The Kubrick family at the Loews Capitol Theatre on Broadway for the New York premiere of 2001.
SPRING 1968
I can’t do anything about things when they’re going well, but I can when they’re not.
—STANLEY KUBRICK
The Moviola wasn’t on board the Queen Elizabeth to continue editing 2001. That had already been accomplished—or so it was assumed. It was for editing trailers, though de Wilde estimates that in their week’s crossing, he and Kubrick spent only six or seven hours in the cutting room, a cabin dedicated for that purpose directly adjoining his on the A deck. The Kubricks, meanwhile, installed themselves in the grandest quarters in the ship, the PM Suite, from which British prime minister Winston Churchill had allegedly planned important military operations while reclining in the bathtub smoking cigars during World War II. The director rarely left it, apart from three times a day for meals, though he and de Wilde did go for occasional walks on the deck.
They’d established a real rapport. De Wilde believes he was on the boat because “I had done three years of working for Stanley and given a hundred percent . . . I think he felt he owed me something.” He also sensed that Kubrick simply wanted to have a male friend on board whom he could talk to freely about whatever was on his mind. Every night, they all ate together in the best restaurant on board, the Verandah Grill, with Stanley in his rumpled blue jacket and Christiane and the girls dressed to the nines and looking “brilliant. They were beautiful,” de Wilde remembered.
One night they were invited to the captain’s table, in this case presided over by the Cunard commodore, Geoffrey Marr—something like a civilian admiral. Although Kubrick mustered up his best tie for the occasion and de Wilde broke out his mohair suit, it wasn’t enough. The ladies had gone ahead, and when Kubrick and de Wilde presented themselves at the grand dining room door, they were coolly met. “Sorry, you can’t come in,” the liveried doorman said flatly. “You’re not dressed for dinner.” Cunard code required tuxedoes. They looked at each other. Neither owned such clothing. “He couldn’t care less,” David remembered. “He didn’t give a toss.” They stood around for a few minutes as word filtered back to the door that it was the occupant of Churchill’s suite—one Stanley Kubrick, director—who’d been denied entry. Suddenly with a flurry of “Terribly sorry” and “Right this way,” they were escorted to the grand central table, where Kubrick was seated between Commodore Marr and Captain William Law, his blue jacket now framed by their dress whites.
Queen Elizabeth arrived in New York early on a misty March morning. It was the last trip Stanley Kubrick ever made to the United States, and de Wilde joined him on the deck to witness a sight he’d never expected to see: a giant female form with a spiky crown and upraised torch emerging from the fog. Jeremy Bernstein went to greet them at Pier 92 on the Hudson River side of Midtown Manhattan, only to discover that apart from an MGM representative, he was waiting with four or five alert-looking men wielding briefcases and manila envelopes: process servers. When Kubrick finally emerged from Immigration and Customs, they pounced, pushing papers into the startled director’s hands and announcing, “You’re served,” one after the other. At this, Kubrick shot an ironic look at de Wilde, who stood, shocked, a short distance away. “I was so unhappy and devastated that this man who controlled a whole studio was being . . . he wasn’t being frog-marched, but he had to swallow it, he had to accept it,” David remembered. “I was embarrassed for the poor man, and it hurt me.”
One of the processes served that day almost certainly was a notice of legal action by Fred Ordway on behalf of an organization he’d cofounded, the International Space Museum and Gallery. After leaving the production in 1966, Ordway had started the project with his friend the space historian Carsbie Adams and a group of investors. Intended as a Washington, DC, showcase for the production’s sets, models, and costumes, it was initially encouraged by Kubrick, who seems to have believed it was a nonprofit associated with the Smithsonian Institution. Following his positive feedback, Ordway and Adams raised funds sufficient to rent a large building in Washington and had already spent more than $200,000 by the time Kubrick became aware it was actually a for-profit company. He subsequently interrogated Lange to find out what he knew and refused any further cooperation. Ordway and Adams’s lawsuit, filed on March 12, claimed damages of $1 million from Polaris Productions and MGM for their outlays plus loss of revenue.
After the processes had all been served and their servers had retreated, Bernstein accompanied the Kubrick family and de Wilde to the Plaza Hotel in a small convoy of MGM Cadillacs. Once they’d settled in, the director came to join Bernstein in the lobby, and they tried to get into the Oak Room—but were refused entry because Kubrick wasn’t wearing a tie.
His first day back wasn’t going particularly well.
• • •
By March 16, the Kubricks had made their way to Los Angeles via Chicago in a luxurious transcontinental train trip, with the Chicago-LA leg spent in a glass-walled dome car apartment complete with master bedroom, easy chairs, and showers. De Wilde and Caras had flown ahead to meet them, and by then, film editor Ray Lovejoy had also arrived from London. After a meeting at MGM’s Thalberg Building in Culver City, Lovejoy and de Wilde began the process of overseeing sound work on the cut reels, which included converting the mono soundtrack they’d made in England into stereo, as well as finishing the trailers started on board the ship.
