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“Close to tears, he left at the intermission”: how Kubrick upset Clarke (2017)

227 points by martincmartin 9y ago

ferorus 9y ago
This is funny. I read the book before I watched the film and didn't know that the movie was released before the book was published. I was amazed of how well the movie put images to what I had read in the book, and having read it, I didn't find it difficult to understand the movie, I just thought it was one of the best adaptations of a book I'd ever seen!
- SilasX 9y ago
  But the Star baby wouldn’t make sense without the book.
- kqr 9y ago
  Yes, having read the book makes a huge difference. I tried watching the film first, but I failed and stopped watching a short way into it. Then at some point I read the book, which I really enjoyed. I thought I'd give the film a second chance and I'm glad I did because it was brilliant, having read the book. Strongly recommend treating them as two integral parts of one work of art -- consuming either one and not the other will leave you much less satisfied. I think that may be true for several other longer adaptations including STALKER (from A Roadside Picnic) and Apocalypse Now (from A Heart of Darkness).
  - coatmatter 9y ago
    On the other hand, I read the book before seeing the film and wish I had done it the other way around. Same case with The Martian too - I found myself distractedly comparing notes (in my head) too often while watching. Perhaps the one book-then-movie reading/viewing sequence I'm happy with was Casino Royale. It was a good faithfully-gritty adaptation.
  - toyg 9y ago
    Apocalypse Now does not require any additional reading, it's a perfectly self-contained masterpiece.
  - sirclueless 9y ago
    Heart of Darkness/Apocalypse Now also has a pretty remarkable adaptation in video game format called Spec Ops: The Line. It's the same story premise cast as a modern military shooter. The gameplay is a fairly generic (some say this is an intentional statement on the drudgery of video game violence but I'm not so sure) but the story is excellent and there are lots of audible and visual details that show the gradual descent into madness of the main character and his teammates -- your voice lines go from professional callouts to angry emotional outbursts, "Hunt him down!", "Got the fucker!" etc.
    - kqr 9y ago
      Yes! Spec Ops: The Line was absolutely brilliant, and I'm sorry I left it out!
  - lobster_johnson 9y ago
    Stalker is interesting in that Tarkovsky originally used the Strugatskys' screenplay, but went back and changed it. Tarkovsky had become increasingly disillusioned about the whole project as he entered into production — he had fights with his cinematographer and had doubts about the story. At one point, they had filmed 6 months of material when they discovered the film negatives were unusable, for reasons nobody has been able to figure out (they used Kodak stock imported from the US, which Soviet labs were unfamiliar with, and it may have been out of date; Tarkovsky himself suspected it was sabotage). As a result, the project went into hiatus while Tarkovsky considered his next steps and sought new funding from the Soviet film board to reshoot. It was actually Arkady Strugatsky, after many discussions and drafts, who suggested a compromise, where most of the sci-fi elements would be stripped from the film, and he encouraged Tarkovsky to build up the screenplay again based on his own ideas. It's fascinating to think what Stalker might have been, if Tarkovsky hadn't deviated from the original script. Roadside Picnic is certainly a novel that could work as a film or miniseries. (WGN considered producing a TV show based on Roadside Picnic last year, with Matthew Goode as the lead, but the pilot was rejected.)
sharkjacobs 9y ago
Here's the original article sans google AMP: https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/books/2017/01/close-tears-he-left-intermission-how-stanley-kubrick-upset-arthur-c-clarke https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/books/2017/01/close-tea...
- dang 9y ago
  Yes, we changed to that from https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.newstatesman.com/culture/books/2017/01/close-tears-he-left-intermission-how-stanley-kubrick-upset-arthur-c-clarke%3famp https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.newstatesman.com/culture/bo....
andrewflnr 9y ago
I can't blame Kubrick for cutting all the voice-overs, which probably would have made the movie unbearable to watch. At the same time, it's maddening in its ambiguity. Seeing it as a product of this enormous gulf between creative approaches explains a lot.
- interfixus 9y ago
  It certainly does. Being much, much more Clarke than Kubrick, I watch the thing in awe up till and including "My God, it's full of stars", and then usually switch off, as I know from then on the masterpiece will be descending into lava lamps and nonsense.
  - CamperBob2 9y ago
    It certainly does. Being much, much more Clarke than Kubrick, I watch the thing in awe up till and including "My God, it's full of stars", and then usually switch off, as I know from then on the masterpiece will be descending into lava lamps and nonsense. I envy you the progress you'll make when you get around to re-examining some of your faulty assumptions (as we all eventually must, or at least should). Most of us don't have that much room left for personal growth and discovery in our lives.
    - dang 9y ago
      Personal attacks will get you banned here. Please don't post like this, regardless of how much another comment annoys you. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
      - CamperBob2 9y ago
        Personal attacks? What personal attacks? I'm on record (although it would require a pretty exhaustive Google News search to find it) as saying pretty much the same thing as the OP, right after I watched 2001 for the first time. In that case, other people on rec.movies were patient enough to give me some good advice, which was to set the Clarke book aside for the moment, give the film another try in a better viewing environment, and move past my prejudices and knee-jerk first impressions. It sounds like HN's goal is somehow to create an even less open-minded environment than 1990s-era Usenet, which will be quite a trick. But if anyone can pull it off, it'll be you guys.
tomcatfish 9y ago
This article CONSTANTLY refreshes on mobile, even after several minutes, making it next-to-impossible to read
- knolan 9y ago
  I used reader mode on iOS safari and it was fine.
  - code_duck 9y ago
    I used safari in normal mode and didn’t notice any refreshing.
- Crontab 9y ago
  It the advertising. It is annoying in a standard web browser as well.
- raldi 9y ago
