Kubrick with a heavy Panaflex camera on his shoulder at Shepperton.
DECEMBER 1965–JULY 1966
Never let your ego get in the way of a good idea.
—STANLEY KUBRICK
Production of 2001: A Space Odyssey began on December 30, 1965, at a thirty-foot-deep excavation in the Moon’s surface within the prominent southern crater Tycho, a location where Earth was at a permanently low inclination above the lunar horizon, one advantageous for cinematography. Actually a 120-by-60-foot quadrangle of interlocked, fretted metal plates rising from the concrete floor of Stage H at Shepperton, the Tycho Magnetic Anomaly set (TMA-1, to Kubrick, Clarke, and company), location of the first alien artifact ever discovered by humankind, was as sizable an affair as could be housed under a studio roof within the borders of the United Kingdom. Twenty-one months had passed since Kubrick wrote Clarke proposing that they make “the proverbial ‘really good’ science fiction movie.”I
It’s difficult to exaggerate the magnitude of the transition between preproduction and production. Preproduction is aspirational and notional. It’s where filmmakers project an idealized vision of what they want to make and then endeavor to set up the best possible conditions to achieve it, be they financial, logistical, or conceptual. The right collaborators, the right equipment, the right schedule. It’s not unlike planning a battle.
Production is where one discovers what percentage of those aspirations will actually be achieved. It’s where the rubber meets reality’s road. Any military historian will tell you that even the most meticulously organized offensive deviates from its objectives the moment it’s launched. To quote boxer Mike Tyson, everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth. Still, achieving even a reasonable percentage of those original aspirations can frequently yield something a good deal better than okay.
Kubrick’s ambitions were much greater than that, though he might not have admitted as much. Despite the seeming chaos—the whiplash switches of plot and concept, the last-minute design changes, the ongoing winnowing of dramaturgical chaff—his preproduction process had delivered an entire major studio complex’s wealth of resources to his fingertips. Behind it stood a significant budget, with the possibility of going back for more, should he go over—something the accounting department was already warning he would.
His recruitment had been impeccable. Kubrick had arrayed around him a team of exceptional talent and ability. He could count on the unstinting support of studio boss Robert O’Brien. His cinematographer, Geoffrey Unsworth, was among the best in the business. Much the same could be said for the rest of his collaborators. And he had a world-class intellectual interlocutor in Arthur C. Clarke, who’d accepted the reality of ever-lengthening story development—something by no means over yet, despite their best efforts, despite the completed sets, despite the wide-gauge 65-millimeter film stock even now being threaded into those fat Panaflex camera magazines.
Even if his tendency was always to aim higher than yesterday’s iteration of his vision—a process producing a constant upward ratcheting of effort and aspiration, sometimes at the expense of his collaborators’ sanity—Kubrick had achieved conditions more than adequate to vault beyond his original goal. What he was after now was a film spanning “nothing less than the origins and destiny of Man”—something he hadn’t allowed Clarke to state so explicitly in his draft article for Life, the one they hadn’t published.
Everyone present for 2001’s first production day cites one sight above all that transmitted the thrill of the event: Kubrick hoisting the twenty-four pound bulk of the Panaflex on his own shoulder and filming his space-suited Moonwalkers from behind as they descended the ramp toward the monolith below. Assistant director Derek Cracknell flanked him on one side, lugging the battery case. Camera operator Kelvin Pike brought up the other, monitoring focus and aperture. It was simultaneously the most vivid demonstration of Kubrick’s hands-on approach possible and something not unlike the opening move in a chess game.
A young assistant to Roger Caras, Ivor Powell, remembered the moment vividly. “This was Panavision, these were big buggers, and to see him just handle this camera and do it, it was just incredibly exciting,” he said. He was particularly struck by Harry Lange’s space helmets. “Jesus Christ, they were good,” he said. “Shivers up my spine. They were so beautiful, unbeaten until today.”
Actually, Kubrick’s handheld shot was made on Day Two: Friday the thirty-first, New Year’s Eve. It made it into the final film, providing a subjective first-person sense of being among the astronauts as they descended toward the mysterious rectangular object. December 30 had been spent getting a number of static high-angle wide views, including from a tall rostrum platform, with plenty of empty black space left around the well-lit Tycho Magnetic Anomaly excavation at the center of the frame.
The first main unit film exposed for 2001: A Space Odyssey was thus devoted to simple, powerfully evocative, stage-setting master shots. In them, six astronauts in silver space suits walk to the edge of the excavation and pause to look at the monolith at its center. On this opening production day, they were filmed such that the pause permitted a short exchange between base commander Halvorsen and space agency official Floyd:
“Can we go down closer?”
“Certainly!”
Perhaps recognizing the dialogue’s banality, Kubrick would redo the establishing shot on January 2 with no words spoken. In those takes, one of which is seen in the final film, the astronauts simply pause to observe the monolith from above in silence. Rather than being rushed to the lab for development, this footage was couriered to cold storage at MGM, where it became “held takes.” The visual effects crew would eventually fill in the black areas around the brightly lit central part of the set with rugged lunar topography, complete with a blue-white Earth hanging in the starry sky.
It’s a measure of Kubrick’s confidence in the process he’d worked out with his two visual effects Wallys—Wally Gentleman and Wally Veevers—that for each shot requiring that a lunar landscape be added later, only two takes were held for that purpose. This left little latitude for error. They certainly couldn’t be redone later in the event of a mistake: the set would have long since been struck. And because they’d been filmed so early in the production, those Shepperton shots requiring additional effects work would languish undeveloped in cold storage for almost two years before finally being run through an animation-stand camera to add the surrounding lunar terrain. It was a risky procedure, and far from the usual practice with precious first-generation camera negative stock, which was customarily developed immediately. As an opening example of the complexity of the game that had just commenced, it required both nerve and luck.
Prior to the Tycho Magnetic Anomaly rehearsals on the twenty-ninth, a number of second-unit sequences had been filmed as well. (In film production, a second unit is typically tasked with capturing shots or sequences that don’t require a director’s physical presence, while the main or first unit works under his immediate supervision.) Most of 2001: A Space Odyssey was shot on 65-millimeter film, but all of this material, shot just before Christmas, was filmed on standard 35-millimeter stock and would later be seen on various screens embedded in the sets. It was intended to simulate TV programs or other video content. Scenes produced before Shepperton included a passport girl, a judo match, and a young couple chatting in a futuristic, javelin-shaped General Motors concept car. All three are visible in the final film, with the latter glimpsed briefly on the flat screen mounted to the seat in front of a sleeping Heywood Floyd as he is vaulted toward the space station in his Pan Am shuttle.
So to be truly accurate, production on 2001: A Space Odyssey actually began on December 17, 1965, with second-unit sequences shot on 35-millimeter. That day already featured lines written by Kubrick that subtly differentiated his stance from Clarke’s more optimistic take on the space age. A young woman in a brick-red uniform welcomes a space station visitor to “voice-print identification.” Having instructed him on procedures necessary to pass through her automated portal, she continues:
Despite an excellent and continually improving safety record, there are certain risks inherent in space travel and an extremely high cost of payload. Because of this, it is necessary for the Space Carrier to advise you that it cannot be responsible for the return of your body to Earth should you become deceased on the Moon or en route to the Moon. However, it wishes to advise you that insurance covering this contingency is available in the main lounge. Thank you. You are cleared through voice-print identification.
Like so much of the film’s scripted dialogue, it wouldn’t make it to the final cut.
• • •
Not technically a soundstage because of its lack of soundproofing, the Shepperton venue was big enough to contain its own ecosystem. Flies buzzed through the floodlit camera rehearsals. On January 1 Kubrick noticed that one had landed on a helmet during a take, alerted the script “girl” (actually an adult woman, Pamela Carlton), and the event was duly noted in the Daily Continuity Report—a document intended to help ensure that a film’s scenes flow seamlessly. Another day, a bat kept on flitting down among the astronauts and past the monolith. No doubt seeking lunar flies, it was hunted in turn by a propman with a net. Finally captured after bringing production to a halt all morning, it bit its tormentor on the hand, drawing blood before being hauled outside and released into the frigid air. A much-touted “magnetic induction” communications system, installed in the venue at great expense, was supposed to allow two-way communication between Kubrick and his space-suited actors. Worthy of its own press release, it failed to work as advertised.
Despite these problems, shooting concluded ahead of schedule on January 2. In part, this was because so much dialogue had been cut just prior to showtime and transferred to another scene: the Moon Bus ride between the lunar base and the Tycho excavation site. Script drafts from late November had featured a conversation between the astronauts in the presence of the monolith, during which they debated its purpose and also made clear that it would soon be exposed to sunlight for the first time in four million years. Asked about the object’s color, one was to have replied, “At first glance, black would suggest something sun powered. But then why would anyone deliberately bury a sun-powered device?” This, in turn, would have clarified why the monolith emitted “a piercingly powerful series of five electronic shrieks” at the end of the scene—sending its visitors into paroxysms as they tried to protect ears unreachable under their helmets. But Kubrick, evidently already intent on inserting calculated measures of ambiguity into his film, elected to convey this part of the story purely through image and sound cues.
Dramatic films are usually shot out of sequence, and a series of scenes depicting Floyd’s journey to the Moon followed over the next few days. With Shepperton’s flies and bats behind them, the troupe of actors, technicians, makeup people, wardrobe assistants, grips, electricians, set dressers, visual effects people, and note takers made their way back to the more sterile environs of Borehamwood’s Stage 2, where a set representing the circular, elaborately padded passenger area of the spherical Aries lunar transit vehicle had been constructed. There a stewardess in one of Hardy Amies’s crisp white Pan Am uniforms attempted to bring food to a sleeping Heywood Floyd, and in a series of takes on January 4, the Aries’s captain, played by Ed Bishop, tried to squeeze information out of his VIP passenger. “Rumors about some kind of trouble up at Clavius” were circulating, he said, referring to their Moon base destination. Meanwhile, Floyd’s rectangular tray of slurpable liquid food floated up from his lap in the zero gravity—an effect achieved with a simple but effective fishing line rig devised by Wally Veevers.
He was politely rebuffed by Sylvester, who feigned ignorance. If it had made it into the film, their dialogue would have furthered a story element made explicit in a space station scene to be shot later that month but meant for earlier in 2001’s narrative arc. The next day, January 5, they shot one of the film’s few overtly humorous moments: a deadly serious Heywood Floyd, intently reading the zero gravity toilet instructions (“Passengers are advised to read before use”), all ten points of which were helpfully located outside the toilet.
• • •
It was the morning of January 6, and Vivian fidgeted and squirmed. She wanted to do what Daddy asked her to, and she was wearing her new red blouse with the frilly sleeves, but the lights were very bright in her eyes—why did they have to be so-ooo bright?—and he was over there, beside the camera, not here, closer to her. And that man was holding a big thing over her head—he’d said it was to record her words, the ones she’d been trying to remember—but why was it called a “boom” if it was supposed to listen? It was all very confusing. Her sister had warned her it would be strange. Anya had already gone through this yesterday, and even though her mother was hovering in the background, occasionally offering words of encouragement, and even though everyone had been very nice and friendly, there were all these strange men around, doing strange things with strange pieces of equipment.
They’d done three “takes” already, but nobody had taken anything away, as far as she could see, and they said this was the fourth. Daddy had said, very quietly, “Cut,” in the middle of the first, but nobody cut anything that she could see, and then he asked her not to look off to the side but instead to look right at him—there, where he was sitting, right beside the camera, with the lights in her eyes all around, so she couldn’t really see him. Now he asked if she was ready, and she said yes, and they were starting again. First she heard somebody say, “Turn over,” and then somebody else said, “Turning.” Then the first person said, “Quiet, everyone!” and then “Roll sound,” and somebody else said, “Speed.” And then a fourth person came up to her with a small rectangular blackboard with a kind of stick on top that you could raise and lower, and raised it and lowered it—it made a small sound, like a clack—and then he went away very quickly, and Daddy said, “Hello, sweetheart, how are you?”
And she’d waited for a bit, trying to remember the answer. Finally, she said, “All right”—but he’d already started to say something on top of that. So he said, “I’m sorry, let’s start again,” and they did, this time without all the cutting and taking. “Ding-aling-aling,” Daddy said, like a telephone. “Yes,” she said. “Hello,” he said. And they went from there.
She remembered everything, all the words, until they got to Rachel going to the bathroom—that was the name of her real housekeeper: Rachel—but then she’d forgotten what to say after that. So Daddy said, “No, sweetheart, you ask me something, if I’m coming to your party,” and she’d said it, but very quietly, and he said, “Do it again. Remember, the party is tomorrow, and say it right to me, real loud.” So she’d asked him, Was he coming? And he’d said he was sorry, he couldn’t come, he was away, and he wouldn’t be coming home for about a year—a year!—but he’d get her a present anyway. And he’d asked if there was anything she’d like, and she’d thought about it but couldn’t remember, so she said, “A telephone.” And daddy had said, very patiently, “You say ‘A bush baby,’ ” and so she’d said that immediately, in case she forgot it again—“A bush baby,” very fast—and he’d said, “Wait till I ask you the question again.” She waited, and then said it, but then he’d said, “Say it again, but wait till I’ve finished speaking now.” And she had, and it had been okay.
And finally after she stood and said “Bye-bye,” and after Daddy had said “Bye-bye,” and after he’d said “Cut” again—but this time it was “Cut, print,” not just “Cut”—after all that, everybody clapped, and Daddy came to give her a hug, and told her it was very good, and he was proud of her, and Mommy hugged her, too, and took her home.
• • •
On Monday, January 10, Ivor Powell was delegated to go pick up Keir Dullea at Southampton, where his ocean liner, the SS United States, had docked that midafternoon. Like Kubrick and Dullea’s costar, Gary Lockwood, the actor had a fear of flying. The most convincing film about space exploration ever made would be captained and crewed by groundlings.
