Underman's 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY - 30 YEARS ON
25 YEARS ON

2001: A Space Odyssey - 30 Years On

Mr Kubrick's masterpiece, in retrospect.
Mystifying

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This page contains some sample press coverage that accompanied the 25th anniversary screening of 2001 by the American Film Institute.

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This page contains:

*For Stanley Kubrick, a space odyssey of the mind*For Arthur C. Clarke, a nostalgic, 25th year odyssey
*For Keir Dullea, a role that transcended the rest*'2001: A Space Odyssey', mystifying for 25 years
* Details that make an epic

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'2001': Space odyssey of the mind

Ask the man in the street to hum the opening bars of Richard Strauss' "Also sprach Zarathustra", and most likely you'll get a blank stare in reply.

Ask that same guy to give a rendition of the theme to "2001: A Space Odyssey," and you're almost guaranteed to get a custom version of the bombastic horns and pounding timpani that have made it perhaps the most familiar movie soundtrack of all time.

It is, of course, the same piece of music.

And it's a testament to the profound impact that director Stanley Kubrick's space epic has had on popular culture that a masterwork by a German composer has become the symphonic equivalent of pop music.

The April edition of Preview, the American Film Institute's magazine, puts it like this: "'2001' is perhaps the most original and audacious of great films, a huge and surprising hit that has been so widely admired, parodied and ripped off that even people who have not seen it recognize its most famous images and moments."

"2001" was that rarest of breeds, a box- office hit that won thunderous praise, even awe, from critics. Directors from around the world voted it one of the 10 greatest films ever made in a 1992 poll in the British magazine Sight and Sound.

Mr. Kubrick's films have the visual and ideological coherency that signify an artist, not merely a film- maker. This combination of talent has served Mr. Kubrick well; five of his movies are acknowledged masterpieces: "2001," "A Clockwork Orange," "Dr. Strangelove," "The Killing" and "Paths of Glory."

Even the music is carefully chosen to serve Mr. Kubrick's intellectual purposes. The dramatic effect of "Zarathustra" is obvious, but it signifies more than a call to attention for the audience.

Strauss called the piece a "tone poem," a 19th- century term for program music, which consciously attempts to illustrate a text or idea. In this case it was philosopher Freidrich Nietzsche's work of the same name.

Compare the final scenes of the movie, when astronaut David Bowman goes through the "stargate" and is reborn as the star child, with these words of Nietzsche's: "Now I die and decay...and in an instant I shall be nothingness. Souls are as mortal as bodies. But the complex of causes in which I am entangled will recur - it will create me again. I myself am part of these causes of the eternal recurrence."

The ideas are the same, from text to music to film.

For instance, Strauss' motto for the opening bars was "The individual enters the world or the world enters the individual." The first time the theme is heard in the film is just before the Dawn of Man sequence, in which the evolution of man is set in motion by a mysterious black monolith. (The Dawn of Man was recently parodied on "The Simpsons," demonstrating as well as anything the effect the film has had on pop culture.)

But while "2001" owes much to Nietzsche and Strauss, it is unmistakably Kubrickian.

His films are about walls. He portrays people as prisoners in a world they have created. Mankind creates societies based on rules and class structures and then surrenders to them.

"2001" depicts a future in which man has created complex machines to do the work. The machines ultimately do all the thinking, while people do the menial, the mechanical, labor. People become machines.

Stanley Kubrick has some important things to say in the film. His characters, however, have virtually nothing important to say.

There are roughly 43 minutes of dialogue in this 141- minute film, and almost all of it is meaningless. "2001" is pure cinema, in that the pictures, not the words, tell the story.

Viewers learn very little from the mostly banal exchanges between characters. Information is passed along to the characters - and the audience - through computer readouts and television broadcasts and through the ... interpretation.

Consider when Mr. Kubrick made the movie: 1968, the apogee of the '60s drug culture. The stargate sequence looks a whole lot like an acid trip. This is precisely the director's intent. The film was billed, when it opened, as "The Ultimate Trip."

"The most powerful level on which a film works on the audience is on the subconscious," Mr. Kubrick has said. "On this level we are all equally perceptive and equally blind. Watching a film is really like taking part in a controlled dream."

As soldiers in Vietnam used to say, there it is.

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The Washington Times

'2001': A nostalgic, 25th year odyssey

Arthur C. Clarke stole the show at the commemoration of the 25th anniversary of the release of "2001: A Space Odyssey" Thursday night. And he wasn't even there.

The renowned science- fiction author spends most of his days in Sri Lanka and so wasn't able to make it to the reception at the INTELSAT building or the screening at the Cineplex Odeon Uptown. But conversation at the reception invariably turned to him, and his recorded message had the audience at the theater rolling with laughter.

Mr. Clarke wrote the screenplay with director Stanley Kubrick and advised on technical issues. He is an acknowledge expert on space, with extensive ties to NASA, which makes former Bell Labs scientist John Pierce (known as "the father of the communications satellite") all the more impressive a figure.