  It also scrolls back to the top instantly if you try to search the text, like for the word "tears" so you can quickly look up the antidote to the clickbait headline. It also blocks copy-paste, so you can't share the relevant paragraph and save the rest of HN ten minutes of reading.
- Nomentatus 9y ago
  The ads also interfere with navigation and Google's decision-tree based reporting system makes it impossible to report this. I gave up on the article.
truculation 9y ago
>Explanations were his forte. He was uncomfortable with most forms of ambiguity. One can enjoy good explanations without necessarily enjoying them in movies. I think it's more fun like to try to explain what's going on by oneself from the few clues available. It seems to me that many works of art are polysemic. For example, a passage of Shakespeare can light up several different ideas in one's head thereby creating a stimulating, almost psychedelic experience. It makes the bare plot worthwhile (and worth explaining).
- kqr 9y ago
  It's nice that you were able to put into words some things I like about classic books and poetry. Kafka was also a master of this. That said, I don't enjoy it as much at all in films. Don't know why. I try to, for sure. It can be stimulating. But it's not on the level of "almost psychedelic" as you so aptly describe what I can experience with books.
dudul 9y ago
Kubrick was fairly known for heavily adapting the novels he used for inspiration. There are huge differences between the novel "Lolita" and Kubrick's adaptation. Same with "Shining" or "Clockwork Orange". TBH, I'm really happy we didn't get a version with voice-overs and all. Hard to imagine a concept of "documentary" would have been better than what we ended up with.
- jccooper 9y ago
  Stephen King is publicly critical of Kubrick's treatment of "The Shining", mostly about its unchanging and one-dimensional characters. While I expect "2001" would not have been improved by a lot of explanatory voiceovers, I think "The Shining" would be seriously improved by Jack not being obviously crazy right from the first.
  - coldtea 9y ago
    >Stephen King is publicly critical of Kubrick's treatment of "The Shining", mostly about its unchanging and one-dimensional characters. It's not like King is some king of nuance in characters himself...
    - drharby 9y ago
      Scary door type subtlty
  - dudul 9y ago
    Most authors complained about it yes. Burgess accused Kubrick of not having understood a single word of "Clockwork Orange". Nabokov was the most gracious when he said that while Lolita was a very good movie, he didn't recognize his original work at all :) I think it's a very difficult exercise to adapt a novel. Should you literally put on the screen what is written in the book ? What's the point ? You're not creating much. On the other hand, if you deviate from the original work, fans start attacking you for "betraying" the spirit of the book.
    - 9y ago
tempagain567i 9y ago
I literally had to scroll all the way to the very bottom in order to get to the point. If journalists want us to pay them then they must abandon this cancerous writing style of endless fluff and nonsense.
- MR4D 9y ago
  I think you nailed it. Clarke's dialogue in his script was mostly removed. Relevant passage is this: "Close to tears, he left at the intermission, having watched an 11-minute sequence in which an astronaut did nothing but jog around the centrifuge in a scene intended to show the boredom of space travel. This scene was considerably cut in the version put out on general release. If Arthur was disappointed by Kubrick’s decision to cut his dialogue and narrative to the bone, he was eventually reconciled by being able to put everything left out of the film into the novel, meaning that each man was able to produce his own preferred version. The success of the film ensured that the book became a bestseller, as audiences sought answers to questions raised by Kubrick’s version, and Arthur soon got over his disappointment, going on to write three bestselling sequels to his novel, only one of which has been filmed so far."
- terminado 9y ago
  It's not "some journalist," it's Michael Moorcock, and not only that, he's recounting personal first-hand details of his interaction with a friend. And you didn't even condense the salient detail for us, being that Kubrick had cut Clark's extensive voice-over narration, which wasn't revealed until the premiere, provoking Clark to walk out of the screening.
- pavlov 9y ago
  If you want information delivered in ultra-condensed nuggets, try Twitter? There’s no shortage of TL;DRs on today’s Internet. No one is forcing you to read the “fluff and nonsense” of an award-winning 78-year-old author who was friends with A. C. Clarke.
  - jonhendry18 9y ago
    Oh lord Moorcock is 78. I feel old.
DEFCON28 9y ago
I didn't quite get why Kubrick kicked Moorcock off the set. Anyone care to explain?
- mkl 9y ago
  It wasn't spelled out, but I think Kubrick didn't know who he was, and just didn't want anyone extra on the set. Given how behind and over-budget the movie was, and how many people wanted to visit such an unusual (for the time) film production, I can understand that.
  - Crontab 9y ago
    This was my thought as well. As an aside, I would personally love to meet Michael Moorcock. He is one of my favorite authors.
- surbas 9y ago
  Kubrick didn’t want it to come out, on the set, that he had asked other authors to collaborate with him.
  - PhasmaFelis 9y ago
    Kubrick probably had no idea who he was, from the sound of it. Moorcock says "I prepared to meet the man who had contacted me a year or so earlier," implying that they had never met face-to-face but only spoken on the phone or through Kubrick's people.
- lurquer 9y ago
  The original article was to have a voice-over that explained such things.
- pryce 9y ago
  I think it's pretty clear that Moorcock is showing how ambiguity is an important or even necessary part of the human experience. He himself doesn't know for certain whether he was kicked off due to A) Kubrick not knowing for certain who he was, or B) Kubrick knowing exactly who he was but aiming to prevent Kubrick's earlier proposals to collaborate with Moorcock from coming into public view. I notice that two different commenters here have reached two totally different yet sensible conclusions, based on exactly the same evidence. To me, Moorcock seems to be staking his flag into the ground over the inalterable need for truth to be filtered and interpreted by the human psyche - and that if even direct and worldly concerns like this have no straightforward single answer, the idea that our species might encounter spiritual or transcendental truths without ambiguity over what they actually mean is pretty tenuous. But I could be mistaken.
coupdejarnac 9y ago