The first time 2001: A Space Odyssey was screened at full length, with all visual effects in place and no interruptions, was on Saturday, March 23, in a giant theater in Culver City in front of a tiny audience. In addition to Kubrick, who hadn’t seen his own film in its entirety before, only de Wilde, Lovejoy, and the studio’s top brass were present: president and CEO Robert O’Brien; VP and president of MGM International Maurice Silverstein; editorial administrator Merle Chamberlain; and MGM supervising editor Maggie Booth. Then seventy, Booth was one of Hollywood’s grand dames. She’d started as a negative cutter for seminal producer-director D. W. Griffith in 1915 before going on to work for Louis B. Mayer well prior to the merger that had produced MGM in 1924. A legendary figure, she was diminutive but commanding, and de Wilde was keenly aware that she was one of the most experienced film editors in Hollywood and had reigned over all the studio’s final cuts for three decades.
De Wilde and Lovejoy sat in the back of the theater, as far as possible from the VIPs up front. Both were anxious. “For three years, they had been coming over and we’d been running this show reel, and now we were showing them the whole thing, what it was all about,” said de Wilde. “And, of course, the actual film itself is a mystery. A mystery.” Asked if he thought Kubrick was nervous as well, the assistant editor said he gave no sign of it.
When the lights faded and the film started, however, the director kept coming back to tweak the sound. The film hadn’t yet been fully mixed, and Kubrick wanted de Wilde to increase the volume for Thus Spoke Zarathustra, among other places. The running time was then 161 minutes, and from their darkened perch, de Wilde and Lovejoy watched 2001 unfold, simultaneously dazzled by the achievement and uneasy. A radically experimental work of art, it had no narrative voice-overs and few cues given to guide audience understanding. It also betrayed signs of first-draft editing, with certain scenes unnecessarily long and others needlessly repetitive of sequences that had gone before. Apart from the opening credit sequence and the Dawn of Man, the film was without title cards.
When the lights went up again almost three hours later, “they all stood up, and I thought, ‘Shit.’ I thought it was a disaster,” de Wilde remembered. He’d deemed the film brilliant—but on examining the body language of O’Brien, Silverstein, Chamberlain, and Booth at the other end of the theater, he recognized that they might have reached a different judgment. “The way they stood up and shook hands with Stanley and everything, and ‘Congratulations,’ ‘Thank you, Stanley’—it was just the body language . . . I thought, ‘Jesus this didn’t go down well. Jesus.’ ”
De Wilde was in charge of the print, however, and he couldn’t hang around to verify his supposition—he had to go claim it in the booth. Leaving the theater, he realized to his surprise that he was shaking. He was profoundly invested in the film. “Three years of my bloody life, and Stanley’s as well,” he recalled. “I loved the guy.” Climbing the stairs, he replayed Maggie Booth’s restrained reaction in particular. In congratulating Kubrick, she’d looked like she was only going through the motions. It didn’t bode well.
On reaching the projection area, he saw to his surprise, in addition to the projectionist, a young man of about eighteen—Maurice Silverstein’s nephew. He’d evidently watched the whole thing from the booth windows. He had an ecstatic look on his face.
“Did you work on that?” he asked excitedly.
“Yeah, we just finished it,” confirmed de Wilde.
“Who are you?” Not a demand but, rather, in wonder.
“I’m Stanley’s assistant editor.” De Wilde was gradually calming down.
“Well, I just watched it.”
“What did you think?”
“It was the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen.”
• • •
A good two years after Clarke had first insisted it was ready, Kubrick finally green-lighted the novel. Following an auction among publishing houses that had been well aware of the property for that period, on March 20 Scott Meredith succeeded in extracting an offer from New American Library for $130,000—$30,000 less than what Dell had offered two years before. Still, after Kubrick’s percentage, Clarke would earn the equivalent of over a half million dollars today. Enough to cancel his debts with money to spare.
No directorial revisions had been offered after Kubrick’s initial tranche in June 1966, and the suggestions he had made hadn’t been incorporated. Nor was he listed as coauthor—though they’d agreed that the title page would contain the line “based on a screenplay by Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke.” In his incomplete list of proposed changes, Kubrick had questioned whether one could use the word “veld” for a drought-stricken area, if bees could be found in such conditions, and if leopards could be said to growl. In the published book, bees buzzed above a veld populated by growling leopards. “When Stanley approved the book for publication, not a word had been changed,” Clarke observed to Jerome Agel, editor of The Making of Kubrick’s 2001, in 1970. “There seems to be a right way to do things, a wrong way, and Stanley’s way.”
A revealing few letters between Clarke and two old friends through 1967 and 1968 provide an interesting portrait of the writer on the verge of 2001’s world premiere. One exchange was with his fellow science fiction author Sam Youd, who was also represented by Meredith’s literary agency under his pen name, John Christopher. The other was with rocket scientist Val Cleaver, the chief engineer of the Rolls-Royce Rocket Division.
In June 1967 Clarke had filled Youd in on the failure of his Dell deal, detailing with theatrical relish how far into debt he’d fallen as a result (he cited a figure of $50,000) and concluding with “Apart from that, Mrs. Lincoln, all is going well, and I’ve no doubt 2001 will be published eventually and I’m not too upset—the movie is going to be fantastic.”
