1. According to Arthur C. Clarke, Stanley Kubrick wanted to get an insurance policy from Lloyd’s of London to protect himself against losses in the event that extraterrestrial intelligence were discovered before the movie was released. Lloyd’s refused.
2.The total footage shot was some 200 times the final length of the film.
3. Stanley Kubrick had several tons of sand imported, washed, and painted for the moon surface scenes.
4. The carry-on bags belonging to Russian space scientists with whom Dr. Floyd shares a drink are marked Aeroflot (in Cyrillic), still today the Russian national airline.
5. A working title was “Voyage Beyond the Stars”. When Fantastic Voyage was released, Stanley Kubrick reportedly so disliked that film that he did not want his film to sound anything like it. In the end, “2001” was chosen as it is the first year of both the 21st century and the 3rd millennium.
6. There is no dialogue in the first 25 minutes of the movie (ending when a stewardess speaks at 25:38), nor in the last 23 minutes (excluding end credits). With these two lengthy sections and other shorter ones, there are around 88 dialogue-free minutes in the movie.
7. Rock band Pink Floyd was at one point approached to perform music for the film. However they turned it down due to other commitments.
8. The main Discovery set was built by aircraft manufacturer Vickers-Armstrong inside a 12-meter by two-meter drum designed to rotate at five km per hour. It cost $750,000.
9. Frank Poole and Dave Bowman watch themselves in a television interview on “BBC 12”. This was a play on the fact that, at the time of production, there were only BBC channels 1 and 2. The presenter in this scene is Kenneth Kendall, the first newsreader seen on British TV in 1955.
10. Originally, Stanley Kubrick had Stuart Freeborn create a primitive but more human-like makeup for the actors playing early man, but he couldn’t find a way to photograph them in full length without getting an X-rating from the MPAA, since they had to be naked. So Kubrick went with the hairy monkey model instead. With the exception of two baby chimpanzees, all were played by humans in costume.
11. The entire film contains only 205 special effects shots, compared to 350 in Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope and over 2,200 such shots in Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith.
12. The last movie made about men on the moon before Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked there in real life. 40 years later, conspiracy theorists insist that this is not a coincidence, claiming that all footage of Armstrong’s voyage was a hoax film directed by Stanley Kubrick using leftover scenes and props from this movie.
13. HAL 9000 never once says, “Good Morning, Dave,” despite this line being one of his most recognized quotations.
14. Aside from the film’s music, no sound is heard in the space sequences. This is because technically in space, there is no sound.
15. Originally, HAL was to be called Athena and have a female voice.
16. In the premier screening of the film, 241 people walked out of the theater, including Rock Hudson who said “Will someone tell me what the hell this is about?” Arthur C. Clarke once said, “If you understand ‘2001’ completely, we failed. We wanted to raise far more questions than we answered.”
17. The movie was not a financial success during the first weeks of its theatrical run. MGM was already planning to pull it back from theaters, when they were persuaded by several theatre owners to keep showing the film. Many theater owners had observed increasing numbers of young adults attending the film, who were especially enthusiastic about watching the ‘Star Gate’ sequence under the influence of psychotropic drugs. This helped the film to become a financial success in the end, despite the many negative reactions it received in the beginning.
What I find very telling is that critics denounced the film; completely and utterly wrote it off. However, after the cult following made it a huge hit, they all changed their tune.
Hence why critics should always be ignored.
I’m not sure how much research you did.
But, the reviews I’ve read (and remember reading at the time of the movie) were generally positive.
Such as Roger Ebert’s original review :
http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/2001-a-space-odyssey-1968
Brilliance/genius is so often accompanied by eccentricity.
Which is why Kubrick is (and was) so often misunderstood and vilified.
as crazy as this may sound, there are many things about 2001 and 2010 that may actually be based on truth. i am currently gathering more information to further prove this. many people agree Hollywood has been used to plant small amounts of truth (mixed with fantasy) behind extraterrestrial life in movies.
truth about what? the moon landings were faked. This film is a work of sci-fi genius and special effects were top rate for the time. What Kubrick did is get it in people’s mind that space travel is possible, what the moon looks like, the earth in orbit, etc. then he faked moon landings. You ate it up as everyone else in the public, including me.
>7. Rock band Pink Floyd was at one point approached to perform music for the film. However they turned it down due to other commitments.
This is 100% not true. Stanley Kubrick sourced the music in 1967, while Pink Floyd were relatively unknown. He did approach them later for his movie “A Clockwork Orange.” He wanted to use their piece “Atom Heart Mother.” Upon hearing that he would chop it up and distribute it throughout the movie, the band elected to not allow the use of the music. Roger Waters has said that this was a huge mistake. Source: “http://www.amazon.com/Comfortably-Numb-Inside-Story-Floyd/dp/0306817527” Comfortably Numb: the Inside Story of Pink Floyd
This is one of the greatest sci-fi’s of all time. And Kubrick is one of the greatest also.
That said, I believe Kubrick did help produce the fake moon landings, and this film was
financed by NASA. Arthur C. Clarke came up with the idea of a Satellite, which are not even possible, due to orbiting in the Thermosphere which would melt anything a satellite is made of. Nasa is full of BS and Kubrick’s wife and daughter have disclosed the work he did to fake the moon landings. I know there a lot of space cadets where this crushes their fantasies and dreams, but Neil and Buzz did not go to the moon. And no one will go
to Mars, it is all BS.
The moon landings were not faked. And all the so-called visual anomalies have been debunked.
Kubrick’s moonscapes in ‘2001’ look different in texture and topography from how the moon really looks. There are many actual moon pictures to look at and they are consistent with each other and different from the best scientific predictions that influenced fictional depictions including Kubrick’s. I don’t know why I’m bothering with this reply; if you’re determined to believe it was a fake, I won’t change your mind here, but just look at all the many pictures from the Apollo missions. The Saturn V rocket alone is too expensive to simply be part of an elaborate ruse – and they launched six of them.
By the way, I love ‘2001’.
Clarke invented the idea of *geosynchronous* satellites — satellites which stay relatively stationary above one point on the equator (a bit of orbital wobble, usually). The idea of (artificial) satellites, generally are probably about as old as Newtonian physics.
Of course, if you think that satellites, generally are impossible, then you’re in a bad place. This would mean that GPS is a hoax, along with satellite TV, Google maps, the Hubble space telescope, remote sensing and a host of other things.
Do you believe that trips to the outer planets are faked as well?
Dude, the Moon landings are ridiculously easy to prove. They even had this in Big Bang Theory. You can (and many many people have) shoot a laser at the moon and bounce it off reflectors left there by the Apollo 11 mission. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_Laser_Ranging_experiment
Psychotropic? I was only too glad to help out.
How is it in this modern age no one, and I mean absolutely no one, who knows in proper grammar form it is never not once despite? It is in spite of. EVERY TIME. Boggles my mind. Next thing you know, people will start saying surreal and basically in everything they are talking about.
Eh? I don’t understand what you are saying. “people will start saying surreal and basically in everything they are talking about”. WTF
Elon musk laneded on Mars last night, he’s just too busy to tell anyone about yet ….