Having read 2001, A Clockwork Orange, and Lolita, I'd say Kubrick's end products justified his changes. Imagine A Clockwork Orange having a happy ending... Well, that's how the book ends.
- jlg23 9y ago
  Not sure which cut you watched, it does have a happy ending for the protagonist. He enjoys Beethoven again. EDIT: A friend who read the book initially just said it was not happy, but agreed it is when you only know the movie.
  - BashiBazouk 9y ago
    They both have happy endings. In the book, the final chapter is about Alex starting to mature into an adult. The book is also organized into three sections of seven chapters meant to represent the three phases of childhood and ending in chapter 21: adulthood. The movie was pretty close to the book it just left off the 21st chapter as did the American version of the book.
    - bigger_cheese 9y ago
      I had to study the novel in high school as you mentioned the 21 chapter thing is important because the book is divided into 3 parts of 7 chapters and there is supposed to be an element of symmetry in the progression. One of the central themes running through the book is free will and choice. It has been a fair amount of time now since I've read it but I believe the book opens with the quote "So what is it going to be then?" and ends with Alex making the choice to set aside his past. Importantly he also says something along the lines that if he ever has children he won't try to stop them making the same choices as he has. One of the things our teacher repeatedly stressed was Saint Augustine and Anthony Burgess's Catholic background.
- mieseratte 9y ago
  As a former disaffected youth I've very much come to appreciate the original ending of A Clockwork Orange as I've gotten older. While I am a bit of a fan of Kubrick, I think he did the story a great disservice by ending it as he did.
indescions_2018 9y ago
Have revisited 2001 recently. Particularly the scene just before Intermission. Where HAL is reading the lips of the astronauts in the pod. It just really holds up. Apart from the genius editing and sound design. It feels even more a cautionary moment for modern minds on AI. As it must have been to American audiences during the height of the Vietnam War era. Ridley Scott's original Alien and Blade Runner remain immensely watchable 30+ years on. Perhaps even more so. Which makes it high time not to just complete Clark's monoliith films. But write the next chapter in "Dystopian AI" cinema. One in which a super-intelligence doesn't merely write off the necessity of humanity. But actively yet surreptitiously nudges us to produce more powerful versions of itself ;)
- coldacid 9y ago
  If you're into anime, you might enjoy watching Beatless. It's a wonderful and scary view into what an AI dominated future may hold for us.
- potench 9y ago
  You should watch the “Autofac” episode of Electric Dreams.
- firasd 9y ago
  Ghost in the Shell (1995) takes an interesting path away from the usual 'Frankenstein'-type AI narratives .
- cromwellian 9y ago
  Try thto Person of Interest TV series, from season 2 and especially 3, onwards it is all about super intelligence combined with super surveillance. https://youtu.be/SmUO0v7VYTo https://youtu.be/SmUO0v7VYTo
  - shkkmo 9y ago
    I totally missed your comment when writing mine, I should have refreshed the window :)
  - 9y ago
da02 9y ago
Did anyone ever definitively figure out what Kubrick was trying to do with "2001"? (The interpretation that made the most sense to me was the one where the monolith is a metaphor to the cinema screen and Philosopher's Stone.)
- paulmd 9y ago
  The book addresses this. The Monolith is an interstellar "seed" sent out to stimulate the development of other forms of sentient life. This scene is supposed to depict the Monolith stimulating humanity's primate ancestors to develop tool usage (bones as clubs/etc) and catalyzing our societal development as a result. Next, we see Humanity discover the Tycho Monolith buried on the moon. As the lunar dawn strikes it, it unleashes a massive burst of radio energy towards Jupiter and goes silent. This is implied as being an alert that Humanity has reached a crucial stage of development and the stage is set for the completion of its mission. You can alternately view it as an energy-based life-form shifting from one repository/location to another. So the Jupiter Monolith could potentially be interpreted as being the same sentience/AI/etc. The other confusing scene is the ending, where Bowman travels through the Jupiter Monolith and becomes a Star Baby. This is the Monolith finishing its mission, and allowing Bowman to shed his corporeal body and become a being of pure energy, like the Monolith and its creators. So all in all, the movie depicts the Monolith guiding humanity through all the stages of its evolution, from primates to a higher plane of existence. Then we have several artistic interludes that connects these scenes... an idealistic depiction of humanity's technological development as Floyd travels to the moon, and then a horror sequence as one of our creations malfunctions and becomes murderous. The book is vastly more comprehensible than the movie, without some of the narration that Kubrick cut it's pretty difficult to follow what's going on. On the other hand, from an artistic perspective, narration would have ruined the film (imagine David Attenborough narrating...) so it's easy to see why Kubrick didn't go that route, and his imagery actually does fit the sequences Clarke describes perfectly, as long as you understand what's going on. It just does a shit job of explaining what's going on, for the most part.
  - da02 9y ago
    When I read the book, I thought that too. However, Clarke's book is separate from Kubrick's movie. Kubrick focused a lot of things in the movie that were ignored in the book. Essentially, Kubrick and Clarke have two different interpretations. That's why I was asking the question. For example, * The number 4 and 3 keep appearing in the movie. * Lots of 90-degree angles in the movie compared to the book. * Why everyone is cold and sterile as the move away from Earth. * Rectangles and circles. HAL is a black rectangle and a red circle. The monolith is a black rectangular object. * Kubrick excited at making the biggest "religious" movie. * The original cut of the movie had the scene of the broken wine glass jerk/skip, giving the impression Bowman had realized he was in an artificial environment created by others. * The appearance of diamond shapes in the movie and his other movies, The Shining and Full Metal Jacket: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MSo6s_xrj4c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MSo6s_xrj4c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mpWMnlMIWAU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mpWMnlMIWAU
ams6110 9y ago