Youd answered with a reassuring “I’m sure the deal will reemerge much as before when things get near the film’s release. I trust you get a good slice of the proceeds from that?”
To which Clarke had replied, “No, I have no part of the movie, alas.”
The response was both incredulous and indignant:
If I have got it straight in my mind, the position is this: you write the book which sets the whole thing up, and Kubrick collects 50% of the cash and credit on that one, plus the right to bugger the whole thing up as he eventually did.I But you get nothing for the film rights. I’m surprised that Scott OK’d a deal of that kind, and a little surprised that you yourself didn’t do a spot of boggling. I hope you did not rely on the good faith of anyone—unwise in any kind of business, suicidal where film people are concerned.
Rationalizing Meredith’s failure to leverage the writer’s standing during the negotiation with Kubrick back in 1964, Clarke responded on October 21, “The book-film situation is much more complex than I can go into here—I’ll still do pretty well out of it eventually. But I could have done with that $100,000 in 1966.”II
As for Val Cleaver, he’d been Clarke’s friend since the 1930s, and had served as the second when the author went for a good-natured verbal duel with C. S. Lewis in Oxford in 1954—a faceoff designed to defend the merits of spaceflight, which Lewis had publicly attacked. (Lewis’s second was J. R. R. Tolkien, producing a remarkable—but unfortunately, otherwise undocumented—clash between the leading British fantasy and science fiction writers.) On March 24, shortly before 2001’s world premiere, Cleaver wrote Clarke a simple, heartfelt message.
My best wishes for every success on April 2nd. I do hope it all lives up to your expectations. I’ll even include Stanley in that—I’m feeling in a generous mood tonight! But I have some idea how much this means to you—as a vivid representation of the world of imagination in which you have mostly lived during the past 40 years, emerging from it only occasionally to converse with mid-20th century mortals such as I. Stanley thinks he’s made this film for himself, or for MGM, or for the public, but of course he’s wrong. He’s really made it for you. So, above all, I wish you every happiness and satisfaction on The Night.
• • •
Although he made concerted efforts to disguise it, when Clarke finally saw 2001: A Space Odyssey at a press preview screening on March 31 at the Uptown Theater—an imposing movie palace with a Mesopotamian façade in the Cleveland Park neighborhood of Washington, DC—it failed to live up to his expectations, produced little happiness, and gave no satisfaction. Though he knew in advance that Kubrick hadn’t used any of his voice-over narration, he was shocked and disappointed by the film’s lack of concession to audience understanding. It was only hours after Lyndon Johnson had announced he wouldn’t seek another term in the White House, and Clarke overheard one MGM executive say to the other, “Well, today we lost two presidents”—referring, of course, also to studio chief O’Brien.
The official world premiere took place two days later at the Uptown, and by then, the entire top MGM hierarchy was in attendance, as were Keir Dullea and Gary Lockwood. Kubrick had returned to New York from Los Angeles by train only days before, and because the Manhattan opening was the following day, he’d elected not to attend. It was a rainy evening, and Lockwood, who’d smoked a joint for the occasion, remembered tables set out in the lobby with beautifully produced illustrated programs and a sense of excitement as the lights went down. Before too long, however, people started voting with their feet, and at the intermission, they “were just streaming out. It was a disaster. No one liked it.”
Victor Davis of the Daily Express had flown in from London for the event and filed a piece on April 3 that led with: “I have never seen a major film preview like it: there was not a single handclap—not even from the studio men. The audience just rose, stunned and thoughtful, and shuffled out to the pavement.”
He pointed out that MGM had “gambled their financial health” on the film, writing, “Man’s deepest purpose is questioned, and then Kubrick ejects us on the street baffled.” Standing on that damp sidewalk was none other than Clarke, however, who soon found himself surrounded by “wet huddles” of confused journalists and was quoted as saying, “You’ll have to see it six times to arrive at any sort of understanding.”
Although Davis’s piece was actually mixed—he not only called the film “visually staggering” but predicted that the “under-35s” among its audience would be “repeatedly drawn” to it, a prescient comment—other UK press reports were categorically negative, with the lead paragraph of Donald Zec’s Daily Mirror article the same day reading, in its entirety, “It took four years to complete, £4,000,000 to produce, and precisely two hours and forty-two minutes to confirm that it is uncommonly painful not to laugh when you feel like it.” The Washington papers weren’t much better, with a gossipy piece in the Evening Star stating, “Despite its marvelous and elaborate sets and the perfection of its technique, it has a plot aimed at 7-year-olds. Cracked a man in the movie business, ‘I have never seen such a piece of junk in my life.’ Said another observer: ‘It took three hours to find out that God is a monolith.’ ”
Exiting the premiere, Lockwood skirted the press scrum around Clarke and returned to the Shoreham Hotel, where he found himself riding up in the elevator with Robert O’Brien and “one of the sycophants, who looked at me and said, ‘Where did you guys go awry?’ ” Lockwood, who knew the significance of what he’d just seen, glared at the man. “We didn’t ‘go awry,’ ” he said. “Wait, just wait.” (By contrast, O’Brien was “very nice about it all.”) He met up with Dullea and they proceeded to the postpremiere party in the ballroom, where they discovered that the Lester Lanin Orchestra was playing to only a handful of people, and made themselves scarce.
