This is a phenomenally reported and gripping account of one of the most influential and groundbreaking movies ever made. Benson's descriptions of the lengths Kubrick went to achieve the effects he wanted, the technical breakthroughs his vision required, the demands he put on his crew and actors, and the Kubrick-Clarke relationship make this (relatively) long book feel like a speedy read. Perhaps most incredibly, it's not necessary to have seen 2001 to appreciate and enjoy Space Odyssey.

2001: A Space Odyssey remains one of the most puzzling films of all time. As an exercise in film-making, 2001 sustains deep analysis even 50 years later. Michael Benson's book is a substantial addition to this body of analysis. Detail and lively writing make this film history a true pleasure to read.

Fantastic story of the making of 2001. But more than just a behind the scenes story, this book explores the cultural influence if the movie on art, science and philosophy. I saw 2001 in the movie theater and it blew me away. But there was so much I didn’t know about Arthur C. Clarke and Kubrick and how the movie came to be that I was blown away again. Read it!

Yep, yet another written documentary on the movie.
For someone who’s a big fan of Homer, it never came close to occurring to me that this movie might be right out of The Odyssey as much as Ulysses is; the author really enjoyed making comparisons to that one. Yes, I know it’s in the title, but that wasn’t enough to make it obvious.
Quite a bit of writer Arthur C. Clarke’s personal life is in the section of how he and Kubrick eventually met. Not that I ever cared about the man’s personal life, but to find out he was gay as well as having financial problems paying off his beard adds a lot of dimension to him.
Truthfully, this is a bit of a slog. Took me forever to get though, yet I’m finding it hard to think of something to say about it. It’s definitely meticulously researched, with a lot of interesting stories, but also a lot that weren’t. And the last fifth is just notes.
Like the movie, it could be cut down quite a bit.

From: http://www.thespacereview.com/article/3462/1

Today, 2001: A Space Odyssey is acknowledged as one of the greatest films of all time, regularly appearing in top-ten lists of the best movies even 50 years after its debut. But when the film was released 50 years ago to this day—April 2, 1968, at the Uptown Theater in Washington, DC—the reaction was more negative. At that premiere, people “were just streaming out,” recalled Gary Lockwood, one of the stars of the film, who “smoked a joint for the occasion,” as recounted by Michael Benson in his new book Space Odyssey. “It was a disaster. No one liked it.” Arthur C. Clarke, who attended a press review of the movie—the first time he had seen the finished product—a few days earlier, was also disappointed: “it failed to live up to his expectations, produced little happiness, and gave no satisfaction,” Benson wrote.

Those initial strong negative reactions to the movie, in Washington and in New York the next day, are well chronicled, as was the sweeping change in opinion in the weeks that followed as lines of moviegoers drowned out the critical reviews (see “Fifty years after the future arrived: the astronauts of 2001: A Space Odyssey”, The Space Review, this issue.) What’s less well known, but superbly chronicled in Space Odyssey, is the effort to make 2001, an epic in and of itself.

While 2001 hit theaters in April 1968, work on the movie started four years earlier. In early 1964, Clarke was living in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), writing science fiction and essays about the new Space Age, but lamenting that none of his work had been adapted for the big screen (his novel Childhood’s End had been optioned by a studio, but never produced.) “I remain the most successful writer in the world who’s never had a movie made,” he lamented to a writer friend. At the same time, nearly halfway around the world in New York, Stanley Kubrick, fresh off the success of Dr. Strangelove, was thinking about his next work, and wanted to tackle science fiction, a genre at the time associated with B-movies. “I want to make the first science fiction film that isn’t considered trash,” he told a friend.

Kubrick became aware of Clarke’s work and the two met in April 1964 in New York, part of a visit Clarke had already planned for other writing. The two hit it off and agreed to collaborate on a science fiction epic—but what that epic would be about took a long time to come together. Indeed, the plot for 2001 continued to evolve even after filming began, much to the consternation of Clarke, MGM, and just above everyone else but Kubrick. “This improvisatory, research-based approach was practically unheard of in a project of this scale,” Benson writes.