> Arthur developed polio in the 1980s, making travel increasingly difficult Polio in the 1980s??? How did that happen?
- throwaway76543 9y ago
  It's wrong. He contracted Polio in 1962. In the 80s he developed PPS. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-polio_syndrome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-polio_syndrome
- ckarmann 9y ago
  Clarke was actually diagnosed in 1962 (http://www.clarkefoundation.org/about-sir-arthur/ http://www.clarkefoundation.org/about-sir-arthur/). He developped complications in the 80s. He has lived in Sri Lanka since the 50s, which was probably not the best place for access to the brand-new vaccine that was just being invented at the same period.
lucas_membrane 9y ago
There was one other contributor who was equally or even more disappointed by the first viewing on opening night, the composer who had been hired to write the score, who found out then that Strauss had been substituted.
cperciva 9y ago
Arthur C Clarke wasn't the only person who was shocked at the premiere of 2001. Stanley Kubrick commissioned the prominent film composer Alex North -- famous for the scoring of Spartacus -- to write the music for 2001. However, film music is only recorded and added at the final stage of editing; normally all of the video is laid down first so that the music director knows exactly how long each scene will be and the music can be recorded at the right tempo to match up. During the video editing process, "temp music" is used -- typically classical music because it's widely available -- so that scenes have the right feeling when they're viewed by the director. For this purpose, Kubrick selected the opening fanfare from Also Sprach Zarathustra for the start of 2001, The Blue Danube for "floating through space" scenes, et cetera. However, after viewing the edited scenes with the "temporary" background music, Kubrick decided that he really liked it that way -- and so rather than using the score which North was composing and recording, he re-edited the video to match the tempo of the classical recordings he had used. Legend has it that Kubrick didn't know how to break the news to North -- but however it happened, North turned up for the premiere expecting to hear the music he had spent six months composing and recording, and was devastated to hear the supposedly "temporary" music used instead.
- michaelgrafl 9y ago
  That's a great anecdote. Where do you have it from? I'd love to find more of this kind of stuff. And wow, by the way. That's harsh.
  - cperciva 9y ago
    I heard about this a couple years ago when my orchestra (I'm a violinist) did a "movie music" concert with a guest conductor (Hal Beckett) who worked in the industry. We opened the concert with the fanfare from Also Sprach Zarathustra... then he turned to the audience and explained about temp music, and we played the Alex North fanfare. I have a feeling that these sorts of stories fall into the category of "well known in the industry but not thought to be interesting enough to write down or relate to outsiders".
    - 9y ago
rainloft 9y ago
I've watched 2001 twice in my life. Once on my laptop screen, and once in a theater. Wildly different experiences. On a laptop, it was maddeningly slow. I couldn't bear that scene where the spaceship docks on the space station while the Blue Danube Waltz played. Excruciating. I wish there was more explanation, as my mind was wandering watching this dull film. In a theater, I experienced a completely different film.On the big screen, I could imagine the scale of this achievement, of a man-made spaceship landing on a man-made space station, all this coordination, against the Blue Danube waltz, and it was all I could see in my field of vision. Not distracted by other things as I was on my laptop. I didn't need explanation. I just felt it. I finally felt that I had "gotten" the movie. It was an experience. Not just plot and explosions and super heroes, like most movies are today. A powerful film is expressed in images! Film. It's called a motion picture. The more a film can be expressed in images, the more "pure" it is to its medium! And most of the film was silent. I'm glad Clarke got the chance to make it a novel, and told it in the form most fitting for him. Kubrick was a filmmaker and Clarke a writer. I think it is natural that they would disagree on the telling of this story. Different mediums call for different ways to tell the story.
- KozmoNau7 9y ago
  I've had the same experience with The Shining. On my PC, it's a bit plodding and slow, but on the big screen, it's a completely visceral and intense experience like no other film I've seen.
  - logicallee 9y ago
    Lawrence of Arabia is supposed to be an immersive, "culturally, historically, and aesthetically significant" epic historical drama film which won Best Cinematography. But I couldn't avoid constantly glancing at the time and my notifications, when I watched it on a smart watch screen that also displayed a bar across the top showing the time and my notifications.
    - socceroos 9y ago
      I had a similar experience when watching this through the terminal (img to ascii conversion) on my headless server. It was too easy to get distracted by syslog events that were overwriting stdout from the video.
scruffyherder 9y ago
The monolith really works as a Visial metaphor for the Cinema screen. Just as the movie starts as we are staring at the monolith ready to go on a literal space Odyssey. It's a shame so many re-releases "fixed" the faux screen jump when Bowman nearly touched the edge, and instead shattered the glass. It really is brilliant, a movie within a movie. All through the film there are so many rotating monoliths it's incredible that we never get the hint that the upright position of the monolith as it is presented is incorrect. Even the actual end leaves us starting at the monolith, with the profound music. If you dig for interviews you'll see that Kubrick always said that the simple surface story is the simple alien device that transforms man.
- lobster_johnson 9y ago
  Can you elaborate on the "fix"? It's not in IMDb's list of alternate versions.
- KingEllis 9y ago
  > the faux screen jump when Bowman nearly touched the edge, and instead shattered the glass. It really is brilliant, a movie within a movie. > that the upright position of the monolith as it is presented is incorrect. Can you provide references for either of these?
Tharkun 9y ago
My favourite author talking about my second favourite author, discussing my favourite movie. Truly a rare treat.
nikofeyn 9y ago
i wonder what his feelings were regarding the followup of 2010: the year we make contact. although certainly vastly different from the 2001 movie, i thought it was a great movie in its own right. and it seems it contains more of what clarke preferred, even having a few narrations by haywood floyd.

