Arts: The proverbial "really good" science fiction movie

You've got to understand that, with only a couple of exceptions like Forbidden Planet and The Day the Earth Stood Still, for the longest time there was no such thing as a major Hollywood science fiction movie. For that matter, aside from such pictures as Metropolis and Things to Come, there never had been any major science fiction movies period. The Golden Age of science fiction, as far as writers were concerned, was a penny dreadful, cheap book genre phenomenon, far removed from real writing. In the movie world, it was cheap serials and B pictures mostly aimed at the most non-discriminating audiences, like Saturday afternoon double features, and these were mostly populated by Bug-Eyed Monsters.

Still, there were some good movies among all of these. Scratch any buff, and you'll come up with things like the Quatermass films, for instance. But in the 1960s, major studios producing major pictures with major talent was not happening. 2001: A Space Odyssey changed all that.

Arthur C. Clarke was a soft-spoken gentleman whom I brought to Syracuse as part of a big annual event with various speakers and whatnot, which is a good story that I'll get to eventually. We picked him up at the airport and, not being terribly versed in SF, did our best work when we brought him into contact with some local writers with whom he could speak the same language. Clarke was very excited at the time about the possibility of a film of Childhood's End, which he claimed had paid a lot of bills for him because it had been optioned since day one, but now, finally, it looked as if it might really happen. It never did, of course. Anyhow, mostly we brought in Clarke because of 2001. This wasn't just a movie we liked. It was the experience of going into space. It was filmed in Cinerama, a really really wide widescreen process, sort of the IMAX of its day. It was the apotheosis of the space traveling future the baby boomers had all been promised, a year before Apollo 11 landed on the moon. Heady times.

When Clarke talked about 2001, he actually did use the expression "the proverbial 'really good' science fiction movie." That's what he and Kubrick set out to make, not just a humongous budget, special effects juggernaut, but a movie with some real thought in it. So much thought, as it turned out, that it may be one of the most misunderstood or least understood movies of all time. Letters of Note manages to track down the original correspondence between Kubrick and Clarke, initiating their collaboration.

Open the pod door, Hal.
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