Sep 272010
Excuse me.
Douglas Trumbull, director of Silent Running and Special Effects Supervisor for 2001: A Space Odyssey, is readying a documentary about his time with Stanley Kubrick. The detail in this undertaking is amazing. The filmmakers are literally crawling into never-before-seen-images.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EspoBBvhKdQ
Included in the trailer were a number of preliminary designs for the Discovery spacecraft:
UPDATE: It’s been cancelled. Goddamnitsomuch…
10 Responses to “Yes! Yes! Oh, god, yes!”
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Can’t wait for this to hit DVD. Also read somewhere that Mr. Trumbull has a couple more “sci-fi” films in the works. It’s been a long time since “Brainstorm.”
Bad news – it was canceled.
🙁
in this presentation
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c2cG1dkkqwY&feature=related
He intros the trailer you see on the other URL, but intros it be saying Warner canceled the project for some reason.
DAMN!!!!
This seems to suggest it’s still on as of two days ago:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dan-persons/cinefantastique-post-mort_b_739267.html
Well, crap. Anything that stops and starts suffers.
I have just went through two hours of YouTube 2001 and Arthut Clarke stuff.
It is not that they do not make these movies anymore, they made it only twice… (Forbidden Planet was also a major brain trip with some of the evolutionaey issues)
I really regret not have been born in the 1920’s
How much fun!!!
…and 50+ years of wasted time and treasury.
Also, after seen the simian scenes in ‘2001’ and how evolution themes are the focus of the movie, I wondered what was the reception this movie got in the Bible Belt…
I think what made 2001 such a hit was the attention to detail. That just doesn’t happen in movies that are driven by cleavage, curses, or explosions.
I’m glad to have missed the 20s. The house I am in now got its plumbing in 1927 — it must have been really, really nasty going potty at night in December. No Internet, and “high speed” required merely a Curtis V-1400. “Space” was anything over 50,000 feet.
I think everyone would be surprised how little the fabled Bible Belt cares about questions about evolution. I’ve lived there, and know people who live there, and no one talks about the issues that seem to damn the area in the minds of those who don’t know the area.
While I can’t imagine Discovery looking any cooler than it did on screen, these fatter designs seem to make more sense in terms of propellant stowage.
I’m trying to figure out what all the “coffee cans” around the periphery are all about.
According to the book “Filming The Future” the one thing Kubrick _didn’t_ want to look like was an aircraft or classical finned rocketship… so even though the real one would probably have very large radiator fins on it, they were eliminated pretty early on as looking too much like wings.
The only thing that did stay pretty much the same all the way through was the command sphere with the three hatches for the space pods.
The finished design had two symbolic advantages; it looked like the skull and vertebra of some animal, tying it in with the bone being tossed into the air during the ape scene…and it also looked a bit like a giant sperm cell, with the crew being the genetic material in the head…tying it in neatly with the Starchild being born.
It seems that we had it better in Argentina in the 1920s. My Granma’s house in Bragado–200 km west of Buenos Aires–had all the amenities by that time. But my mother’s father was a prosperous General store owner then, making lots of money selling imported goods to the local grain and cattle narons.
My Dad probably s@%t in the same outhause I was horrified to use when visiting his sister in the late 1960s–but they were pretty poor farmers of Volga-German origin in the middle of the Pampas.
My point is that for a guy born in the 1920s with a technical/scientific education could work almost anywhere in very challenging hardware stuff in aviation, rocketry and physics.
Now we have lot of computer simulations and paper studies and Green-wackos, plus lots of pseudo-physics==”String Theory’–and no hardware flying.
I would s*#t in a hole in the ground, calculate with a slide rule and tables, draft plans with china ink as I did in Technical H S if I could go back to 1950/1960 and work as an engineer with Reimar Horten in the Argentinean Fabrica Militar de Aviones, or even better in North American Aviation. Those were the glory days–no matter how wonderful tool the Internet is.
And at least the stuff Hollywood was making entertaining movies instead of the currentoverblown PC crap.
I have never been very fond of the idea of past Golden days. I was a ‘Golden Future’ guy al-in-all–what other idiot would have specialized in Laser Fusion to build spacesgips?
Perhaps being 48 with three post-graduate degrees in Physics & Engineering but unemployed and coped in a miserable rented room in Toronto does not allow me to appreciate this version of the 21st century.
‘2001’ was to be ‘my future’. iPods do not compensate that…
I never visited the Bible Belt–vo offense implied–, but my sister;s in-laws are Evangelists–kind of difficult to make them understand the Big Bang Theory and Evo;ution. Never had the same problem with some ultra-Catholic wackos i met. Their idiocies were more socio-political than scientific.
Sorry for the rant… 8-*
The thing I could never figure out about Discovery is that the design _looks_ like its supposed to rotate around the central communications section so that both the command sphere and engine section have artificial gravity in them.
In “2010” when Discovery is spinning around near Io, you can see how the balance point ends up at the com section.
This would explain the ship’s great length, so that the crew wouldn’t get vertigo from too small of a rotation diameter.
Of course you would have to de-spin it to deploy and recover the space pods, but this would eliminate the need for the centrifuge…and remove one of the movie’s most memorable (and expensive) scenes.
I would have loved to be there the day they first cranked that thing up and there was a rain of razor sharp glass fragments as all the fluorescent tubes inside of it began to shatter as their mountings were deformed by parts of the wheel stretching and contracting as it rotated.