Fifty years ago this spring, Stanley Kubrick’s confounding sci-fi masterpiece, 2001: A Space Odyssey, had its premieres across the country.. Onscreen it was 2001, but in the theatres it was still 1968, after all. Kubrick’s gleeful machinery, waltzing in time to Strauss, had bounded past an abundance of human misery on the ground.
Hippies may have saved 2001. Stoned audiences flocked to the movie. David Bowie took a few drops of cannabis tincture before watching, and countless others dropped acid. According to one report, a young man at a showing in Los Angeles plunged through the movie screen, shouting, “It’s God! It’s God!”
M-G-M thought it had on its hands a second Doctor Zhivago (1965) or Ben-Hur (1959), or perhaps another Spartacus (1960), the splashy studio hit that Kubrick, low on funds, had directed about a decade before. But instead the theatres were filling up with fans of cult films like Roger Corman’s The Trip, or Psych-Out, the early Jack Nicholson flick with music by Strawberry Alarm Clock.These movies, though cheesy, found a new use for editing and special effects: to mimic psychedelic visions. The iconic Star Gate sequence in 2001, when David Bowman, the film’s protagonist, hurtles in his space pod through a corridor of swimming kaleidoscope colors, could even be timed, with sufficient practice, to crest with the viewer’s own hallucinations. The studio caught on, and a new tagline was added to the movie’s designed posters: “The ultimate trip.”
“Anybody There?: Fifty years later, the tedium and the triumph of 2001: A Space Odyssey.”