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2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
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Pow
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PostPosted: Fri Apr 06, 2018 2:19 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Read an article recently that said that Kubrick & Clarke met with famed astronomer Carl Sagan to consult about 2001: ASO.

Kubrick did not like Sagan at all & told Clarke to get rid of Carl as quickly as possible.

Wonder what his beef was with Sagan?
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Gord Green
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PostPosted: Fri Apr 06, 2018 6:44 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Carl was a wonderful guy, but he could sometimes seem rather "smug".

I only met him once and only got to speak with him for a few minutes after one of his last speaking engagements so I can't personaly vouch for that being so, but he did tend to be a bit aloof.

Kubrick, besides being very somewhat excentric was a "high energy" kind of guy while Sagan was a bit more laid back.

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Krel
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PostPosted: Fri Apr 06, 2018 11:51 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

bulldogtrekker wrote:

2. The filmmakers also envisioned a world with self-driving cars.

"In early chapter drafts," Benson writes, "the character who would become David Bowman is named Bruno," and he rides a "computer-guided Rolls" along the "auto-highway" bisecting the great "Washington-New York complex," child and dog in tow.

They might have gotten that from GM. GM produced a promotional film with their 1958 Firebird II turbine powered car. The car is driven onto a highway, and the car goes under a remote guidance system so the family can relax and enjoy the ride.

GM did provide their Firebird IV for the movie. It is the car shown on the TV screen in the shuttle while Dr. Floyd sleeps.

David.
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Gord Green
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PostPosted: Sat Apr 07, 2018 2:41 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Originaly the idea was for there to be an electronicly enhanced cable laid beneath every highway that controlled the car like a train running on a track.

Currently the concept is for the auto itself to have sensors and radar receptors integrated into a matrix that keeps the car on the right track. Augmented by GPS an auto could follow a route to it's destination.

The recent accident in Arizona shows that the process is not fool proof....However, accidents can occur due to human error, like someone stepping out into traffic!

Still...it seems the future will have self driving cars in some form.

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Gord Green
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PostPosted: Sat Apr 07, 2018 3:02 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

"Near the beginning of Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, a big black monolith appears in an African desert, leaving a group of prehistoric ape-men standing there baffled. And that was pretty much the reaction that greeted the film itself when it premiered 50 years ago this week.

Nobody was quite sure what to make of it. The critics were harsh, with Variety dismissively saying flatly, "2001 is not a cinematic landmark."

( MY COMMENT : I saw it shortly after viewing PLANET OF THE APES, and it was far from the simple lineal storytelling of that film. I hardly was able to appreciate the pure experience of FEELING the film versus just VIEWING it.)

"It's hard to imagine being more wrong.

The one thing that's undeniable is that it's a cinematic landmark. Not only was it the No. 1 box office movie of 1968 — young people flocked to it to have their minds blown — but in international polls, 2001 routinely ranks as one of the top 10 films of all time.

An avant-garde art film dressed in Hollywood money, it unknowingly foreshadowed the future of movies as effects-driven blockbusters.

I saw it again a few days ago, inspired by Michael Benson's terrific new book, "Space Odyssey: Stanley Kubrick, Arthur C. Clarke and the Making of a Masterpiece" .

Though Benson is afflicted with what a friend calls the "Stanley syndrome" — he never stops telling you that Kubrick is a "genius" and "a perfectionist" — his book is filled with nifty stories.

My favorite is when the control-freak director asks Lloyd's of London if they could insure him in case NASA spoiled 2001's plot by discovering extraterrestrial life before the movie came out.

Watching 2001 again, I was startled anew that, in nearly 2½ hours, there's so little dialogue or dramatic storytelling — the characters barely register.

Rather, in an attempt to make what Kubrick called "the proverbial 'really good' science-fiction movie" — not something hokey — he and co-writer Arthur Clarke thought big. Visionary big. They concocted nothing less than a poetic myth of human evolution, a vaulting ambition announced by the music from Richard Strauss' "Thus Spoke Zarathustra," which everyone knows largely because of this movie.

