In the original story, the monolith was a glowing diamond. The effects people couldn’t get it right, so they put a black rectangle on all the storyboards to indicate that they’d come up with a replacement eventually.
Sone day someone looks at the rectangle and says that it would look good. The build one and hell yes, ti looks great.
Movie comes out and all the critics and fans try to figure out what the monolith represents. Is it the Bible? A tombstone? What???
Years later, the original writer, Arthur Clarke, is doing a Q+A and some snotnosed punk stands up and tells Clarke that he’s figured it out.
The monolith is in the ratio 1 : 4 : 9, the squares of the first three numbers.
Worth mentioning that the book and movie were written at the same time and influenced each other.
Originally, Kubrick and Clarke had planned to develop a 2001 novel first, free of the constraints of film, and then write the screenplay. They planned the writing credits to be “Screenplay by Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke, based on a novel by Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick” to reflect their preeminence in their respective fields. In practice, the screenplay developed in parallel with the novel, with only some elements being common to both. Kubrick originally planned a novel, first, with a film adapted from it. They also decided to release the same story as a novel.
But I love this story…
In the original story, the monolith was a glowing diamond. The effects people couldn’t get it right, so they put a black rectangle on all the storyboards to indicate that they’d come up with a replacement eventually.
Sone day someone looks at the rectangle and says that it would look good. The build one and hell yes, ti looks great.
Movie comes out and all the critics and fans try to figure out what the monolith represents. Is it the Bible? A tombstone? What???
Years later, the original writer, Arthur Clarke, is doing a Q+A and some snotnosed punk stands up and tells Clarke that he’s figured it out.
The monolith is in the ratio 1 : 4 : 9, the squares of the first three numbers.
Clarke loves it, and puts it in the next book.
Worth mentioning that the book and movie were written at the same time and influenced each other.
https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-making-of-2001-a-space-odyssey-jay-cocks/de3b7dea4dff974f
Nonfiction book, The Making of 2001.
If you’re interested in film making, or just exploring the creative process, this is a good read.
There’s a cute line near the end.
The editor asks a proofreader if they’d already seen the movie.
“Well, I thought I had.”
Sounds interesting, thank you.