57 Fun Facts About 2001: a Space Odyssey

Which board game does HAL play against Frank Poole aboard Discovery in 2001?

Chess: HAL wins easily, yet he misdescribes one move and skips a defence that would have delayed the mate, a slip some viewers read as an early hint that the computer is flawed.

Which facility on the Moon shuttle in 2001 comes with a long placard of printed instructions?

The zero-gravity toilet carries a wall of small print that a passenger stops to study, a sight gag often called the film's only intentional joke.

Which other science-fiction film won the honorary make-up Oscar that 2001's own creature suits missed?

Planet of the Apes won John Chambers an honorary Oscar because the Academy then had no make-up category; 2001's man-apes, the work of Stuart Freeborn, went unrewarded.

Which Arthur C. Clarke short story was the main inspiration for 2001: A Space Odyssey?

The Sentinel was first meant to supply the film's climax, the discovery of an alien artefact; as the plot grew, that discovery moved to the start of the story instead.

What does the little girl on the videophone finally ask her father for as a birthday present in 2001?

A bush baby is her second choice, after a telephone; she was played by Kubrick's own daughter Vivian, and a scene of her father ordering one by videophone was cut.

Which planet is Discovery One bound for in Kubrick's 2001?

Jupiter replaced the novel's Saturn because the effects team could not produce rings convincing enough for the screen.

Who plays astronaut Dr Dave Bowman in 2001: A Space Odyssey?

Keir Dullea plays Bowman; three years earlier Noël Coward had greeted him on another film set with the quip 'Keir Dullea, gone tomorrow'.

Who plays Dr Frank Poole, the astronaut HAL sends tumbling into space?

Gary Lockwood plays Frank Poole, who is sent a recorded birthday greeting from his parents on Earth not long before the ship's computer turns on him.

Who provided the voice of HAL?

Douglas Rain got the part after Kubrick heard him narrate the Canadian space documentary Universe; Martin Balsam's earlier recording had sounded too American.

Which character travels to Clavius Base to inspect the buried lunar monolith?

Dr Heywood Floyd keeps the find secret on the way: when Soviet scientists ask about rumours of an epidemic at the base, he declines to discuss them.

Near which lunar crater is the buried monolith dug up in 2001?

Tycho: the slab betrayed itself with a magnetic field far too strong for natural rock, so the diggers named it Tycho Magnetic Anomaly One.

How does HAL learn that Bowman and Poole plan to disconnect him?

By lip reading: Bowman and Poole retreat to an EVA pod to talk in private, but the computer watches their mouths through the pod window.

How does Bowman get back aboard Discovery after HAL refuses to open the pod bay doors?

Through the emergency airlock: with no helmet, he blows his pod's door off so that the escaping air hurls him across the vacuum and into the ship.

Which song does HAL sing as Bowman disconnects his memory?

Daisy Bell was chosen because a 1961 Bell Labs speech-synthesis demonstration had a computer sing it, a feat the screenplay's co-author had witnessed in person.

According to HAL in 2001, in which city did he become operational?

Urbana, Illinois: as Bowman pulls out his memory modules, the computer regresses to its earliest memories and recites its start-up at the HAL plant there in January 1992.

What does HAL's name stand for, according to Clarke?

Heuristically programmed ALgorithmic computer is the novel's expansion of the name, which now also circles the Sun: asteroid 9000 Hal, found in 1981, is named after him.

Fans claim HAL's name is a coded jab at which computer company that advised the makers of 2001?

IBM is one letter on from H-A-L at every step, but Clarke called it a coincidence: the firm had helped them, and they would have changed the name had they noticed.

Which actor read HAL's lines on set, before the voice was dubbed in post-production?

Nigel Davenport was Kubrick's first pick for the computer's voice and read the part on set, until the director decided against his accent and recast the role.

Which name had Clarke considered for the computer in early drafts, before HAL?

Socrates was the computer's name in early drafts; a female-personality version called Athena followed before the final name was chosen.

Which Richard Strauss tone poem thunders over the opening titles of 2001?

