Home > Work > Space Odyssey: Stanley Kubrick, Arthur C. Clarke, and the Making of a Masterpiece
21 " Only three science fiction feature films were released in 1950, but by the middle of the decade, the genre was averaging around twenty-five per year, and by its end over 150 had been released—an unprecedentedly fast expansion for a new genre, even if most of the productions were schlocky B-grade material. "
― , Space Odyssey: Stanley Kubrick, Arthur C. Clarke, and the Making of a Masterpiece
22 " Despite some well-publicized attempts to render the genre respectable over the previous decade or so, in the early 1960s, science fiction was only a step or two above pornography on the social acceptability scale. "
23 " Standing in front of a mirror, it dawned on him that what had been an enjoyable discussion had become an audition in front of one of the world’s great film directors. "
24 " But you pay a terrific price for a good plot, because the minute everybody's sitting there wondering what's going to happen next, there isn't much room for them to care about how it's going to happen or why it happened. "
25 " As a result, throughout the production, the director shot an estimated ten thousand Polaroids as the lighting was adjusted, then readjusted, and the camera positions were modified. "
26 " Late May and early June were spent exploring some of the implications of inorganic versus organic extraterrestrials. "
27 " Like Charlie Chaplin's bolt-tightening factory laborer in "Modern Times" (1936), spinning along with the very cogwheel he's working on--only with less humor and more pathos--they were ghosts in the machinery, component parts of their chilly, refrigerator-white mother ship. "
28 " It was Minsky who’d recommended the terms behind HAL’s acronym, and he’d also been the one who confirmed to Kubrick that computers thirty-five years in the future might be advanced enough to suffer breakdowns when faced with apparently irresolvable conflicts. And Kubrick had named one of 2001’s hibernating astronauts Kaminsky in tribute to the creator of the first self-learning neural network, SNARC.III An "
29 " (Later revised to “Stanley has invented the wild idea of slightly fag robots” doing "
30 " These included dozens of futuristically curvaceous scarlet Djinn chairs, designed by Olivier Mourgue in 1963, which livened up the otherwise monochrome interior of Space Station 5, and several examples of Eero Saarinen’s 1957 Tulip table. Geoffrey Harcourt’s chrome-and-leather lounge chairs furnished the Clavius Moon Base conference room. "
31 " After seeing his guests to the door, he waited an hour and then called Clarke at the Chelsea. “Get rid of him,” he said. “Make any excuse, take him anywhere you like. I don’t want to see him again. "
32 " At one point in July, he and Clarke suspended their discussion of plot development to engage in a lengthy exegesis of Cantor’s paradox, which is based on the idea that the number of infinite sizes can itself be infinite. "