Powell’s mother had died on Saturday, so he was in a shaken state but had elected to fulfill his duties anyway. After greeting Dullea— a square-jawed, appropriately handsome type with strikingly blue eyes—they watched together as his Mercedes 250 SL was hoisted from the giant ship’s hold and deposited on the pier. Dullea had been in England less than a year before, working on Otto Preminger’s psychological thriller Bunny Lake Is Missing—a nightmare experience under a shouting Teutonic despot. The actor had high hopes that this would be a different experience. At age twenty-nine, he was still up-and-coming, but to Powell, seven years younger, he was glamour personified—a bona fide movie star—and his arrival with a two-seater sports car gave a kind of James Dean frisson to the moment. Powell soon discovered that Dullea was the opposite of snooty—on the contrary, he was personable and open, very sympathetic when he heard about his escort’s loss, and as they drove into town in the Mercedes, they hit it off.
Lockwood had arrived in London a few weeks earlier, and then gone on a jaunt to Rome and Paris, where he’d spent time with Jane Fonda—a friend ever since he’d played a supporting role alongside her in There Was a Little Girl on Broadway in 1960. He’d returned to London on the sixth, subletting a Bayswater apartment from Sean Connery’s wife, actress Diane Cilento. Starting in the second week of January, both actors were regularly present at Borehamwood, being fitted with costumes and undergoing makeup tests designed to make them look like they were in their midthirties. Their first shooting day was scheduled for the thirty-first.
As an assistant to the film’s chief publicist, Powell spent a lot of time with Dullea and Lockwood. They were good unpretentious company, always ready for a joke and a party—something that would soon be helped along by ample quantities of unstructured time between camera setups, which extended for many hours and even days as Kubrick and Unsworth lit the challenging sets. Although both were married—Keir to actress Margot Bennett, and Gary to Stefanie Powers—Swinging London was peaking, and the city had shed its bleak postwar torpor and emerged as a colorful center of style, sexual liberation, and rock ’n’ roll. As good-looking actors working on a big-budget film with an internationally acclaimed director, they had major sex appeal, they knew it, and they were not averse to taking advantage of it.
Both were professionals, however, and knew how to learn their lines—even if they’d just been revised for the fifth time that morning. On Stage 2, a short walk from Hawk Films HQ behind MGM’s central administrative building, Kubrick discovered that the same wasn’t necessarily true of his middle-aged North American expats.
From the outside, the Moon Bus set looked less like the miniature of a lunar transportation workhorse that Doug Trumbull had added detail to, and more like a weirdly shaped amusement park hotdog stand: an oblong wooden box with multiple windows and an elongated snout, surrounded by film lights. With its padded walls, airplane seats, stowed equipment, and recessed ceiling lights, the interior was thoroughly credible, however, and associate producer Victor Lyndon had scheduled just two days of production there starting January 12 for what was expected to be an easily shot sequence. Their dialogue had been filled out with lines taken from the Tycho Magnetic Anomaly scene, and was intended to bridge Heywood Floyd’s Clavius Base conference room talk and the arrival of the astronauts at the monolith. The bulk of the scene was actually shot on the thirteenth and fourteenth, and featured three principal actors: William Sylvester as Floyd, Robert Beatty as Halvorsen, and Sean Sullivan as Dr. Bill Michaels.
From the very beginning, there were dialogue problems. The first two takes—more than five minutes of film—were unusable. Soft-spoken and solicitous as usual, Kubrick had little to say beyond “Let’s try it again,” with assistant director Derek Cracknell conveying camera and sound cues in his distinctive East End twang. Typical of Kubrick, he’d set the frame, tweaked the lights, and only then allowed operator Kelvin Pike behind the camera. Unsworth stood just outside the cramped set, keeping a keen eye on developments.
After the standard UK film production litany—“Turn over,” “Turning,” “Roll sound,” “Speed,” “Slate it,” “Action”—they tried again with a third take, out of sequence in the scene’s middle section; a wide shot with Sylvester and Beatty seated on the frame’s left and right sides, respectively. Sullivan approached at frame center, offering sandwiches to his colleagues. “Looks pretty good,” Sylvester offered. “Well, they’re getting better all the time. Whoops,” said Sullivan, dropping his sandwich on the floor. When he didn’t hear the expected “Cut” from Kubrick, he squatted and scooped it up.
“You know, that was a . . . an excellent speech you gave us, Heywood,” said Beatty, flubbing the line. Again Kubrick refrained from cutting, and they rolled onward. Sylvester complimented his colleagues on how they’d handled “this thing”—the monolith’s discovery and the subsequent cover story concerning an epidemic at Clavius Base—whereupon Sullivan put down the pesky sandwich, retreated to the bus’s front end, and returned with photographs of the excavation site.
After some more discussion, it was back to Beatty: “When we first found it, we thought it might be an outcrop of magnetic rock, but all the geological evidence was against it. And not even . . . um . . . big nickel iron meteorite could produce a field as intense as that. So, we decided to have a look.”
Once again, Kubrick desisted from cutting.
Beatty: “It seems to have been deliberately buried.”
Sylvester, mildly incredulous: “Deliberately buried? And your tests don’t show anything?”
Beatty: “We’ve only been able to make some preliminary checks. We’re still waiting for security to get in a . . . or, to clear in a special evaluation team to go over everything. What we have found is that the surface is completely sterile, it’s completely inert, and we haven’t detected any vibration, radioactivity, or any other energy source apart from some magnetism.”
Despite the new flub—making four in all, including the sandwich and “Whoops”—Kubrick went to the planned end of the shot. At 480 feet of film, or about four minutes in total, it was a mistake a minute. He spoke reassuringly to Beatty—an experienced character actor now in his late fifties who’d once been a B movie heartthrob—and they tried again. Once more he flubbed several lines, in Takes 4, 5, and 6. So they broke for lunch and reconvened that afternoon to try again.
After lunch, Beatty’s shipwreck really started. Kubrick’s new strategy was to chip away at the problematic parts with shorter takes. Notes taken on set tell the tale. Slate 99, Take 1, almost three minutes long: no good, dialogue. Take 2: cut short at less than a minute due to Beatty’s flub. Takes 3 and 4, just over a minute of film: no good, dialogue again. Take 5: to Beatty’s relief, Kubrick said, “Print that.” But the reprieve was short; the next two takes were no good, dialogue again. Then Beatty began crashing repeatedly into the dialogical rocks. Fourteen takes followed, making a total of twenty-seven that day, with sixteen no good, dialogue—or twenty minutes of tossed negative stock. Those few the director deemed worthy of printing were filled with flubbed iterations of his “preliminary checks” speech. In all, Beatty attempted the three lines about thirty times; fifteen in the eleven takes that were printed, and an unknown number in the sixteen that weren’t.
Throughout, Kubrick had been as cool and collected as the mid-January drizzle that had been pelting the studio roof all day. He didn’t like confrontations—they were both counterproductive and antithetical to his way of working—but he’d been laboring intensely without break for many months trying to master this exceedingly complex production, and he expected others to hold down their parts. He occasionally said of acting, “Real is good, interesting is better.” This was clearly neither, and having shot forty-five minutes of film with almost half of it going straight into the trash, he was quietly fuming.
He hid it well, though, and calmly told Cracknell to wrap. They would try again tomorrow.
• • •
The Clavius Moon Base conference room scene of 2001: A Space Odyssey isn’t remembered as particularly remarkable, given the more fancy and complex spacecraft sets. At first glance, it is nothing but a rectangular room largely indistinguishable from corporate meeting areas today. But although perfectly bland and anonymous, as such spaces usually are, it represents a fascinating example of both Kubrick’s perfectionism and his sophisticated understanding of photographic technique.
The director had insisted not only that the three large, unadorned walls visible to the viewer be the only light sources for the room but also that this trio of oblong rectangles have absolutely no brightness variations whatsoever. They needed to be completely uniform: uninterrupted sheets of pure white light. This was not nearly as easy to achieve as it might sound. They couldn’t simply use a brute-force approach and flood the walls with so much light that they were overexposed. That would only blow out the scene and make it unfilmable. And as soon as the walls were brought down to reasonable light levels, it was extremely hard to ensure that hot spots or other subtle tonal variations wouldn’t show up when they were captured on film.
After discussing the problem with Kubrick, Unsworth worked with Masters to create a simple but highly effective light-diffusing structure. The conference room itself was essentially just a ceiling, built on the bottom of a wooden frame suspended by steel cables from Studio 5’s roof beams, and a carpeted floor made of dense blue wall-to-wall nylon fiber. As for the walls, despite their apparent solidity—in the film, they look like featureless blocks of glowing marble—they were simply large sheets of translucent polyester light-diffusing gel, stretched tight over the gap between ceiling and floor. The room’s corners were mostly hidden by drapes.
These gels alone wouldn’t have ensured uniform illumination, however, and Masters had constructed another external structure, surrounding the entire conference room, intended solely to diffuse light. Giant floods, each powered by a single industrial-strength tungsten bulb the size of a cantaloupe, were mounted on top of the conference room’s external ceiling frame—a rectangular phalanx of light artillery pointing counterintuitively away from the set below and at the surrounding structure. Made of reflective bounce boards, it served as a kind of diffusion moat. By the time all that firepower had ricocheted around and reached the gels, it was so dispersed that they finished the job, and the light was rendered completely flat inside. A small miracle of photographic problem solving, it was a remarkably efficient way to achieve Kubrick’s goal of absolutely invariable illumination.
So far, William Sylvester had been entirely prepared and unruffled. His Moon Bus line readings had been relaxed and word perfect. But Beatty’s travails four days previously must have spooked him. Now the three actors from that scene, plus nine extras playing Clavius Base officials, had moved into the flawlessly opaque wash of light bathing Masters’s conference room, where Sylvester was to deliver the longest single monologue in the film. To make things harder, Kubrick was so pleased by the neatly geometrical precision of his master shot—which he’d framed, in what would become a directorial signature, as a symmetrical composition, with the speaker’s podium at the center and the rest of the room in mirrored equalization—that he wanted to cover the whole thing in a single take.
Sylvester’s monologue was about 280 words, broken into nineteen uninterrupted sentences, after which he was asked a question by Sean Sullivan, and then had another 100 or so words to say, totaling about 380. In principle, that many lines within a single take of four and a half minutes shouldn’t be a big deal for an experienced actor. After all, in Stratford, Ontario, in 1959, Sylvester had played Orlando in As You Like It, a character with almost that much to say the moment the curtain went up—and that was in Shakespearean English. But he didn’t have other characters to play off of now. It wasn’t a dialogue, it was a speech. He was on his own.
Sylvester’s first problematic sentence was, “It should not be difficult for any of you to realize the extremely grave potential for cultural shock and social disorientation contained in the present situation, if the facts were prematurely and suddenly made public without adequate preparation and conditioning.” A bit of a mouthful, to be sure, but, in any case, he found himself unable to say it. He blew the phrase over and over, with the number of takes growing to a total of twenty-one, only five of which were deemed good enough to print. The last nine constituted an uninterrupted, building humiliation of unprinted flubs and “Let’s try it agains” and “Turn overs” until Sylvester, who’d started visibly trembling and was bathed in flop sweat, said finally, “I can’t do it anymore. I’ve had it”—and was helped from the podium by one of the nurses always on call and taken away.
Sylvester in the conference room.
To make matters more humiliating, a far larger crowd was watching than had been present during the cramped Moon Bus scene: camera assistants, grips, sound crew, and costume and makeup people. Visual effects assistant Brian Johnson recalls witnessing the unfolding scene. Sylvester, he said, “never got it; he tried all day. He just lost his nerve. He had, virtually, a nervous breakdown. He shook. He shook, and he had to be taken off the set because he was shaking.” Throughout this ordeal, Kubrick had been seated in his chair directly beside the giant Panavision camera just outside the open fourth wall of the conference room. He’d been quietly furious after Beatty’s failings a few days before, and now he was utterly uncompromising. He wanted his master shot, and he aimed to have it.
Although Johnson professes great respect for Kubrick, whom he remembers with some warmth, he characterized the incident as an example “of how cruel Stanley could actually be with his actors.” Asked about the director’s demeanor, he responded, “He wasn’t nasty. But he just wouldn’t let go.”
• • •
Roger Caras had played multiple roles in the film industry prior to being a PR man and then VP of Kubrick’s production companies. He’d been assistant director of story and talent for one studio, and casting director for another. He’d been Joan Crawford’s press secretary, no less, and he’d dealt with many a problematic actor in his time—something Kubrick knew very well. One day in mid-January, the director summoned him after a long, aggravating shoot. It’s unclear if he was upset following Beatty’s failings in the Moon Bus scene, or Sylvester’s in the Clavius Base conference room.
In any case, Kubrick was “beside himself,” remembered Caras. He vented about how many takes he’d just blown and said he never did get the scene, which was easy enough to do.
“Is he on drugs?” he demanded about the actor in question.
“Yes,” Caras said.
“Are you certain?” asked Kubrick.
“Yes, he is.”
“Well, do what you have to do. I don’t want to ever have a day like that again. Don’t tell me what you have to do.”
Unsure exactly how he should handle the situation, but in no doubt that the problem was now his, Caras went off to find the actor, whom he located in his dressing room. After brief opening pleasantries, he announced the reason for his visit. “We’re going to a press conference tomorrow at ten o’clock,” he said cheerily. “Stanley won’t be shooting. Please come to a press conference.”
The actor looked surprised. “What’s it all about?” he asked. “It’s unusual to have a press conference at this stage of production.”
“Well, yeah,” Caras conceded, suddenly serious. “We’re gonna announce that we’re gonna be replacing you, because you’re a junkie, and you can’t learn your lines anymore, and you’re useless as an actor.”