Clarke and Kubrick carry us from the origins of human beings in those desert apes to the climactic birth of an advanced new life form: a star baby, engendered by extraterrestrials. In between, we follow two astronauts, played by Keir Dullea and Gary Lockwood, whose journey to Jupiter runs afoul of their ship's supposedly infallible computer, known as HAL, the prototype of countless movie computers to follow.

Like many classics, 2001 isn't always a good movie. Some bits are boring or superfluous, and Kubrick was clearly more fascinated with the film's sleekly designed spaceships than its ideas about human evolution, which are thin and arbitrary.

Yet the movie is carried by images you'll never forget: the monolith, the space stations waltzing to Johann Strauss' "The Blue Danube" and the long "Star Gate" sequence, featuring a hurricane of lights and images that were once thought trippy. The film's effects were all the more amazing because Kubrick had to pull them off without CGI.

Kubrick's example inspired later directors, who felt that he had both upped the technical ante and made science-fiction films respectable. They genuflected before Kubrick's courage in refusing to tell a conventional story — though, of course, they themselves never dared to do that in their own science-fiction films like Star Wars, E.T., Blade Runner or Avatar.

The movie also tapped into a key aspect of the '60s: the counter-cultural belief in expanding consciousness. Though Kubrick was vehemently not a drug user, he wanted 2001 to open the doors of perception, to show us a higher level of being. That dream seems like something out of the past in these days of shrinking consciousness filled with fake news and the hatred of science.

Indeed, watching 2001: A Space Odyssey now is like opening a time capsule. And it can bring on a melancholy nostalgia for the era that spawned it, an optimistic time in which Americans believed the future was limitless.

The Kennedyesque confidence that we had the strength and ambition to travel the cosmos seems long gone in this era when even getting our roads repaired feels impossible."
https://www.npr.org/2018/04/03/599121542/50-years-later-2001-a-space-odyssey-is-still-a-cinematic-landmark

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Last edited by Gord Green on Sat Apr 07, 2018 4:02 pm; edited 1 time in total
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Bud Brewster
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PostPosted: Sat Apr 07, 2018 8:39 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

________________________________

Gord forgot to include the link to the article he pasted above, which is from the NPR site, and its title is —


50 Years Later, '2001: A Space Odyssey' Is Still A Cinematic Landmark — by John Powers

Great artcle, Gord! Thanks for sharing it with us. Very Happy
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Gord Green
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PostPosted: Sat Apr 07, 2018 4:13 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

There is a exerpt from the new book SPACE ODYSSEY by Michael Benson here :
https://www.npr.org/books/titles/599129550/space-odyssey-stanley-kubrick-arthur-c-clarke-and-the-making-of-a-masterpiece#excerpt

I'll only post a couple of paragraphs here, but the first chapter prologue is available at the site.


Space Odyssey

CHAPTER ONE

PROLOGUE: THE ODYSSEY

The very meaninglessness of life forces man to create his own meanings.
—STANLEY KUBRICK

The twentieth century produced two great latter-day iterations of Homer's Odyssey. The first was James Joyce's Ulysses, which collapsed Odysseus's decade of wandering down to a single city, Dublin, and a seemingly arbitrary day, June 16, 1904. In Ulysses, the role of Ithaca's wily king was played by a commoner, Leopold Bloom—a peaceable Jewish cuckold with an uncommonly fascinating inner life, one the author effectively allowed us to hear. Serialized from 1918 to 1920, it was published in full in 1922.

The other was Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke's 2001: A Space Odyssey, in which the islands of the southeastern Mediterranean became the solar system's planets and moons, and the wine-dark sea the airless void of interplanetary, interstellar, and even intergalactic space.

Shot in large-format panoramic 65-millimeter negative and initially projected on giant, curving Cinerama screens in specially modified theaters, 2001 premiered in Washington, DC, on April 2, 1968, and in New York City the following day. Produced and directed by Kubrick and conceived in collaboration with Clarke, one of the leading authors of science fiction's "golden age," the film was initially 161 minutes long. Following a disastrous series of preview and premiere screenings, the director cut it down to a leaner 142 minutes.

