![]() Renata Adler, in the Times, described the movie as “somewhere between hypnotic and immensely boring.” Its “uncompromising slowness,” she wrote, “makes it hard to sit through without talking.” In Harper’s, Pauline Kael wrote, “The ponderous blurry appeal of the picture may be that it takes its stoned audience out of this world to a consoling vision of a graceful world of space.” Onscreen it was 2001, but in the theatres it was still 1968, after all. “2001” isn’t long because it is dense with storytelling it is long because Kubrick distributed its few narrative jolts as sparsely as possible. ![]() There is something almost taunting about the movie’s pace. “2001” is a hundred and forty-two minutes, pared down from a hundred and sixty-one in a cut that Kubrick made after those disastrous premières. A businessman overheard on his way out of a screening spoke for many: “Well, that’s one man’s opinion.” Strangelove, Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.” From the look of things, the Zeitgeist was not going to strike twice. It had been four years full of setbacks and delays since the director’s triumph, “ Dr. Kubrick, a doctor’s son from the Bronx who got his start as a photographer for Look, was turning forty that year, and his rise in Hollywood had left him hungry to make extravagant films on his own terms. The after-party at the Plaza was “a room full of drinks and men and tension,” according to Kubrick’s wife, Christiane. Clarke, Kubrick’s collaborator, was in tears at intermission. ![]() Kubrick nervously shuttled between his seat in the front row and the projection booth, where he tweaked the sound and the focus. A sixth of the New York première’s audience walked right out, including several executives from M-G-M. In the annals of audience restlessness, these evenings rival the opening night of Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring,” in 1913, when Parisians in osprey and tails reportedly brandished their canes and pelted the dancers with objects. To hear more feature stories, download the Audm app for your iPhone.įifty years ago this spring, Stanley Kubrick’s confounding sci-fi masterpiece, “ 2001: A Space Odyssey,” had its premières across the country. It missed the deadline, but critics and fans alike would probably agree it was well worth the wait.) 2001: A Space Odyssey hit theaters in April 1968-a year before Apollo 11 landed on the moon and provided another glimpse of what space travel might look like.Audio: Listen to this story. MGM's contract with Kubrick stipulated that 2001 would wrap in 1966. Trumbull played with colored filters, photographed different graphics slides, and then projected them onto the set. So his team faked it by mounting high-contrast film negatives onto mobile glass panels. That was advanced for the 1960s, but Kubrick knew it would be too crude for the year 2001. MIT, where Kubrick had met with AI and robotics professor Marvin Minsky, was developing them, but they had a resolution of just 512 pixels across. But Doug Trumbull, who did airbrush paintings for films, hit a speedbump: Computer-generated graphics didn’t exist in any real way yet. Of course, to animate HAL 9000, Kubrick’s team had to create the graphics. In the end, Kubrick warmed to IBM's drawings for the sake of creating another character and adding drama to the movie. "Rival companies, such as Motorola and Raytheon, were pushing toward miniaturization, spurred in large part by NASA’s urgent requirement for computers small enough to fit inside the new lunar capsules." "IBM’s assumptions were behind the times," Bizony writes. He wanted something smaller, like a control panel. He proposed to Kubrick that "a computer of the complexity required by the Discovery spacecraft would be a computer into which men went, rather than a computer around which men walked." Kubrick lost it. Eliot Noyes, IBM's industrial design consultant, based his renderings on current technological achievements, which were room-sized supercomputers used only by professionals and the military. They went to IBM, then the world's largest computing company, for drawings and blueprints that could imagine the future of personal computing. Kubrick and Clarke needed to conceive of an onboard computing system for the Discovery, which they initially called Athena, not HAL.
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