'Dear Mr. Kubrick': 1960s Audience Responses to 2001 — A Space Odyssey (2009) [pdf] | Hacker News Reader

'Dear Mr. Kubrick': 1960s Audience Responses to 2001 — A Space Odyssey (2009) [pdf]

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“The audience for Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey … has always included an unusually large number of people … who felt the need to express their feelings and thoughts about the film in writing.”

This may be the truest statement I have ever read. I’m rolling.

FWIW, I like it.

This reminds me of the wide range of reactions sparked by Andrei Tarkovsky’s Mirror, his most avant-garde film. On one hand, you can put that film on before a gathering of fairly open-minded cinephile friends, and even they might reject it as artsy-fartsy or unintelligible. On the other hand, a number of ordinary proletariat people in the USSR wrote to Tarkovsky to say how his film touched them deeply and felt directly relatable to their own lives.

I happened recently with my girlfriend and I after watching The boy and the Heron, the last Miyazaki.

I was disoriented, trying to make heads or tails of what I just saw, and she was completely happy of all the poetry and symbolism she just saw.

Some art pieces are not meant to be overanalyzed. They are meant to be felt.

I had the same experience with the movie. Even though I knew up front about Isao Takahata’s passing, I struggled to make all the imagery fit into my expectations of a “coherent” story. At one point I just had to let go of my search of any overarching analogy, and just enjoyed the fireworks.

The oft quoted phrase: “writing about music is like dancing about architecture”.

I saw the movie in October of 1968 (I think), my 13th birthday. It was a totally enjoyable and life-changing experience for me. But I had no problem understanding the movie because I'd read Clark's novel before seeing the film. The comments in this article affirm my long-held believe that the key to the movie is indeed in the book, and I've never again ignored the novelization of a movie I enjoy...even if the writer isn't also one of the screenwriters.

> The audience for Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), which was initially released on 70mm in Cinerama theatres (with their huge, curved screens) in April 1968 before going on general release on 35mm in January 1969, has always included an unusually large number of people (including many academics in Film Studies and other disciplines) who felt the need to express their feelings and thoughts about the film in writing.

Well, I'm not a letter writer. But if you want to experience the film in 70mm (alas, without the curved Cinerama screens) look for a showing by Alamo Drafthouse. They have at least one copy of the film in 70mm and will occasionally show it at a theater (I saw it in Austin). They include the intermission in the show, as 2001 was considered to be a very long film for it's time (but not nearly as punishing as the LOTR extended edition films). The "trippy dimensional travel" scene with it's music is unbelievable.

There is apparently a 4k transfer now, but I don't know if they started with a 70mm print or the later 35mm print.

I believe Hollywood Theater in Portland also owns a 70mm print, so that's another option if you are in that part of the world.

The Castro Theater in SF also screens it in 70mm from time to time, though I'm not sure if it's their own print or if it's been transported around.

> “ she had gone to a drive-in cinema with her husband and children to see a double bill of Winnie the Pooh and the Blustery Day and 2001: A Space Odyssey”

Bizarre choice - apparently they marketed it as a family movie

I can’t imagine an atomic family from the 60’s rolling up to this and getting caught off guard like that XD

The ending is one of the scariest moments in cinema for me. I remember watching it in the middle of the night on PBS I think. I was absolutely terrified about what was in that room with him as he was aged and kept looking over his shoulder.

I feel like we all have a “I saw it in middle of the night on PBS and it really screwed with my head” movie.

For me it was being maybe 13 and tuning in to the last half of Lord of the Flies at about 1am. Those kids abandoned on a lonely island, followed by the rescuer showing up, followed by credits, followed by the national anthem and test colour bars will forever be burned into my brain.

For me it was the first letterboxed thing I had ever seen on TV and I asked my dad what was wrong with the TV. Feels like it was on A&E? At least 30 years ago.

My parents had recorded something on our VCR and "to be safe" it recorded the first half hour or so of the following movie. The following movie was the original Alien. It stopped around the dinner scene before it gets really going. I must have watched that part of the movie ~20 times when I was around 10. I'd be constantly afraid about facehuggers hiding under the bed or behind the shower curtain when it was dark.

For me that was Beyond the Valley of the Dolls. Roger Ebert was not just a movie critic... And it inspired Austin Powers as well!

I can see it easily happening. People were not "tuned in" back then as we are now. People used the newspapers to see what was playing and what times where available. Trailers weren't available 24/7 for instant viewing. You saw previews before the movie you were about to watch. The TV advertising wasn't so prevalent for movies. My parents would go to the movies and see whatever was playing on the one screen the theater had when they were kids, not just go to see a specific movie at the cineplex with 30 different screens. Things were very different back then.

This was still somewhat the case in the late 90s and early 00s before Youtube and IMDB were really big. We'd go watch Star Trek Nemesis because it had Star Trek in the name or watch whatever looked good in the trailers last time we went. What was your alternative? Watch it on your CRT tv a year later, probably with ads? Rental existed, but at least where I lived it was very uncommon. I honestly miss it. Driving to the cinema with a bunch of friends, sometimes not even certain what we'd watch and how it would turn out. Really great! Recently I visited an old friend at his new (to me) apartment and it came up that he had kept all his cinema tickets from back in the day. We went through all of them swimming in nostalgia, a little blurry-eyed, while our wives laughed at us.