Anxious not to antagonize Kubrick, and acutely conscious that his book’s future depended on the film’s reception, Clarke kept his true views to a small circle. On April 24 he received a letter from screenwriter Howard Koch, who’d written a script based on Childhood’s End a decade previously that had been in development at MGM when Kubrick came along—after which it was suppressed, evidently with some help from Louis Blau. “George Pal called me and told me you were deeply disappointed with 2001,” Koch wrote. “I saw it and share your disappointment . . . So much money and brains expended on such a cold, unhuman, bloodless work!”
Clarke’s annotations to the letter tell their own story. A wavy blue pen line through “deeply disappointed,” Koch’s phone number in Los Angeles—and a note indicating that he’d called him on May 2, no doubt to ask that his views be kept in confidence.
Decades later, however, Clarke quietly confirmed that he’d been shocked, baffled, and dissatisfied by the film—at least initially.
• • •
Christiane Kubrick remembers 2001’s premiere as the one she attended on the night of April 3 at Loews Capitol Theater on Broadway—an invitation-only event with a press mob outside and an audience comprised predominantly of entitled representatives of the media and cultural elite, senior- to midlevel MGM staff, and celebrities of various stripes, including Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward, Gloria Vanderbilt, and Henry Fonda. The New York premiere was, in effect, the Kubrick premiere, and against all odds, she’d persuaded Stanley to don a tuxedo for the occasion. He even consented to do an on-camera interview in the lobby—one of the few such clips available. Little Vivian was there, wearing the same red dress as in her space station videophone scene, and Clarke had returned to New York for the occasion. He and Kubrick sat together in the front row of the theater, which seated more than 5,000 people and was completely jammed.
Looking around before the lights went down, Christiane noted the predominance of older people in the audience, and thought to herself, “Lots of alte kackers here”—literally “old shitters” in German and Yiddish, but more accurately translated as “old farts.” Magician and radio host James Randi attended the screening with a posse of science fiction writers that included Isaac Asimov. Randi sat two-thirds of the way back in the theater with a clear view of Clarke and Kubrick up front, silhouetted by the curving, two-story-high Cinerama screen. He has vivid memories of the event, and recalls audience disquiet erupting during an extended sequence toward the end of the first half in which Bowman jogged around and around the centrifuge—a scene he suspected was “Kubrick trying to prove how boring it was to be in space. He certainly proved his point.”
As Dullea ran in protracted circles, Randi started hearing boos and hisses. People “were saying things like, ‘Let’s move it along,’ ‘Here we go,’ ‘Next scene,’ that kind of thing. Not calling out loudly, but you could hear them saying it. And they even started to giggle, because it was a silly thing, with this long, long scene in there.” When the lights went up for the intermission, he witnessed Kubrick and Clarke walking silently up the theater aisle together. Grim faced, Kubrick was lost in thought. Tears were clearly visible on Clarke’s face. “He was very upset,” Randi recalled. “Very, very upset.”
Throughout the first half, a fretful Kubrick had prowled the theater, commuting regularly up to the projection booth to check focus and monitor sound. Caras remembered him pacing “up and down the side aisles and across the back, looking for the squirm factor.” The director would comment later, “I’ve never seen an audience so restless.” He’d stationed someone at the entrance to count the walkouts, which gradually turned from a trickle to a steady rain, and then a deluge at the intermission. When Kubrick returned to his seat, he muttered terse comments to Christiane. “He was suddenly thinking, ‘I held certain things too long, either [the] running around the wheel, or . . . ,’ ” she recalled. “And he felt great hostility from the staff of MGM, and all the executives totally walked out. Bored. It was really frightening.”
At the intermission, Christiane felt an oppressive schadenfreude radiating from the house. Escaping to the washroom, she overheard one woman saying to another, “I didn’t know there wasn’t any air on the Moon.” At this, she began to understand that this could simply be the wrong audience. Things might not be as bad as they seemed. “They are not going to be the ones that like this film,” she told herself fiercely. “They are not going to be who pays for tickets for this film. I know people love to read Arthur Clarke. I know they like stories like that. It’s brilliantly done!”
Clarke, who’d already seen the film twice, left at the intermission, retreating to the Chelsea in humiliation and disappointment. Later, he recalled overhearing another comment emanating from the seated phalanx of MGM executives: “Well, that’s the end of Stanley Kubrick.”