227 points by martincmartin 9y ago

This is funny. I read the book before I watched the film and didn't know that the movie was released before the book was published. I was amazed of how well the movie put images to what I had read in the book, and having read it, I didn't find it difficult to understand the movie, I just thought it was one of the best adaptations of a book I'd ever seen!

SilasX 9y ago
But the Star baby wouldn’t make sense without the book.
kqr 9y ago
Yes, having read the book makes a huge difference. I tried watching the film first, but I failed and stopped watching a short way into it. Then at some point I read the book, which I really enjoyed. I thought I'd give the film a second chance and I'm glad I did because it was brilliant, having read the book. Strongly recommend treating them as two integral parts of one work of art -- consuming either one and not the other will leave you much less satisfied. I think that may be true for several other longer adaptations including STALKER (from A Roadside Picnic) and Apocalypse Now (from A Heart of Darkness).
- coatmatter 9y ago
  On the other hand, I read the book before seeing the film and wish I had done it the other way around. Same case with The Martian too - I found myself distractedly comparing notes (in my head) too often while watching. Perhaps the one book-then-movie reading/viewing sequence I'm happy with was Casino Royale. It was a good faithfully-gritty adaptation.
- toyg 9y ago
  Apocalypse Now does not require any additional reading, it's a perfectly self-contained masterpiece.
- sirclueless 9y ago
  Heart of Darkness/Apocalypse Now also has a pretty remarkable adaptation in video game format called Spec Ops: The Line. It's the same story premise cast as a modern military shooter. The gameplay is a fairly generic (some say this is an intentional statement on the drudgery of video game violence but I'm not so sure) but the story is excellent and there are lots of audible and visual details that show the gradual descent into madness of the main character and his teammates -- your voice lines go from professional callouts to angry emotional outbursts, "Hunt him down!", "Got the fucker!" etc.
  - kqr 9y ago
    Yes! Spec Ops: The Line was absolutely brilliant, and I'm sorry I left it out!
- lobster_johnson 9y ago
  Stalker is interesting in that Tarkovsky originally used the Strugatskys' screenplay, but went back and changed it. Tarkovsky had become increasingly disillusioned about the whole project as he entered into production — he had fights with his cinematographer and had doubts about the story. At one point, they had filmed 6 months of material when they discovered the film negatives were unusable, for reasons nobody has been able to figure out (they used Kodak stock imported from the US, which Soviet labs were unfamiliar with, and it may have been out of date; Tarkovsky himself suspected it was sabotage). As a result, the project went into hiatus while Tarkovsky considered his next steps and sought new funding from the Soviet film board to reshoot. It was actually Arkady Strugatsky, after many discussions and drafts, who suggested a compromise, where most of the sci-fi elements would be stripped from the film, and he encouraged Tarkovsky to build up the screenplay again based on his own ideas. It's fascinating to think what Stalker might have been, if Tarkovsky hadn't deviated from the original script. Roadside Picnic is certainly a novel that could work as a film or miniseries. (WGN considered producing a TV show based on Roadside Picnic last year, with Matthew Goode as the lead, but the pilot was rejected.)

sharkjacobs 9y ago

Here's the original article sans google AMP: https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/books/2017/01/close-tears-he-left-intermission-how-stanley-kubrick-upset-arthur-c-clarke https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/books/2017/01/close-tea...

dang 9y ago
Yes, we changed to that from https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.newstatesman.com/culture/books/2017/01/close-tears-he-left-intermission-how-stanley-kubrick-upset-arthur-c-clarke%3famp https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.newstatesman.com/culture/bo....

andrewflnr 9y ago

I can't blame Kubrick for cutting all the voice-overs, which probably would have made the movie unbearable to watch. At the same time, it's maddening in its ambiguity. Seeing it as a product of this enormous gulf between creative approaches explains a lot.

interfixus 9y ago
It certainly does. Being much, much more Clarke than Kubrick, I watch the thing in awe up till and including "My God, it's full of stars", and then usually switch off, as I know from then on the masterpiece will be descending into lava lamps and nonsense.
- CamperBob2 9y ago
  It certainly does. Being much, much more Clarke than Kubrick, I watch the thing in awe up till and including "My God, it's full of stars", and then usually switch off, as I know from then on the masterpiece will be descending into lava lamps and nonsense. I envy you the progress you'll make when you get around to re-examining some of your faulty assumptions (as we all eventually must, or at least should). Most of us don't have that much room left for personal growth and discovery in our lives.
  - dang 9y ago
    Personal attacks will get you banned here. Please don't post like this, regardless of how much another comment annoys you. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
    - CamperBob2 9y ago
      Personal attacks? What personal attacks? I'm on record (although it would require a pretty exhaustive Google News search to find it) as saying pretty much the same thing as the OP, right after I watched 2001 for the first time. In that case, other people on rec.movies were patient enough to give me some good advice, which was to set the Clarke book aside for the moment, give the film another try in a better viewing environment, and move past my prejudices and knee-jerk first impressions. It sounds like HN's goal is somehow to create an even less open-minded environment than 1990s-era Usenet, which will be quite a trick. But if anyone can pull it off, it'll be you guys.

tomcatfish 9y ago

This article CONSTANTLY refreshes on mobile, even after several minutes, making it next-to-impossible to read

knolan 9y ago
I used reader mode on iOS safari and it was fine.
- code_duck 9y ago
  I used safari in normal mode and didn’t notice any refreshing.
Crontab 9y ago
It the advertising. It is annoying in a standard web browser as well.
raldi 9y ago
It also scrolls back to the top instantly if you try to search the text, like for the word "tears" so you can quickly look up the antidote to the clickbait headline. It also blocks copy-paste, so you can't share the relevant paragraph and save the rest of HN ten minutes of reading.
Nomentatus 9y ago
The ads also interfere with navigation and Google's decision-tree based reporting system makes it impossible to report this. I gave up on the article.