At this, the actor in question stared disbelievingly for a moment, and then burst into tears. After a wordless pause punctuated by sobbing, Caras extracted a promise concerning the rest of the shoot. “Which was kept,” he remembered. “I made no such statement. There was no press conference. But I scared him to death.” From then on, the man knew his lines.
A few days later, Kubrick took Caras aside. How had this miraculous transformation been brought about? “I told Stanley exactly what I’d done,” Caras recalled. “And Stanley just kept saying, ‘Jesus, oh Jesus,’ and he was writhing that this was said. I said, ‘Stanley, you said, “Do whatever you have to do.” Are you having trouble getting your film in the camera now?’ It was that kind of thing. Whatever Stanley needed.”
• • •
Throughout December and January, a strangely inwardly focused predecessor to the London Eye Ferris wheel was rising and being accessorized in Stage 4. With an interior designed by Masters and Lange in New York and constructed in sections at MGM, and a hulking exterior frame engineered and built by Vickers-Armstrongs, 2001’s centrifuge set represented a mechanical way of producing artificial gravity for long-duration space missions. At thirty-eight feet in diameter, ten feet wide, and thirty tons, it was among the largest kinetic film sets ever built. It would doubtless have been bigger still, but its frame took it to the maximum height the tallest soundstage at Borehamwood allowed.
Constructed at a cost of over $750,000, the centrifuge was supposed to be the Jupiter-bound astronauts’ main living quarters, and would gobble up about one-eighth of the film’s original budget, which MGM had adjusted upward to $6.5 million—though after all the dust settled and the accountants had a chance to do their work, it eventually worked out closer to one fourteenth of the film’s final price tag of between $10.5 and $12 million. The central part of the studio floor had to be jackhammered open so that a new concrete base could be sunk into the ground to accommodate the wheel, with dual pyramidal I-beam support structures bolted directly into it. The set’s two sides were perfectly matched drums, their external parts made of mirrored steel-fretwork circular walkways with curving wooden floors and a ring of film lights, all pointing outward from the hub, or “down” toward the outermost rim—meaning in the direction of the set’s hamster-wheel floor, invisible from outside. A disc-shaped chain of diffusion gels ensured evenly distributed light within the cloistered interior.
Arranged at various points along the external wheel on both sides were batteries of Bell & Howell 16-millimeter projectors, each pointing at one of the centrifuge’s flat-screen displays. Twelve were mounted on a rectangular frame backing HAL’s console alone. With the additional medical displays for the three hibernating astronauts, a total of fifteen projectors ran simultaneously. Getting all of them to run together and in synchrony was a nontrivial accomplishment, and it provided an example of a management technique Kubrick sometimes used: playing his talented staff off against one another. Rehearsals had been scheduled to commence on January 31, but by midmonth, a satisfactory way of mounting the projectors within the rotating structure still hadn’t been devised. Kubrick’s lead on this, as on all mechanical effects, was Wally Veevers.
Veevers was a fascinating character. He’d handled the filming of Dr. Strangelove’s B-52 bomber, among other things, and had visual effects credits extending as far back as the seminal 1936 British science fiction movie Things to Come—the film that had caused Kubrick to exclaim “I’ll never see another movie you recommend!” to Clarke in New York. Bald and wide, with a physiognomy similar to Alfred Hitchcock’s, only with a pug nose, he was well loved by his coworkers, extremely capable, and notorious for his short fuse, which periodically caused him to turn bright red. Veevers had constructed an unwieldy rig of steel joists for the centrifuge projector arrays, such that the projectors themselves were arranged at different distances from HAL’s tightly clustered face-panel screens—a design that, in turn, necessitated lenses with different throws to compensate for the distance discrepancy. Unfortunately, this had introduced a new problem: the screens supplied by the more distant projectors were dimmer than the others.
Kubrick was aware of all this, and, unbeknownst to Veevers, had summoned Brian Johnson and told him they were running out of time. “I want you to redesign it, ’cause it’s not going to work the way Wally is designing it,” he said. Johnson had been hired at the age of twenty-six straight from producer Gerry Anderson’s successful Thunderbirds TV series, where he’d been responsible for constructing and filming the program’s rocket planes and spacecraft. He’d been working on 2001’s miniatures, which by now were being made entirely at the studio. After his discussion with Kubrick, he hiked over to Stage 4 to study the situation.
Johnson quickly realized that the projectors could be arranged differently. Each upright one could be matched with one bolted below it. Although nominally upside down, the lower projectors immediately took care of the main problem introduced by Veevers’s design, namely some screens being dimmer than others because of varying projector distances, and since the whole set would be turning, all the projectors would be going through full 360-degree rotations: there was no up or down here. Of course, in Johnson’s design some of the projectors were upside down in relation to the set inside. But in those cases it was easy simply to run the film upside down and in reverse—something that immediately oriented their footage “up” vis-a-vis HAL’s “face” inside the wheel. It was an elegant solution.
He rigged four projectors in this way just a few feet from Veevers’s more complicated array, alerted Kubrick, and a side-by-side test was arranged. The massive wheel had been turned so that HAL’s multi-screen console, which centered on the computer’s cyclopean red eye, was at the bottom, easily accessible through one of the rectangular floor hatches.II Arriving with Veevers, Kubrick said, “Right, show me what you’ve got.” Trumbull and Logan’s animated films depicting HAL’s data stream had been printed on eight reels of 16-millimeter film and threaded by assistant film editor David de Wilde through the various projectors. Veevers, Johnson, and Kubrick climbed inside the set through a trap door in the floor. Veevers’s array was behind the four screens on one side of HAL’s eye, and Johnson’s behind a similar set of screens on the other.
When de Wilde rolled the films, it was immediately clear which system was better: Johnson’s. They climbed silently out of the centrifuge. “Wally, file your stuff. We’re using Brian’s,” Kubrick said, departing. A furious Veevers picked up a light stand with both hands, smashed it onto the floor, and stalked away, his head a navigational beacon fading in the gloom.
He didn’t talk to Johnson again for weeks.
When they did their first test run with a full slate of fifteen projectors and the centrifuge spinning simultaneously—thirty film reels in total, all rotating within the gargantuan set’s mega-reel—they’d somehow forgotten to take into account the gravitational forces at play, and the reels all fell off, clattering two by two onto the circular wooden flooring of the centrifuge’s external framework.
• • •
If a map were to have been made of Kubrick’s on-set peregrinations during the making of 2001: A Space Odyssey, the orbits inscribed therein would always have centered on the camera. He might go on long cometary trajectories to outer regions, the better to consult with Geoffrey Unsworth on lighting issues, or Tony Masters on the sets. But he always returned reflexively to the mammoth Panavision, which was almost invariably outfitted with Zeiss lenses, contrary to Panavision’s contractual understanding. He usually had one or more still cameras around his neck as well.
If the shot was even slightly complex, the director usually operated it himself—no reflection on the abilities of operator Kelvin Pike but simply Kubrick’s way. This was one of the many reasons why the director couldn’t and didn’t last in Los Angeles in the late 1950s. Union rules prohibited anybody but the cinematographer and his assistants from operating the camera in Hollywood, and a Kubrick unable to handle his own camera was a Kubrick artificially hobbled. Even when he didn’t operate it, he always set the compositions, which were invariably things of beauty.
Alongside Kubrick was Unsworth, the lighting cameraman, aka the director of photography. As with Pike, in practice it was a role he shared with Kubrick—something this avuncular, balding, soft-spoken professional had adapted to with the egoless assurance of a master who firmly believed that cinematography should always serve directorial intent. A versatile, intuitive craftsman, Unsworth had shot thirty-five features before 2001. Veterans of the production remember him and Kubrick in ongoing quiet dialogue throughout the long production weeks, sometimes flanked by Pike and camera assistant John Alcott, sometimes off by themselves as they hashed out photographic approaches to some of the most complex sets and setups in filmmaking history.
Geoffrey Unsworth.
If Kubrick wasn’t on set throughout the lighting process, he invariably tweaked the results on his return. As with the Clavius conference room, most of 2001’s scenes were characterized by a chilly, almost preternaturally uniform illumination. This wasn’t easy to achieve, and he and Alcott had established an effective way to determine if their lighting ratios worked. Their solution wasn’t based on light meters but by taking innumerable black-and-white Polaroid stills.
Late in the preproduction period, Alcott had conducted many tests to calibrate the relationship between the Polaroid’s aperture settings and those of their lenses. After this had been definitively established, those small rectangular instant photographs—which at the time required peeling away from their negative and coating by hand with a wet fixative—were the most important on-set guide to how their filmed shots would actually appear. This master-slave relationship between a mass-production camera and their expensive 65-millimeter Panavision was remarkably effective, and somewhat comparable to using a cheap car radio speaker to test a mix in a recording studio.
Kubrick and Alcott’s innovation was part of why the director frequently had a boxy Polaroid Land Camera around his neck while on set, its black bellows extended. But their replacing of traditional light meters with Polaroids was also an outgrowth of Kubrick’s prior practice of checking compositions with stills. “I think he saw things differently that way than he did looking through the camera,” Alcott commented.
When you’re looking through a movie camera, you’re seeing a three-dimensional image, so you’re getting a feeling of depth. But when Kubrick looked at this Polaroid still, he would see an entirely different, two-dimensional picture—it was all one surface and closer to what he was going to see on the screen. And many times, just before we were going to shoot, he would change the setup because he didn’t like what he’d seen in the Polaroid.
As a result, throughout the production, the director shot an estimated ten thousand Polaroids as the lighting was adjusted, then readjusted, and the camera positions were modified. They ended up strewn everywhere, a kind of instant-image confetti piling up in the corners and being swept away by janitors every evening. Only those stills judged of direct utility for continuity or composition, or in determining key exposure settings, were retained by Alcott, who kept them neatly in an album near the camera.
Kubrick’s attention to cinematographic questions was the legacy of a lifelong engagement with photography predating even his five years as a photojournalist for Look magazine in the late 1940s. His understanding of aperture, focal length, depth of field, film stock, frame rates, and exposure times was unparalleled. Asked about this in 1980, Alcott—who would shoot 2001’s Dawn of Man sequence, and later serve as director of photography on Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971), Barry Lyndon (1976), and The Shining (1980)—said, “If he were not a director, he would probably be the greatest lighting cameraman in the world.” Kubrick’s mastery in this regard sometimes resulted in an on-set dynamic where, when finally ready to roll after hours of lighting, Unsworth would call out to Alcott, “Make that a five-six”—an aperture of 5.6—and Kubrick would countermand, “No, a six-three,” whereupon Unsworth would give Alcott a discreetly good-humored wink, and they would split the difference.
Or not. At the time they worked together, Unsworth was fifty-two and Kubrick thirty-eight. One day late in the production, Caras invited Unsworth to lunch in the MGM restaurant. They were making their way past the studio’s slab-sided soundstages to the commissary building when he noticed the cinematographer squinting meditatively down at the pavement as he walked, his brow furrowed, clearly lost in thought. “Geoffrey, why so deeply contemplative?” asked Caras.
Unsworth considered the question for a minute. “You know, Roger,” he replied, “if anyone had told me six months ago that I had anything of any substance to learn about my profession at this stage of the game, I would have told them they were mad. I have been a top British cinematographer, a top man, for twenty-five years. In fact, though, I have learned more about my profession from that boy in there in the last six months than I have in the previous twenty-five years. He is an absolute genius. He knows more about the mechanics of optics and the chemistry of photography than anyone who’s ever lived.”
He stopped and turned to look Caras in the eye. “Are you aware of this?”
• • •
With the giant wheel almost finished, MIT artificial intelligence pioneer Marvin Minsky paid a visit to Borehamwood, and Kubrick proudly took him to demonstrate its capabilities. One issue the Hawk Films contingent had been facing throughout its construction was that the MGM workmen installing lights, panels, and bulkheads would simply forget the nature of the object they were working on, drop their tools, and go to lunch. With Minsky standing directly at its base, the better to appreciate its magnificent kineticism, Kubrick ordered that the centrifuge be taken for a spin. With a low moan of power and a portentous whirr, thirty tons of steel heaved into motion. At the half-turn mark, a heavy pipe wrench shifted with an ominous rasping sound at the twelve o’clock position and plummeted forty feet—slamming into the ground with a sickening blam directly at the scientist’s feet.
“I could have been killed!” Minsky remembered. “Kubrick was livid and shaken and fired a stagehand on the spot.” Once the dust had settled, the scientist’s near-death experience created an interestingly paradoxical yin and yang of fact and fiction—wheels within wheels again. It was Minsky who’d recommended the terms behind HAL’s acronym, and he’d also been the one who confirmed to Kubrick that computers thirty-five years in the future might be advanced enough to suffer breakdowns when faced with apparently irresolvable conflicts. And Kubrick had named one of 2001’s hibernating astronauts Kaminsky in tribute to the creator of the first self-learning neural network, SNARC.III An astronaut in turn destined to be bumped off, during the course of its mission, by a murderous supercomputer.
• • •
Following the Clavius conference room scene—which Kubrick was finally forced to break into shorter takes in response to Sylvester’s problem—all the Space Station 5 material was shot relatively uneventfully in late January. On the nineteenth, the first actual words spoken in 2001’s running time, twenty-five minutes after the film’s opening title—“Here you are, sir, main level, please”—were enunciated by the elevator operator (played by model and actress Maggie London) as the station’s circular lift rotated into view. On the twenty-fifth, Christiane brought little Vivian back into the studio, this time to watch her father film Heywood Floyd calling her on the station’s videophone.
By the end of January 1966, all attention was focused on the giant wheel. The first two weeks of February were spent on camera, camera mount, video assist, and lighting tests, as well as actor rehearsals. It was the most complex shooting environment anybody on the highly experienced crew had ever encountered.