By the end, 241 walkouts had been recorded. Afterward, the Kubricks sent their girls off to the mansion they’d rented on Long Island and made their way back to the Plaza, where they’d organized a postpremiere reception in a large suite. Jeremy Bernstein had attended the screening with his New Yorker editor, who commented, as they rose to leave, “Whatever it was, it was a big one.” Arriving at the party, which he described as “very gloomy,” he saw Terry Southern sitting in a corner “looking rather miserable.” A sense of doom hung over the room. “Apart from Louie Blau, who kept on going around saying it was a masterpiece, I think the rest of us, including me, were disappointed,” he recalled. “We had expected something else.” Asked about Kubrick’s demeanor, Bernstein said, “He looked a little bewildered, I think.”
Christiane remembers the scene with the indelible clarity that traumatic events can retain for decades. “It was just a room full of drinks and men and tension,” she said. “I’ve never seen such a full room, you could barely move, and it went on and on. And Stanley was so unhappy.” People said “poisonous things,” and friendships ended that night, with “schadenfreude and a nasty smile. The thing we all fear most: other people being triumphant that you’ve failed.”
She recalls Southern as a hugely reassuring presence, however. “Terry was trembling for Stanley because some of these people were very negative,” she said. “I spoke to Terry most of the time because I was lost and afraid of the people.” She remembers saying, “I’m so sad, this is so horrible for Stanley,” and Southern replying, “This is a great film, don’t worry, it’ll be fine. Look at these assholes. Do you normally talk to them? Talk to me.”
“I’ve always loved him for that,” she said.
Throughout, Kubrick chain-smoked, and by three in the morning, everyone had gone, leaving a nasty vacuum, a stink of cigarettes, and a colossal sense of failure. “Stanley was tearing himself to shreds,” Christiane said. “Saying, ‘Oh my God, they really hated it.’ He was heartbroken.” She tried to rally him, saying, “They did not hate it. Did you see that audience? They’re people you never talk to. Of course they didn’t like it. Wait until the audience comes—it will be different.”
Impossible to mollify, he paced the room, asking, “What am I going to do?” over and over. Normally her husband was very secure, observed Christiane, but the evening had devastated him, and now he was losing his voice. She decided to take a different tone.
“This is rubbish,” she told him. “You’re just obeying something you would never obey normally, and now you’re folding up. This is crap!” She poured him a scotch. “Have a drink.”
By now, it was four in the morning. “And we lay down, and Stanley couldn’t sleep and couldn’t speak and couldn’t do anything, he was just shattered,” she said. “He was close to crying. I mean, he didn’t cry, but he said, ‘Oh God, this is just terrible.’ He felt terrible—terrible, terrible—and we had rented this house, so very early in the morning, like four, he said, ‘Listen, let’s drive there, and at least have something to do.’ ”
So we went to that house on Long Island—which was splendid—and I remember I had a handbag and an evening dress, and I just fell on my stomach on the bed and fell asleep completely. Only to wake up to the radio, where the guy was reading the news and saying, “They’re standing around the block for Stanley Kubrick’s film.” And they did. There was the first performance of the day, twelve o’clock or something like that, and there were huge queues, and [on the radio] they said, “This is a fantastic film.” And from then on, it rained praise.
She woke him up just in time to hear the end of the report—a silver lining concluding one of the darkest nights in Stanley Kubrick’s life.
• • •
Apart from Penelope Gilliatt in the New Yorker, who described 2001 as “some sort of great film, and an unforgettable endeavor,” the city’s leading critics lined up to slam the movie, mostly in reviews published that morning. Writing in the Times, Renata Adler called it “somewhere between hypnotic and immensely boring,” accusing the film of “a kind of reveling in its own IQ.” (She did, however, approvingly cite the “carnivorous apes that look real.”) In the New Republic, Stanley Kauffmann called 2001 “a major disappointment,” stating that it was “so dull, it even dulls our interest in the technical ingenuity for the sake of which Kubrick has allowed it to become dull.” In the Village Voice, then at the height of its influence, Andrew Sarris dubbed 2001 “a thoroughly uninteresting failure and the most damning demonstration yet of Stanley Kubrick’s inability to tell a story coherently and with a consistent point of view.”
Although he caught wind of her disdain well in advance, Pauline Kael, already one of the most influential film critics in the country, waited almost a year before absolutely strafing Kubrick. In an article for Harper’s that didn’t even give 2001 the respect of considering it alone, Kael called the film “monumentally unimaginative,” denounced it as “trash masquerading as art,” and characterized it as “Kubrick’s inspirational banality about how we will become as gods through machinery.” She even accused him of theft, on the grounds of similarities between the Star Gate sequence and the work of experimental filmmaker Jordan Belson—something like accusing Faulkner of stealing from Joyce because both used stream of consciousness techniques.
We don’t know what MGM’s supervising editor, Maggie Booth, said to Kubrick or her colleagues after that first Culver City screening less than two weeks before. But she’d left her imprint on all of the studio’s productions for more than three decades, and we can be sure her views were taken into consideration. By April 4, the consensus at MGM was that the film was an epic disaster, with some going so far as to say it would sink the studio. Kubrick’s contract gave O’Brien the right to request changes that if disputed by the director would be subject to an audience reaction test. But after O’Brien’s unwavering support over the past four years, Kubrick wasn’t about to initiate such a confrontation. In any case, by April 4, Kubrick had already conducted several excruciating assessments of the audience’s “squirm factor,” not to mention counting the walkouts. That reaction test had already been made, and the results were clear.
