When was 2001 written

As the film lurched into existence—without a set plot line, much less a finished script—its behind-the-scenes reality often proved as outlandish as its futuristic fiction. Clarke and the Making of a Masterpiece. Stanley decided to take his chances with the universe. Early in pre-production Kubrick proposed to Clarke that they co-write a novel first, then base their film script on it—rather than the other way around.

In fact, the director had promised Clarke that their novel could be published before the film came out. A behind-the-scenes shot of Stanley Kubrick on set. During production, Kubrick at first refused to let spacewalking stuntman Bill Weston wear a second cable for safety, although he was 30 feet above a hard concrete studio floor.

In another incident, Kubrick refused to let Weston punch holes in the back of his space helmet, which meant the stuntman was perpetually on the verge of blacking out from carbon-dioxide poisoning as he engaged in complicated maneuvers while hanging high above the camera.

But Kubrick had fled the scene, causing production to grind to a halt for several days. The mysterious black monolith began as a translucent Plexiglas tetrahedron, which ultimately assumed a monolith shape because Plexiglas cools better that way. The book is a bit better. The Hal episode is surprisingly short in the book, and is very well written indeed — the suspense is superbly done. But everything that comes after that is a bit of a letdown. I had read the novel back around when I was in high school, ten years before I finally got to see the movie.

Then you understand that the monolith is enhancing the intelligence or the potential intelligence of these australopithecines, bringing them closer to their potential so they can survive and become more. The movie is a more visual and subconscious experience but I think the novel by Clarke and the movie by Kubrick enhance each other. They are both among the most profound of their mediums.

But I understand a lot of people will prefer whichever version they experienced first. In fact, Clarke even wrote a book where he gave alternate versions of the story that he had considered before deciding on the final version. Name required. Email required. Click here to cancel reply. Get the best cultural and educational resources on the web curated for you in a daily email. We never spam. Unsubscribe at any time.

Open Culture scours the web for the best educational media. Comments 6 You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

Fred says:. July 7, at am. Kresling says:. July 7, at pm. The lines between film and reality were blurred. In the coming decades, conspiracy theorists would allege that Kubrick had helped the government fake the Apollo 11 moon landing.

Kubrick brought to his vision of the future the studiousness you would expect from a history film. By rendering a not-too-distant future, Kubrick set himself up for a test: thirty-three years later, his audiences would still be around to grade his predictions. Part of his genius was that he understood how to rig the results. The plot was simple and stark. Back in England, a massive camera system was built to project these shots onto screens, transforming the set into an African landscape.

Actors, dancers, and mimes were hired to wear meticulously constructed ape suits, wild animals were housed at the Southampton Zoo, and a dead horse was painted to look like a zebra. They dutifully reported their findings: most of the participants had indeed touched God.

Yet some of the most striking effects in the film are its simplest. In a movie about extraterrestrial life, Kubrick faced a crucial predicament: what would the aliens look like? Cold War-era sci-fi offered a dispiriting menu of extraterrestrial avatars: supersonic birds, scaly monsters, gelatinous blobs. In their earliest meetings in New York, Clarke and Kubrick, along with Christiane, sketched drafts and consulted the Surrealist paintings of Max Ernst. For a time, Christiane was modelling clay aliens in her studio.

Its eerily neutral and silent appearance at the crossroads of human evolution evokes the same wonder for members of the audience as it does for characters in the film.

By Attraction. By Experience. Learn More. Before You Visit. Things To Do. Courses Camps and Programs.