentional statement on the drudgery of video game violence but I'm not so sure) but the story is excellent and there are lots of audible and visual details that show the gradual descent into madness of the main character and his teammates -- your voice lines go from professional callouts to angry emotional outbursts, "Hunt him down!", "Got the fucker!" etc.
On the other hand, I read the book before seeing the film and wish I had done it the other way around. Same case with The Martian too - I found myself distractedly comparing notes (in my head) too often while watching.
Perhaps the one book-then-movie reading/viewing sequence I'm happy with was Casino Royale. It was a good faithfully-gritty adaptation.
Kubrick was fairly known for heavily adapting the novels he used for inspiration. There are huge differences between the novel "Lolita" and Kubrick's adaptation. Same with "Shining" or "Clockwork Orange".
TBH, I'm really happy we didn't get a version with voice-overs and all. Hard to imagine a concept of "documentary" would have been better than what we ended up with.
Stephen King is publicly critical of Kubrick's treatment of "The Shining", mostly about its unchanging and one-dimensional characters. While I expect "2001" would not have been improved by a lot of explanatory voiceovers, I think "The Shining" would be seriously improved by Jack not being obviously crazy right from the first.
Most authors complained about it yes. Burgess accused Kubrick of not having understood a single word of "Clockwork Orange". Nabokov was the most gracious when he said that while Lolita was a very good movie, he didn't recognize his original work at all :)
I think it's a very difficult exercise to adapt a novel. Should you literally put on the screen what is written in the book ? What's the point ? You're not creating much. On the other hand, if you deviate from the original work, fans start attacking you for "betraying" the spirit of the book.
Billy Wilder told the story of adapting Stalag 17. Co-writer Blum showed up the first day with a copy of the original play and said “I thought we could use this.” To which Wilder showed him how they could use it: by dropping it on the floor and using it as a door stop.
Don't forget Dr. Strangelove, which is based on a very serious novel about nuclear war, "Two Hours To Doom" (published in the US as "Red Alert"), which Kubrick and Terry Southern turned into a comedy. (Today the book is out of print and largely forgotten except for its relationship to the film.)
The Godfather was pretty close to the novel, with much dialog line-for-line identical. The main difference was the subtraction of a few egregiously daft subplots.
Hum, there was also a lot of differences with the importance of the character of Johnny Fontane who is way more present in the novel.
In this instance, the "opposite" actually happened. Coppola is supposed to have said, when finishing the last page of the novel, "I'm supposed to make a masterpiece of this turd ?"
Steven King got to write the screenplay for his own version of the shining in the form of a TV miniseries. It was so bad it was actually funny instead of being scary. I think it is safe to say here that history has proven Kubrick right on this particular point.
Eh. Unlike the previous commenter, I didn't like the miniseries "way more," but in certain respects it's an unfair comparison--a workmanlike director rather than Stanley Fucking Kubrick, an overlong script treated as more or less untouchable, and what was, when push comes to shove, a TV movie budget for special effects. This affected nearly all of King's TV adaptations, with the possible exception of "Salem's Lot," which had the good fortune to be directed by Tobe Hoober. (For all the fondness the original "It" is remembered with, it's...more unintentionally comical than I think people remember, too.) Even so, I would argue that the miniseries does a better job of capturing the novel's themes about alcoholism and mental illness than the movie does. If they'd had a slightly more inventive director--and both the willingness and contractual freedom to make it a two-part miniseries instead of a three-part one--it would have been pretty great. Not Kubrick great, no, but great.
(Also: Steven Weber is a better Jack Torrance than Jack Nicholson is. Fight me.)
My understanding is that 2001 isn't so much an adaptation of the novel as it is a script that was written through extensive collaboration between both Kubrick and Clarke, eventually adapted into both screenplay and novel. I've got quite an interesting book that goes into some detail about it - "2001: filming the future"
I think it may have been in there that I read something to the effect of "Kubrick withheld his approval of the book because he didn't want to hurt the release of the film."
A Clockwork Orange is supposedly loyal to it's source material, the American edition of the novel.
> This plot discrepancy occurred because Kubrick based his screenplay upon the novel's American edition, its final chapter deleted on insistence of the American publisher.
I can appreciate that, but to me it feels like a deux ex machina given how the events unfolded up until the end. I think it demonstrates a cultural difference between Americans and British- by taking the route of personal growth, the book goes against the dour, nihilistic ending British would expect. I don't remember any buildup to Alex's epiphany, so I found it unsatisfying.