With the film now playing daily in Washington and New York and the negative reviews pouring in—albeit ameliorated by a handful of positive ones—a decision was taken to make cuts. While Kubrick would later state they were made “at no one’s request,” we can be sure the studio exerted significant pressure in this regard. Participants at the April 4 trim meeting in MGM’s headquarters on Sixth Avenue included Kubrick and top studio officials, including O’Brien; MGM VP and director of advertising and promotion Dan Terrell; VP and general sales manager Morris Lefko; and the president of MGM International, Maurice Silverstein—whose teenaged nephew had provided the first “under-thirty-five” reaction. The next day, Kubrick and Ray Lovejoy met in a basement editing facility at the MGM building and sat up all night working. Editing continued across that weekend, ending on the ninth.
Because 70-millimeter prints with optical soundtracks integrally bound to them had already been distributed to eight theaters, Kubrick’s edits were artificially constrained to places where impact on the film’s sound was minimal—a highly unorthodox situation, and far from ideal. As a result, Aram Khachaturian’s moody “Gayane Ballet Suite (Adagio)”—which plays across the opening shots of Discovery on its way to Jupiter—had to be trimmed, though the effect on the composition was subtle. On the ninth, a list of cuts was sent to the Loews and Uptown theaters, the Warner in LA, and also to theaters in Boston, Detroit, Houston, Denver, and Chicago, all of which started screening 2001 on April 10 or 11. After years of excruciating, finicky exactitude concerning all aspects of the production, crucial cuts to 2001: A Space Odyssey were being entrusted to eight unknown projectionists working on tabletop splice rigs—at least until new prints could be struck.
According to an unnamed studio executive quoted in an unpublished draft of Agel’s The Making of Kubrick’s 2001, top MGM brass “were all present until the decision of the trim was finalized. None of them stayed for the mechanics, however.” Kubrick insisted this line be removed from the book. Still quoting the executive, the text continued:
The basement in the MGM building where we have our editing facilities was generally crowded during trim sessions. Lots of people looking for Stanley—big people, little people, fat people, thin people. Stanley’s youngest daughter, Vivian, was present during much of the editing. She’s a chocolate donut nut—always asking for a chocolate donut. Stanley hated the Sixth Avenue Delicatessen across the street. He said it couldn’t make a good outgoing sandwich.
This passed muster but was followed by another line that Kubrick crossed out: “He did not seem happy to make the cuts—trims—but I might be wrong. I certainly got the feeling that what was trimmed was what would show in the least in projection.” Kubrick defended his changes to the book with scribbled comments. About the trim meetings: “Not true. No MGM exec ever suggested the film be cut.” Concerning being unhappy to make the cuts: “Bullshit, again this is anonymously attributed. It’s a lie.”
In fairness to the unnamed executive—who himself indicated he might be wrong—all the evidence suggests that by April 4, Kubrick had fully recognized the necessity of trimming his film. This includes what he’d said to Christiane at the premiere the night before. Apart from exhaustion, Kubrick’s demeanor may have stemmed from concern over how to accomplish this, given the unusual stricture that any trims be undetectable in a sound mix now permanently wedded to the picture.
As for the director’s categorical statement about MGM not suggesting trims, it’s certainly wrong and reflects his determination that no hint of the studio’s true influence be permitted beyond a small circle. As even Kubrick loyalist Roger Caras put it in 1989, “Stanley will deny anything, no matter what, he will deny anything he thinks will reflect less than sensationally on the mythic Kubrick.”
The cuts, made on MGM publicity man Michael Shapiro’s Moviola, amounted to about nineteen minutes—or about 12 percent of the film’s original running time. They included the removal of Dullea’s jogging sequence—the one which had triggered boos and catcalls on the third—a redundant scene anyway, since the first interior views of Discovery featured Lockwood doing exactly the same thing. Also tossed was a lengthy, almost shot-by-shot repetition of Bowman’s preparations to exit Discovery, this time by Poole—an excision that reportedly reduced some of the shock of his subsequent murder. Other edited sections included a request by HAL to replay Mission Control’s message concerning his own malfunction; trims to the lunar monolith scene; a sequence in which HAL switches off the radio link to Poole just before killing him; and some edits to the Dawn of Man sequence.
Two new title cards were added as well. One was positioned just prior to the first view of Discovery and read “Jupiter Mission 18 Months Later.” The other, “Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite,” signaled the film’s last two acts, namely the Star Gate and hotel room sequences. Finally, Kubrick inserted the brief reprise of Cantwell’s sunrise-over-the-monolith shot, just prior to Moonwatcher’s bone-weapon epiphany.
