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1* AwesomeDearBoy: [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l2c_rSLXq6U According to Gary Lockwood]], when his agent called him to say that Stanley Kubrick was doing a new movie called ''2001: A Space Odyssey'', [[Creator/GaryLockwood Lockwood]] asked how much he had to pay Kubrick to be there.
2* BeamMeUpScotty:
3** "'''''I'm afraid I can't do that, Dave.'''''"
4** "'''''I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't let you do that.'''''"
5** "My god, it's full of stars!" -- This line appears in ''2001'' the book, but not in the movie. Nevertheless, it does show up in ''[[Film/TwoThousandTenTheYearWeMakeContact 2010]]'' as being Bowman's last recording before entering the Star Gate.
6* CastTheExpert: After failing to find a British actor who could play the Mission Control [=CapCom=], Kubrick hired a real U.S. Air Force air traffic controller stationed in Britain. The interviewer from the BBC was also played by a real BBC newsreader.
7* DeletedScene:
8** [[https://lostmediawiki.com/2001:_A_Space_Odyssey_(lost_deleted_scenes_of_science_fiction_film;_1968) Deleted scenes]] include details about the daily life on Discovery, additional space walks, astronaut Bowman retrieving a spare part from an octagonal corridor, a number of cuts from the Poole murder sequence including the entire space walk preparation and shots of HAL turning off radio contact with Poole--explaining HAL's response that the radio is "still dead" when Bowman asks him if radio contact has been made--and notably a close-up of Bowman picking up a slipper during his walk in the alien room; the slipper can still be seen behind him in what would have been the next shot in the sequence.
9** The film originally opened with a ten-minute black-and-white opening sequence featuring interviews with actual scientists, including Freeman Dyson, discussing off-Earth life. Creator/StanleyKubrick removed it after an early screening for MGM executives.
10* EnforcedMethodActing: Douglas Rain was only given HAL's lines, not the full script - thus keeping the CreepyMonotone at all costs. He was also given a pillow to rest his feet on to keep his voice relaxed.
11* FakeAmerican: Dr. Ralph Halvorsen and Dr. Roy Michaels, two of the scientists who accompany Dr. Floyd to the excavation site at Tycho, are played by Canadian actors Robert Beatty and Sean Sullivan.
12* FakeRussian: British actor Leonard Rossiter plays Dr. Smyslov, the guy who grills Floyd about just what's going on at Clavius, while Elena is played by fellow Brit Margaret Tyzack.
13* FilmOfTheBook: Averted, despite conventional belief. While the project was inspired by Clarke's earlier short story ''The Sentinel'', the novel and the film were written pretty much in parallel, with developments in screenplay and filming influencing the book, and vice versa. As Clarke put it, the screenplay is by "Kubrick and Clarke," while the novel is by "Clarke and Kubrick."
14* FlipFlopOfGod: What exactly the orbital platforms are for. Originally they were intended to be nuclear delivery systems, but this was later {{retcon}}ned to leave their purpose ambiguous.
15* IAmNotSpock: Drawing some shades of Creator/AlecGuinness' relationship with ''Franchise/StarWars'', Douglas Rain found himself somewhat annoyed for only being remembered for voicing HAL despite having a rather impressive stage career beyond it. Despite this, he was still amicable enough about the role to reprise it in ''[[Film/TwoThousandTenTheYearWeMakeContact 2010]]''.
16* LifeImitatesArt: In spite of the long ScienceMarchesOn listing below this, the movie features a brief sequence wherein HAL and Dave play chess together. This was years before computers were designed with the ability to play chess, and then later stacked up against Grandmasters.
17** The movie predicts that humans will become so technologically advanced that they are able to live in outer space for long periods of time with the conveniences of home, including entertainment. This movie is now one of [[https://paleofuture.gizmodo.com/the-complete-list-of-movies-and-tv-shows-on-the-interna-1782918945 533 listed movies and Tv Shows]] onboard ''the International Space Station''.
18* OrphanedReference: A scene was removed where HAL severs radio communication between the "Discovery" and Poole's pod before killing him. This scene explains a line that stayed in the film in which Bowman addresses HAL on the subject.
19* PermanentPlaceholder: One of the most famous examples. Kubrick had put together a temporary track of ClassicalMusic selections in his initial edits of the film and absolutely fell in love with them, but MGM insisted on a custom-written score, so he reluctantly brought in Alex North, who'd scored ''Film/{{Spartacus}}''. North tried to keep the feeling of some of Kubrick's classical pieces in his score--his main title theme is [[SuspiciouslySimilarSong Suspiciously Similar]] to ''Also Sprach Zarathustra'', with the bass drone at the beginning, the DramaticTimpani, and a pipe organ coda. But Kubrick never really wanted a new score, and used his decision to largely dispense with music in the second half of the film as an excuse to let North go, but not before North recorded his score, which was eventually released in 1993. However, Kubrick's plan caused some unforeseen trouble for MGM, since the original thought was that all the pieces were in the public domain and they wouldn't have to shell out money for them. As it turned out, only ''Also Sprach Zarathustra'' and ''Blue Danube'' were old enough to be public domain, and, even then, only the written scores counted as PD. MGM still had to pay for the rights to use those specific recordings of them. The possibility of having North conduct new recordings of the PD pieces had been shot down by North himself, who rejected Kubrick's suggestion to incorporate them in his score.