truculation 9y ago

>Explanations were his forte. He was uncomfortable with most forms of ambiguity. One can enjoy good explanations without necessarily enjoying them in movies. I think it's more fun like to try to explain what's going on by oneself from the few clues available. It seems to me that many works of art are polysemic. For example, a passage of Shakespeare can light up several different ideas in one's head thereby creating a stimulating, almost psychedelic experience. It makes the bare plot worthwhile (and worth explaining).

kqr 9y ago
It's nice that you were able to put into words some things I like about classic books and poetry. Kafka was also a master of this. That said, I don't enjoy it as much at all in films. Don't know why. I try to, for sure. It can be stimulating. But it's not on the level of "almost psychedelic" as you so aptly describe what I can experience with books.

dudul 9y ago

Kubrick was fairly known for heavily adapting the novels he used for inspiration. There are huge differences between the novel "Lolita" and Kubrick's adaptation. Same with "Shining" or "Clockwork Orange". TBH, I'm really happy we didn't get a version with voice-overs and all. Hard to imagine a concept of "documentary" would have been better than what we ended up with.

jccooper 9y ago
Stephen King is publicly critical of Kubrick's treatment of "The Shining", mostly about its unchanging and one-dimensional characters. While I expect "2001" would not have been improved by a lot of explanatory voiceovers, I think "The Shining" would be seriously improved by Jack not being obviously crazy right from the first.
- coldtea 9y ago
  >Stephen King is publicly critical of Kubrick's treatment of "The Shining", mostly about its unchanging and one-dimensional characters. It's not like King is some king of nuance in characters himself...
  - drharby 9y ago
    Scary door type subtlty
- dudul 9y ago
  Most authors complained about it yes. Burgess accused Kubrick of not having understood a single word of "Clockwork Orange". Nabokov was the most gracious when he said that while Lolita was a very good movie, he didn't recognize his original work at all :) I think it's a very difficult exercise to adapt a novel. Should you literally put on the screen what is written in the book ? What's the point ? You're not creating much. On the other hand, if you deviate from the original work, fans start attacking you for "betraying" the spirit of the book.
  - 9y ago

tempagain567i 9y ago

I literally had to scroll all the way to the very bottom in order to get to the point. If journalists want us to pay them then they must abandon this cancerous writing style of endless fluff and nonsense.

MR4D 9y ago
I think you nailed it. Clarke's dialogue in his script was mostly removed. Relevant passage is this: "Close to tears, he left at the intermission, having watched an 11-minute sequence in which an astronaut did nothing but jog around the centrifuge in a scene intended to show the boredom of space travel. This scene was considerably cut in the version put out on general release. If Arthur was disappointed by Kubrick’s decision to cut his dialogue and narrative to the bone, he was eventually reconciled by being able to put everything left out of the film into the novel, meaning that each man was able to produce his own preferred version. The success of the film ensured that the book became a bestseller, as audiences sought answers to questions raised by Kubrick’s version, and Arthur soon got over his disappointment, going on to write three bestselling sequels to his novel, only one of which has been filmed so far."
terminado 9y ago
It's not "some journalist," it's Michael Moorcock, and not only that, he's recounting personal first-hand details of his interaction with a friend. And you didn't even condense the salient detail for us, being that Kubrick had cut Clark's extensive voice-over narration, which wasn't revealed until the premiere, provoking Clark to walk out of the screening.
pavlov 9y ago
If you want information delivered in ultra-condensed nuggets, try Twitter? There’s no shortage of TL;DRs on today’s Internet. No one is forcing you to read the “fluff and nonsense” of an award-winning 78-year-old author who was friends with A. C. Clarke.
- jonhendry18 9y ago
  Oh lord Moorcock is 78. I feel old.

DEFCON28 9y ago

I didn't quite get why Kubrick kicked Moorcock off the set. Anyone care to explain?

mkl 9y ago
It wasn't spelled out, but I think Kubrick didn't know who he was, and just didn't want anyone extra on the set. Given how behind and over-budget the movie was, and how many people wanted to visit such an unusual (for the time) film production, I can understand that.
- Crontab 9y ago
  This was my thought as well. As an aside, I would personally love to meet Michael Moorcock. He is one of my favorite authors.
surbas 9y ago
Kubrick didn’t want it to come out, on the set, that he had asked other authors to collaborate with him.
- PhasmaFelis 9y ago
  Kubrick probably had no idea who he was, from the sound of it. Moorcock says "I prepared to meet the man who had contacted me a year or so earlier," implying that they had never met face-to-face but only spoken on the phone or through Kubrick's people.
lurquer 9y ago
The original article was to have a voice-over that explained such things.
pryce 9y ago
I think it's pretty clear that Moorcock is showing how ambiguity is an important or even necessary part of the human experience. He himself doesn't know for certain whether he was kicked off due to A) Kubrick not knowing for certain who he was, or B) Kubrick knowing exactly who he was but aiming to prevent Kubrick's earlier proposals to collaborate with Moorcock from coming into public view. I notice that two different commenters here have reached two totally different yet sensible conclusions, based on exactly the same evidence. To me, Moorcock seems to be staking his flag into the ground over the inalterable need for truth to be filtered and interpreted by the human psyche - and that if even direct and worldly concerns like this have no straightforward single answer, the idea that our species might encounter spiritual or transcendental truths without ambiguity over what they actually mean is pretty tenuous. But I could be mistaken.

