The First Time I Made It to 2001...

Rating: 10/10 (11 April 2005)

In late 1968, I got my dad to drive me to Hollywood (I was ten) to see "2001" during its roadshow engagement. Earlier that year, during a family trip to San Francisco, we had stopped to eat at a Howard Johnson's diner, and with our meal I had received a comic book promoting the film. (If you'll remember, one of Kubrick's less astute predictions was that Howard Johnson's would be the food franchise on the Space Station.) After the mind-blowing revelation of that comic book, I suffered through four or five months waiting for my chance to see it.
It took two tries. The first try was the weekend that the Apollo 7 mission became the first to circle the moon. My dad took not only me but also my mom and six-year-old brother. We drove the thirty miles to Hollywood...
...only to find that "2001" was sold out.
Quickly we checked the paper for a suitable alternative. There was an ad for another interesting looking sci-fi film playing just a few blocks up Hollywood Boulevard... "Barbarella." This was literally just a week or two before the ratings system went into affect, so the only way we had to judge the suitability of the subject matter was by the ad, which was illustrated with goofy, fun-looking cartoons. "I wanna see Bar-bella!" my brother cried excitedly. It looked good to me too. So off we went.
Try to imagine sitting next to your fairly prudish mother in 1968, watching -- without any warning -- Jane Fonda's zero-gravity striptease. And then every stripe of fetishism and polymorphous perversity, under only the thinnest satirical sci-fi camouflage. I remember afterward, out in the lobby, my dad kneeling by my sniffling brother, gently explaining "Those dolls couldn't really have been biting her  they COULDN'T really bite her because their teeth were angled in if they were really going to bite her their teeth would have had to angle OUT. So you see"
But I digress.
On our second try, dad took just me. This time we got in. The theater was huge, with dark red curtains. The screen was huge, but thankfully not deeply curved like a Cinerama screen. (Over the decades since then, I have seen "2001" several times at the Cinerama Dome in Hollywood, where the screen IS deeply curved. Every time the spaceship Discovery is shown from the side, it curves up at the ends like a smile. By the nature of its visual geometry "2001" was meant to be seen on a FLAT screen.)
The overture began  weird otherworldly sounds like I'd never heard before  as the auditorium lights slowly dimmed. And then, that amazing stylized MGM logo, created specifically for "2001" and never used at the head of any other film (although MGM did later adopt it for a time as their corporate logo). And then the thrilling swell of "Also Sprach Zarathustra," and that awesome lineup of the moon, the Earth and the Sun! An image like nothing ever seen before on a movie screen. Or in real life either -- "2001" was showing us vistas of our solar system that NASA photography had yet to capture even approximately.
Half the time I had no idea what was going on. But I didn't care. To me it seemed like a film FROM the year 2001. I was enthralled, and goaded to TRY to understand. More than any other film I can think of, "2001" really lived up to that oft-misused cliché phrase: it made me think.
Driving home that night, I remember doing the math: in 2001 I'll be forty-three. I'll SEE all that!
My dad died in 2001.