2001 was quite HALarious, too…
Confidential space cases! We’ve been struggling to finish C-U Confidential #8 but our new hope is to nail the outstanding elements in the next week en route to hitting those presses and jump-starting the spring issue. Luckily, we have just the intergalactic divergence to keep you entertained if the Stanley Kubrick/Arthur C. Clarke masterwork 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY is your style!
A few days ago, our friend Luke Boyce of Shatterglass Studios in Champaign made the discovery that Hollywood workaholic Steven Soderbergh had released a “fan edit” of 2001 this past Wednesday, January 14, tucked away on his boutique Web site Extension 765 and credited to the nom de plume “W. de Rijk.” Within the same evening, University of Illinois alumnus and scholar in robotics ethics Dr. Peter Asaro pointed out this 2001 homage in the form of wallpapers and Flash backgrounds, a work-in-progress designed by Mike Dillinger of OVNI Armada that has possibly been hiding deep inside an Internet crater for a few years now. Finally, your humble editor attempted to locate The Making of Kubrick’s 2001 edited by Jerome Agel (Signet Books/NAL, 1970) that he remembered appearing on several genre pages two years ago. No such luck for him, as copyright infringement notices now stand in for the digital facsimile, so enthusiasts will have to dredge up physical copies on their own or instead read 2001: Filming the Future by Piers Bizony (Aurum Press, 1994) at the Urbana Free Library or merely salivate over the sold out, limited edition, four-volume expansion by Bizony and Parisian design house M/M, The Making of Stanley Kubrick’s ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’, released by Taschen last summer.
Chances are pretty good none of you dearest readers would’ve had 1,000 bones to toss away for the pleasure of caressing that monolithic marvel. Don’t lie. HAL is watching you.
~ Jason Pankoke
p.s. Regarding the Agel title, a 350-page compendium of miscellanea including several Kubrick and Clarke interviews, media coverage and criticism of the time, numerous stills, myriad fact sheets, and the Clarke short story “The Sentinel” that inspired 2001 … we can confirm a young Roger Ebert is excerpted quite enigmatically on page 239.
p.s.2 The fictional relationship between Urbana, the University of Illinois, and the HAL-9000 computer, as dramatized in both the filmed and novelized 2001, is what justifies an occasional mention here on C-U Blogfidential. Nonetheless, it begot a one-shot campus event in 1997 called Cyberfest, which indirectly begot Roger Ebert’s Overlooked Film Festival in 1999, which directly begot the inevitable “Ebertfest” screening of 2001 in 2001 … because, 2001.
p.s.3 Of course we’d find another HAL-9000 simulator while fact-checking this post. We do it all for you, cyberfriends!