Cine-master class "2001: A Space Odyssey" - Part 2 

"This could easily spread to our base".... I know this great scene by heart.

Look magazine had been the employer of Stanley Kubrick in the '50s, and he still had ties with it and Look publisher Vernon Myers. Look did this promotional film (the one showing Arthur C. Clarke and the LM) in 1966 for the release of 2001: A Space Odyssey, but also as a call for advertisers for a special edition due out in 1968 promoting the moon program, to be timed with the movie's release. And NASA and its moon contractors worked with the production of the movie, and the Look edition, so it was all one big ecosystem of entities living off each other.

At 27:37 when Keir Dullea (Dave Bowman) climbs „down“ the ladder you see Gary Lockwood (Frank Poole) „sitting“ at a table and eat on the „ceiling“, they stopped the centrifuge set in this position, strapped the actor firmly to his bench and glued sticky food with Gelatine to the plates. But it so happened that parts of the mush fell from the plate and spread over the set…. funny detail, Gary Lockwood loves to tell.

At 31:38 you can clearly see that the IBM logo vanished near HAL‘s red eye after the company‘s complaints…. Btw, the 1:4:9 (first 3 primes 1,2,3 squared) ratio for the monoliths are only and exclusively valuable for the novel! You can see, that the film monoliths and their about hundred hidden equivalents (HAL‘s camera, windows, doors,..) obviously have a different ratio than 1:4:9. They all have a ratio of 1:2.76 which is exactly the ratio of a 70mm screen, in which Stanley filmed….

The shot at 13:55 was also made using front screen projection as were all of the ape scenes in „Dawn of mankind“. Here it was a painting of the moon, the other ape scenes used real photographs made by a beta team on location in Africa. The photos were overlaid with a marked grid like a chess board and sent to London. Stanley then chose his preferred background shots by selecting the coordinates (e.g. move the mountain peak more towards D3 and the cloud to G1..). His commands were then forwarded per telephone or telegram to the on site team. To avoid any visible shadows of the actors due to the front projection, he aligned the camera‘s point of view perfectly with the projection‘s PoV using a semitransparent mirror behind which the camera was mounted.

Fantastic analysis, thank you. Interesting rumour about Clarke and the Mother...

Of course, today we all have video phones in our pockets, not on a wall Oras a stand alone unit.

Awesome ❤

17:32 the „windows“ in the conference room (windows to nothing) have exactly the monolith‘s dimensions as has the only exit to leave the room. You can find a huge number of these shapes throughout the movie e.g. HAL‘s eyes). I already explained their relevance and meaning in my comment under the first part of this series.

Yes, Kubrick had absolute control, even over Clarke‘s novel. AC Clarke wrote his book after pages of the script were ready and was allowed by Stanley to go deeper into explanations than the movie. Some differences developed like Jupiter (film) vs Saturn‘s moon Iapetus (book) as Douglas Trumbull couldn‘t get Saturn‘s rings done well enough….

Epidemic ... the 'solution' to so many 'human problems'.

What's funny is in 1966 Star Trek had flip phones, but the advertisement for 2001 has a luggable hacked-together word processing typewriter. We haven't built a moon base, but we have personal communications lightyears ahead of 2001.

11:42 Stanley‘s daughter Vivian Vanessa, some 12 years later, directed her father’s movie „Making The Shining“. 👍😀

Pardon?

Another „goof“ 😄: if you carefully stop the video at exactly 16:33, you see the group of Russians and Dr.Floyd and in the background a window to a room, where a lady (secretary?) is sitting at a desk writing. That is, what our brains are telling us, because normally, people are sitting at a desk, right? But look closely. She is sitting on the floor! Of course the actress had troubles due to the curved floor of the set and so she sat on the floor….

Demmick cover story ... the 'solution' to so many 'human problems'.

Yeah right, that hunk of junk landed on the moon.

Clarke‘s notion about HAL=IBM at 38:58 was a defense. He felt uneasy to possibly be in the midst of a quarrel between one of the contributors (IBM) and his former boss (Kubrick) and I don‘t believe him. And IBM was absolutely not „proud of it“ as Clarke said. They were very angry and, as I mentioned, wanted the product placement reduced wherever practicable. They really were unhappy being THE company that produced the first homicidal computer. 🫢