coupdejarnac 9y ago

Having read 2001, A Clockwork Orange, and Lolita, I'd say Kubrick's end products justified his changes. Imagine A Clockwork Orange having a happy ending... Well, that's how the book ends.

jlg23 9y ago
Not sure which cut you watched, it does have a happy ending for the protagonist. He enjoys Beethoven again. EDIT: A friend who read the book initially just said it was not happy, but agreed it is when you only know the movie.
- BashiBazouk 9y ago
  They both have happy endings. In the book, the final chapter is about Alex starting to mature into an adult. The book is also organized into three sections of seven chapters meant to represent the three phases of childhood and ending in chapter 21: adulthood. The movie was pretty close to the book it just left off the 21st chapter as did the American version of the book.
  - bigger_cheese 9y ago
    I had to study the novel in high school as you mentioned the 21 chapter thing is important because the book is divided into 3 parts of 7 chapters and there is supposed to be an element of symmetry in the progression. One of the central themes running through the book is free will and choice. It has been a fair amount of time now since I've read it but I believe the book opens with the quote "So what is it going to be then?" and ends with Alex making the choice to set aside his past. Importantly he also says something along the lines that if he ever has children he won't try to stop them making the same choices as he has. One of the things our teacher repeatedly stressed was Saint Augustine and Anthony Burgess's Catholic background.
mieseratte 9y ago
As a former disaffected youth I've very much come to appreciate the original ending of A Clockwork Orange as I've gotten older. While I am a bit of a fan of Kubrick, I think he did the story a great disservice by ending it as he did.

indescions_2018 9y ago

Have revisited 2001 recently. Particularly the scene just before Intermission. Where HAL is reading the lips of the astronauts in the pod. It just really holds up. Apart from the genius editing and sound design. It feels even more a cautionary moment for modern minds on AI. As it must have been to American audiences during the height of the Vietnam War era. Ridley Scott's original Alien and Blade Runner remain immensely watchable 30+ years on. Perhaps even more so. Which makes it high time not to just complete Clark's monoliith films. But write the next chapter in "Dystopian AI" cinema. One in which a super-intelligence doesn't merely write off the necessity of humanity. But actively yet surreptitiously nudges us to produce more powerful versions of itself ;)

coldacid 9y ago
If you're into anime, you might enjoy watching Beatless. It's a wonderful and scary view into what an AI dominated future may hold for us.
potench 9y ago
You should watch the “Autofac” episode of Electric Dreams.
firasd 9y ago
Ghost in the Shell (1995) takes an interesting path away from the usual 'Frankenstein'-type AI narratives .
cromwellian 9y ago
Try thto Person of Interest TV series, from season 2 and especially 3, onwards it is all about super intelligence combined with super surveillance. https://youtu.be/SmUO0v7VYTo https://youtu.be/SmUO0v7VYTo
- shkkmo 9y ago
  I totally missed your comment when writing mine, I should have refreshed the window :)
- 9y ago

da02 9y ago

Did anyone ever definitively figure out what Kubrick was trying to do with "2001"? (The interpretation that made the most sense to me was the one where the monolith is a metaphor to the cinema screen and Philosopher's Stone.)

paulmd 9y ago
The book addresses this. The Monolith is an interstellar "seed" sent out to stimulate the development of other forms of sentient life. This scene is supposed to depict the Monolith stimulating humanity's primate ancestors to develop tool usage (bones as clubs/etc) and catalyzing our societal development as a result. Next, we see Humanity discover the Tycho Monolith buried on the moon. As the lunar dawn strikes it, it unleashes a massive burst of radio energy towards Jupiter and goes silent. This is implied as being an alert that Humanity has reached a crucial stage of development and the stage is set for the completion of its mission. You can alternately view it as an energy-based life-form shifting from one repository/location to another. So the Jupiter Monolith could potentially be interpreted as being the same sentience/AI/etc. The other confusing scene is the ending, where Bowman travels through the Jupiter Monolith and becomes a Star Baby. This is the Monolith finishing its mission, and allowing Bowman to shed his corporeal body and become a being of pure energy, like the Monolith and its creators. So all in all, the movie depicts the Monolith guiding humanity through all the stages of its evolution, from primates to a higher plane of existence. Then we have several artistic interludes that connects these scenes... an idealistic depiction of humanity's technological development as Floyd travels to the moon, and then a horror sequence as one of our creations malfunctions and becomes murderous. The book is vastly more comprehensible than the movie, without some of the narration that Kubrick cut it's pretty difficult to follow what's going on. On the other hand, from an artistic perspective, narration would have ruined the film (imagine David Attenborough narrating...) so it's easy to see why Kubrick didn't go that route, and his imagery actually does fit the sequences Clarke describes perfectly, as long as you understand what's going on. It just does a shit job of explaining what's going on, for the most part.
- da02 9y ago
  When I read the book, I thought that too. However, Clarke's book is separate from Kubrick's movie. Kubrick focused a lot of things in the movie that were ignored in the book. Essentially, Kubrick and Clarke have two different interpretations. That's why I was asking the question. For example, * The number 4 and 3 keep appearing in the movie. * Lots of 90-degree angles in the movie compared to the book. * Why everyone is cold and sterile as the move away from Earth. * Rectangles and circles. HAL is a black rectangle and a red circle. The monolith is a black rectangular object. * Kubrick excited at making the biggest "religious" movie. * The original cut of the movie had the scene of the broken wine glass jerk/skip, giving the impression Bowman had realized he was in an artificial environment created by others. * The appearance of diamond shapes in the movie and his other movies, The Shining and Full Metal Jacket: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MSo6s_xrj4c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MSo6s_xrj4c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mpWMnlMIWAU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mpWMnlMIWAU

ams6110 9y ago

> Arthur developed polio in the 1980s, making travel increasingly difficult Polio in the 1980s??? How did that happen?