Where Joyce's strategy had been to transform Odysseus into a benevolently meditative cosmopolitan flaneur, and to reduce ten years of close calls and escape artistry to twenty-four hours in proximity of the River Liffey, Kubrick and Clarke took the opposite approach. Deploying science as a kind of prism, which during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries entirely transformed our sense of the size and duration of the universe, they vastly expanded Homer's spatiotemporal parameters. 2001: A Space Odyssey encompassed four million years of human evolution, from prehuman Australopithecine man-apes struggling to survive in southern Africa, through to twenty-first-century space-faring Homo sapiens, then on to the death and rebirth of their Odysseus astronaut, Dave Bowman, as an eerily posthuman "Star Child." In the final scene, the weightless fetus returns to Earth as Richard Strauss's 1896 composition Thus Spoke Zarathustra pounds cathartically on the soundtrack.

In 2001: A Space Odyssey, the meddlesome gods of the ancients have become an inscrutable, prying alien super-race. Never seen directly, they swoop down periodically from their galactic Olympus to intervene in human affairs. The instrument of their power, a rectangular black monolith, appears at key turning points in human destiny. First seen among starving man-apes in a parched African landscape at the "Dawn of Man," 2001's totemic extraterrestrial artifact engenders the idea among our distant ancestors of using weaponized bones to harvest the animal protein grazing plentifully all around them. This prompting toward tool use implicitly channels the species toward survival, success—and, eventually, technologically mediated global domination.

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scotpens
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PostPosted: Sat Apr 07, 2018 11:25 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Krel wrote:
GM produced a promotional film with their 1958 Firebird II turbine powered car. The car is driven onto a highway, and the car goes under a remote guidance system so the family can relax and enjoy the ride.

The film, "Design for Dreaming," is actually from 1956.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4_ccAf82RQ8


Krel wrote:
GM did provide their Firebird IV for the movie. It is the car shown on the TV screen in the shuttle while Dr. Floyd sleeps.

That car, originally shown in 1964, was given a new paint job and renamed the Buick Century Cruiser for the 1969 auto show circuit.

This is obviously the 1969 version.




It would make a great Back to the Future-style hovercar. Hell, the thing already looks as if it could fly.

Gord Green wrote:
. . . The film's effects were all the more amazing because Kubrick had to pull them off without CGI.

Sorry, I can't help chuckling at that. Those newfangled computer-generated effects didn't really take off until the 1990s. Movies had some pretty impressive special effects for three-quarters of a century before CGI! The in-camera composite shots in Metropolis are still amazing, for example.
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PostPosted: Sun Apr 08, 2018 11:01 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

scotpens wrote:
The film, "Design for Dreaming," is actually from 1956.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4_ccAf82RQ8

That's not the one I was talking about, this one is, also from 1956:

GM Motorama Exhibit 1956. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rx6keHpeYak

That means that I was wrong about the GM Firebird II's date. Oops! Laughing

David.
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Bud Brewster
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PostPosted: Mon Apr 09, 2018 12:37 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

________________________________

That second video is a amazing!

The miniature highway landscapes with the moving cars is a terrific series of special effects, along with all the background paintings and matte shots. The "control tower" set with the operator communicating with the family in the car was like watch a "lost 1950s sci-fi" movie.



















Trivia note: I'm pretty sure the young teenage boy was Timmy Everett, who played Tommy Djilas in The Music Man, although IMDB doesn't list Key to the Future (the video on Youtube) in Timmy's filmography. But Timmy's distinctive voice clued me the first time the young man spoke.
Very Happy


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orzel-w
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PostPosted: Mon Apr 09, 2018 2:17 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

One thing the prognosticators were typically naive about was their failure to portray the crowding on the freeways we see today. The utopian (autopian) visions of future traffic show cars breezing along, spaced 6 car lengths apart on narrow freeways.

Nowadays we have three and four lanes in both directions, yet the traffic is regularly bumper-to-bumper, moving along at 25 mph (average). Self-driving cars might alleviate the speed problem somewhat, by eliminating the rubbernecking past accidents that have occurred on the opposing side of the freeway.

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Bud Brewster
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PostPosted: Mon Apr 09, 2018 4:41 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

orzel-w wrote:
One thing the prognosticators were typically naive about was their failure to portray the crowding on the freeways we see today. The utopian (autopian) visions of future traffic show cars breezing along, spaced 6 car lengths apart on narrow freeways.