The changes were controversial in some quarters. A letter from NYU graduate film student Jon Davison to the New York Times on April 28 slammed MGM for the edits and “meaningless title cards.” Davison wrote that “Stanley Kubrick’s magnificent work has been butchered; the sad result of the critical abuse heaped upon it,” concluding, “The bastardization, complete with sloppy splices and uneven pacing, is now being viewed by even more confused audiences than met the original. But the most confused of all is MGM, whose lack of artistic faith in its own film led it to cut what it couldn’t comprehend, thus destroying what it hoped to save.”III
There are good reasons to suppose that the initial hostility to the film, particularly among New York critics, was at least to some degree due to that first edit with its avoidable redundancies. Contrary to Davison’s supposition, however, Kubrick’s trims were both self-directed and well founded. The bad splices he referred to must mean that the print he saw was one of those trimmed by projectionists in response to the cut list sent out from MGM on April 9. They would soon be replaced by seamless new prints.
While 2001’s negative reviews weren’t limited to New York, they were predominantly by critics who’d seen the first edit. Hollywood’s leading industry paper, Variety, gave the film a decidedly mixed and ultimately negative review on April 3, singling out “some wholesale and rather hasty cutting decisions on the part of Kubrick” and stating flatly, “2001 is not a cinematic landmark.” (The cutting decisions referred to were in the premiere print, not the shorter version.) Remarkably, the writer believed the makeup in the Dawn of Man sequence was “amateurish compared to that in Planet of the Apes.” A more sympathetic Variety piece published two weeks later pointed out that “Kubrick didn’t see a final cut of 2001 until eight days before the press preview,” and meditated on the damage the longer first edit may have done: “Considering that most viewers, regardless of their initial reaction, agree that 2001 is substantially better in the tighter version, it seems a shame that Kubrick’s first, not final cut, was the one subjected to national reviews.”
As if to prove the point, a sidebar story quoted Boston Globe critic Marjorie Adams, who’d seen the second cut and called 2001 “the world’s most extraordinary film. Nothing like it has ever been shown in Boston before, or, for that matter, anywhere . . . This film is as exciting as the discovery of a new dimension in life.”
Despite the problematic launch, Kubrick and Clarke’s cosmic epic wasn’t just holding its own. It was starting to prevail.
• • •
Contrary to the myth that 2001 faltered at the box office and was on the verge of being withdrawn when younger audiences came riding to its rescue, box office data reveal excellent ticket sales from Day One. Within a week of its premiere, the April 10 Variety was already recording advance ticket sales 30 percent better than they were for MGM’s 1965 hit Doctor Zhivago.
But as the reaction of Silverstein’s nephew had already hinted, how 2001 was received largely depended on which side of the late-sixties generational divide the audience fell. Like “Mr. Jones” in Bob Dylan’s 1965 song “Ballad of a Thin Man,” something was happening, and older audiences didn’t necessarily know what it was. Most film executives didn’t, either, and the Variety piece on April 10 led with what today might seem a ridiculously self-evident observation: “Because today’s filmgoers are predominantly under 25, it would seem vital for the industry to learn something about this market and their tastes.” Citing Marshall McLuhan, the article cut to the heart of the Clarke-Kubrick left-brain, right-brain split that Colin Cantwell had identified months before, pointing out that to the “visual-oriented” youth of 1968, “visual and aural sensations have replaced words.” It also quoted one of Kubrick’s earliest public comments on 2001: “I wanted to make a nonverbal statement, one that would affect people on the visceral, emotional, and psychological levels. People over forty aren’t used to breaking out of the straitjacket of words and literal concepts, but the response so far from younger people has been terrific.”
So while younger people were, in fact, largely responsible for the film’s success, this happened almost immediately. By mid-May, Variety was reporting that in its first five weeks 2001 had already grossed more than $1 million from only eight theaters, with Loews Capitol in New York instituting five o’clock screenings on weekend afternoons to keep up with the demand. Meanwhile, as popular acclaim continued mounting, a number of critics had second thoughts. Newsday’s Joseph Gelmis, for example, was intrigued enough to attend a repeat screening, this time of the second cut. His first review, on April 4, had concluded, “The film jumps erratically. The episodes aren’t structured logically until the very last moments of the film. It is a mistake. Instead of suspense, there is surprise and confusion, and, for many, resentment.”
In his second piece—a remarkable mea culpa published two weeks later—Gelmis proclaimed the film a “masterwork,” comparing initial critical reactions, including his own, to the reception that had greeted Herman Melville in 1851.
About 100 years ago, Moby-Dick was eloquently damned and devastatingly dismissed by one of Britain’s most influential and erudite literary critics. He argued persuasively that the book was a preposterous grab bag. He ridiculed its self-indulgent lyricism and poetic mysticism. He said it was an unconditional failure because it didn’t follow the accepted canons of how a 19th-century novel should be written. He was impeccably correct. Yet today there are perhaps a half-dozen scholars who can recall the critic’s name, while every college freshman knows the name of the maligned novelist.
He went on to observe, “A professional critic is sometimes trapped by his own need for convenient categories, canons, and conventions . . . He is the upholder of the familiar, the promoter of the status quo.” Clarke was so tickled that he wrote Gelmis a note from the Chelsea on May 6.