throwaway76543 9y ago
It's wrong. He contracted Polio in 1962. In the 80s he developed PPS. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-polio_syndrome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-polio_syndrome
ckarmann 9y ago
Clarke was actually diagnosed in 1962 (http://www.clarkefoundation.org/about-sir-arthur/ http://www.clarkefoundation.org/about-sir-arthur/). He developped complications in the 80s. He has lived in Sri Lanka since the 50s, which was probably not the best place for access to the brand-new vaccine that was just being invented at the same period.

lucas_membrane 9y ago

There was one other contributor who was equally or even more disappointed by the first viewing on opening night, the composer who had been hired to write the score, who found out then that Strauss had been substituted.

cperciva 9y ago

Arthur C Clarke wasn't the only person who was shocked at the premiere of 2001. Stanley Kubrick commissioned the prominent film composer Alex North -- famous for the scoring of Spartacus -- to write the music for 2001. However, film music is only recorded and added at the final stage of editing; normally all of the video is laid down first so that the music director knows exactly how long each scene will be and the music can be recorded at the right tempo to match up. During the video editing process, "temp music" is used -- typically classical music because it's widely available -- so that scenes have the right feeling when they're viewed by the director. For this purpose, Kubrick selected the opening fanfare from Also Sprach Zarathustra for the start of 2001, The Blue Danube for "floating through space" scenes, et cetera. However, after viewing the edited scenes with the "temporary" background music, Kubrick decided that he really liked it that way -- and so rather than using the score which North was composing and recording, he re-edited the video to match the tempo of the classical recordings he had used. Legend has it that Kubrick didn't know how to break the news to North -- but however it happened, North turned up for the premiere expecting to hear the music he had spent six months composing and recording, and was devastated to hear the supposedly "temporary" music used instead.

michaelgrafl 9y ago
That's a great anecdote. Where do you have it from? I'd love to find more of this kind of stuff. And wow, by the way. That's harsh.
- cperciva 9y ago
  I heard about this a couple years ago when my orchestra (I'm a violinist) did a "movie music" concert with a guest conductor (Hal Beckett) who worked in the industry. We opened the concert with the fanfare from Also Sprach Zarathustra... then he turned to the audience and explained about temp music, and we played the Alex North fanfare. I have a feeling that these sorts of stories fall into the category of "well known in the industry but not thought to be interesting enough to write down or relate to outsiders".
  - 9y ago

rainloft 9y ago

I've watched 2001 twice in my life. Once on my laptop screen, and once in a theater. Wildly different experiences. On a laptop, it was maddeningly slow. I couldn't bear that scene where the spaceship docks on the space station while the Blue Danube Waltz played. Excruciating. I wish there was more explanation, as my mind was wandering watching this dull film. In a theater, I experienced a completely different film.On the big screen, I could imagine the scale of this achievement, of a man-made spaceship landing on a man-made space station, all this coordination, against the Blue Danube waltz, and it was all I could see in my field of vision. Not distracted by other things as I was on my laptop. I didn't need explanation. I just felt it. I finally felt that I had "gotten" the movie. It was an experience. Not just plot and explosions and super heroes, like most movies are today. A powerful film is expressed in images! Film. It's called a motion picture. The more a film can be expressed in images, the more "pure" it is to its medium! And most of the film was silent. I'm glad Clarke got the chance to make it a novel, and told it in the form most fitting for him. Kubrick was a filmmaker and Clarke a writer. I think it is natural that they would disagree on the telling of this story. Different mediums call for different ways to tell the story.

KozmoNau7 9y ago
I've had the same experience with The Shining. On my PC, it's a bit plodding and slow, but on the big screen, it's a completely visceral and intense experience like no other film I've seen.
- logicallee 9y ago
  Lawrence of Arabia is supposed to be an immersive, "culturally, historically, and aesthetically significant" epic historical drama film which won Best Cinematography. But I couldn't avoid constantly glancing at the time and my notifications, when I watched it on a smart watch screen that also displayed a bar across the top showing the time and my notifications.
  - socceroos 9y ago
    I had a similar experience when watching this through the terminal (img to ascii conversion) on my headless server. It was too easy to get distracted by syslog events that were overwriting stdout from the video.

scruffyherder 9y ago

The monolith really works as a Visial metaphor for the Cinema screen. Just as the movie starts as we are staring at the monolith ready to go on a literal space Odyssey. It's a shame so many re-releases "fixed" the faux screen jump when Bowman nearly touched the edge, and instead shattered the glass. It really is brilliant, a movie within a movie. All through the film there are so many rotating monoliths it's incredible that we never get the hint that the upright position of the monolith as it is presented is incorrect. Even the actual end leaves us starting at the monolith, with the profound music. If you dig for interviews you'll see that Kubrick always said that the simple surface story is the simple alien device that transforms man.

lobster_johnson 9y ago
Can you elaborate on the "fix"? It's not in IMDb's list of alternate versions.
KingEllis 9y ago
> the faux screen jump when Bowman nearly touched the edge, and instead shattered the glass. It really is brilliant, a movie within a movie. > that the upright position of the monolith as it is presented is incorrect. Can you provide references for either of these?

Tharkun 9y ago

My favourite author talking about my second favourite author, discussing my favourite movie. Truly a rare treat.

nikofeyn 9y ago

i wonder what his feelings were regarding the followup of 2010: the year we make contact. although certainly vastly different from the 2001 movie, i thought it was a great movie in its own right. and it seems it contains more of what clarke preferred, even having a few narrations by haywood floyd.