Wayne, I'm sure the rosy version of the future we saw didn't include crowded freeways because the producers didn't realize it would eventually happen. The film was made to present "the best case scenario" for our automotive future.

To be fair to the producers of Key to the Future, their goal was to present the most appealing concepts they could imagine — like elevated highways which have less impact on the environment, and roads with an electronic strip to guide the cars, and cool "control towers" along the highway which provide technical assistance for the drivers of advanced automobiles!

In short, this is a commercial.

But it's not just a commercial for cars, it's a commercial for a future in which people have solved problems with brilliant innovations! Cool

We've already solved the problem of advanced automobiles that parallel park themselves and offer a pleasant female voice which provides detailed driving directions so precise that blithering idiots can't get lost on their way unfamiliar places unless they literally don't know their left from their right! Rolling Eyes

However, the civilization we see in Key to the Future isn't quite here yet, despite the fact that our present-day cars are well on the road (so to speak) to matching everything the video depicts.

Look at this way.

According to young Timmy Everett's whimsical remark when he wonders if the car radio might transport them into the future, that enjoyable video promised us all the wonders it demonstrates as if they will happen by the year 1976. And [color-red]2001: A Space Odyssey[/color] promised us wheel-spaced space stations, lunar passenger liners, and colonies on the Moon by the turn of the century! Shocked

I'd said Key to the Future did about as well as 2001 at predicting what they thought the future would hold, relevant to the subject areas they each addressed.

And of course, we have to remember that General Motors was promoting their vision of this marvelous future, not actually predicting it.

PS: Did you notice the opening credits stated that Key to the Future was filmed in VistaVision? The Youtube video is a poor 4:3 version of a widescreen film! Boy, would I love to get a good widescreen copy of this little gem! Very Happy

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scotpens
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PostPosted: Mon Apr 09, 2018 7:37 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Bud Brewster wrote:
We've already solved the problem of advanced automobiles that parallel park themselves and offer a pleasant female voice which provides detailed driving directions so precise that blithering idiots can't get lost on their way to unfamiliar places unless they literally don't know their left from their right! Rolling Eyes

Unfortunately, time and again those "blithering idiots" put too much trust in their GPS navigation systems -- sometimes with deadly consequences.

Link: https://www.methodshop.com/2016/12/death-by-gps.shtml
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PostPosted: Mon Apr 09, 2018 8:51 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

scotpens wrote:
Unfortunately, time and again those "blithering idiots" put too much trust in their GPS navigation systems -- sometimes with deadly consequences.

Yes indeed, the tragic situations described in the article does demonstrate the fact that GPS systems are not guardian angles which safely transport us to our destinations. But the consider the fact that the article at the link you shared concludes with this advice.
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The advice for avoiding Death by GPS is simple: Trust your gut. If a road seems unsafe, go back. Search and rescue teams also recommend a paper map that clearly marks passable and maintained roads. GPS is helpful to have, but traditional paper maps are a life-saving second opinion.
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That's good advice for travelers in remote locations, but I've used maps for decades, and trying to navigate in urban areas with those things is a nightmare! Shocked

The tiny text which identifies street names is difficult to read under the best of circumstance — and it's absolutely impossible while driving in city traffic.

When you compare that to what my daughter did last week while she and my grandchildren where visiting me, there's no question that trying to use those old maps is a poor substitute for what we did when it was time to go see Ready Player One. All my daughter had to do was say, "Seri, take us the Stonecrest Regal Cinema."

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PostPosted: Mon Apr 09, 2018 8:53 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

scotpens wrote:
Unfortunately, time and again those "blithering idiots" put too much trust in their GPS navigation systems

Yeah, I was one of those a few years back. Laughing

My Brother lent me his GPS when I went to the World Con in San Antonio. I went pickup my sister and her husband a couple of days into the con. Before we left the airport, I typed the new hotel address into the GPS and away we went. I was watching the road, following the directions from the GPS, when it announced that we had reached our destination...an empty field. The GPS not only didn't send us to the correct address, it had sent us in the opposite direction from where we should be!

Needless to say, I take anything those things tell me with a grain of salt.

David.
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