Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke set out to make a new kind of sci-fi. How does their future look now that it’s the past?
,” the early Jack Nicholson flick with music by the Strawberry Alarm Clock. These movies, though cheesy, found a new use for editing and special effects: to mimic psychedelic visions. The iconic Star Gate sequence in “2001,” when Dave Bowman, the film’s protagonist, hurtles in his space pod through a corridor of swimming kaleidoscopic colors, could even be timed, with sufficient practice, to crest with the viewer’s own hallucinations.
In Clarke, Kubrick found a willing accomplice. Clarke had served as a radar instructor in the R.A.F., and did two terms as chairman of the British Interplanetary Society. His reputation as perhaps the most rigorous of living sci-fi writers, the author of several critically acclaimed novels, was widespread. Kubrick needed somebody who had knowledge and imagination in equal parts. “If you can describe it,” Clarke recalls Kubrick telling him, “I can film it.” It was taken as a dare.
Kubrick brought to his vision of the future the studiousness you would expect from a history film. “2001” is, in part, a fastidious period piece about a period that had yet to happen. Kubrick had seen exhibits at the 1964 World’s Fair, and pored over a magazine article titled “Home of the Future.