The Amazingly Accurate Futurism of 2001: A Space Odyssey

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Caption: The Making of Stanley Kubricks '2oo1: A Space Odyssey' Taschen

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Caption: A new book, The Making of Stanley Kubricks 2001: A Space Odyssey chronicles the creation of the epic sci-fi movie. Here, actor Keir Dullea poses in the equipment storage corridor to one side of Discoverys pod bay. Dmitri Kessel/Getty Images

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Caption: The central design challenge for 2001 was creating a set and props that could outpace 1960s technology. While they filmed, NASA was trying to put a man on the moon. If 2001 looked too much like what NASA had created, its futuristic setting wouldn't be believable. Taschen

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Caption: The book's author Piers Bizony points out that here and there, the movie forecasts our technology today. The executive briefcase with its phone handset and dial? Look closely, and all the elements of the laptop or smartphone are there, half a century ahead of time, he says.Taschen

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Caption: Kubrick hired a skunkworks team of aeronautics engineers and astronomy illustrators to help create the set. This drawings shows a cross section of the Discovery. Oliver Rennert/TASCHEN

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Caption: Kubrick and his team shooting the nal scenes of 2001 in the faux-luxurious bedroom. Stanley Kubrick Archives/TASCHEN

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Caption: Actor Gary Lockwood in the main command deck of 2001: A Space Odyssey's interplanetary spacecraft. Even though the design of the movie needed to outpace what NASA was creating, the designers took some cues from the industry and based spacesuits on actual NASA designs.Stanley Kubrick Archives/TASCHEN

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Caption: Kubrick and author and co-creator Arthur C. Clarke pose for publicity photographs inside the passenger deck set of the Aries lunar ferry. Stanley Kubrick Archives/TASCHEN

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Caption: Stanley Kubrick gives instructions through a hatch at the bottom of the centrifuge, as actors Keir Dullea and Gary Lockwood prepare for a scene. Stanley Kubrick Archives/TASCHEN

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Caption: Most of the movie was filmed in England. Here, Kubrick directs the lunar monolith scenes over the Christmas of 1965 at Shepperton, on Europes second-largest shooting stage. Taschen

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Caption: Book cover designer Roy Carnon helped created a visual scheme for how lighting might look in outer space. This is a rendering of the docking area at the hub of the space station, with a winged shuttle parked after arrival.Taschen

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The Making of Stanley Kubricks 2001: A Space Odyssey documents in nearly scientificdetail exactly that: the story of how the iconic science-fiction film came into existence, and how it predicted much of the technology we take for granted today.

Science writer and space historian Piers Bizony offers an extraordinarily detailed catalog. It begins with the genesis of Kubricks masterpiece, starting with his partnership with author Arthur C. Clarke, and extends through the creation of the films futuristicset design. Only 1,500 copies were printed, and theyve long since sold out at $1,000 each. (A $70 second edition version is now available for pre-order.)

In the tome, which is chock-full of previously unseenimages, Bizony highlights the central tension of the films design: Even as Kubrick and his teamincluding cinematographer Geoffrey Unsworth and art director John Hoesliwere creating a fictive future set in space, NASA was racing to put a man on the moon. The set and props in 2001: A Space Odyssey had to dramatically outpace the emerging technology, lest NASA succeed while they were filming and make Kubricks vision appear outdated, or, worse, flat-out wrong.

Thisforced Kubricks team to do deep, meticulous research, which Bizony says helps explain why much of the set design accurately forecasted how we live with technology today. The executive briefcase with its phone handset and dial? Look closely, and all the elements of the laptop or smartphone are there, half a century ahead of time,Bizonytells WIRED. You could also, for example, see HAL 9000 as a proto-Siri.

The book is packed with other detailsabout the making of the film (for example, Clarke wrote the most of the screenplayat the Chelsea Hotel, in the company of William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg), but is most elucidating in its attention to the technical and design details that made the film such anenduring paragon almost 50 years after its release.

In the 1960s, television spelled trouble for film executives. With more viewers getting their entertainment athome, studios needed a way to lure them into movie theaters. The board of MGM grew interested in a new widescreen format called Cinerama, which used a three-camera system to create an impossibly large, wide picture. It required special projection equipment, and audiences would buy tickets and seats ahead of time as if they were going to a Broadway playor, by todays standards, to a 3-D IMAX flick.

With the country entranced by NASAs race to the moon, Kubrick and Clarke realized the sweeping galaxy-building of their filmthe working title was Journey to the Starswas exactly the widescreen extravaganza MGM needed. MGM took the bait,Bizonysays.

That left Kubrick to build a space-age world unlike any other. After surveying set designs from other 1960s-era sci-fi films, Kubrick decided he didnt want to leave 2001s mise en scne in the hands of film industry artists. He wanted a more realistic setting. He assembled a skunkworks team of astronomical artists, aeronautics specialists, and production designers. Aerospace engineersnot prop makersdesigned switchpanels, display systems, and communications devices for the spacecraftinteriors.

This particularly helped with the movies light design. Artist Richard McKenna was creating color schemes for spacecrafts before anyone really knew what they might look like. Roy Carnon, another illustrator, created a visual system for Kubrick that imagined how sunlight and shadows might fall in space. Other advisors took cues from submarines and military vehicles to create the red-lit interiors of the moonbus cockpit.

Hans-Kurt Lange, who worked as an illustrator in NASAs Future Projects Division, modeled 2001s space suits on NASAs, using the same horizontal stitching to maintain a constant volume of air. They resembled a slimmed-down Michelin Man. Likewise, drawings of the Discoverys control panels were based on NASA photos showing astronauts huddled around an in-development Apollo space capsule.

Kubrick and Clarke needed to conceive of an onboard computing system for the Discovery, which they initially called Athena, not HAL. They went to IBM, then the worlds largest computing company, for drawings and blueprints that could imagine the future of personal computing.

IBM had trouble with that. Eliot Noyes, IBMs industrial design consultant, based his renderings on current technological achievements, which were room-sized supercomputers used only by professionals and the military. He proposed to Kubrick that a computer of the complexity required by the Discovery spacecraft would be a computer into which men went, rather than a computer around which men walked. Kubrick lost it. He wanted something smaller, like a control panel. IBMs assumptions were behind the times, Bizony writes. Rival companies, such as Motorola and Raytheon, were pushing toward miniaturization, spurred in large part by NASAs urgent requirement for computers small enough to fit inside the new lunar capsules.

In the end, Kubrick warmed to IBMs drawings for the sake of creating another character and adding drama to the movie. Of course, to animate HAL 9000, Kubricks team had to create thegraphics. ButDoug Trumbull, who did airbrush paintings for films, hit a speedbump: Computer-generated graphics didnt exist in any real way yet. MIT, where Kubrick had met with AI and robotics professor Marvin Minsky, was developing them, but they had a resolution of just 512 pixels across. That was advanced for the 1960s, but Kubrick knew it would be too crude for the year 2001. So histeam faked it by mounting high-contrast film negatives onto mobile glass panels. Trumbull played with colored filters, photographed different graphics slides, and then projected them onto the set.

MGMs contract with Kubrick stipulated that 2001 would wrap in 1966. It missed the deadline, but critics and fans alike would probably agree it was well worth the wait.) 2001: A Space Odyssey hit theaters in April 1968a year before Apollo 11 landed on the moon and provided another glimpse of what space travel might look like.

If there was a space race between Kubrick and NASA, the director won. But as the many, many pages in Bizonys book show, 2001 wasnt just a journey through space. It was a carefully wrought prediction for the future.

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The Amazingly Accurate Futurism of 2001: A Space Odyssey