20* PortrayedByDifferentSpecies: The novel has primitive hominids using Neolith-inspired tools to kill warthogs. The film uses tapirs, a completely unrelated animal that doesn't even occur in Africa.
21* PropRecycling: Deliberately averted. Kubrick had all the sets, special effects models, and design notes destroyed after filming was complete to prevent them being reused in low-budget B-movies. The production crew for ''2010'' had to rebuild ''everything'' by examining the film itself, frame-by-frame. A deliberate case of NoPlansNoPrototypeNoBackup. It didn't work, though. Several models (rebuilt or maybe the same film clip) have been used in various places. ''Series/{{Space 1999}}'' used the same rocket landing site on the Moon, for instance. And some years later, the reconstructed ''2010'' models ''did'' get re-used.
22** Bowman's spacepod [[ShoutOut can be seen in the background]] of Watto's scrapyard in ''Franchise/StarWars Episode I: Film/ThePhantomMenace''. Interestingly, the book ''Inside the Worlds of Star Wars: Episode I'' notes it as a "repair and maintenance pod of unknown origin". In real-world terms, it's most likely the reconstructed ''2010'' prop.
23** ''Series/BabylonFive'' would re-use one of the distinctive spacesuits for a major plot device of its own (incidentally, using the only one never used in either ''2001'' film - the blue suit.)
24** The (unused) model for Saturn was finally used for ''Film/SilentRunning'', by which time Trumbull had figured out how to make it look good.
25* RealLifeRelative: Creator/StanleyKubrick's daughter Vivian plays Floyd's daughter.
26* RealSongThemeTune: The film uses a climactic fanfare that comes from the opening of Richard Strauss's "Also Sprach Zarathustra", written in 1896, music that Kubrick had first heard in a television documentary about UsefulNotes/WorldWarI. The work wasn't that popular in the English-speaking world at the time, so it's understandable that many viewers assume it was written especially for the movie.
27* ReferencedBy: [[Referencedby/TwoThousandOneASpaceOdyssey Has its own page]].
28* ScienceMarchesOn:
29** Besides [[IWantMyJetpack technology progressing slower]] than the production team anticipated, there are two details of astronomy in this movie that have since become dated. Kubrick insisted that the artists paint the Earth very pale blue because its albedo is 0.38. Only a few years later, photos from the Apollo missions made everybody realize that this figure is averaged over the pure white clouds and the deep blue oceans. Jupiter and its moons were also intentionally depicted vaguely because of the limitations of ground-based telescopes.
30** The film's depiction of the lunar landscape owes much to the craggy, mountainous terrain that was common in science fiction before the Apollo landings, which showed that micrometeoroid impacts on the Moon erode hills into rounded shapes.. Nonetheless the film is surprisingly accurate given that the production predated even the Surveyor probes, let alone manned exploration.
31** Floyd and everyone else on the Moon walk around completely normally. The Apollo landings later revealed that a loping gait was required in the Moon's 1/6 gravity.
32** The proto-hominids in the opening sequence are all about the same size, but current theories and fossil evidence suggest that the males should've been ''substantially'' larger than the females.
33** The notion that the Monolith's influence guided one of the hominids to pick up a bone and start hitting stuff with it loses much of its impact, now that it's known that tool use also occurs in our great ape cousins, as well as ravens, monkeys, elephants, dolphins, and dozens of other genera that aren't our close relatives. The scene still works as a metaphor, but in the ''literal'' sense, those creatures would have come up with tools as basic as clubs long before they left the trees (for example, we know that chimpanzees use sharp sticks as spears when hunting small monkeys).
34** Giovanni Cassini deduced back in 1705 that Iapetus was dark on one hemisphere and light on the other. In the novel, Iapetus is depicted as a dark moon with a light oval on one hemisphere (in the exact center of which is the Monolith). The Voyager and Cassini missions have now shown that it's actually a ''light'' moon with a ''dark'' oval on one hemisphere.
35*** When Voyager returned the first close-up pictures of Iapetus in 1981, Creator/CarlSagan sent Creator/ArthurCClarke a copy captioned "Thinking of you...".
36* ShootTheMoney: The film had a $10.5 million budget, and $6.5 million of it went to special effects—62%. The first ''thirty minutes'' of the film is showing off the Africa projection transparencies, the Earth from space, and the orbiting spacecraft and space station.
37* ShrugOfGod: Certain ambiguous or unrealistic elements have been shrugged off by Kubrick and Clarke, such as the true meaning of the Monolith or how HAL was able to read lips from the side. The latter has since been vindicated in recent years. Computer techniques have been capable of figuring out words from using a side camera view for quite some time now.
38* TechnologyMarchesOn: Floyd uses a video payphone. Payphones are obsolete now and video phones flopped, though video conferencing over computers is fairly common and there are Skype/Facetime apps for cell phones.
39** When Hal detects a fault on the AE-35 unit, Dave requests hard copy of that information. Hal produces a ''punched card''.