In practice, two categories of shots were planned: those with the set turning, and those with it stationary. The centrifuge could rotate in either direction at speeds sufficient for an actor to stroll along at a normal pace at the bottom. When turning at its maximum speed, three miles per hour, he could break into a jog. Shots where the wheel wasn’t in motion were relatively straightforward and were handled in a regular way, with auxiliary film lights sometimes brought in to augment the diffused light cast from the wraparound ceiling.
Stanley and Vivian Kubrick watch William Sylvester at the videophone.
Filming while the set was turning was another matter. The kinetic shots were also divided into a further two categories: those in which the camera remained near the bottom of the wheel, and those where the camera (and its two-person crew) rotated all the way around as the centrifuge turned. In both cases, the actors usually remained at the bottom—though in one spectacular shot, Lockwood was strapped to his seat at the dining table and then rotated to the top, where he was seen upside down eating lunch when Dullea entered and climbed down a ladder from the center—thirty-eight feet below and 180 degrees away from Lockwood; then he walked around to join him, with the turning wheel effectively bringing him around to his deputy. Both actors ended up in a heads-up position by the end of the shot. It was a bravura piece of work.
Centrifuge conference with, from left to right: Stanley Kubrick, John Alcott, Kelvin Pike, Keir Dullea, Gary Lockwood, and Geoffrey Unsworth.
These two species of camera position—if one can use the term for a set in motion—had necessitated the construction of a unique pair of shooting platforms. For shots in which the camera remained near the bottom, it was mounted on a dolly that rolled along on four large rubber wheels—fixed in relation to the studio outside, but in motion vis-a-vis the rotating set. On the other side of the centrifuge floor, the dolly was mounted to a platform external to the set by a thin steel blade, which permitted the camera to be hoisted up to 40 degrees from the very lowest extension of the wheel—or about twenty feet up the sloping floor from the actor. This was necessary because when walking or running, Dullea and Lockwood always stayed at the bottom of their high-tech hamster wheel. Once a given angle was chosen and the dolly fixed, the giant set turned around it, and the blade knifed between rubber matting on the floor, which fell back into place after it passed.
The second species of centrifuge camera position required an even more ingenious camera mount: one in which it was now fixed in relation to the centrifuge, but in motion vis-a-vis the studio outside. According to a production memo that January, a rig permitting the Panavision “to be rotated like a clock, as well as being turned over and over in the other plane of movement” was required. MGM engineer George Merritt soon devised an ingenious gyroscopic framework permitting the camera—as well as camera operator Kelvin Pike and camera assistant John Alcott—to ride around and around as the set turned, all while bolted securely to the wall. A nested pair of stainless steel hoops, the spinnable mount allowed its passengers full freedom to pan and yaw the camera no matter what their orientation. In 1984 Alcott remembered the experience of riding Merritt’s rig.
We would go up with the wheel itself. It was a little hairy being up there thirty-five feet. It was like going to a fairground. There was a massive gimbal mechanism to hold the camera. It was a 65-millimeter camera—a sound camera, too, so it had a big blimp on it. The camera was attached to the base, and we could sit on it; and as we went up, the movement would be counteracted by the movement of the wheel. It was a bit hairy. We used to have lifelines up there, you know, which we could jump on anytime we needed. Gyro lines—you’d just have to step onto them, and you’d come down.
Since the lens was always pointed at the actor down at the bottom even as the camera crew rotated all the way around, Pike and Alcott had to perfect the art of keeping their feet out of the frame. Once that was accomplished, however, the handmade technologies devised to shoot in their topsy-turvy environment would enable them to produce some of the most blatantly original footage in filmmaking history.
• • •
With all thirty projector reels now affixed antigravitationally to their stubs by retaining clips, and each projector housed in thick-walled sound-insulating blimps, the first actual takes in the big wheel were made on February 16—the so-called roadwork sequence in which Gary Lockwood jogs along, shadowboxing as the wheel turns around him. In the final film, those four shots of astronaut Frank Poole working out constitute an extraordinarily innovative display of filmmaking. The first extended take alone served to catapult the audience into a wondrously strange realm in which up and down no longer had their accustomed meanings.
In this first interior view of the giant Jupiter-bound spacecraft Discovery, the elongated rectangular aspect ratio of the 65-millimeter film frame is used to full advantage, and we see Poole coming toward the camera from a horizontal position, face left and feet right. He’s running along on what transpires to be a kind of endlessly circular floor, and as he jogs by, his horizontal position changes rapidly to a vertical one, as seen from directly below—but this, too, transforms quickly, becoming a kind of flip-turn from his first position: now Poole’s running away, sneakers to the left, head to the right. Meanwhile, without a cut or change of camera position, our point of view continues to morph seamlessly from what may initially have seemed a shot from midway up a wall, to a view clearly looking up from the floor, and finally a vertiginous look straight down, from the ceiling—unless he’s running across the ceiling? It all has a Möbius-strip, M. C. Escher, WTF quality, a disorienting tour de force in which Lockwood runs circles around the audience and prior cinematic verities. Nothing like it had ever been seen before. All that problem-solving had paid off. Kubrick had made it new.
Because only Pike, Alcott, and Lockwood could be inside the set while shooting—and sometimes, when the camera was on its dolly, Lockwood was alone—a small video camera was mounted directly beside the Panavision’s lens. This allowed Kubrick to monitor events from a closed-circuit TV monitor in front of his command chair outside—among the first times such a video assist had been used in film production. Seated at the centrifuge base, the director communicated with Pike and Lockwood through two microphones, one of which hooked up to the wheel’s internal PA system and the other to their earpieces.
Kubrick’s bulbous TV monitor had been masked with tape to define the borders of the rectangular film frame. It was a far cry from the ersatz high-tech flat screens inside the wheel, but it worked. Apart from the microphones and monitor, he had a turntable on the desk in front of him, and for Poole’s workout session, he’d cued up an LP of Chopin waltzes. It was the first time those multiple rotations—spinning vinyl evoking dancing couples turning in three-quarters time; and gleaming white machinery rotating smoothly in space—had been combined within the wheeling, weightless, rhythmic, ever-kinetic context of 2001: A Space Odyssey.
On their first day of shooting, they managed seven takes, exposing more than twenty minutes of film as they turned the wheel twenty-two times. Impressive for a first try, particularly given that they managed both kinds of shot: those with Alcott and Pike riding around the wheel in their gyroscopic camera rig, and those with Lockwood alone inside the centrifuge with a “fixed” camera riding a dolly as the set turned around it. In the latter scenario, after a flurry of barked commands from assistant director Cracknell, Kubrick cued Lockwood, who reached forward and started the camera himself before everything else began turning. In effect, the familiar filmmaking litany had changed from “Roll camera, roll sound,” to “Roll camera, roll set”—with “Spin Chopin” somewhere in between. A nicely multivalent set of rotational energies.
Not everything went flawlessly. On February 21 they were filming with an ultrawide lens when the Panavision detached from the dolly and smashed to the floor, breaking the video system in the process and delaying the shoot by several hours. The Grundig video camera was primitive, and being clamped to the Panavision with an adjustable bracket, was easily nudged away from its correct orientation. The communications system between deep space and ground control wasn’t wireless but required cables that fed through slip rings and gradually wound onto the centrifuge drum, requiring that the whole thing be reversed and unwound at the end of long takes. The second the finicky video camera went out of alignment—a regular occurrence—Kubrick, desperate to know what was happening inside, fired rapid questions at Pike: “Kelvin! What are you doing? What are you doing! It’s getting away from you!” Pike’s voice would echo back, as distant as an astronaut from the Moon: “It’s fine, Stanley, it’s okay, it’s okay!” Houston, no problem. Apart from everything else, a Nikon F single lens reflex, one of Kubrick’s favorite still cameras, had been mounted on the Panaflex, and Pike periodically squeezed off shots.
After a few days of jogging, Lockwood had run so many miles in new sneakers that he emerged from the centrifuge limping from blisters. Returning downtown, he started to notice that no matter which direction he turned, London’s streets seemed to curve upward in front of him, causing him to lean slightly forward in compensation. The set’s circular logic had warped his visual perception. Heat from all the lights and a buildup of exhaled carbon dioxide made it hard going inside. Outside, the wheel turned with a groan of applied power accompanied by the constant ominous tinkle of fallen nails and shattered tungsten bulbs. “It was a scary place to work,” Trumbull recalled. “Film lights don’t like to go upside down when they’re hot. There was a constant barrage of exploding glass. Every time the centrifuge went around, there was this Pow! as lights blew up.”
In fact, Kubrick’s Mission Control area, jammed with speakers and wires, had a large, rectangular chicken-wire frame around it to shield the crew from a perennial rain of broken glass and other debris. Anyone leaving the protected zone was supposed to put on a hard hat.
With the actors—and frequently the camera crew—sealed inside, the wheel was also a significant fire hazard. Exit through the floor hatches was neither fast nor easy. A fire department team was always on alert at the peripheries of Stage 4 during shooting. Given the amount of electricity coursing through fat cables; the popping bulbs and falling objects; the snaking, overlapping air-conditioning conduits and projector wires; and the flammable materials comprising many of the interior set elements, the risk of a sudden flash fire was real.
But they were lucky.
• • •
Throughout the shooting of 2001, Gary Lockwood provided a textbook case of a well-documented filmmaking phenomenon in which the goings-on behind the camera are sometimes more interesting than those in front. Despite his deltoid quarterback’s body, maintained by working out several times a day and by his rigorously self-enforced diet of veggies and fish, Lockwood’s presence within the film was curiously anodyne. This was intentional. Kubrick and Clarke had conceived of the spacemen in charge of Discovery as well educated and acutely self-controlled, a pair of dual PhDs so unflappable as to be almost android. Like Charlie Chaplin’s bolt-tightening factory laborer in Modern Times (1936), spinning along with the very cogwheel he’s working on—only with less humor and more pathos—they were ghosts in the machinery, component parts of their chilly, refrigerator-white mother ship.
In real life, however, Lockwood was a charismatic trifecta of charmer, hustler, and rogue, a gambler, pool shark, and ladies’ man; not the brightest bulb on the set but by no means unintelligent; and possessing a highly attuned antenna for imprecision and bullshit almost comparable to Kubrick’s own. Although he’d been a rabble-rouser in college, and although some on the set remember him as never seeing a recreational drug he didn’t like, the actor kept his head together and was a disciplined presence throughout.
To his own surprise, Kubrick found himself intrigued. The director had more than a streak of hustler himself, albeit in a more cerebral way, and, like Lockwood, had on several occasions supported himself with gambling of one kind or another. While famous for having earned just enough money to survive by playing chess for quarters in Lower Manhattan’s Washington Square Park in the late 1940s, it’s less well known that a decade later, Kubrick kept food on the table by playing a weekly high-stakes poker game with Hollywood fat cats. Having completed Paths of Glory in 1957, he returned to Los Angeles from Germany accompanied by his glamorous new wife, Christiane, her daughter, Katharina, and a large debt. The latter was the result of loans made over the previous several years by supporters, including his partner Jim Harris, who’d produced three of his early films—money that Kubrick had used to complete his second and third features, Killer’s Kiss (1955) and The Killing (1956).
As a result—and despite the success of Paths of Glory—the couple hit the ground broke. Christiane has vivid memories of discomfort with her new husband’s gambling. “I felt this was so not-solid, so Wild West. I just felt, ‘This is going to end badly,’ ” she recalled. “He sits there in a circle of people, there are these big, fat cars parked outside our house, and it made me so nervous.” She soon realized, however, that his approach to gambling mirrored his on-set discipline, producing exactly the results he’d predicted. “He played, and he never won big, and he never lost, he made very small irregular [bets],” she said. He told her, “I don’t want them to think I have a pattern or certain technique or I play in a certain way . . . so it has to be irregular. I’m only trying to get two hundred bucks for the supermarket next week. No more.”
“And he did it,” said Christiane. “We survived on it.”
Throughout his time as Discovery subcommander Frank Poole, Lockwood engaged successfully in various forms of gambling as well, both in the London casinos that had been legalized in 1960—providing an excellent opportunity for organized crime figures such as the Kray brothers—and in relatively small-stakes games with the Borehamwood staff. At one point, he was owed so much by his lighting stand-in from gin rummy winnings that the man failed to show up for work the next day. Evidently he didn’t want to pay up, and thereafter simply went AWOL. Hearing of this, Kubrick felt he had to intervene. Summoning Lockwood to his office, he asked him to quit gambling with his film crew. “It was very simple,” said Lockwood. “It wasn’t like I needed it. And I just said, ‘Sure.’ We didn’t make a big thing out of it.”
“Everybody was so in awe of Kubrick, they just constantly were like sycophants,” Lockwood remembers. “And that’s not my nature. I’m a quarterback. I’m an alpha male, aggressive. I’m a bar fighter. I was smart in school. I’m a piece of shit, you know.” The actor’s success with women fascinated Kubrick, as did his knowledge of sports, particularly football. Kubrick had been flying in films of NFL games from New York since his arrival, and he and Lockwood began watching them on Friday nights at the Kubrick residence at Abbots Mead, the early-nineteenth-century house just south of the studio that he bought in 1965, periodically commanding projectionist Eddie Frewin—Tony’s dad—to stop the film so they could discuss plays.
When they tired of this, they played a lot of snooker. “He had the most beautiful snooker table I ever saw,” Lockwood recalled. In an inverse of the chess-dominance tactic Kubrick had engaged in with unwary actors on set—most famously George C. Scott, whom he’d repeatedly checkmated while shooting Dr. Strangelove—Lockwood never failed to thrash him at the game. When Kubrick noticed that the actor was fully ambidextrous, using his left and right hands with equal skill and shooting without a rake, it was the last straw. “How did you get the way you are?” he demanded. Lockwood shifted his attention from table to director. “Life,” he replied. “How’d you get the way you are?”
Asked years later if Kubrick ever showed signs of irritation at being unable to beat him on his own table, the actor denied it. On the contrary, he said, Kubrick always seemed to enjoy their games. “He was the epitome of cool,” Lockwood observed appreciatively. “I mean, Steve McQueen was called ‘Mr. Cool.’ But it was really Mr. Kubrick.”