They both have happy endings. In the book, the final chapter is about Alex starting to mature into an adult.
The book is also organized into three sections of seven chapters meant to represent the three phases of childhood and ending in chapter 21: adulthood. The movie was pretty close to the book it just left off the 21st chapter as did the American version of the book.
I had to study the novel in high school as you mentioned the 21 chapter thing is important because the book is divided into 3 parts of 7 chapters and there is supposed to be an element of symmetry in the progression.
One of the central themes running through the book is free will and choice. It has been a fair amount of time now since I've read it but I believe the book opens with the quote "So what is it going to be then?" and ends with Alex making the choice to set aside his past. Importantly he also says something along the lines that if he ever has children he won't try to stop them making the same choices as he has.
One of the things our teacher repeatedly stressed was Saint Augustine and Anthony Burgess's Catholic background.
There was one other contributor who was equally or even more disappointed by the first viewing on opening night, the composer who had been hired to write the score, who found out then that Strauss had been substituted.
I think it's pretty clear that Moorcock is showing how ambiguity is an important or even necessary part of the human experience. He himself doesn't know for certain whether he was kicked off due to
A) Kubrick not knowing for certain who he was, or
B) Kubrick knowing exactly who he was but aiming to prevent Kubrick's earlier proposals to collaborate with Moorcock from coming into public view.
I notice that two different commenters here have reached two totally different yet sensible conclusions, based on exactly the same evidence. To me, Moorcock seems to be staking his flag into the ground over the inalterable need for truth to be filtered and interpreted by the human psyche - and that if even direct and worldly concerns like this have no straightforward single answer, the idea that our species might encounter spiritual or transcendental truths without ambiguity over what they actually mean is pretty tenuous.
It wasn't spelled out, but I think Kubrick didn't know who he was, and just didn't want anyone extra on the set. Given how behind and over-budget the movie was, and how many people wanted to visit such an unusual (for the time) film production, I can understand that.
Film people hate having non-crew people on set, they get in the way, are a safety risk, and are generally distracting. It's typically intensive work with 12-18 hour workdays, and for all the creativity and artistry it's also a busy industrial environment. People who don't belong or get on with the film crew are generally not made to feel welcome.
Kubrick probably had no idea who he was, from the sound of it. Moorcock says "I prepared to meet the man who had contacted me a year or so earlier," implying that they had never met face-to-face but only spoken on the phone or through Kubrick's people.
Clarke was actually diagnosed in 1962 (http://www.clarkefoundation.org/about-sir-arthur/). He developped complications in the 80s. He has lived in Sri Lanka since the 50s, which was probably not the best place for access to the brand-new vaccine that was just being invented at the same period.
The monolith really works as a Visial metaphor for the Cinema screen. Just as the movie starts as we are staring at the monolith ready to go on a literal space Odyssey.
It's a shame so many re-releases "fixed" the faux screen jump when Bowman nearly touched the edge, and instead shattered the glass. It really is brilliant, a movie within a movie.
All through the film there are so many rotating monoliths it's incredible that we never get the hint that the upright position of the monolith as it is presented is incorrect.
Even the actual end leaves us starting at the monolith, with the profound music.
If you dig for interviews you'll see that Kubrick always said that the simple surface story is the simple alien device that transforms man.
Did anyone ever definitively figure out what Kubrick was trying to do with "2001"?
(The interpretation that made the most sense to me was the one where the monolith is a metaphor to the cinema screen and Philosopher's Stone.)
The book addresses this. The Monolith is an interstellar "seed" sent out to stimulate the development of other forms of sentient life. This scene is supposed to depict the Monolith stimulating humanity's primate ancestors to develop tool usage (bones as clubs/etc) and catalyzing our societal development as a result.
Next, we see Humanity discover the Tycho Monolith buried on the moon. As the lunar dawn strikes it, it unleashes a massive burst of radio energy towards Jupiter and goes silent. This is implied as being an alert that Humanity has reached a crucial stage of development and the stage is set for the completion of its mission. You can alternately view it as an energy-based life-form shifting from one repository/location to another. So the Jupiter Monolith could potentially be interpreted as being the same sentience/AI/etc.
