Space Odyssey: Stanley Kubrick, Arthur C. Clarke, and the Making of A Masterpiece

Somehow, my GLBTQ teachers - if I had any - failed to communicate to us that groundbreaking hard sci-fi scribe Arthur C. Clarke was gay, although we read his short story "The Sentinel" in class and I was assigned a book report on his novel-length revisitation of that story, "2001: A Space Odyssey." The fact that Clarke was gay - and that he had a long-time partner named Mike Wilson, a filmmaker whose projects were a financial drain on the writer - are quickly to surface in Michael Benson's lively and detail-filled "Space Odyssey: Stanley Kubrick, Arthur C. Clarke, and the Making of A Masterpiece," published by Simon & Schuster.

With Stanley Kubrick's film version of "2001: A Space Odyssey" reaching the half century point this year, it's an auspicious time for Benson's book. (So is a truly superior home video edition: A 4K release of the film is slated for the fall, and with luck it will be superior to the not-universally-acclaimed 2007 Blu-ray edition. Moreover, Christopher Nolan is reportedly working on a 70 mm re-release.) Benson covers everything you may have wanted to know about the film's production - including tales of Kubrick's legendary obsessiveness, his equally legendary fickleness, the origins of the project (Kubrick and Clarke worked for years to hash out the story and the script was still being written and revised well into production), and - a source of mystery ever since that high school book report - the reason why Clarke's novel, written in tandem with the film's production, sets the space-borne action at Saturn rather than Jupiter, as in the movie.

The collaborative process between the two giants - Kubrick the director and Clarke the visionary writer - occupies the book's initial chapters and forms a long-running arc throughout the story, but there's so much more to know. Benson dishes on everything from the sorts of research that went into the production and makeup designs to how Kubrick interacted with the actors on the project (Keir Dullea came into the project overawed; Gary Lockwood, in turn, excited Kubrick's envious admiration; Douglas Rain as the inimitable voice of HAL-9000 was a late addition, almost an afterthought). He also explains why Kubrick used existing music for the movie (discarding a soundtrack written for the film by Alex North) and delves into the friction surrounding the director's secrecy around the production - a secrecy so complete that Kubrick wouldn't even allow MGM's publicists to distribute film stills prior to the movie's release.

The contributions of a small army of very young, very talented British film crew at MGM's Borehamwood studio are dutifully, and fascinatingly, tracked, and so are the innovations achieved by an American special effect upstart named Douglas Trumbull. (Kubrick, evidently a credit hog, more or less made himself the Oscar contender for the film's still-admirable effects work.)

If all this sounds like the makings of an encyclopedia, don't worry. "Space Odyssey" isn't as fantastically stuffed with minutiae as, say, Preston Neal Jones' exhaustive (and, in some ways exhausting) "Return to Tomorrow," the tome that chronicles every aspect of the production of "Star Trek: The Motion Picture" (itself a film that strove to reach the grandeur of "2001," only to fall far short despite the presence of another legendary director, Robert Wise - and which echoed many of the production difficulties "2001" endured).

The long and short of "Space Odyssey" is this: Kubrick took it into his head one day to create a "really good" science fiction film. To accomplish this task, he turned to Clarke, who was already much admired for his work in the field, particularly for his novel "Childhood's End." The "Odyssey" in "2001: A Space Odyssey" is very much a real and thriving literary presence, from the name of its far-journeying hero, David Bowman, to the principle nemesis of the piece (HAL, with his glowing lens of an eye). For all your other questions - what's up with that trippy "Star Gate" sequence? Why did we have to wait for Peter Hyams' 1985 sequel "2010" for a cinematic explanation of HAL's murderous freakout? How did anyone ever come up with that superb match cut of a bone hurled in the sky becoming an orbiting nuclear weapon four million years later? - pick up this book and read. The answers are surprising, illuminating, and hugely satisfying.

" Space Odyssey: Stanley Kubrick, Arthur C. Clarke, and the Making of A Masterpiece"
by Michael Benson
Hardcover
$30
http://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Space-Odyssey/Michael-Benson/9781501163937