> late 90s and early 00s

I remember going to Moulin Rouge without knowing it was a musical!

The Barbenheimer of the 1960s...

“Poohthousand and one”

That was normal in the 60s. Scifi was encouraged. They wanted kids to be inspired by space and technology. Star Wars changed things, driving a wedge separating what would eventually be "kids" movies from hard scifi, but that wasnt always so. Movies like 1953's War of the Worlds were very much all-family affairs.

She had a valid complaint, putting pooh at 11pm after 2001

And honestly, thinking back, the end of 2001 is pretty nonsensical to most normal people. I remember watching it when I was young and it was hard to figure out what the trippy stuff meant, let alone the end.

In comparison, 9 years later Star Wars was completely approachable to the entire family.

> She had a valid complaint, putting pooh at 11pm after 2001

Mr. Kubrick's programming choices are, indeed, bizarre. ;-)

I doubt that was Kubrick's choice. It was the theater or their parent company that made the programming decision.

The letter was complaining to Kubrick, not to the cinema, which I personally find bizarre.

The identification of the movie with Kubrick was very strong, as I think was pointed out in the paper. And it's much more satisfying to address a complaint to a person rather than a faceless corporation.

I watched Bowie's 'The Man Who Fell to Earth' after hearing a very wide range of opinions - love, hate, and "meh".

It's a very interesting film in somewhat the same vein as 2001 - It does not provide a narrative throughline and the conclusion is less than satisfying.

An unsatisfying narrative and conclusion is a double edged sword - it can lead people to think about the film for a longer time and ruminate on it - or it can make people angry and/or say stupid things. See also https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=URo66iLNEZw

---

I also think about Alex Garland's film 'Civil War'. It is very unsatisfying to never be told which side is the 'right' side, or what the war was about.

That unsatisfaction can make someone hate the movie, or it can be taken as commentary on war - it doesn't matter which side is right or what the fighting is for, no one wins a war. Winning a war is not morally satisfying. I think this is very very hard for Americans to understand, as our military tradition has centered on WWII.

I feel pretty confident in saying that no war that America fought after WWII has had a satisfying conclusion.

After 'Winning WWII' America also won the peace, which is actually why we can feel satisfied now. In no war before or since has America won the peace at anything close to the Post-WWII level.

I’ve always tried to model my academic career on Rip Torn’s character.

I like this film, I saw part of it again recently. but it didn't age very well IMO. It has some very overdrawn sequences of spaceships docking etc. I'm sure this was awe-inspiring in the 60s but these days not so much :) And it's not just the times, I do find Hitchcock classics to stand up way better in this day.

However it is full of pop culture influences and a lot of prescience about AI so it's nice to watch.

By the way I didn't make the connection between Elite's use of the Blue Danube song until now lol. When I first played elite in the 80s I'd never seen the movie.

But it is partly "just the times". There's a dividing line in 1977 called Star Wars. Before Star Wars it was much more common for science fiction films to use long establishing sequences of especially space technology. For a 1960s audience when the actual moon landings were fresh to mind, the long, slow ballet of space was very palpable and appreciable. Star Wars changed a lot of things for scifi, including reducing some of those establishing sequences to their quickest and most basic. It is harder to appreciate something like 2001 on this side of Star Wars. Scifi movies have been trying to mostly be "the next Star Wars" for almost every decade since, with few exceptions, many of which don't always do well in the box office (Tron is a cult favorite, but early theatrical audiences found it slow; Star Trek: The Motion Picture is often considered a bomb by Star Trek standards for being a pre-Star Wars sort of movie released two years after Star Wars; Gravity and Interstellar both got accolades in somewhat recent years for mostly sort of getting away with pre-Star Wars scifi pacing, but partly got away with it from Brand Name stars and directors and a focus on IMAX tech and spectacle).

2001 didn't feel out of place versus scifi movies of its time. It feels slow and ponderous post-Star Wars.

Dear participations: I can’t find any audience responses in that pdf. Only thoughts about them in a different language.

Thankfully, I read the book before seeing the movie.

Most of the friends I've been with who saw the film first did a good job of following the plot up until the final act, which was pretty much unfilmable at the time.

Decades later, the Jodie Foster movie, Contact, did a much better job of visualizing "a trip through an interstellar mass transit system" than 2001 showing a trippy light show.

Note though that the movie is not an adaption of the novel. They were written in tandem, and the movie was published slightly before the book.

The book makes a lot of things clearer than the film.

Interestingly the book and the film were developed together by Kubrick and Clarke as a collaborative process.

Usually the book comes before the film, but occasionally it comes after.

I can't think of other examples where the novel was developed alongside the film but I expect there are!

> I can't think of other examples where the novel was developed alongside the film but I expect there are!

Game of Thrones?

That was a television series that should've waited. They needed the books to be finished.