• • •
The question of how to transmit the essence of HAL’s internal dilemma to the audience had preoccupied Kubrick and Clarke for many months, and it hadn’t been resolved even as the film went into production. In late January Kubrick wasted almost a week filming space agency ground controllers, including actor Neil McCallum, looking straight into the camera and giving lengthy, verbose explanations about the type of malfunction HAL “may be guilty of.” McCallum advised Bowman and Poole that they were conducting a three-day “feasibility study” to look into the possible transfer of spacecraft control from HAL to an Earth-based computer. The material was intended to play as a video uplink received by HAL and played for the astronauts in the centrifuge, presumably upping the computer’s paranoia in the process.
The problem with this approach was that the astronauts were essentially passive receivers of someone else’s decision making. Plus, it was a telling, not a showing—an elementary dramaturgical error. None of this sat particularly well with Lockwood, who instinctively sensed something was wrong, and by mid-February, when the two jump suited actors were preparing to shoot the sequence at HAL’s centrifuge console, he was convinced that a mistake was being made. The scene was “a little bit redundant and, candidly, just a little bit on the corny side,” he remembered. “I really didn’t like it, and I just felt it wasn’t up to where we had been. And two guys as brilliant as Kubrick and Clarke, they were trying to solve a problem verbally. And we were making a very nonverbal type film.”
For his part, Kubrick sensed that Lockwood’s heart wasn’t in it. “You’re not showing your normal enthusiasm today,” he observed. His cover blown, the actor launched spontaneously into a weirdly off-color story. “You know, Stanley, I grew up in a redneck town with a lot of rough people and rednecks and stuff like that, and I was always disruptive in class,” he said. “And I sat in the back of the room, and this one girl would come down the aisle that had the greatest ass on her—callipygian, if you will—and she would hand out test papers.IV And every time she got to me, I would look up and say, ‘Hi, Peggy, how about a piece?’ And then I took my right elbow and I went”—he jabbed his elbow at Dullea, who was watching the whole performance with opaque amusement—“ ‘Yuck yuck yuck.’ Well, that’s what I think of this fucking scene.”
Kubrick quietly absorbed the information. He wasn’t used to being spoken to in this way. “Derek?” he said. “Yes, Guv?” Cracknell replied. “It’s a wrap.” It was only eleven in the morning.
Lockwood withdrew to his dressing room, unsure if he’d blown it. While he felt bad that he’d sassed Kubrick, his conviction that the scene wasn’t right remained unchanged. “I guess there was a side of me that wanted to protect this great movie,” he said later. Although worried about the potential consequences, he’d started his daily exercise routine when a knock sounded on his door, and Cracknell stuck his head inside. “The Guv wants to see you,” he said.
“Right,” said the actor. “Hey, Derek, before you go, am I fired?”
“Don’t know, mate.”
Lockwood showered rapidly, toweled himself off, threw on some clothes, and went to Kubrick’s private lair, a second-floor dressing room off Stages 6 and 7 that he used for rewrites and solitary brainstorming. “You’re Polish, aren’t you?” the director asked, inviting him in.
“I’m Polish and German,” Lockwood responded.
“You want schnapps or vodka?” Kubrick asked.
“Candidly, I like tequila,” said Lockwood.
“How do you take it?”
“In a snifter, like brandy.”
Kubrick poured him a shot of “not a great tequila but a so-so tequila,” as Lockwood remembered it, and walked over to “a wall of records; an absolute wall. ‘What do you want, Chopin?’ ‘Yeah, Chopin’s fine. Stanley, before we get into what happened, am I fired?’ ”
No, Kubrick replied, Lockwood had been very much a team player, and he’d learned to pay attention when somebody who’d been working conscientiously had a problem. He referred to an incident in which John F. Kennedy, visiting NASA headquarters for the first time, saw a janitor at work behind the assembled brass. Circumventing the suits and walking over, he introduced himself and asked what the man was doing. “Well, Mr. President, I’m helping put a man on the Moon,” was the response. You never know who’s going to have a good answer, Kubrick observed. He asked the actor to explain what the problem was. Lockwood said that the series of little scenes that Kubrick and Clarke had written to “tighten the screws on the computer” didn’t “cut to the marrow.” In his opinion, they were too diffuse. He said that while he thought Kubrick was the best director in the world, there had to be a better way to trigger HAL’s paranoia.
Kubrick listened carefully, and when they finished their drinks, he said he knew Lockwood liked deli food. He would give Eddie Frewin some money, and Eddie would drive him to the best deli in Golders Green—London’s small kosher nexus—for lox, whitefish, and bagels. “Then I want you to go home, and the next time I hear from you, I want to know how you would solve the problem.”
Back at home, Lockwood finished his bagel and got out a spiral notebook. He listed everything he liked and disliked about what they’d been filming, writing down what he thought Clarke and Kubrick were trying to accomplish, how they were trying to accomplish it, and where it had gone awry. At some point late that afternoon, he remembered that just the week before, he’d gone to visit a new set being constructed on Stage 1 called the pod bay. With typical attention to detail, Kubrick had asked him to go there, don a space suit, and see if it was awkward to climb in and out of one of the space pods that aviation firm Hawker Siddeley would soon stuff with buttons, screens, and controls.
In doing so, Lockwood had, in fact, noticed a small problem and had asked that a handhold be installed directly inside the pod door. If Kubrick hadn’t asked him to reconnoiter the situation in the first place, the actor wouldn’t have known about the space pods, let alone that they could hold two people. The pod bay scenes were months away.
By nine o’clock, Lockwood had developed an idea. He called Kubrick and said he thought the astronauts should find a pretext to climb into one of the pods, thereby cutting themselves off from HAL entirely so that they could talk in private. Their discussion could then include disconnecting the computer—and HAL could stay a step ahead of them by figuring out how to overhear them. That way, he said, the audience would discover everything they needed to know, and HAL could be made to experience a very human persecution complex.
Hearing this, Kubrick grew excited. He sent a car to pick up Lockwood. It was a subzero February night, but by the time the actor got to Abbots Mead, a fire was roaring in the fireplace. They sat in front of it until the early hours of the morning, drinking, discussing, and, finally, improvising the scene together.
• • •
Kubrick rarely raised his voice on set. That was Cracknell’s job. Sometimes he didn’t even interact with his actors at all, particularly if they were young, attractive women—such as 2001’s stewardesses, several of whom were well-known London models.
Heather Downham, who played the Pan Am stewardess that picks a floating pen out of thin air and then gently inserts it back into a sleeping Heywood Floyd’s pocket, described how she would show up on set in the morning and relay any questions concerning her role to Cracknell, who would ask Kubrick for his thoughts, which would then be transmitted back to her via Cracknell again—even though they were all standing in the same tightly constricted space. While this may sound bizarre—and it says something about Kubrick’s shyness when confronted by female beauty—it’s actually not that unusual. A film director is constantly barraged from all sides by questions and demands. If he’s not to deplete his energy reserves, he needs to rely on assistants to serve as filters. Making a film, the director sometimes observed, is “like trying to write War and Peace in a bumper car in an amusement park.”
Keir Dullea’s relationship with Kubrick was somewhat different from Lockwood’s, and ultimately more distant. The actor arrived still shell-shocked from Preminger’s tyrannical behavior on Bunny Lake Is Missing—a sadistic daily shout-fest—and so Kubrick’s tranquil ways were a great relief. On the other hand, Dullea was very much in awe of Kubrick, whose work he’d admired for years. He regarded the director as a genius, and so was initially a bit starstruck. It hobbled his first week of work.
Despite Sylvester’s experience of Kubrick’s implacable will during the Clavius conference room scene, most who worked closely with Kubrick describe him as a caring and empathetic presence, soft-spoken but with a wicked sense of humor. Dullea was no exception, but if anything, this made the situation worse: these very qualities made the director practically godlike, particularly in contrast with Preminger. “I was projecting my awe, and being in awe is not freeing,” Dullea reflected.
Kubrick intuited what was going on, and after several days of awkwardly tentative takes, he dismissed the crew and took aside the actor. For several hours, they calmly discussed the problem. Kubrick told Dullea he thought he was one of the finest actors working. He hadn’t been chosen by accident, he said, but because he was perfect for the role. He felt badly because it was his own fault—he, Kubrick, was doing something wrong, and was personally responsible for the actor not feeling more relaxed. Somewhat dismayed at this, but relieved to be discussing the matter so frankly, Dullea assured him it was entirely his own problem; in fact, Kubrick had been great. He felt better, however, and soon transitioned from a state of trepidation to one of trust. He would soon need it.
Of the two actors, it was Lockwood who knew from the beginning that they were involved in “the greatest film ever made.” The sets were so brilliantly lit that the actors wore sunglasses between takes. Occasionally Lockwood would survey their environment, turn to Dullea, lower his shades, and say, “Can you believe this?” He was just as impressed by Kubrick’s ability to improvise within all this grandly conceived futurism.
“Stanley was simply much more intelligent than other directors, and in a nonlinear way,” the actor observed. “You found that anything could happen at almost any time. Despite all the careful preparations, he designed 2001 with an air of flexibility, and that’s what made the picture brilliant. Directing is all management of human relations, logistics, details, and so on. On top of all that, Stanley still found room for a kind of danger—even a kind of bravery or recklessness. He was always trying things where there was a high risk of failure. He wasn’t the obstinate, solitary genius of popular imagination. He needed people to bounce off, and he would often turn around and ask if he was doing the right thing.”
As with other actors who’d worked with him, however, Dullea and Lockwood sometimes experienced Kubrick’s inability to articulate what he wanted. At the end of takes, they would frequently hear a terse “Okay, let’s do another.” When they asked what he wanted done differently, he would respond with “Let’s just see what happens.”
As Tony Masters had discovered, he needed to be presented with options, and only then could he decide.
• • •
Clarke had returned to Ceylon in early February 1966, where he immediately found himself in a ludicrous position. Despite having put more than five thousand miles between himself and the daily struggle to shoot 2001, he discovered an all-new, high-stakes set of film production issues confronting him. He’d poured a significant amount of money into his partner Mike Wilson’s Sinhalese James Bond parody, Jamis Bandu. But Wilson, who’d been behaving increasingly erratically, had devoted only fitful attention to the project. After shooting just over half the film, he’d simply dropped everything and left the country, bound for England.
Forced to protect his investment—which would soon rival the total sum he’d made from his involvement in 2001 thus far—Clarke had no recourse but to assume the role of film producer. If he could get the remaining scenes shot, with luck he might recoup at least some of his outlay from ticket sales.
Apart from his drug use, Wilson’s distraction had undoubtedly been triggered by a competitive response to Clarke’s involvement in big-time filmmaking, with its promise of the imminent arrival of the world’s first blockbuster science fiction film. Arriving in London, he quickly used Clarke’s entrée to insinuate himself into the Hawk Films group at Borehamwood. Meanwhile, his partner was pouring his last savings into the film he’d abandoned—and simultaneously fielding a steady stream of urgent cables from Kubrick. In the midst of trying to persuade the Ceylonese government to lend him a detachment of army troops for Jamis Bandu’s grand finale—something it flatly refused due to a recent military coup attempt—Clarke tried to help Kubrick find a plausible way for HAL to listen in on Bowman and Poole as they discussed the computer’s fate within a hermetically sealed space pod.
He had one foot planted in an escapist, derivative Third World popcorn feature and the other in the most sophisticated evocation of human origins and destiny Hollywood had ever attempted, with the latter funding the former.
• • •
Centrifuge sequences dominated February and March. With Stage 4 being a cavernous, noisy, chilly place, Kubrick had a large trailer brought directly onto the premises. Following Lockwood’s space pod breakthrough, he invited his actors into this heated, sound-insulated bubble between setups, and they improvised what they might say to each other, ostensibly out of HAL’s hearing. After taping their exchanges, Kubrick had them transcribed. Then he edited the transcripts every morning, gradually whittling their dialogue down to the essentials.
But he hadn’t yet figured out a plausible way for HAL to overhear them. They still had six weeks before moving to the pod bay set, but the director was unwilling to defer a solution. Clarke’s proposal—that HAL access “geophones in the soft lander probes”—risked incomprehensibility. How to explain what a “geophone” is, let alone a “soft lander probe”? The film wasn’t for geeks alone.
One afternoon, Victor Lyndon arrived in the trailer with some documents. Kubrick’s associate producer was looking increasingly pale and tense these days. A large part of his work had devolved into the thankless task of filing a seemingly endless succession of insurance claims, with the quality of Kodak’s film stock and that of the Technicolor lab’s development regularly exchanging leading positions of dishonor in the director’s eyes. He was relieved to take a short break and watch the actors run through their lines. On hearing that they still hadn’t figured out how HAL could overhear them, Lyndon looked at Dullea and Lockwood as though it was the most obvious thing in the world. “He could just read your lips,” he said. There was a moment of thunderstruck silence. “God, that’s a great idea!” Kubrick exclaimed. They had their answer.
In late April they finally moved to the pod bay set for a couple weeks of filming. Possibly the purest expression of 2001’s collective design genius, Discovery’s parking garage with its three space pods poised in front of circular air lock doors was among the most finely realized of Masters’s collaborations with Lange and Ordway. Everything in the set was purely utilitarian—a Bauhaus marriage of form and function. The total effect was as pure as physics, with even the vivid colors of its racked space suits justifiable as the fastest way for spacewalking astronauts to identify each other from a distance.
On May 6 Kubrick shot Bowman’s and Poole’s conspiratorial space pod discussion in thirty-five takes. At almost three minutes, it would ultimately constitute the longest single dialogue in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Lockwood still considers it his biggest single contribution to the film.
