“Close to tears, he left at the intermission”: how Kubrick upset Clarke (2017)
newstatesman.com
newstatesman.com
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.
And wow, by the way. That's harsh.
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".
[1] "Alex North's 2001: World Premiere Recording" [ https://www.amazon.com/Alex-Norths-2001-Premiere-Recording/d... ]
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.
On my PC, it's a bit plodding and slow, but on the big screen, it's a completely visceral and intense experience like no other film I've seen.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_70_mm_films
I love to geek out on this film so this thread is a welcome respite.
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.
And don't get me started on The Shining.
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.
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.
An interesting article about the setting and social environment: 'HAL, Mother, and Father: Watching the sixties and seventies through 2001 and Alien.' https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2015/01/09/hal-mother-an...
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.
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.
By the way, as touched upon in Moorcock's article, Clarke would not have appreciated you calling his novel a novelization.
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.
I still enjoyed it though, and rewatch it occasionally.
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.
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.
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 wonder if prints of it still exist in a vault somewhere.
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.
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.
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.
The hot dog scene by itself is a classic bit of screenwriting.
If you were going to cut material from 2001 that made it unbearable to watch, the film would be 5-10 minutes long.
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.
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.
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.
Not just any lenses! Lenses designed for NASA to capture the far side of the Moon: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Zeiss_Planar_50mm_f/0.7
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.
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.
Maybe if I watched it again I would get more of it.
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 ;)
I couldn't get past the first season. I couldn't suspend my disbelief for it to be watchable.
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.
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.
The real question is, what film called Blade Runner did you see?
There's a whole universe in there. It's best watched alone in the dark.
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.
> it doesn't have the film noir feel
That would have been gimmicky. It was innovative when the original was released but it's now been done to death.
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 thought that was a brilliant film, too.
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).
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.
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).
Perhaps the one book-then-movie reading/viewing sequence I'm happy with was Casino Royale. It was a good faithfully-gritty adaptation.
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.)
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.
It's not like King is some king of nuance in characters himself...
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.
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 ?"
https://www.google.com/search?q=francis+ford+coppola+masterp...
And the Fontane subplot is one of the two daft subplots that I mentioned.
I find [this argument][1] that one of its central themes is a suppressed history of violence and bloodshed convincing.
A film masterpiece.
[1]: http://www.collativelearning.com/the%20shining%20-%20chap%20...
Off the top of my head the best King films have been "The Shining", "Misery", "Pet Semetry", "Stand by Me", & "The Shawshank Redemption".
So many more films have been terrible (I've not seen the recent version of "It").
(Also: Steven Weber is a better Jack Torrance than Jack Nicholson is. Fight me.)
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."
Imagine A Clockwork Orange having a happy ending... Well, that's how the book ends.
EDIT: A friend who read the book initially just said it was not happy, but agreed it is when you only know the movie.
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.
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.
While I am a bit of a fan of Kubrick, I think he did the story a great disservice by ending it as he did.
> 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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Clockwork_Orange_(film)#Diff...
As an aside, I would personally love to meet Michael Moorcock. He is one of my favorite authors.
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.
But I could be mistaken.
Polio in the 1980s??? How did that happen?
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.
> that the upright position of the monolith as it is presented is incorrect.
Can you provide references for either of these?
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.
* 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_xrj4c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mpWMnlMIWAU
https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/books/2017/01/close-tea...
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."
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.
No one is forcing you to read the “fluff and nonsense” of an award-winning 78-year-old author who was friends with A. C. Clarke.