Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey took more than four years to develop and make, at a cost of more than $10 million—a formidable price tag in mid-1960s Hollywood. Kubrick’s project promised the moon and then some, but executives at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer feared they had a disaster on their hands when the picture was finally ready for release, 50 years ago, in the spring of 1968. Some audience members had fidgeted and talked through the movie’s first private screening; a few had walked out. At a subsequent press screening one skeptic was overheard sniping, “Well, that’s the end of Stanley Kubrick.” Many early reviews were just as dismissive.

The film was finally released to the public on April 3, 1968, four days after President Lyndon Johnson announced he would not seek re-election in the face of increasing opposition to the war in Vietnam, and just a day before Martin Luther King Jr. would be assassinated. You might have thought escapism would be in vogue, and 2001 offered that, but moviegoers in this uneasy but heady era were also in a mood to be provoked and challenged, even baffled, and they had never seen anything like 2001—literally, in terms of the film’s painstakingly realistic portrayal of inter-planetary space travel, with special effects that still hold up, and figuratively, in the sense that 2001’s elliptical storytelling was as confounding to many viewers as, for others, the film’s cosmic scale, mythic reach, and wordless, psychedelic finale were exhilarating (if still confounding). An art film made on a big-boy budget, it became the highest-grossing picture of 1968—“perhaps the most offbeat blockbuster in the history of U.S. pic playoff,” as Variety put it in early 1969.

The British science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke co-authored the 2001 screenplay with Kubrick, as well as a companion novel. Clarke may have prefigured the reaction of audiences when, with the film still two long years from completion, he described 2001’s making as “a wonderful experience streaked with agony.” It was all that, and more: a feat of sustained innovation, even improvisation, led by one of the most controlling and obsessive directors in movie history. That MGM, traditionally the stodgiest of studios, gave Kubrick the freedom to set off toward an end point even he wasn’t entirely sure of—and this was half a decade before Hollywood would make a thing of indulging visionary young directors—is almost as astonishing as the film that resulted.

“It’s certainly one of the last of its kind,” Ivor Powell told me. He should know, having worked on the film in a variety of capacities, including as an assistant to the art and special-effects departments, and then gone on to help produce two other science-fiction landmarks, Alien and Blade Runner. “God knows,” he continued, “you just wouldn’t have that kind of autonomy today where you can start making a picture on that scale and basically have no end to it and no sort of supervision, really.” Powell referred to 2001 as “an open canvas”—and it clearly was, arguably the largest open canvas in movie history. “Looking back,” Powell said, “it’s unbelievable.”

Photos: Behind the Scenes of 2001: A Space Odyssey



1 / 5 Chevron Chevron From Collection Christophel. Dullea in his space pod.

Trader Vic’s and Beyond the Infinite

Kubrick was 36 years old in 1964 and enjoying a commercial and critical success with his just-released nuclear black comedy, Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. That film, and his audacious 1962 adaptation of Lolita, along with his bitter anti-war movie Paths of Glory (1957), had earned him a reputation as an enfant terrible. He was maybe outgrowing the enfant half of the equation, but the terrible persisted, his public image that of an eccentric, secretive, obsessive-compulsive genius—a European-style auteur with a Bronx accent. All of which was true, though he was as prickly about his control-freak reputation as he was, inevitably, controlling. In the Kubrick Archive at the University of the Arts London, I found a directive issued to 2001’s publicity team, presumably signed off on if not dictated by Kubrick, which read in part: “Mr. Kubrick is not an exhibit in a sideshow. What he likes or dislikes, how he lives, any of his personal habits—these are not for publication and are not publicity fodder. He and he alone will say what he thinks.” (The majority of documents I quote in this piece came from the Kubrick Archive.)