• • •
Another aspect of the story that hadn’t been adequately solved when shooting started concerned how to get Bowman back into Discovery after his commandeering of a space pod to recover Poole’s lifeless body. Following his request to “Open the pod bay doors, HAL,” and the computer’s famous response—“I’m sorry, Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that”—Discovery’s sole surviving human crew member had to find another way back inside. Complicating matters further, he’d left his space helmet behind in a distraught rush to recover Poole.
Dullea and Lockwood rehearse their discussion.
In another example of their quest to ensure maximal technical accuracy, Clarke and Ordway had both reached out to various air force researchers, seeking confirmation that a human being could, in fact, withstand unshielded exposure to the hard vacuum of space for the short period necessary to move between the pod and ship. While they’d verified it was indeed possible, Bowman’s method of ingress hadn’t been worked out.
Harry Lange had designed 2001’s spherical, anthropomorphic pods, but their ingeniously contrived servo arms had been taken directly from Marvin Minsky’s published work—another instance of the scientist’s influence on the film. But even if the same arms that enabled HAL to kill Poole via remote control could also be used to open Discovery’s emergency air lock when under Bowman’s command, how would he vacate his pod and get inside the ship fast enough to survive? On February 10 Kubrick wrote Clarke that he had a “completely believable” solution.
After the pod arms open the air lock door . . . Bowman backs the pod up, so that the rear pod door, which is smaller than the air lock door, is perfectly aligned and almost touching the open airlock door. This rear pod door will have explosive bolts which Bowman will explode without bleeding the pod air. The result of this should be that if Bowman is in a curled-up position and pointing toward the door, he should be shot like a cannonball directly into the open air lock. If he then manages to bang the control button, he would then, within a matter of seconds, have made the exit from the pod into the air lock and have the air lock door closed. I think this should cover even the worst skeptics. What do you think?
Clarke responded that he’d already thought of that gambit and “it’s quite okay. Also crawling with Freudian symbols, as you are doubtless aware.” Bowman’s explosive reentry into Discovery became one of 2001’s most memorably kinetic moments. It interrupts the film’s stately rhythm with an eruption of smoke out of which Dullea vaults like a cartoon figure in a Roy Lichtenstein “Pow!” painting. There was no question of using a stuntman. The actor needed to be recognizable, since he’d left the ship without his helmet—a mistake legitimating the scene in the first place.
The emergency air lock set was a padded, vaguely vaginal tube flooded in pink light. Constructed not far from the centrifuge on Stage 4 and oriented end-up, it stood twenty-four feet high—almost three stories—directly above which a space pod had been suspended by chains from the ceiling. The pod was stabilized and made accessible by a raised platform, its back to the set. The sequence required some old-school theatrical effects. To his trepidation, Dullea needed to climb to the top of the platform, then be tethered to a thin wire attached to the small of his back by a leather harness fastened around his waist and hidden under his space suit. After about twenty feet, the wire was attached to a thick rope, which had a knot tied in a position just prior to Dullea’s maximum extension—meaning, as close as they wanted him to get to an encounter with the camera at the bottom, before he was made to ricochet back to the air lock’s entrance.
Hidden from the camera by Dullea’s body, the wire and rope were attached to another person: an expert in theatrical flying from Eugene’s Flying Ballet, a company famous for the technique. The company roustabout was poised on the platform outside, ready to jump as soon as the knot hit his gloved hand. He would provide the counterweight, smoothly reversing Dullea’s fall and returning him back to the entrance, where, if everything worked as planned, he would float convincingly toward the “emergency hatch close” lever—the mechanism of his salvation.
When they shot the scene on June 16, Unsworth had camera operator Kelvin Pike roll thirty seconds of static shot with the pod doors closed—material for Kubrick to edit seamlessly with what was to follow—and then they cut and opened the pod door. His heart pounding, Dullea was lowered into place and braced himself with both hands at the open door. At Kubrick’s command, he released his grip, extended his hands forward, held his breath, and Pike rolled the camera again. At “Action,” a team on the platform blasted a thick dollop of smoke through the air lock entrance, and the actor was released, his wire rapidly unspooling in a headlong plunge toward the camera. A split second later, the roustabout saved Dullea from being impaled, with all movements rendered jolt-free by a system of geared aluminum drums and “ball-races”—ring-shaped components stuffed with ball bearings. Rebounding to the air lock top, Dullea swiftly reached around to the lever, closing the door and smiling in relief as oxygen ostensibly flooded the chamber.
On the twentieth, a Monday, they continued covering the scene. Now Unsworth had Pike undercrank the camera—setting its frame rate at eighteen and not twenty-four frames per second, thus speeding up the action—and shot it again. Dullea, an actor so nervous of heights that he refused to fly, willingly repeated his emergency air lock swan dive five times during the two shooting days.
Reflecting on the experience decades later, he said, “People ask, ‘Why were you willing to do it?’ And my answer is, I totally trusted Stanley.”
• • •
In March Kubrick shot two quickly executed scenes with Lockwood in the centrifuge that on first viewing may have seemed unimportant—as close as the director ever got to filler—but have since become practically legendary, at least for some. One was Poole’s birthday greeting from his parents. The other was the chess game.
The question of who was to play HAL remained unresolved throughout the actual live-action shooting. At first, Kubrick brought in UK actor Nigel Davenport, who for the first week was present to read the computer’s lines. His delivery was soon judged too British, however. Kubrick’s next plan was to record American actor Martin Balsam, but that would happen only in postproduction anyway. Meanwhile, HAL was played either by Derek Cracknell—whose cockney accent, Dullea observed, made the computer sound a bit like Michael Caine—and sometimes even by Kubrick himself.
In practice, Kubrick usually played HAL when working with Lockwood. On March 7, they filmed Poole’s centrifuge tanning bed scene with a small crew. A birthday greeting from the astronaut’s parents had been filmed weeks before and was cued up on a projector behind the solarium screen. Kubrick usually didn’t provide his actors with much direction, relying on them to feel their way into a scene and shooting many takes. This time the utterly dispassionate way Lockwood played it resonated with him immediately, however, and they nailed the sequence in just eleven minutes of film. The director introduced an element of improvisation, throwing in an unscripted curveball to see how Lockwood would react.
In the final take, Kubrick suddenly said, “Happy birthday, Frank,” after Poole’s parents sang to him, and following his father’s concluding line, “See you next Wednesday.”V Lockwood responded with an impassive, “Thank you, HAL. A bit flatter, please”—commanding the computer to lower his automated bed. The actor’s opaque reactions to both his parents and HAL were indistinguishable: a kind of numb flatness. More than any other scene in the film, Poole’s birthday transmitted a quietly excoriating message about the desensitizing effects of technologically mediated communications. Those who criticized the film for its emotionless performances missed Kubrick’s point entirely—in this case, as channeled through an underrated actor who knew exactly what he was doing.
The chess scene, shot later in March, immediately follows Poole’s birthday in the film’s running time as well. This one wasn’t even scripted and appears to have been a pure improvisation—though its dialogue is based on a game Kubrick had chosen in advance and asked Trumbull to animate. While the sequence’s significance is so understated as to be practically invisible to anyone but hard-core chess players, it’s nevertheless consequential, because it presents the first hint that something’s not quite right with HAL.
Kubrick based the game on an actual documented match played in Hamburg in 1913. In the part we see, Poole decides to resign when HAL—again voiced during filming by Kubrick—says, “I’m sorry, Frank, I think you missed it. Queen to bishop three. Bishop takes queen. Knight takes bishop. Mate.” This early in Discovery’s trajectory toward Jupiter, it didn’t occur to Poole that the computer might be cheating or making an error. But that’s how the director played it, because it should have been “queen to bishop six”—something the astronaut failed to notice, despite its being on the screen in front of him. Kubrick was subtly transmitting that HAL’s first victim had his guard down.
There’s another subtlety to their game as well. Of filmmakers then active, Kubrick valued Ingmar Bergman above all—so much so that he wrote the Swedish director a fan letter in 1960, praising his “unearthly and brilliant contribution,” and stating, “Your vision of life has moved me deeply, more deeply than I have ever been moved by any films.” In view of Poole’s eventual fate at HAL’s remote-controlled hands—so remote as to convert the pod that killed him into one pawn taking another—there’s a parallel between the brief, seemingly inconsequential scene where Poole effectively plays chess with Death, and Max von Sydow doing the same in his incarnation as a medieval knight playing the same grim adversary in Bergman’s The Seventh Seal.
• • •
Kubrick’s mastery of the goings-on at Borehamwood and his almost preternaturally keen attention to detail were legendary, as were certain personal peccadilloes that his young assistants sometimes satirized, always behind his back.
His ability to see through obfuscation was usually immediate and unsparing. Kept waiting one afternoon due to an alleged problem with a piece of recording equipment, Kubrick took in the mumbo-jumbo technical explanation offered by Derek Cracknell, digested it, waited a few more minutes, and then said, “The next time the sound mixer’s late back from lunch, just tell me.”
Regularly stopping assistants such as Ivor Powell in the hallway, the director would pull out a set of index cards and ask for status updates as he shuffled rapidly through them, plowing through innumerable bullet points covering various aspects of the production. Powell quickly learned that if he didn’t know something, he should say so rather than risk bluffing.
When Kubrick asked for a technical explanation, he homed in mercilessly on fuzzy thinking or partial accounting by people who should know better. “If you can’t explain something to me, you don’t understand it,” he said to special effects man Bryan Loftus, who had to admit he was right. What he wanted was the truth, observed Loftus, and if somebody didn’t know something, that was acceptable to him, because it, too, was a truth, one that could then be tackled.
Quickly spotting technical anomalies, Kubrick attacked them with intuitive intelligence. After days of subpar images from an optical printer that manifested as misaligned color layers, he grew impatient of failed attempts to fix the problem and came to inspect the machine himself. Evaluating the device with its keeper, Loftus, he asked if the printer was, in fact, rock steady. “As far as I know,” Loftus replied, pointing out that it was bolted securely to its concrete base. At this Kubrick, who happened to be holding a plastic cup of water, placed it on the machine. The two of them leaned forward to observe as tiny wavelets started coursing across its surface. “Look at that, Bryan,” the director said. “It’s rippling. It must be moving.” Having established the source, they could now address the problem. There were many such stories.
Few portraits of Kubrick have captured his alert, contemplative essence as well as this one by Dmitri Kasterine.
As to his peccadilloes, those close to him might wave them away as overblown or even manufactured, but they existed. Fastidious about personal hygiene, he couldn’t stand to be around anybody who was ill. If this was unavoidable, he insisted that they—and everybody else on the set or in the office—wear surgical masks to lessen the danger of germs spreading. The sight of blood sent him speed walking in the opposite direction. Flies and other insects were anathema, and despite his crush of responsibilities, he found time to pay close attention to the studio’s window screens so as to keep bugs out of his working environment. Like General Jack D. Ripper in Dr. Strangelove, he insisted on drinking only bottled water—something one assistant earned quiet backstage laughs circumventing by amassing empties of Malvern Water, surreptitiously filling them at the tap, and providing the director with “new” bottles on demand. “Stanley drank tap water for two and a half years,” said Brian Johnson.
A heavy smoker since the age of twelve, under pressure from Christiane he’d convinced himself that he was quitting, and so never bought cigarettes. As a result, he was the most reliably shameless bummer of smokes in the British film industry, to the point where poorly paid crew members took to keeping empty packs in their pockets so they could demonstrate they were out. Discovering what was going on, an embarrassed Christiane brought a carload of cartons to the studio one day and saw to it they were distributed, in partial compensation.
Although stories that he only drove at slow speeds have been dismissed by some, credible accounts have it that during the production of 2001, Kubrick operated under a self-imposed limit of twenty-nine miles per hour, having deduced that this was the top survivable speed should an accident occur in his Mercedes or Rolls. Attempting to disguise what he knew must sound strange, he explained to cabbies and car service drivers that he was recovering from back surgery, and they’d simply have to keep their speed down, ostensibly for medical reasons.
Concern for his personal safety also lay at the root of Kubrick’s fear of flying, which originated in a traumatic near-death experience while piloting a plane in the late 1950s. One day he observed to Roger Caras that being brave was stupid; why would you risk the only chance you have at life, simply to prove something? Commenting on Gary Lockwood’s physique while playing touch football in the Kubricks’ backyard one day, Jeremy Bernstein told the director that the two of them together might manage to bring him down. “Never get into a fair fight,” was the response.
• • •
Three months into the production of 2001, financial and logistical pressure had been building so severely on Clarke that he finally erupted at Wilson, then still in London. “I am now fighting to finish the movie,” he wrote from Colombo on March 12—referring not to 2001 but to Wilson’s Bond parody. “I am absolutely sick and disgusted with the whole situation, now I know what has happened. I don’t trust myself to write about it.”
Last week I borrowed another 10,000—making 35,000—so that we could continue. I now hear that the Rocket Publishing Co. [Clarke’s UK company] has spent almost £3,000—half of its income—on the movie—and now has nothing in the bank. I cannot even help my own family, and there is nothing to cover the next tax demand. Though I was anxious not to do it, I have now had to start borrowing from Stanley. Because of all these worries, I have not been able to sleep or to do any work on the novel. Whether I am ever associated with you again in any project depends entirely on satisfactory answers to my earlier letters and the arrangement you are making to settle your liabilities.
Wilson’s profligacy had caused Clarke to cross a line he’d sworn he wouldn’t. By borrowing from Kubrick, he was now literally in his debt—something that, in turn, reduced his leverage when it came to publishing the novel. Despite this, wrote Clarke, “I am still anxious to help you, even though I have practically ruined myself to do so.” With striking frankness, he continued: “Everything I have earned in the last 10 years has been poured into your projects.” But like a long-suffering parent, he concluded, “Meanwhile so that you can carry on until I get back to London on the 5th . . . I have asked Stanley to advance you a couple of hundred if you need it.” Kubrick had become a banker so that Clarke could continue funding his partner of seventeen years.
