{"id":6674,"date":"2018-05-11T17:09:25","date_gmt":"2018-05-12T00:09:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/?p=6674"},"modified":"2020-10-18T11:43:27","modified_gmt":"2020-10-18T18:43:27","slug":"michael-bensons-space-odyssey","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/2018\/05\/11\/michael-bensons-space-odyssey\/","title":{"rendered":"Michael Benson&#8217;s SPACE ODYSSEY"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/05\/benson2001.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft  wp-image-6676\" src=\"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/05\/benson2001-300x285.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"621\" height=\"590\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/05\/benson2001-300x285.jpg 300w, https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/05\/benson2001-768x730.jpg 768w, https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/05\/benson2001-1024x974.jpg 1024w, https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/05\/benson2001.jpg 1265w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 621px) 100vw, 621px\" \/><\/a><br \/>\nThis is not my usual methodical summary with comments, but rather a compilation of random bits that stood out, as I read this book, without taking notes.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>I was struck again and again by how key plot points, or techniques of special effects, or composers whose music was used, were accidental discoveries or were decided serendipitously.\n<ul>\n<li>The idea of HAL reading lips was suggest by an associate producer, to solve a plot point.<\/li>\n<li>The notion of knocking the wine glass onto the floor \u2013 an incident fraught with symbology \u2013 was an offhand suggestion by the actor.<\/li>\n<li>The colorized landscapes (of Scotland, and Monument Valley) used a technique they came to call \u2018Purple Hearts,\u2019 an accidental discovery that film stock recorded in three basic colors could be recolored randomly in restoration.<\/li>\n<li>At one point Kubrick all but buys out a local record shop, playing bits of hundreds of LPs for appropriate tracks; but Gyorgi Ligeti was heard by chance by his wife on the radio.<\/li>\n<li>That the tiger\u2019s eyes reflected light was an accidental effect of the front-projection technique used in the Dawn of Man scenes.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<li>Similarly: work would proceed on one part of the film, even as the overall story was undetermined, and techniques for filming other parts were undetermined. (All the 2001 era scenes with actors were filmed first; then the Dawn of Man; finally the Star Gate effects.)<\/li>\n<li>The dimensions of the interior sets (as described in production details) are not consistent with the exterior ship Discovery (judging its size by what we see of the pod bay deck from the outside). Why is the emergency entry hatch so deep? As with so many others, the interior of Discovery is bigger inside than outside. (No doubt there\u2019s a technical term for this.)<\/li>\n<li>Gossip:\n<ul>\n<li>William Sylvester couldn\u2019t get through the long take of the lunar briefing room conference; he was a junkie, and was threatened with dismissal, before he got his act together. (Even so, Kubrick didn\u2019t get the single long take he\u2019d wanted.)<\/li>\n<li>Kubrick took a dislike to Carl Sagan, introduced to him by Clarke. He found Sagan \u201csupercilious\u201d and \u201cpatronizing\u201d [Benson\u2019s words] and didn\u2019t want to see him again. (Nevertheless, Sagan took credit for one of his suggestions about the film, in his book THE COSMIC CONNECTION, that the aliens not be shown, only implied.)<\/li>\n<li>Dan Richter, a ballet dancer who played Moonwatcher, was also a junkie \u2013 but a legal junkie, under British laws at the time, under a doctor\u2019s supervision to administer doses.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<li>I have a much better understanding of the \u2018front-projection\u2019 and \u2018slit-scan\u2019 techniques than I\u2019ve ever had, via diagrams on pages 270 and 343.<\/li>\n<li>The \u2018pace\u2019 of the spacecraft scenes was dictated by the movements of the stars [which shouldn\u2019t have been moving at all] \u2013 any faster, they would have blurred, or twinkled. And so the spacecraft, e.g. the Discovery, moved at the same pace, in slightly different directions.<\/li>\n<li>Doug Trumball, one of the key special effects wizards, was drafted and pretended to be gay to avoid it. Benson mentions that this \u2013 that homosexuality was still illegal in Britain, and the US \u2013 was the reason Clarke had relocated to Ceylon (later known as Sri Lanka), where he lived most of his life<\/li>\n<li>Other music Kubrick liked in early edits was Mahler\u2019s 3<sup>rd, \u00a0<\/sup>Vaughn Williams\u2019 7<sup>th<\/sup>, and the scherzo of Mendelsohn\u2019s Midsummer\u2019s Night Dream.