Benson provides a detailed and thorough study of the making of 2001 over the four years from Kubrick’s meeting with Clarke to the film’s premiere. The book explains how many iconic aspects of the film came into being, such as the development of the monolith. Originally, Kubrick envisioned a transparent pyramid as the symbol discovered on the Moon, and sent a film designed to a trade fair in London to look into getting it made in Perspex, what Plexiglas was called in England. A company there said they could make it, but it would better as a big slab.

Kubrick later agreed, and the company provided that slab—only to find that, in its completed form, it had a greenish tint, rather than being “magically ultraclear” as Kubrick envisioned. “So, let’s just make a black one,” the designer then suggested. “Okay,” Kubrick responded.

The movie is known for its limited dialogue, although the book notes that there was much more dialogue planned but later cut, and even a mini documentary of interviews with scientists that Kubrick at one time planned as a prelude to the film, only to cut it later: part of what Benson describes as a “calculated ambiguity” that ultimate led people to love, or hate, the film. Benson cites as one example the scene were Lockwood’s character, Frank Poole, is lying on a tanning bed, listening to a happy birthday message from his parents and dismissing it with a “numb flatness” that many considered emotionless. That scene, Benson writes, “transmitted a quietly excoriating message about the desensitizing effects of technologically mediated communications,” one that rings as true today as it did a half century ago.

In the book’s conclusion, Benson states that “2001’s influence remains so pervasive that it’s hard to overestimate.” It’s hard to disagree with that assessment, and this is an ideal book for anyone who has seen the movie and wants to appreciate how it was made and how challenging a project it truly was. This book is extensively researched, and Benson talked with many of the people involved, including Clarke before his death a decade ago (Kubrick passed away in 1999, but Benson did talk with his widow.)

Fifty years later, the Uptown Theater is still in operation in Washington, now formally called the AMC Loews Uptown 1 but just the Uptown for locals. However, on this 50th anniversary of the premiere of 2001 it is not screening that movie but instead another film set decades in the future and made by a famous director: Steven Spielberg’s Ready Player One, depicting a future where cyberspace, rather than outer space, is preeminent. Each era, it seems, gets the cinematic future it deserves.

Opening line:
"The twentieth century produced two great latter-day iterations of Homer's Odyssey."

This book if full of WOW. If you want to know the ins-and-outs of Stanley Kubrick's movie Space Odyssey, this book is the one you want to read. Holy detail, Batman! This book is full of all the background you might, and might not, want to know. How Clarke and Kubrick met, what they were doing when they met, how they collaborated, which was first, the ape or the monolith, ALL technical details you ever wanted to know, plus pictures!
This book is for those who want to know more about Kubrick and the movie. Everything you want to know. Every. Thing.

(over 66 swear words)

Thanks to netgalley for the early read.

BookFilter Review: Everyone knows about Stanley Kubrick's science fiction masterpiece "2001: A Space Odyssey." Even if you've never seen it, you've seen clips from the film or parodies of the film and the stirring strains of "Also sprach Zarathrustra" are already ringing in your ears. To be clear, it's a landmark film that can still stun with its special effects (all hail hand-crafted models over the purely digital) and utterly confuse the literal-minded. As a kid, I had to read the novel by Arthur C. Clarke to grasp what the hell was going on. We've caught up to the film's elliptical nature so it may not be quite as confounding today to a new viewer. If you haven't watched it yet, you must. And once you do, you may well get obsessed. And if you do get obsessed, you might well want to read Michael Benson's thorough coverage of the making of this film. It's strictly for fans of Kubrick and/or the film itself -- all but ardent fans will get bored during early passages about what was shot when and how and by whom. Benson speaks to many people and creates good drama out of his material but it doesn't come quite to life on its own terms as a story. Yet if you care about filmmaking, you'll discover a lot of fascinating information about the endless creativity, how a brilliant director can frustrate and inspire everyone around him and the improvisation that is inherent in even the most meticulously planned production. And though Kubrick was as prepared and painstaking as possible, a film with no finished script is hardly one destined for a casual shoot. I was surprised to hear how this director famed for his controlling image was hugely open to ideas and delegated problems to people he knew could tackle them, the way he thrust responsibility on newbies with little to no track record and -- after all that -- how petty he could be about giving credit where credit is due. It's all here (to a fault), from the first meeting of Kubrick and a too-trusting Arthur C. Clarke to the disastrous opening night and the film's rather quick rebirth as both a critical and popular hit. Everyone cherished their participation in this classic -- well, not everyone, since there were a surprising number of casualties both professionally and health-wise -- and who could blame them?: How often do you get to be a part of an adventure like this? I can recommend the movie wholeheartedly -- and if you feel nonplussed or bored or just bewildered, welcome to the club. If you become entranced, like me and so many others, you might just end up tackling this book. I've never read a Kubrick bio or the other earlier tales about the making of the film, but on its own this certainly leaves no stone (or monolith) unturned. -- Michael Giltz

