Director Stanley Kubrick originally had a very different opening in mind for 2001: A Space Odyssey. We head back to the early days of his 1968 sci-fi epic.
In 1966, twenty one of the world’s most eminent scientists, philosophers, theologians and astronomers received a letter from a man named Roger Caras inviting them to be interviewed on camera about one of the biggest questions ever posed by mankind: are we alone in the universe?
Some of these luminaries included Harlow Shapley, an American astronomer who contributed significantly to exploring the shape and size of our galaxy. Aleksandr Ivanovich Oparin conducted ground-breaking studies into the origin of life on earth. Margaret Mead, Frank D Drake, BF Skinner, anthropologists, behavioural psychologists ā the list goes on. Arguably an assortment of the mid-20th centuryās greatest minds.
Caras was the assistant of Stanley Kubrick and his letter, written by Kubrick, was part of the directorās ambitious plan for his sci-fi epic 2001: A Space Odyssey. Kubrick’s idea was to shoot each interview subject on 35mm black and white film as they answered the question about extra-terrestrial life. It was intended to form 2001's extended opening.
We all remember how 2001 really begins. After a brooding, ominous overture set György Ligetiās ‘Atmospheres’, Kubrick gives us an awe-inspiring shot of the Sun rising above the Earth to the strains of Strauss’ ‘Thus Spoke Zarathustra’, before moving to his famed ‘Dawn of Man’ opening sequence. The original vision of 2001 would, presumably before these sequences, set the tone of the movie with interviews that placed 2001 in the realm of serious science speculation.
The truth is, Kubrick wasnāt especially enamoured with the state of sci-fi storytelling. He enormously enjoyed the genre as a child, reading magazines such as Amazing Stories growing up in the Bronx, but his assistant Anthony Frewin once said that he disliked the quality of the writing and characterisation in the stories he read as an adult.
Kubrick struggled with the public perception of the genre as pulp entertainment, fashioned by the adventure serials of yesteryear such as Flash Gordon or Buck Rogers, not to mention the B-movies produced in the 1950s often as a reaction to the ‘Red Scare’ following the Second World War. Kubrick believed the profound ideas baked into sci-fi storytelling had been subsumed by Hollywood’s desire to make a buck.
Even one of the 20th century’s pre-eminent sci-fi authors, Arthur C Clarke, with whom Kubrick developed 2001 into both an adjacent novel and screenplay, failed to convince him of these merits, as Clarke recounted in a 1968 the story of their collaboration for New York Magazine:
“In my opinion there have been a number of good — or at least interesting — science fiction movies in the past. They include, for example, the Pal-Heinlein Destination Moon, The War Of The Worlds, The Day The Earth Stood Still, The Thing and Forbidden Planet. However, my affection for the genre perhaps caused me to make greater allowances than Kubrick, who was highly critical of everything we screened. After I had pressed him to view HG Wells’ 1936 classic, Things To Come, he exclaimed in anguish: āWhat are you trying to do to me? I’ll never see anything you recommend again!ā”
Read more: 10 classic sci-fi films of the 1950s
Though he wasnāt a director to regularly compile favourite film lists, with the only known official one dating from relatively early on in his career in 1963, Kubrick was asked and did comment on certain science-fiction movies that he did enjoy. His daughter Katharine asserted that Fritz Lang’s influential 1927 opus Metropolis was a favourite, but Frewin is less sure ā he once told the BFI that Kubrick thought Metropolis was āchildishā.
Ridley Scott made the claim that Kubrick had enjoyed Alien following the release of that film in 1979 ā possibly because he had horror on his mind due to being in production of The Shining at this point. One film Kubrick is known to have admired ā calling it “terrific” ā is Mike Hodges’ adaptation of Michael Crichton’s The Terminal Man, released in 1974. Kubrick helped get the movie released in the United Kingdom.
Kubrick is said to have voiced admiration for both Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) and E. T. (1982) ā both films about alien life ā plus Andrei Tarkovsky’s celebrated, meditative Solaris (1972), though Frewin was less certain about his apparent enthusiasm for Czech director JindÅich Polák’s 1963 film Voyage To The End Of The Universe.
Kubrick therefore saw the thinkers he sought to open 2001 as key to the success of the film, and his audience accepting the ideas in his and Clarkeās story, which travelled beyond the realm of extra-terrestrial life and its existence. He was a particular fan of the scientific work of Carl Sagan, who became one of the 20th century’s most well-known adherents of the search for extra-terrestrial life. Sagan wrote the book that became the successful Robert Zemeckis film Contact in 1997, starring Jodie Foster, and one of many films that owed a debt to 2001.
Read more: 2001: A Space Odyssey | Douglas Trumbullās contribution to a sci-fi classic
Kubrick also read a 1966 book called Intelligence In The Universe co-written by Frederick L Ordway III, who went on to consult on the production and assisted in drawing up the list of people to interview. Ordway turned out to be a key collaborator on 2001 ā a scientific expert who helped Kubrick in his quest to make, as he termed it, “The proverbial āreally goodā science fiction movie”. That famous line came from some of his earliest letters to Arthur C Clarke in 1964, in which he outlined his three key principles for a potential story ā the reasons for believing in alien life, the impact it would have on Earth, and exploration of the Moon and Mars.
Kubrick had no idea one of these ambitions would be achieved by the United States in 1969 (an achievement he would later reference in The Shining, albeit glancingly). But his aspiration from the beginning was, with Clarke and all of these collaborators, to make a film that stood out from the crowd of genre films heād admired in the past.
Despite the fact 2001: A Space Odyssey never opened with the great minds he sought to collate, few could argue that Kubrick not only made a “really good” science-fiction movie, but also the all time great one.
You can find A J. on social media, including links to his Patreon and books, via Linktr.ee here. Next year, he releases An Overlook of Madness, a book about Kubrick and the making of The Shining.
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