The other confusing scene is the ending, where Bowman travels through the Jupiter Monolith and becomes a Star Baby. This is the Monolith finishing its mission, and allowing Bowman to shed his corporeal body and become a being of pure energy, like the Monolith and its creators.
So all in all, the movie depicts the Monolith guiding humanity through all the stages of its evolution, from primates to a higher plane of existence. Then we have several artistic interludes that connects these scenes... an idealistic depiction of humanity's technological development as Floyd travels to the moon, and then a horror sequence as one of our creations malfunctions and becomes murderous.
The book is vastly more comprehensible than the movie, without some of the narration that Kubrick cut it's pretty difficult to follow what's going on. On the other hand, from an artistic perspective, narration would have ruined the film (imagine David Attenborough narrating...) so it's easy to see why Kubrick didn't go that route, and his imagery actually does fit the sequences Clarke describes perfectly, as long as you understand what's going on. It just does a shit job of explaining what's going on, for the most part.
When I read the book, I thought that too. However, Clarke's book is separate from Kubrick's movie. Kubrick focused a lot of things in the movie that were ignored in the book. Essentially, Kubrick and Clarke have two different interpretations. That's why I was asking the question. For example,
* The number 4 and 3 keep appearing in the movie.
* Lots of 90-degree angles in the movie compared to the book.
* Why everyone is cold and sterile as the move away from Earth.
* Rectangles and circles. HAL is a black rectangle and a red circle. The monolith is a black rectangular object.
* Kubrick excited at making the biggest "religious" movie.
* The original cut of the movie had the scene of the broken wine glass jerk/skip, giving the impression Bowman had realized he was in an artificial environment created by others.
* The appearance of diamond shapes in the movie and his other movies, The Shining and Full Metal Jacket: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MSo6s_xrj4chttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mpWMnlMIWAU
i wonder what his feelings were regarding the followup of 2010: the year we make contact. although certainly vastly different from the 2001 movie, i thought it was a great movie in its own right. and it seems it contains more of what clarke preferred, even having a few narrations by haywood floyd.
It also scrolls back to the top instantly if you try to search the text, like for the word "tears" so you can quickly look up the antidote to the clickbait headline. It also blocks copy-paste, so you can't share the relevant paragraph and save the rest of HN ten minutes of reading.
I literally had to scroll all the way to the very bottom in order to get to the point. If journalists want us to pay them then they must abandon this cancerous writing style of endless fluff and nonsense.
It's not "some journalist," it's Michael Moorcock, and not only that, he's recounting personal first-hand details of his interaction with a friend.
And you didn't even condense the salient detail for us, being that Kubrick had cut Clark's extensive voice-over narration, which wasn't revealed until the premiere, provoking Clark to walk out of the screening.
I think you nailed it. Clarke's dialogue in his script was mostly removed.
Relevant passage is this:
"Close to tears, he left at the intermission, having watched an 11-minute sequence in which an astronaut did nothing but jog around the centrifuge in a scene intended to show the boredom of space travel. This scene was considerably cut in the version put out on general release.
If Arthur was disappointed by Kubrick’s decision to cut his dialogue and narrative to the bone, he was eventually reconciled by being able to put everything left out of the film into the novel, meaning that each man was able to produce his own preferred version. The success of the film ensured that the book became a bestseller, as audiences sought answers to questions raised by Kubrick’s version, and Arthur soon got over his disappointment, going on to write three bestselling sequels to his novel, only one of which has been filmed so far."
Stanley Kubrick commissioned the prominent film composer Alex North -- famous for the scoring of Spartacus -- to write the music for 2001. However, film music is only recorded and added at the final stage of editing; normally all of the video is laid down first so that the music director knows exactly how long each scene will be and the music can be recorded at the right tempo to match up.
During the video editing process, "temp music" is used -- typically classical music because it's widely available -- so that scenes have the right feeling when they're viewed by the director. For this purpose, Kubrick selected the opening fanfare from Also Sprach Zarathustra for the start of 2001, The Blue Danube for "floating through space" scenes, et cetera. However, after viewing the edited scenes with the "temporary" background music, Kubrick decided that he really liked it that way -- and so rather than using the score which North was composing and recording, he re-edited the video to match the tempo of the classical recordings he had used.
Legend has it that Kubrick didn't know how to break the news to North -- but however it happened, North turned up for the premiere expecting to hear the music he had spent six months composing and recording, and was devastated to hear the supposedly "temporary" music used instead.