The financial pressures on Clarke made it that much more imperative that he sell the book. As of March, he and Meredith were still operating under the assumption that Kubrick would shortly allow them to sell hardcover rights, thereby giving them sufficient lead time to monetize a paperback edition as well, with the whole program ostensibly timed to the film’s release. A communications nexus had developed in which Clarke bitched to Kubrick about the novel and Meredith pressured Kubrick’s lawyer Louis Blau regarding the same, with plenty of pushback from both and cross-communication among all parties. Although he masked it with various excuses, the director simply wasn’t giving permission. His loans to Clarke took off some of the pressure. Those close to Kubrick understood that he simply didn’t want the book coming out before the film was released. To be straight about that would be to break his word, however, so he said he needed time to suggest revisions—time he didn’t have at the moment.
Clarke and Mike Wilson in the Aries lunar vehicle set, below a sign reading “Caution: Weightless Condition.”
As Clarke’s intimate and confidant, Caras was aware of the financial strains on him and the resulting pressure to get his novel into print after two full years of work. Uncharacteristically for the prolific author, apart from a smattering of magazine articles, he hadn’t managed to do any significant writing outside of 2001. Caras had few illusions about the source of his friend’s pecuniary problems. He was carrying Wilson’s water. “His relationships, one after the other, the most important relationships of his life, have been founded strictly on his homosexuality,” he told Clarke’s biographer Neil McAleer in 1989. “It has cost him millions of dollars . . . He has spent millions of dollars on these relationships.” Clarke, said Caras, “was victimized by Mike Wilson. Severely.” Adding to the burden, the author wasn’t just supporting Wilson, who was evidently bisexual, but also the man’s family: his wife, Liz, their kids, and even Wilson’s mother in England.
Apart from that, his collaboration with Kubrick had long since moved on from its happy perambulatory brainstorming phase. Caras was well positioned to evaluate Clarke’s state of mind throughout the production, and although the author tried to mask it, what he saw was not good. “I think he found it all very frustrating because he had no control. Stanley had no time for him,” Caras said. “He was never not in control of his own project before.” Asked to elaborate, he continued, “Arthur was not happy . . . I have every reason to believe . . . knowing Arthur’s look on his face, things he said, that Stanley was being unreasonable. Just expressions he dropped, and knowing that he rarely voices a negative response . . . Arthur has a positive opinion about anything—he’s a very positive fellow. I have reason to believe he was desperately unhappy about the whole thing.” Concerning Clarke’s struggle to complete and sell the novel, Caras observed:
He couldn’t really finish the book . . . until the picture was made because he never knew what Kubrick was going to do next on the set. At any moment, Stanley could have gone off on some tangent, and the book would be nonsensical as a representative of the film. He was held up there. And he was very perturbed about Stanley holding up the pub date of the book. That bothered him. He talked about it quite a bit—more than any other single negative element in all the years that I’ve known him.
Despite this, Clarke showed immense loyalty to Kubrick. In response to repeated cables and letters from the director, who was handling the colossal strains of the ongoing day-by-day production schedule and simultaneously the stresses of attempting what amounted to a coherent jazz improvisation with critical plot points, Clarke kept a nervous breakdown at bay—something he admitted to Meredith—and proceeded to greatly tighten and improve the film’s plot.
As Lockwood had intuited when he spontaneously told his off-color story to Kubrick the previous month, Bowman’s and Poole’s reactions as they become aware of HAL’s incipient disorder had retained, as Clarke put it in a letter from Colombo on March 11, “a lot of unnecessary dead wood and fossil material from previous versions. (Sorry about mixed metaphor.)” His detailed communication to the director that day constituted a decisive intervention, further reducing and compressing the story following Lockwood’s space-pod conspiracy idea by listing nine actions he proposed Kubrick either film or use existing material to illustrate. At this key moment halfway through the shoot, Clarke’s nine-point plan became a blueprint the director largely followed, though he cut them down a bit further, in part by incorporating some into the astronauts’ pod dialogue, which hadn’t been shot yet.
In much the same way that Lockwood’s and Dullea’s dialogue improvisations had methodically been reduced to their essence, Clarke’s suggestions stripped down and clarified the story. HAL predicts the failure of Discovery’s antenna’s guidance unit, necessitating Bowman’s spacewalk to go retrieve it. Tested in the pod bay, the unit checks out okay, however, and Mission Control “hints that the fault may be in HAL.” Bowman and Poole discuss this with HAL, who “sticks by his diagnosis and claims he is right. (Your pod-bay eavesdropping here?)” Kubrick indeed put it there. Poole then goes on his fatal space walk. “Unless I am suffering from chess blindness and can’t see an obvious move, this seems a vast improvement,” Clarke wrote. “It is also more logical.”
Clarke’s contribution from Colombo in March 1966—a time of great personal and professional turmoil—redefined 2001’s middle passages, producing essentially the film we see today. It serves as a clear testament to the pivotal role he played even during production.
• • •
Although as cool as they come while on set—cooler than Steve McQueen—Kubrick frequently showed the result of the enormous pressures on him after returning home at the end of long, supercharged production days. His constant modifications of story and concept were taking their toll. All eyes were on him at the studio, and he couldn’t afford the slightest sign of weakness or indecision. Safely back at Abbots Mead, however, sometimes he melted down. “I don’t know what I’m doing, I have no idea!” he’d exclaim, his face pale from the strain. At times he struggled “with this feeling of being the dumbest animal walking the earth,” Christiane recalled. Wrestling with how to approach a scene, he’d ask, “Does that sound right? No. It sounds really pompous! Stupid!”
Discussing the project with her, he observed that he was working on “one of those films where you think any minute, ‘I’ve got the answer,’ when, in fact, I know I don’t.” He’d list people he’d previously found ignorant or worthy of scorn, and say, “I’m just like that. Why am I critical? Because I think I’m better! That’s really pathetic.” Weary and seemingly at the end of his rope, he’d obsess over an actor, a bit of dialogue, a production mishap, or a technical problem. “This isn’t doable,” he’d vent. “Why’d I think I could do that? I have no idea! I don’t even know how . . . I’m going to cut the whole scene!” To this, Christiane—an accomplished actress who’d read his script changes, was tracking developments closely with astute intelligence, and understood that he was exhausted and that this was part of his process—would sometimes push back, replying, “No you’re not! It’s really good.” Then he’d either reconsider, or stick to the decision, or table the thought—sometimes concluding the whole thing with “I’m gonna have a hamburger.”
“And then, five o’clock in the morning, he would suddenly say, ‘Well, maybe if I let him come in first and say that, then maybe it would work,’ ” Christiane recalled. “He’d find an intellectual game worth playing. I think he often got himself out of it like that.”
Some days, after returning home thinking the whole thing didn’t make any sense, and rewriting until sunrise, and then returning to the studio the next day to announce the changes, Kubrick struggled with a profound sense of shame that he’d gotten it so wrong to begin with and had deployed dozens of people and much money to realize a set or a scenario that went one way, when, in fact, he now realized, it absolutely had to go in another direction entirely.
Asked incredulously if this was really so—if the great Stanley Kubrick actually felt shame over his many revisions and modifications—Christiane affirmed it.
“He would feel ashamed?”
“Very.”
“But he hid it very well in the studio.”
“He tried.”
“He succeeded. I’ve never heard the slightest—”
“He would hide it. He looked like he didn’t doubt himself, yes. But he so did. He had these ‘I’m just an asshole’ moments all the time.”
• • •
From the outside, the HAL Brain Room set on Stage 6 resembled a strange art installation: a four-story-high rectangular shape so encased in a boxy nestwork of bracing pipes and joints that its true form was hard to discern. The gridded exterior supported and was surrounded by some twenty evenly spaced 10-kilowatt film lights, producing a 200,000-watt glare so brilliant that the towering structure was almost impossible to look at from the outside without sunglasses.
Temperatures in the interior spiked well above 90 degrees. It was constructed of dark-grey sheet metal perforated by hundreds of evenly spaced rectangular slots backed by red-orange gels. With the lights blazing away outside, HAL’s brain glowed from all sides—looking, camera operator Kelvin Pike observed, like the inside of a toaster. Dullea was to kill HAL by floating in through a hatch and methodically disconnecting the computer’s higher-logic functions as it begged for its life. As with the emergency air lock scene, he would need to hang by a single strand of cable for many of the shots, but in this case nothing particularly acrobatic was called for.
“I want this to be a murder,” Stanley had said to Christiane, who clearly remembers the origins and etymology of the scene. “It was Arthur’s idea,” she said. “Stanley wrote it. But he, Arthur, planted the concept of an intelligence as something that’s alive. An intelligence is life. If you hurt an intelligence, it can’t bear it. It knows you’re hurting it.” Recalling her husband’s approach, Christiane said, “It was very important to him that the computer suffers when he takes these bits out and removes bits of the brain. That’s why he lit it red, so it looked fleshy.”
As for HAL singing “Daisy Bell (Bicycle Built for Two),” this, too, was Clarke’s contribution, including the song’s gradual devolution to near incomprehensibility at the end. The idea originated in a visit he’d made in 1962 to Bell Laboratories, where he’d heard John Kelly’s voice-synthesizer experiments with an IBM 7094 mainframe, which had coaxed the machine to sing Harry Dacre’s 1892 marriage proposal—the first song ever sung by a computer. Even as he expired, HAL was referencing a significant moment in computing history.
As with many of 2001’s sets, the Brain Room was a hazardous place. On the morning of June 15, a “sparks” (electrician) had climbed to the very top of the structure and was moving one of the massive 10Ks when he lost his footing, fell almost thirty-five feet to the studio floor, and broke his back. An ambulance rushed him to the nearby Barnet Hospital, where his life was saved. Because the crew had been working on a simple insert shot—of a TV screen blinking fitfully to life with Heywood Floyd’s pretaped message concerning the actual purpose of the mission, supposedly triggered by HAL’s final throes—Kubrick had framed the shot and left it to Pike and Cracknell to film, and was working in his office. A young assistant, Andrew Birkin, was there when word came in that somebody had been badly hurt. “Gee, that’s terrible,” said Kubrick, looking concerned. “Did it wreck the shot?”
Dullea knew that as the stress of losing his fellow astronauts and dueling with HAL took its toll, his character’s seemingly unflappable quality would need to deteriorate, and he prepared for the Brain Room scene by replaying in memory Burgess Meredith’s powerful performance as George in the original 1939 film version of John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men. At the end of the film, George, realizing that his mentally disabled friend Lenny (Lon Chaney Jr.) is about to be murdered by a vengeful mob, decides to shoot him himself—a mercy killing. But first they go over a familiar story: their mutual dream of owning their own ranch, with cows, chickens, and rabbits. Then, with grim determination and evident sorrow, George shoots Lenny in the back.
If this kind of channeling may sound a bit excessive, given Dullea’s performance, it’s only because Kubrick reduced the scene significantly in the editing. In the film as released, the actor has only two short sentences to say while lobotomizing the only other sentient being for two hundred million miles: “Yes, I’d like to hear it, HAL. Sing it for me.” In fact, the scene was shot with much more dialogue. While the computer still had by far the most lines—four hundred words before Dullea’s first—the actor originally had eight subsequent lines totaling more than fifty words.
Side view of Dullea in the Brain Room. Partially degraded Polaroid probably by Kubrick.
The Brain Room sequence was shot across five long days between May 31 and June 29. By the last day, the tricky wirework was done, and Kubrick framed a medium close-up, a side view of Dullea’s face through his helmet. The crew had rigged a seat for the actor to sit on, allowing him to sway backward and forward slightly, simulating weightlessness as he used a small screwdriver to loosen the rectangular Plexiglas blocks representing HAL’s logic and memory circuits.
Dullea’s best performance came on the last take of the last day. “Dave, look. I’m really sorry about everything. I am genuinely sorry,” said HAL, now channeled by Cracknell. Dullea continued working without comment—methodically, inexorably. “Dave, even a condemned criminal isn’t treated like this,” pleaded Cracknell. Swaying slightly under his flat-topped helmet, Dullea had a hooded, cobra-like quality to him—less an agitated Burgess Meredith than a determined assassin. “Please . . . Please, Dave, stop . . . Dave, you will destroy my mind, don’t you understand . . . I will become nothing,” said Cracknell.
“Shut up, HAL, you won’t feel anything, just like when Poole and I go to sleep,” said Dullea finally, his eyes panning over to return the computer’s unblinking gaze.
“Well, I have never slept . . . I . . . don’t know what it’s like,” said Cracknell.
“It’s very nice, HAL. It’s peaceful. It’s very peaceful.”
“What happens after that?” asked HAL plaintively.
“It will be all right,” said Bowman, his attention flickering between his task and HAL’s accusatory glass eye.
“Will I know anything? Will I be me?”
“It will be all right,” Bowman repeated.
“Say, Dave, you know, I’ve just thought of something,” said HAL. “The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.”
“Yes, that’s right, HAL,” said Bowman, relentlessly turning his screwdriver.
“I’ve thought of something else,” said HAL. “The square root of pi is one decimal seven seven two four five three eight zero nine zero.” (Had it been used, this would have provided evidence of the computer’s accelerating decline—the number’s incorrect.)
“Yes, that’s right, HAL,” repeated Bowman, working to finish the job.
In a shot Kubrick captured but didn’t use, HAL’s eye—previously alive with it usual glowing red cornea and yellow iris—had gone black and cold by the end of the scene.
• • •
Early in preproduction, Kubrick had conceived of a documentary prologue, designed to protect 2001 from the kind of misunderstandings engendered by the then prevalent Buck Rogers and Little Green Men school of science fiction. Featuring eminent scientists such as Freeman Dyson, Margaret Mead, B. F. Skinner, and eighteen other leading researchers discussing such subjects as extraterrestrial life, space travel, and communication between alien civilizations, the prologue was entrusted to Roger Caras and was actually shot, on black-and-white 35-millimeter, throughout 1965. Caras even traveled to Moscow to film the eminent Russian biochemist Alexander Oparin, author of the influential “primordial soup” theory of life’s evolution.