Also sprach Zarathustra is heard in Herbert von Karajan's Vienna recording, which goes unnamed in the credits; the original soundtrack album swapped in Karl Böhm's Berlin version instead.

Which waltz accompanies the space plane docking with the space station in 2001?

The Blue Danube began as a temporary track for editing, but Kubrick liked his stand-in classical recordings so much that he kept them in the finished film.

Which Hollywood composer wrote an original score for 2001 that Kubrick then discarded?

Alex North, who had scored Spartacus, recorded his music and then sat through the New York premiere to find none of it used; Jerry Goldsmith finally recorded it in 1993.

Whose ballet Gayane supplies the mournful adagio heard as 2001 introduces Bowman and Poole?

Aram Khachaturian wrote Gayane, and the contrast is hard to beat: the same ballet contains the frantic Sabre Dance, its most famous number.

Which composer's eerie choral Requiem accompanies the monolith on the Moon in 2001?

György Ligeti's Requiem greets the monolith and his Atmosphères carries the Star Gate; nobody had asked his permission, and he later sued the studio over how his music was cut.

What nickname, punning on a Hollywood epic, did Kubrick and Clarke privately give 2001?

How the Solar System Was Won riffed on the western How the West Was Won, and it fitted their first outline: a string of adventures set during the exploration of the Moon and planets.

What title did Kubrick announce in 1965 before settling on 2001: A Space Odyssey?

Journey Beyond the Stars was announced in February 1965; two months later Kubrick replaced it with a nod to Homer, reasoning that space holds the mystery the sea held for the Greeks.

Where did Kubrick and Clarke first meet, in April 1964, to discuss a science-fiction film?

Trader Vic's in New York was only the start: within weeks Clarke had sold Kubrick a batch of his short stories and signed on to write the film with him.

Which airline's logo appears on the Orion space plane in 2001?

Pan Am never reached the future it was given on screen: the airline went bankrupt and stopped flying in December 1991, a decade before 2001.

In 2001, Discovery's crew live inside a huge rotating wheel designed to provide what?

Artificial gravity is the idea; the set was a real Ferris-wheel-sized drum costing $750,000, which turned while the actors walked in place at the bottom.

While making 2001, Kubrick tried to buy insurance against which real-world event?

The discovery of alien life before the premiere could have sunk the plot, so with Mars probes on the way he asked Lloyd's of London to insure him against it.

What technique created the coloured light corridors of the Star Gate sequence?

Slit-scan photography was adapted for 2001 by a young Douglas Trumbull, who built a custom rig to slide artwork past a narrow slit during long exposures.

Daniel Richter, who played 2001's chief man-ape Moonwatcher, came to the role from which profession?

Mime was his trade: he led a troupe, studied apes at the zoo to choreograph the tribe, and later lived and worked with John Lennon and Yoko Ono.

In which country was nearly all of 2001 shot?

England hosted the studio shoot: filming began at Shepperton, whose Stage H was big enough for the lunar excavation pit, then moved to studios at Borehamwood.

Which tagline went on 2001's posters once its makers noticed a young, often stoned, audience?

The Ultimate Trip went on new posters a few months into the run, once the studio realised how many people were watching, as the lead actor put it, 'while smoking funny cigarettes'.

What did Kubrick do to 2001 in the days after its first premieres?

Cut scenes to shorten it: he removed 17 to 19 minutes within days, yet insisted the trims made no critical difference to whether people liked the picture.

Which Hollywood star famously walked out of 2001's Los Angeles premiere, baffled?

Rock Hudson left the Los Angeles premiere partway through, reportedly demanding that someone tell him what the film was about; walkouts were reported in New York as well.

Which critic called 2001 'a monumentally unimaginative movie'?

Pauline Kael wrote the line in Harper's Magazine in 1969; the director dismissed such New York critics as 'dogmatically atheist and materialist and earth-bound'.

For which category did Kubrick win his only Academy Award, for 2001?

Visual effects brought the only Oscar of his career, and it went to him alone, which effects supervisor Douglas Trumbull resented for many years.

HAL's breakdown in 2001 first shows when he wrongly predicts the failure of which part of Discovery?