Because it's either:

A) regular Hollywood schlock that ruined the last seasons; or (worse)

B) that was his actual direction for the book series and now he knows that it's not good.

Either way, I believe we will never get the final books in that series due to the television series.

I definitely agree the show influenced the books. Not sure that’s better or worse. I didn’t hate the ending as much as everyone else. It made sense. Maybe it would be more palatable with a subsequent series.

Counterpoint - the books will never be finished, so waiting would make no sense.

However, they should hire writers that can actually write characters and plots other then simplest ones. The writing quality was indeed horrible by the end.

Star Wars?

Written by another prominent science fiction writer whose name escapes me now (Alan Dean Foster, perhaps?), but released under Lucas's name. It's ironic, because Lucas hates writing so much.

And interestingly Clarke set the destination as Saturn, whereas Kubrick made it Jupiter. In the sequel book, 2010, Clarke used Jupiter as in the movie.

The Third Man is another example. Graham Greene wrote a treatment before he wrote the screenplay. The treatment, which wasn't written with publication in mind, was later published as a novella, and it differs from the film in several notable ways, because Greene and the directors changed things during the writing of the screenplay and the principal making of the film.

That process was documented in Clarke's 1972 book "The Lost Worlds of 2001". I recommend it to anyone who's interested, if you can find a copy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lost_Worlds_of_2001

Orson Scott Card wrote the novelization of James Cameron's The Abyss while on-set during filming, since it was filmed in an abandoned nuclear reactor cooling tower in his home state of South Carolina, and had some input on the script during shooting. (I heard this from Card at a science fiction convention, and it's borne out by IMDb trivia.)

The third act is pretty much Jaws after the breakdown of the animatronic shark. There are actual pre-production stills showing aliens [1], but this was found unsatisfactory and the film drifted towards a much more abstract direction. Probably, it's the much better film, because of this. (Personally, I can't think of any solution showing the events in real life that isn't cheesy or even kitschy. It may have been The Abyss of 1960s cinema. As-is, the notion that the first two realistic acts of the film are driving towards an enigmatic, kind of open end, was certainly important for its reception and its long-term relevance.)

[1] Compare https://touringinstability.wordpress.com/2013/10/18/the-alie...

What is wrong with The Abyss? The theatrical release was fine. The extended addition with the 5 minute video montage of the aliens preaching to Bud that humans are destructive seemed like the only bad thing to me but that wasn't in the theatrical release.

Hum, the ending had to be remade after first screenings, and even as-is, it's subject to critique by many, diminishing the value of the entire film. (I recall it even being laughed at. I guess, audiences may have become more tolerant, since.) It may have done better with a more abstract solution, as well.

(There may be specific topics where "show, don't tell" becomes "experience, don't show". And 2001 tried to accomplish this. The Abyss, on the other hand, tried still to show, probably failing in its mission. — There was a time when German media theory, in the wake of F.A. Kittler, was kind of obsessed with the written signifier of the novel giving rise to an immediate, visually representative significant. Observed from this perspective, even Clarke's novel takes a step back into abstraction: we may find it hard to invoke an immediate imaginary representation, while reading, the narrative pretty much falls back to us being told, instead of giving rise to imagination, much until the last, much more "tangible" gesture of the Space Child. But, even then, the perspective of the Space Child, cynical without cynicism, and what may come of this, is very much an open ending. So, why not move this openness forward in the plot?)

I am not sure what you're referring to.

In the original cut (I saw it opening day in Westwood Los Angeles, owned the laserdisc, then some special DVD set), Russia and the USA are getting agressive with each other. The military on board, Michael Biehn, is going crazy from pressure disease and the knowledge that there is an enemy (Russia). Bud goes down to stop the bomb sent by Beihn. The aliens come up, their ship miles across, so big that several battleships, Russian and USA are sitting on top of it. The end.

The implication being the wouldn't war happen because of the aliens revealing themselves.

This is a very 2001 ending. All implication

In the extend edition the aliens show Bud videos of human aggression and at the same time make tsunamis appear towering over several coastal cities but hovering still, showing the alien power, the aliens basically saying they'll stop the war through their power. The ship rises. The end

This is a completely different meaning that might (the alien's power) gets to preach and decide. It's effectively spelled out.

The extended edition is bad IMO. On top of the long preachy ending, several earlier unimportant fluff is added that makes the movie drag

This was already the cut ending, as indicated by its abruptness. The extended edition apparently tried to reintroduce some of the original ending. (I guess, the towering tsunamis were a new addition, as this would have hardly been possible with the technology of the day.)

Theatrical version just kind of abruptly.. ends.

I thought the movie Contact was very different from the book, and the ending was different -- no?

Both movies had a sequence that was supposed to represent a human being traveling through the equivalent of an intergalactic mass transit system to a distant location.

At the time that 2001 was made, effects were not there yet.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e90egkb-x1s

I was greatly disappointed the movie didn’t include the most interesting part of the book:

A message is discovered in the digits of pi.

Exactly! I was also :)

Tangential, but TIL there exists a journal of audience & reception studies.

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