By Mike Kaplan
If “Marketing” had been an accepted term for the handling of a motion picture in 1968, my title for the two years I spent nurturing 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY would have been Marketing Strategist for Stanley Kubrick and MGM and for the subsequent two years, for Kubrick’s A CLOCKWORK ORANGE.
Dan Chaissan’s contribution to the 2001 anniversary coverage in The New Yorker: “Anybody There?” April 23, 2018) has occasional insights but is filled with inaccuracies and false conclusions. With the opening of “Stanley Kubrick, The Exhibition” at the London Design Museum and the two month Kubrick season at the British Film Institute, it seems an appropriate time to set the record straight.
My own lifelong engagement with 2001 started in the spring of 1968 at the age of six. My mom, a confirmed Clarke fan, took me to an afternoon matinee within weeks of the film’s premiere. Whether it was in Washington (where we then lived) or New York (as I remember it) is unclear. While I was already excited by the jump into space as then best represented by the Apollo program—which had already launched two of its towering Saturn V Moon rockets on unmanned test flights—it was no preparation for my first exposure to such a powerfully ambiguous, visually stunning work.
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