"When he started to make this film, he asked my help," Mr. Pierce said. "We've been friends for many years."

One of the things Mr. Pierce showed Mr. Clarke in his laboratory was a voice synthesizer. He demonstrated it by having it sing "Daisy, Daisy." In the film the HAL 9000 computer sings the song when astronaut David Bowman (Keir Dullea) is disconnecting him.

Mr. Clarke's taped message displayed his acerbic wit and monster ego, especially when he recounted meeting Mel Brooks at a screening of the sequel, "2010." Mr. Brooks won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for "The Producers" in 1968, beating out the writers of "2001."

"Mel, you stole my Oscar," Mr. Clarke told Mr. Brooks.

"You're a genius," Mr. Brooks countered without missing a beat.

"So I was mollified," Mr. Clarke said.

Mr. Clarke's ego was in evidence again when he offered this stinging rebuke of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration: "I can't help but think that if NASA had used [the space shuttle design in '2001'], there would be less blood on its carpet today."

One of the guests, Dennis Gilliam, admitted being a big fan of the film. He flew in from California at his own expense to attend and even brought along the restored spacesuit Mr. Dullea wore in the film. He got it from a museum in Los Angeles when it went bankrupt.

"They're the only remaining things from the movie that we know of," Mr. Gilliam said.

He collects actual spacesuits and has uniforms of varying completeness from the Apollo, Gemini and Mercury missions. The "2001" suit is the only one he owns that wasn't worn on a space mission. It took him 18 years to hunt it down.

"I've always loved the movie," Mr. Gilliam said. He was a teenager when he saw it and, he said, "It inspired me to take up physics." He works as a physicist for TRW Aerospace.

Mr. Clarke's biographer, Neil McAleer, also was there. He told a few anecdotes about the strange Kubrick- Clarke alliance.

The director was a bohemian night owl, while the novelist, a former farm boy, was a scientist who rose early every day.

"They were very different personalities," said Mr. McAleer, who hails from Baltimore. "The point is what they shared: an insatiable curiosity for the world and the universe around them."

Also present were Fred Ordway, a technical consultant for the film; Arno Penzias, a Nobel Prize- winning physicist and vice president of research for Bell Labs; and Fred Durant, director of the Arthur C. Clarke Foundation.

Mr. Dullea, now residing in the "whatever happened to?" file, was scheduled to attend but never showed up.

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For Keir Dullea, a role that transcended the rest

* Playing second banana to an infuriatingly polite computer is no actor's dream job.

Except for Keir Dullea, who jumped at the chance to work with Stanley Kubrick on 2001: A Space Odyssey.

"I don't know if it did a great deal for me," says Dullea, 56, who appeared in 1963's David and Lisa and 22 other features. "But it's among the films I'm most proud to be in."

He fully understood his on- screen mission as the bland astronaut Dave Bowman: "Kubrick didn't want those goateed scientist types from old grade- B movies. But he didn't want the astronauts to be completely robotic. He just wanted them to be more robotic than Hal."

Dullea, who had only a faint notion of what the finished product would look like, was most impressed by the opening "Dawn of Man" sequence. "It made the hair on the back of my neck stand on end when the ape man was fiddling around with the bones and then suddenly something purposeful enters his motions."

As for 2001's much-debated meaning, Dullea saw it as "a kind of Eastern philosophical view of existence, a cyclical view that all things come around again." But ultimately, "Stanley had his own vision and, like most artists, he refused to give explanations. What's important is your own experience."

Although not all experiences are equal, Dullea heard about one man in San Francisco "who ran down the theater aisle and screamed, 'It's God, it's God,' and went racing right through the screen."

Dullea, who now sticks to stage work, still remembers when his art and life met in a kind of harmonic convergence - the day in 1969 when Neil Armstrong took one small step.

"I was invited to tape a CBS interview to be used" during the historic broadcast. "But before they could film it, they announced Armstrong was going to walk on the moon." Who should also be watching at the studios but 2001 author Arthur Clarke. Dullea couldn't resist checking his reaction.

"When I looked over, he had tears in his eyes."

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USA TODAY Thursday April 1 1993

"2001: A Space Odyssey", mystifying for 25 years

2001: A Space Odyssey landed on the big screen 25 years ago. In honor of its anniversary, USA TODAY's Susan Wloszczyna explores the lasting impact of Stanley Kubrick's innovative classic.

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That mysterious black monolith.

The banal dronings of Hal, the computer from hell ("I'm sorry, Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that").

The rolling psychedelic landscapes that inspired ads to declare the experience "the ultimate trip".

Neil Armstrong may have walked on the moon in July 1969. But Stanley Kubrick got there first.

In April 1968, the cutting- edge director (Dr. Strangelove) officially unveiled 2001: A Space Odyssey, his giant leap for movie- kind. Visually astounding, thematically confounding, Kubrick's journey into the future unleashed the same kind of "cultural shock" experienced by the film's space travelers, who discover the first sign of alien life buried under the moon's surface.