Kubrick had good reason to believe he was up against a perception that such subjects weren’t to be taken seriously by serious people, and therefore “could hardly be the basis for what is commonly known to the film industry’s barkers and shills as a major motion picture,” as Tony Frewin put it in his book-length compilation of these interviews, published in 2005. (Transcripts are all that’s readily available, though the actual footage may still exist somewhere in a Warner Bros. vault.) The documentary segment, Frewin pointed out, would have served much the same purpose as the pages of quotations on whales and whaling that Melville inserted at the start of Moby-Dick, prior to the immortal line “Call me Ishmael” that everyone remembers as the novel’s opening. They recall it that way, of course, because the quotes weren’t necessary to the story—something Kubrick ultimately realized about his documentary material. It was “one of Stanley Kubrick’s few really bad ideas,” observed one interview subject, Jeremy Bernstein.
Despite the director’s distaste for Carl Sagan’s patronizing manner at their New York meeting the year before, he’d readily agreed to his inclusion in the prologue. Nothing about Sagan’s reaction to Caras’s letter of invitation, however, was calculated to mollify Kubrick’s aversion to the young astronomer. In his first response in February, Sagan had asked what he would be paid—the only subject to do so. Caras replied that they hadn’t intended on paying a fee. In his second, on March 10, Sagan asked for editorial control due to the “high frequency of quotations out of context and misrepresentations through cuts and juxtapositions” in his “prior experience with the news media”—a statement that couldn’t have been better tailored to irritate the director.
Observing, accurately enough, that the film was not a documentary “but a commercial enterprise of some magnitude,” Sagan wrote that “the scientific introduction is clearly designed, among other things, to gain respectability for the film; this is obviously a negotiable item.” He asked for 0.002 percent of the gross receipts of the film for every minute of his appearance in it.
Prodded vigorously by Kubrick, Caras responded that editorial control would not be possible, and neither would a fee. Sagan was out.
• • •
2001’s penultimate scene, set in a hyperreal hotel room following Dave Bowman’s epic journey through the Star Gate, had its origins in the perception by Kubrick and Clarke that their surviving Odysseus-astronaut would need a place to recover from his exposure to sights the likes of which no human being had been exposed to before. Their room was also supposed to have overtones of a holding tank or zoo cage. “If you were having an extraterrestrial in your bottle in your chemistry lab, and you wanted to make it comfortable so you can observe it,” said Stanley to Christiane one day, “you would try to learn what it likes. And if you milk the brain of a human being, it might like a fancy art-book hotel room.”
The concept originally stemmed from Kubrick’s “robots who create a Victorian environment to put our heroes at their ease”—as Clarke had written in October 1964—and also from the author’s own early draft text in which he’d imagined Bowman seeking shelter in a building that could provide “mental security, for it would shut out the view of that impossible sky.” The Victorian element had evidently shifted by July 1965, when Victor Lyndon specified to Caras that the room’s furnishings should be from the 2001 period. Only a week later, however, Tony Masters—who as production designer had better access to Kubrick’s thinking—wrote Caras that they really didn’t know yet what the room would consist of.
Taking this rather inexact guidance, Kubrick’s vice president proceeded to contact the Armstrong Cork Company, a leading American manufacturer of floorings and ceiling materials, proposing that they take the lead in designing the space. “The situation is roughly this,” Caras wrote on July 29. “[W]hen the lead astronaut arrives . . . he is ushered into what is, in effect, a suite of rooms that is a direct duplicate of a suite . . . he sees on a television program coming from Earth. What has happened is, the superintelligence . . . has recreated this hospitality suite just as they saw it on television, and as they assumed everything on Earth would be.”
Armstrong Cork’s response was a model of industrial futurology. The company’s designers proposed a set of rooms containing a type of inflatable high-tech furniture capable of disappearing into the floor when not needed. The ceilings, they wrote, could be made of “a series of lumps” that “move back and forth . . . giving a very restful, undulating type motion.” If stairs were required, they should be invisible until stepped on, and then vanish again after use. “They propose that the floor will be very soft, and, in effect, padded,” summarized Caras in a letter to Masters. “They say that this floor would glow, would give off light, give a very warm, indirect lighting effect.”
By the time actual construction loomed, however, in the spring of 1966, it was clear that Armstrong’s proposal, which amounted to a setting even more futuristic than the film’s spacecraft interiors, might not have the desired effect. Such a set might, in fact, produce more of a sense that this environment “beyond the infinite” served as living quarters to the invisible aliens, rather than being created to put Bowman at ease. And the idea that the surviving astronaut flip through TV channels and discover a program featuring the very room in which he was sitting had long since been discarded.
By now, Kubrick’s faith in Masters’s judgment was about as strong as his “trust but verify” persona permitted. The designer had saved the day following the Perspex monolith fiasco, rapidly conceiving of what would soon be regarded as perhaps the most powerfully opaque object in film history. All his interiors had been exquisite as well. With the discussion now centering on that black monolith’s last setting—and Bowman’s transformation into a Star Child—Masters proposed another elegantly simple solution. “Why not have a French bedroom?” he said. “I mean, if you’re going to have a bedroom, it could be anything. But one thing we can do quite well is a French bedroom. We’ll do it all in nice soft grey-greens.”
Kubrick evaluated the idea. “Okay,” he said, nodding. “Let’s do a French bedroom.”
“Just like that,” Masters said of the conversation in 1977. The decision had taken seconds.
When he drafted his rococo Louis XIV room, however, the designer did retain an important element from Armstrong Cork: the glowing, indirect floor lighting. Masters’s set was constructed on Stage 4 using that ubiquitous Borehamwood substrate, steel piping, and it floated about twelve feet above the studio floor, giving space for lights amid the pipework. The set’s floor was made of another familiar material: Perspex, in this case, three-foot-square tiles. The lighting was provided by 370,000 watts of firepower from below, creating a kind of Sahara for the crew inside, one that MGM stagehands tried to ameliorate with a giant flexible air-conditioning pipe that was shoved in through the bathroom periodically but didn’t ever seem to cool the set enough. The lights gradually warped the tiles, which required periodic replacement.
Although to a viewer the effect was almost subliminal, Masters’s joined bedroom and bathroom were entirely without exterior doors or windows. While the wall panels could be removed for filming, from an audience point of view, there was no outside to Bowman’s extraterrestrial zoo cage.
The scene was shot during the second half of June, and for the first time required major work by Stuart Freeborn, then already recognized as among the world’s best makeup artists. Freeborn had taken a cast of Dullea’s face in January and since then had created a number of form-fitting foam rubber pieces, which when affixed and augmented during ten-hour makeup sessions, ushered the actor through several stages between his original assumed midthirties vintage all the way to Bowman’s deathbed. These included an octogenarian having supper, and a nonagenarian breathing his last.
A few weeks from the nominal end of main unit production for a film that by now had gone two months over its original shooting schedule, people were starting to drop away. Following the Brain Room scene, Cracknell left for another film and was replaced for several days by an inexperienced Ivor Powell, who’d transitioned in midproduction from serving as Caras’s man in London to being one of Kubrick’s assistants. While Geoffrey Unsworth would shoot the hotel room, he was wanted immediately thereafter on the set of a British musical and would not be available for the Dawn of Man, whenever it might be tackled.
The sequence depicted four transformations of Discovery’s sole survivor. Dullea first appears in his space pod seemingly undergoing a nervous breakdown after his passage through the Star Gate. He’s visible again as seen through the pod window, standing wide-eyed in a Ferrari-red space suit—evidently from the point of view of the shattered, quivering version of himself. Closer shots reveal this to be an older, wrinkled Bowman, perhaps in his midseventies, staring vacantly at the place where the pod no longer is. He walks into the bathroom, seemingly exploring his environment for the first time. Seeing himself in a large mirror, he numbly absorbs the sight of his own wrinkled face. Hearing the sound of cutlery, midseventies Bowman peers from the bathroom door to see octogenarian Bowman from behind, seated at a table beneath an oil painting recessed in the elaborate baroque walls—an arboreal scene. Finally, octogenarian Bowman sees the final version of himself on the bed.
The eight days spent filming the hotel room included a number of actions not used in the final cut. On June 23 midseventies Dullea was filmed walking to where his space pod had just been, then kneeling in disbelief to feel the floor where it had disappeared. Rising, he suddenly grew dizzy and collapsed in a chair, still in his space suit. Gradually he noticed that neatly folded clothing had appeared on the bed—an implicit invitation to shed the suit. Slowly rising, Dullea inspected the clothes. Then he walked into the bathroom—after which he sensed his older self eating at the dining table, as in the existing cut. Various props produced for the scene were also never used. These included a Potemkin phone book produced by Trumbull, which Bowman might have opened to discover nothing but blank pages inside.
The scene gave Dullea an opportunity to show off acting chops that hadn’t really previously been called for. His quivering, catatonic state on arrival in the pod is utterly convincing. His octogenarian incarnation is a kind of understated symphony of stiffened, arthritic movements. In one particularly long take on Friday, June 24—the dolly shot in which midseventies Bowman sees his older self from the bathroom, with the latter seated and eating—octogenarian Bowman senses something, turns in his seat, rises, and approaches the camera to survey the now empty bathroom. Discovering nobody there, he returns creakily to his seat. Handwritten in blue ink, Kubrick’s note in the Daily Continuity Report reads simply, “Very good acting!”
That day, Dullea had an inspired idea. The previous two transitions between his character’s incarnations had been shot to permit straight cuts later in the editing, with each cut reflecting a jump from his younger to his older character’s point of view—something Kubrick would subtly augment with the film’s sound design. Seated now at the dining table with the camera on a high rostrum looking down at him from in front, Dullea surveyed the small tabletop in front of him, which included two cut-crystal goblets, and suddenly thought of a way to mark the final shift between his incarnations. “Stanley, do you mind if I knock this glass over?” he asked. “Let me find a different way of being in the moment of hearing something, or sensing something. Let me knock the glass over, and in the action of leaning over, let me be caught with that sense, right in midmotion, so that isn’t a repeat of how I have done it up until now.”
Intrigued, Kubrick contemplated the suggestion. “Okay, that’s fine,” he decided, dispatching the propman to fetch additional crystal. They proceeded to film Dullea’s idea twice, in wide and medium shots from the rostrum. Then after multiple takes they lowered the Panavision to the floor and shot it a third time, now at table height from the side—the best angle to document the moment Dullea was looking for, as his attention shifted incrementally from the broken glass below him toward the bed, where his older self lay quietly breathing his—their—last, a sight greeted through narrowed eyes with scarcely repressed incredulity. Once again, Kubrick registered approval in blue ink on the Daily Continuity Report: “Very Good.”
While it may seem a less significant contribution than Lockwood’s space pod breakthrough—without the latter’s clarifying effect on the film’s structure—Dullea’s glass shatters during the most ideologically freighted final section of 2001’s multipart structure. Every action in Masters’s eerily echoing French period room resounds with potentially allegorical meanings. It’s a percussive moment, that crystal smashing in the enclosed space, and it has provided grounds for plenty of interpretations in the decades since. In the end, it’s probably as important as Lockwood’s pod-conspirators scene. Resounding in a metaphysical environment somewhere beyond the infinite, it’s simultaneously a manifestation of humanity’s propensity for error, every glass ever broken in all the Jewish weddings of history, a cymbal crash marking the death of God, a metaphorical token akin to the flash of insight produced by a Zen koan—and on and on.VI
It’s also, of course, another example of a onetime aspiring jazz drummer’s innate ability to hear and adapt to the players in his group— a cinematic bandleader’s real-time genius for listening, evaluating, and marshaling his players’ talents to maximum effect.
On telling the story in 2014, Dullea referred to it as a “tiny contribution.” It was more than that. Six months after his lead actor departed from Borehamwood, Kubrick sent a message to producer David Wolper. “Understand you are considering Keir for part in film,” he wrote in the clipped diction of international cables. “He does unneurotic parts with same genius as neurotic ones. You cannot find a better actor or more cooperative or intelligent one. I think he is one of the best actors in the world.”
He didn’t get the role.
I. The start of production has otherwise been widely cited as December 29, but that day was spent in camera rehearsals and lighting, with no film shot.
II. HAL’s eye wasn’t a prop but was actually a Nikon Nikkor 8-millimeter wide-angle lens lit from behind. It was reportedly requisitioned occasionally by Kubrick, affixed to a camera, and used for filming—though not for HAL’s point-of-view shots, interestingly enough, which were made with another lens, a Fairchild-Curtis 160-degree ultrawide angle.
III. For stochastic neural analog reinforcement calculator. But you already knew that.
IV. Callipygian (kal-uh-pij-ee-uh n) adjective 1. having well-shaped buttocks. Origin: 1640–50; Greek kallipyg(os): with beautiful buttocks, referring to a statue of Aphrodite.
V. The seemingly throwaway line concerning Wednesday was used by film director John Landis as the title of his first, unproduced script, and subsequently deployed as a recurring gag in most of his films, including The Blues Brothers and Twilight Zone: The Movie. It then memed its way into innumerable other films, TV shows, and video games.
VI. Consider, for example, this koan: Ikkyu, the Zen master, was very clever even as a boy. His teacher had a precious teacup; a rare antique. Ikkyu happened to break this cup and was greatly perplexed. Hearing the footsteps of his teacher, he held the pieces of the cup behind him. When the master appeared, Ikkyu asked, “Why do people have to die?” “This is natural,” explained the older man. “Everything has to die and has just so long to live.” Ikkyu, producing the shattered cup, said, “It was time for your cup to die.” (From www.ashidakim.com.)
