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'Dear Mr. Kubrick': 1960s Audience Responses to 2001 — A Space Odyssey (2009) [pdf]
- FredPret 2y ago> “ 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
- Willingham 2y agoI can’t imagine an atomic family from the 60’s rolling up to this and getting caught off guard like that XD
- Mistletoe 2y agoThe 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.
- Waterluvian 2y agoI 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.
- wileydragonfly 2y agoFor 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.
- ajmurmann 2y agoMy 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.
- djkivi 2y agoFor me that was Beyond the Valley of the Dolls. Roger Ebert was not just a movie critic... And it inspired Austin Powers as well!
- dylan604 2y agoI 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.
- ajmurmann 2y agoThis 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.
- GoatOfAplomb 2y ago> late 90s and early 00s I remember going to Moulin Rouge without knowing it was a musical!
- glimshe 2y agoThe Barbenheimer of the 1960s...
- riwsky 2y ago“Poohthousand and one”
- sandworm101 2y agoThat 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.
- m463 2y agoShe 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.
- masswerk 2y ago> She had a valid complaint, putting pooh at 11pm after 2001 Mr. Kubrick's programming choices are, indeed, bizarre. ;-)
- themadturk 2y agoI doubt that was Kubrick's choice. It was the theater or their parent company that made the programming decision.
- masswerk 2y agoThe letter was complaining to Kubrick, not to the cinema, which I personally find bizarre.
- themadturk 2y agoThe 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.
- wileydragonfly 2y ago“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.
- canadianfella 2y ago[dead]
- PrismCrystal 2y agoThis 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.
- bdjsiqoocwk 2y ago[flagged]
- PrismCrystal 2y ago[flagged]
- bdjsiqoocwk 2y ago> nearly everyone in the USSR was working class For most of its history, nearly everyone in the USSR was a farmer, so not proletariat and not communist. > I would suggest watching the film The first few paragraphs on how the movie is about a person remembering important episodes of his life got me curious and gave me Butterfly Effect vibes (good), but reading further down I started getting Mulholland Drives vibes (not good).
- PrismCrystal 2y ago"For most of its history, nearly everyone in the USSR was a farmer, so not proletariat." They certainly were in the context we are speaking of here. Official Soviet terminology, apparently starting at least from Lenin but I haven’t checked this thoroughly, divided the proletariat into rural proletarians (in Russian селские пролетарии) and urban proletarians (городские пролетарии). In any event, in colloquial contexts the word serves handily to refer to a life of rather menial trudging wherever it’s lived.
- GeekyBear 2y agoThankfully, 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.
- GrantMoyer 2y agoNote 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.
- nickcw 2y agoThe 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!
- mulmen 2y ago> I can't think of other examples where the novel was developed alongside the film but I expect there are! Game of Thrones?
- Loughla 2y agoThat 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.
- mulmen 2y agoI 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.
- csours 2y agoI 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 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.
- tiahura 2y agoI’ve always tried to model my academic career on Rip Torn’s character.
- maroonblazer 2y agoTangential, but TIL there exists a journal of audience & reception studies.
- mediumsmart 2y agoDear participations: I can’t find any audience responses in that pdf. Only thoughts about them in a different language.
- chiph 2y ago> 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.
- amanaplanacanal 2y agoI believe Hollywood Theater in Portland also owns a 70mm print, so that's another option if you are in that part of the world.
- BHSPitMonkey 2y agoThe 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.
- themadturk 2y agoI 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.
- wkat4242 2y agoI 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.
- WorldMaker 2y agoBut 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.