40* ThrowItIn: Surprisingly, quite a few examples. Kubrick has a reputation as one of cinema's most controlling and micromanaging directors, but some of the most iconic and/or notable scenes in the film were the result of improvisation and brainstorming during production:
41** The glowing eyes of the leopard in one scene from the "Dawn of Man" segment were the result of the leopard's eyes reflecting the light from the front-projection equipment. It was left in because it looked cool.
42** The conversation between Dave and Frank in the EVA pod wasn't originally in the screenplay. The original plan was for the crew to directly ask HAL if something was going on that they didn't know about, but the scene wasn't satisfying Kubrick or the cast in production. Gary Lockwood voiced his frustrations to Kubrick one day, and during a personal meeting with Kubrick later, Gary hit on the idea of a secret conversation out of HAL's hearing, and suggested it to Stanley. Kubrick was already thinking along that line and decided to go ahead with it. The scene as filmed resulted from Gary and Keir Dullea improvising a conversation, having it typed up by Kubrick's PA, and using that script for further improv, with the goal of streamlining the dialogue and making it as lean as possible.
43** Similarly, the plot device of Dave seeing aged-up versions of himself in the Stargate sequence was a near-simultaneous brainstorm by Stanley and Keir during filming. Keir did take sole credit for the toppled wine glass setting up the final aging shot, however.
44* WhatCouldHaveBeen:
45** Creator/StanleyKubrick had allegedly asked Creator/OsamuTezuka to work as a production designer for the film, but sadly, The God of Manga was far too busy with his own projects to oblige.
46** Also worthy of note is that Kubrick approached Music/PinkFloyd to do the music to the film (as well as the later ''Film/AClockworkOrange''), but they declined. Music/RogerWaters later said not scoring 2001 was one of his biggest regrets. (Supposedly "Echoes" syncs up to the third act. Try it out.)
47*** In turn, Waters asked Kubrick for permission to use a sample of the "My mind's going, Dave," dialogue on the beginning of the track "Perfect Sense (Part I)" on Waters' 1992 solo album, ''Amused To Death''. [[note]]Roger meant to use it as a TakeThat to ex-bandmate-turned-bandleader ''David'' Gilmour, with whom he feuded with seven years ago over the rights to the Pink Floyd name.[[/note]] Kubrick refused, so Waters instead left a backwards TakeThat to Kubrick [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nfTXHUfEiks in place of where the ''2001'' dialogue was to be on the album]]. [[note]] When Waters revised and re-released the album in 2015, he was able to use the sample, and the backward-masked message was removed. [[/note]]
48** Early drafts had the ship powered by an OrionDrive.
49** Early drafts included a prologue containing interviews with scientists about off-Earth life, voice-over narration (a feature in all of Kubrick's previous films), a stronger emphasis on the prevailing Cold War balance of terror, and a different and more explicitly explained break-down for H.A.L. Other changes include a different monolith for the "Dawn of Man" sequence, discarded when early prototypes did not photograph well; the use of Saturn as the final destination of the Discovery mission rather than Jupiter, discarded when the special effects team could not develop a convincing rendition of Saturn's rings; and the finale of the Star Child detonating nuclear weapons carried by Earth-orbiting satellites, which Kubrick discarded for its similarity to the finale of his previous film, ''Film/DrStrangelove''. The finale and many of the other discarded screenplay ideas survived into Clarke's novel.
50** Creator/JamesCoburn, Creator/GeorgeHamilton and Creator/RodTaylor were considered for Frank Poole.
51** Among the actors considered for the voice of H.A.L. were Creator/MartinBalsam, Creator/JasonRobards, Creator/RichardBasehart and Creator/JoseFerrer.
52** The film was originally to have ended just as it had in the book, with Bowman discovering the third monolith on Saturn's moon Japetus. This idea was scrapped, however, because the special effects crew was unable to make convincing-looking rings around Saturn...so they thought at the time. It turned out later, when we finally got good photos of the rings, that the ring effect the crew had made for the film looked surprisingly accurate.
53** Frank's father tells him in his birthday message that he's straightened out the problem with Frank's "AGS-19 payments". In the final version of the movie, this has [[NarrativeFiligree no bearing on the plot]], but in an earlier draft, Frank's complaints about him and Dave being at a lower pay grade than the hibernating astronauts lead him to ask HAL whether any aspects about the mission had been withheld from him and Dave. This would have made Frank unintentionally responsible for causing his own death.
54** Creator/KenAdam declined to work on the film as production designer after he found out that Kubrick had been working with NASA for a year on space exploration, and that would put him at a disadvantage in developing his art.
55** Originally, the proto-humans in the "Dawn of Man" sequence were meant to be more manlike and not so much like apes (with Creator/RobertShaw allegedly offered a part as the chief "Moon Watcher" proto-human), but Kubrick couldn't find a way to make them filmable without constant full frontal nudity.
56* WorkingTitle: ''Across the Sea of Stars'', ''Universe'', ''Tunnel to the Stars'', ''Earth Escape'', ''Jupiter Window'', ''Farewell to Earth'', ''Planetfall'', and ''How the Solar System Was Won''.

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