I've seen 2001: A Space Odyssey several times but only once on the big screen. It was at Roger Ebert's 3rd Annual Overlooked Film Festival in Champaign Illinois, fittingly enough in the year 2001. Projected in immaculate 70mm to a capacity crowd of film fans, 2001 was mesmerizing. But I thought a lot of audience members missed the point.

On the voyage to Jupiter, HAL 9000, the sentient computer goes a little crazy and kills most of the astronauts under his care. In an effort to save himself, the only surviving crew member, Dave, begins to remove HAL's memory units. Over the sound of Dave breathing, we hear HAL pleading for his life. During this screening, it struck me that HAL is the most "human character" in the whole movie. Despite, being a computer, he's the only one to express any real emotion. To me, it felt like a murder. But the people around me were laughing. In retrospect, I believe it was nervous laughter. They were uncomfortable with this cold blooded killing, but were unsure how to react.

In Michael Benson's new book, Space Odyssey: Stanley Kubrick, Arthur C. Clarke, and the Making of a Masterpiece, he tells the complete story of how 2001 came to be. From Stanley Kubrick's desire to make a "legitimate" science fiction movie and his first meetings with the author Arthur C. Clark to the casting, filming, and editing where we learn that Kubrick intended the "murder" scene to play exactly as I thought he did.

But Benson dig's further into the film and its creators than that. He presents the crew and cast of 2001 as real people with extremely human foibles. By focusing on the characters behind 2001, he tells a compelling story rather than a dry making-of.

Arthur C. Clark is presented as a broke writer, desperate for a windfall from Hollywood to solve the financial troubles caused by his romantic entanglements and his investment into a Sri Lankan James Bond parody film called Jamis Bandu. Dan Richter was a street mime who manged to get an acting job as and ape man despite his heroin addiction. Andrew Birkin was a movie-obsessed young man who served food during tea breaks and snuck onto other sets to watch nude scenes being filmed until he broke protocol by announcing he knew the perfect location in England to shoot desert scenes. The next day the film's location scouts were fired and Birkin took over their jobs. Benson presents the costume designer Harry Lange as an ex-Nazi who had to be coerced into removing models of the rockets used to bomb London during the Blitz From his office.

But the star of the show is director Stanley Kubrick. According to his telling, Kubrick was a genius, but unfeeling towards his team. He tells of Kubrick's penchant for working his cast to the point of breakdown and forcing continued shooting despite the fact that his astronaut actors were literally suffocating inside their space helmets. During the "Dawn of Man" scenes, when a leopard was brought on set, Kubrick directed from inside a protective cage while the rest of the crew was at risk of a mauling. Kubrick was seemingly unconcerned for schedules and deadlines and only concerned with budgets when it involved paying his collaborators a fair amount. He'd be happiest if he could pay them nothing.

I'm a huge fan of Kubrick, especially 2001, but I was a little intimidated by Michael Benson's book. I thought it might be boring and its 500 plus page count was daunting (Don't worry 20% of the book is composed of citations.) But I couldn't have been more wrong. Space Odyssey is filled with fascinating, behind-the-scenes stories and eccentric characters. I couldn't put it down. And now I want to watch the movie again.

I loved 2001: A Space Odyssey and enjoyed learning more about the creation of the film and book.

This book was a little dry for me. It may be better suited for those who are familiar with the people and places referenced in the book.

You wanna know about 2001 Space Odyssey? All the background that went into the movie? All the thoughts & ideas? Then read this book. I was amazed at all the info that you got from this book. The movie was amazing but after reading this book it makes you appreciate the movie so much more.

This is a non-fiction book, so I am quite honestly not a reader of non-fiction so my review is not as in depth as it would be for a fiction book. I rarely read non-fiction so I apologize for the lack of depth to my review.