About Stanley Kubrick, Part 4
Excerpts from Piers Bizony's 2001 filming the future, (Aurum Press, 1994)

The soundtrack was also quite startling. Kubrick made brilliant use of music, and paid the closest attention to such things as the air-conditioning hiss inside a spaceship, or the rumbling of its mechanical components. He turned the microphones onto the breathing of an astronaut in his helmet. He detailed all the cockpits and control rooms with tiny subtleties of machine noise, and concentrated on the sound made by a chair scraping across a polished floor. And sometimes he would just leave the soundtrack out altogether, allowing the audience to listen to the terrifying silence of deep space, to the vast inhuman nothingness between worlds.
MGM benefited enormously from the fact that it was widely regarded as essential to go to see 2001 several times in order to appreciate it properly. Moviegoers thought nothing of queuing up three or four times a week for repeat viewing. ("2001? I see it every week," quipped John Lennon.) Much of the appeal derived from the film's spectacular cinerama wide-screen process, seen to best effect in the major theatres equipped with appropriate projectors. The whirling shapes on the giant curved screen engulfed whole audiences, already beaten into submission by the noisy wailing from the multichannel stereo soundtrack.
Kubrick's "Space Oddity" turned out to be one of MGM's five most famous and successful creations, along with Gone With The Wind, Lawrence of Arabia, The Wizard of Oz, and Doctor Zhivago. Some theatres kept 2001 on its first run for nearly two years, as its reputation grew; and it was re-released twice, very successfully, during the 1970s. American receipts amounted to $25 million, with the rest of the world topping that figure at more than $40 million. Even accounting for inflation, these figures don't seem as dramatic as Star Wars' $175 million, set against a 1977 budget of $10 million. Next page