It's understandable that audiences were puzzled if not peeved by this space-age Fantasia. After all, how many sci-fi movies, before or since, open with a band of prehistoric apes, feature spacecraft waltzing to The Blue Danube and end with a giant floating fetus?

Critics back then variously found the 141-minute film "somewhere between hypnotic and immensely boring" (The New York Times) and "a bolt of brilliant, high- voltage cinema (Christian Science Monitor). Perhaps the most telling observation came from Alexi Leonov, the Russian cosmonaut who was the first man to "walk" in space: "Now I feel I've been in space twice".

Twenty-five years, many NASA missions and $50 million in box- office rentals later, the achievements of Kubrick and his co- creator, renowned science writer Arthur C. Clarke, can be fully appreciated.

In honor of 2001's anniversary, there will be limited large- screen engagements of the film around the country - including Washington, D.C., where the film originally had its world premiere, starting tonight. And MGM/UA will bring out a special- edition video and laser disc in June.

Experts often hail the film as the mothership of all space- travel adventures, the crucial link between the grade- B creature features of the '50s and otherworldly epics of Steven Spielberg (Close Encounters of the Third Kind) and George Lucas (the Star Wars trilogy) in the '70s and '80s.

Its ambiguities gave it "a lasting artistic power," says Neil McAleer, who wrote a recent authorized biography of Clarke (Contemporary Books, $25). "It made the point that some things in the universe - including extraterrestrial life - may simply be beyond human understanding."

Considering dialogue fills less than a third of the film, one has no choice but to concentrate on the images (at times enhanced, during its original run, by the popular mind- altering drugs of the day).

"I was immediately awe-struck by the technical achievement," recalls David Hutchinson of Starlog magazine. "The genre was never presented in such a big way before. It has so many firsts."

Not only did Kubrick expand cinematic horizons by spending $6.5 million of his $10.5 million budget on special effects alone, winning an Oscar for his efforts. He also popularized the heralding strains of Richard Strauss' Thus Spoke Zarathustra. As realized by Elvis Presley (who used the classical piece to signal his stage entrances) and Madison Avenue (who used it to sell such products as TV dinners), the sound of those booming kettle drums was to be forever synonymous with the arrival of something cataclysmic.

McAleer's book traces the seeds of the 2001 script in the so- called "cerebral marriage" between Clarke, who wrote the best- selling novel while the movie was being made, and Kubrick. As Clarke recalls in the bio, Kubrick "was determined to create a work of art which would arouse the emotions of wonder, awe, even, if appropriate, terror."

The futuristic Frankenstein monster that would provide that terror was the star of the most memorable segment - Hal, the H.A.L. 9000 computer. Hal is the only member of the Discovery crew that knows the reason behind the mission to Jupiter. Never has high- tech paranoia ("Just what do you think you're doing, Dave?") been so well captured. "I got quite scared," said Clarke when he was writing at the time, "when the computer started going nuts, being alone in my room with my electric typewriter."

Much of what 2001 predicted has come true. AT&T has unveiled a VideoPhone similar to the picturephone in the film. And the high- security voice- ID system is now a matter of fact.

As for Hal - who, as revealed in his rambling death scene monologue, celebrated his birthday on Jan. 12, 1992 - his actual arrival is many years down the galaxy. While computers can talk, so far none is capable of independently deciding to kill a human or two (thank the science gods).

The greatest enigma of 2001 lies in its final moments, when astronaut Dave Bowman (Keir Dullea) travels through a stargate, lands in a bedroom filled with elegant antiques, rapidly ages, dies while making contact with the monolith and is reborn as a star- child.

Much is made explicit in Clarke's book. But even the author was unprepared for Kubrick's interpretation and, just like the public, felt baffled. "I didn't know exactly how it was going to end myself."

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Details that make an epic

Some behind-the-scenes tidbits from 2001:

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*Except for two baby chimps, all the apes in the "Dawn of Man" sequence were actors in suits.
* There are two theories on how the name Hal was derived. Kubrick created an acronym combining the words "heuristic" and "algorithmic," the two main learning systems. But some writers propose that Hal refers to IBM, with each letter taken back one step in the alphabet.
* As Neil McAleer's Clarke bio reveals, one of the most lasting effects of 2001 may be its influence on how we refer to the 21st century. "Stanley asked me if we should say 'two thousand and one' or 'twenty oh one,' like we say 'nineteen oh one,'" says Fred Ordway, a technical adviser. "We decided 'two thousand and one' sounded better."

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This page: Copyright © 1997, 1998 by Underman
Articles used: Copyright © 1993 by USA Today and Copyright © 1993 by The Washington Times (see extracts for specific sources)
Writers quoted: Susan Wloszczyna (USA Today) and Jeffrey Staggs (The Washington Times)

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