I was fascinated, and most impressed, by your article in the 20 April Newsday, as the parallels with the initial receptions of 2001 and Moby-Dick had already occurred to me. In fact, I had remarked that the rapid volte-face of the critics (3 weeks, instead of some 80 years) is an indication of today’s rate of progress. It’s a point for McLuhan too . . . However, what makes your comment doubly interesting to me is the fact that during the last couple of years of work on the project, I was quite consciously aware of another Moby-Dick parallel—i.e., the use of “hard” technology to set a background for metaphysical and philosophical speculations.
Although he wasn’t a critic and hadn’t seen the trimmed version, one viewer who remained unconvinced was none other than Fred Ordway, who’d attended the Washington premiere and counted fifty-two people leaving. Already agitated by Kubrick’s turnaround concerning his International Space Museum project, Ordway may not have been in an ideal state of mind to view the film. His single-spaced, eight-page letter to Kubrick on April 9 vented exasperation at 2001’s opacity and contained an extraordinarily detailed and comprehensive negative assessment. Coming from one of Kubrick’s closer collaborators, it was a remarkable document.
• • •
With ticket sales booming and most of the later reviews positive, the Kubricks largely withdrew to their large rented mansion on Long Island’s North Shore, where crowds of “big people, little people, fat people, thin people” descended on them, mostly from the media. “The house had a landing with a light facing Long Island Sound,” recalled Mike Kaplan, a young marketing executive brought in to handle 2001’s promotion once the median age of its audience became clear. “Such was the interest in anything Kubrick that rumors quickly spread it was the actual setting of Jay Gatsby’s mansion in The Great Gatsby.”
A talented visual artist, Christiane tried her hand at depicting the bay and house in oils while simultaneously providing tea and coffee for an endless stream of unwanted guests. She recalled female journalists jostling one another in an effort to get close to Stanley. “It’s the only time in my life that I experienced a kind of catty atmosphere where my husband was concerned,” she said. “They wanted to spend time with him, and I was inconvenient.” Disapproval at her national origins rose to the surface in disgusting ways. “There were some really nasty remarks. You know, my English wasn’t as good then, and I had a German accent. And the war was much more recent. And they just didn’t want me around. I remember one time I had a nice suede jacket on. And one of them looked at me—I don’t remember her name—and she said, ‘What kind of skin is that you’re wearing?’ ”
Recalling the incident with a shudder, Christiane said, “I praised myself for one thing: that these kinds of horrible experiences that I had—several times—I didn’t tell him. I thought I was strong in the sense that my little German hang-up didn’t need to be his fate.”
Although the trimmed film—and the excellent box office—was helping to facilitate 2001’s acceptance, in late April Kubrick decided that a further explanation might be in order, and he chose the New York Times’s movie editor Abe Weiler, then writing a Sunday filmmaking column, as the conduit. Weiler quoted the director at length.
What happens at the end must tap the subconscious for its power. To do this, one must bypass words and move into the world of dreams and mythology. This is why the literal clarity one has become used to is not there. Here is what we used for planning. In Jupiter orbit, Keir Dullea is swept into a Star Gate. Hurled through fragmented regions of time and space, he enters into another dimension where the laws of nature as we know them no longer apply. In the unseen presence of godlike entities—beings of pure energy who have evolved beyond matter—he finds himself in what might be described as a human zoo, created from his own dreams and memories . . . His entire life passes in what appears to him a matter of moments. He dies and is reborn—transfigured. An enhanced being, a Star Child. The ascent from ape to angel is complete.
It took the Kubricks time to recover from their ordeal on the night of the third. At one point, Stanley confided to Christiane, “I was so shocked that I still think any minute now something horrible is going to happen.” Gradually, though, the tension of four years’ sustained effort started to ebb. While he raged at the nasty reviews, he also received a flood of awestruck and supportive letters, and not only from young people. As time passed, the positive assessments outweighed the negative ones. Asked about the initial reactions that September, Kubrick responded, “New York was the only really hostile city. Perhaps there is a certain element of the lumpen literati that is so dogmatically atheist and materialist and Earthbound that it finds the grandeur of space and the myriad mysteries of cosmic intelligence anathema.”
In addition to its landing and light, the Gatsbyesque house with its enormous porch on Long Island Sound also had a shooting range in the basement, and that summer Roger Caras and family would regularly drive over from East Hampton to visit. He and Kubrick shared a love of guns, and Roger would bring a small arsenal to match Stanley’s own. According to Christiane, both were excellent shots. And that’s as good a scene as any to leave the director of 2001: A Space Odyssey and his New York consigliere: the two of them blazing away at a target wreathed in a blue haze of gun smoke, side by side in the subterranean recesses of a magnate’s mansion beside the darkening sea, with the sun sinking over distant Hollywood and Christiane wincing in disapproval at the noise and stink from the top of the stairs.
I. Actually 40 percent, at least of the cash.
II. In fairness to Meredith, it could well have been Clarke, who disliked personal disagreements, who’d caved to Kubrick’s intransigence three years before.
III. Davison would go on to produce such high-profile science fiction films as RoboCop (1987) and Starship Troopers (1997), both for director Paul Verhoeven.