<\/li>\n<li>Famously, the celebrated film composer Alex North was hired to do an original score for 2001, even after Kubrick had committed himself to using Zarathustra, at least, for the opening; and North gamely composed fresh music that attempted to achieve the same effects. Ultimately, it was not used; Kubrick liked his classical tracks better, and preferred a sound design that left much of the film with no music at all. Pieces of North\u2019s score, like everything else, are on YouTube. It\u2019s not bad; but it\u2019s too recognizably the Alex North music of scores for Spartacus and Cleopatra.<\/li>\n<li>It\u2019s impossible to know about the alternate history of the effect of that score having been used, as opposed to the classical tracks by Richard Strauss and Johann Strauss (the pieces by Khachaturian and Ligeti were far less well-known and so carried no cultural baggage). Benson captures the issue with \u201cThe Blue Danube\u201d p358, that it \u201cwas then considered a kitschy, musty, nationalistic composition\u201d. Elsewhere, back in Jerome Agel\u2019s book THE MAKING OF KUBRICK\u2019S 2001, I recall that a concern was that the piece would distract the audience with recollections of movies about Vienna.<\/li>\n<li>Yet Benson confirms another recollection: that Kubrick, as perfectionist with the music as with anything else, \u201clistened to about twenty-five recordings of \u2018Blue Danube\u2019 before choosing the one for Deutsche Grammophon by Herbert von Karajan, the world\u2019s greatest conductor. It\u2019s the kind of music that can sound terribly banal, but at its best, it\u2019s still a magnificent thing.\u201d P359<\/li>\n<li>Indeed, I\u2019ve always thought that this recording of Blue Danube is so much more precise and technical than any other I\u2019ve ever heard. This was von Karajan\u2019s esthetic, and it fit Kubrick\u2019s esthetic exactly.<\/li>\n<li>Benson spends a significant amount of time on Clarke, with the recurring theme that Clarke\u2019s vision for the film \u2013 with introductory interviews by great scientists about the possibilities of extraterrestrial life, and with *narration* throughout the film about the state of the early man-apes, about what was going on with HAL, and so on \u2013 was gradually and eventually completely abandoned by Kubrick, who wanted a visual experience, not a verbal one. Clarke wrote endless drafts of that narration; some of this is in Clarke\u2019s book THE LOST WORLDS OF 2001, published only a few years later in 1972. Clarke was shocked, \u201cin tears,\u201d by the previews of the final version he saw, without those intros and without the narration \u2013 but just as with the critics, he came around to realize what an achievement the film itself was. And Clarke\u2019s novel version, following the release of the film by four months, \u2018explained\u2019 everything in the way he preferred. The film and the novel complement one another.<\/li>\n<li>And there are descriptions of the harsh reactions of critics on the film\u2019s premiere, and the walk-outs from the earliest showings, and the later revisions of opinions by critics. But the box office spoke, especially among younger viewers, as opposed to the elderly film critic crowd. <i>2001<\/i> was the highest box office performing film of its year. It didn\u2019t do so well in the Oscars the following year \u2013 it was nominated in four categories, including best picture, but only won for special effects, which Kubrick had taken complete credit for.<\/li>\n<li>Yet its assessment as a great film rose over the years, gradually, until <i>2001<\/i> is now ranked among the top 10, even the top 3, of various rankings of the greatest films of all time.<\/li>\n<li>And I think a lesson here is that the classics are precisely those works that break new ground, that do new things regardless of the artistic or popular standards of the time, that upset people at first. And those works \u2013 like Melville\u2019s <b>Moby Dick<\/b>, which is compared to <i>2001<\/i> on a couple grounds in this book \u2013 take a while to be recognized.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This is not my usual methodical summary with comments, but rather a compilation of random bits that stood out, as I read this book, without taking notes. I was struck again and again by how key plot points, or techniques &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/2018\/05\/11\/michael-bensons-space-odyssey\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6674","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arthur-c-clarke","category-book-notes"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6674","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6674"}],"version-history":[{"count":15,"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6674\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6690,"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6674\/revisions\/6690"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6674"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6674"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6674"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}