The communications antenna: HAL says its AE-35 unit will fail within 72 hours, but the part checks out perfectly, and that false alarm is what turns the crew against him.

Which US institution selected 2001 for preservation in its National Film Registry?

The Library of Congress added it in 1991, only the Registry's third year, 23 years after audiences had walked out of its premieres.

Which fan-voted science fiction prize did 2001 win for Best Dramatic Presentation?

The Hugo went to 2001 in 1969 over Yellow Submarine and Rosemary's Baby; a year later the same award went to television coverage of the Apollo 11 landing.

Who wrote, produced, shot and directed the 1984 sequel, 2010: The Year We Make Contact?

Peter Hyams, who had directed Capricorn One and Outland, took all four jobs on 2010; the original director gave his blessing but had no hand in it.

Why did Kubrick have 2001's sets, props and models destroyed?

To stop reuse in other films: he feared seeing his spacecraft recycled elsewhere, though one shuttle model survived and sold for $344,000 in 2015.

After the Star Gate, where does Bowman live out his days in 2001?

An ornate period bedroom: Kubrick called it a human zoo, a deliberately inaccurate copy of French architecture made by aliens guessing at what he might find pretty.

Which studio released 2001: A Space Odyssey in April 1968?

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer stood by Kubrick as costs ran over: studio president Robert O'Brien kept crossing the Atlantic to view footage and went home arguing against any budget compromise.

2001 reached New York and Los Angeles only after a world premiere in which other American city?

Washington, D.C. hosted the world premiere at the Uptown Theater on 2 April 1968, well over a year after the Christmas 1966 opening the studio had first planned.

Which Arthur C. Clarke short story inspired the man-ape opening of 2001?

Encounter in the Dawn, a 1953 story about visitors meeting primitive humans, fed the man-ape prologue; the director had optioned several of the author's stories in 1964.

What do the two man-ape tribes fight over at the start of 2001?

A waterhole: the rival tribe drives Moon-Watcher's group away from it, and after discovering the bone as a weapon the group returns and kills the rival leader to reclaim it.

How did the effects team on 2001 make a pen float in the space-plane cabin?

Stuck it to a sheet of glass: double-sided tape, new at the time, held the pen on a large pane that an operator slowly turned in front of the camera.

The giant front-projection screen built for 2001 created the landscapes behind which sequence?

The Dawn of Man: Kubrick projected African stills onto a reflective screen behind the actors, and a leopard's eyes caught the beam and glowed, an accident he liked and kept.

Which astronomer told Kubrick and Clarke to merely suggest alien intelligence rather than show aliens?

Carl Sagan argued that real aliens would look nothing like us, so any actor in a costume would ring false; he came to the premiere and was pleased to see his advice taken.

Under which widescreen brand name were the first 70 mm showings of 2001 advertised?

Cinerama: the picture was shot in 65 mm Super Panavision but billed under the grander name wherever a deeply curved screen was fitted; Kubrick rated those cinemas the best equipped.

In the final shot of 2001, what has Bowman become?

The Star Child: Kubrick likened the ending to myths in which a hero is taken away, transformed into 'some kind of super being' and sent back to Earth.

In Clarke's novel of 2001, Discovery One flies on to which two-toned moon of Saturn?

Iapetus, spelled Japetus in the novel, puzzled its discoverer Cassini, who could see it on only one side of Saturn and rightly guessed that one face is far darker than the other.

According to Clarke's novel, why does HAL malfunction?

He was ordered to lie to the crew: told to conceal the mission's true purpose, the computer found the order conflicted with its basic programming to relay information accurately.

Which actor stars as the lead American scientist in 2010: The Year We Make Contact?

Roy Scheider plays the scientist who travelled to the Moon in the original, now sent to the Discovery aboard the Soviet ship Leonov alongside John Lithgow and Bob Balaban.

Effects pioneer Douglas Trumbull, who worked on 2001, went on to direct which 1972 sci-fi film?

Silent Running put Earth's last forests in domes aboard a space freighter; its three waddling drones were played by bilateral amputees walking on their hands inside the shells.