Director and visual effects pioneer Doug Trumbull, in Toronto to screen Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey” (on which Trumbell labored), had a crazy piece of news for those in attendance.
From a report by “Aries 1B” at eagletransporter.com:
[Trumbull] also informed us that the 17 minutes that Kubrick cut from 2001 shortly after the film's release have been found by Warners in their vault in a salt mine in Kansas. These cut scenes are perfectly preserved in CMY component negatives. Trumbull has no idea of what Warners plans to do with them.
Releasing them on a new “2001” Blu-ray might be a good place to start?
Kubrick filmed several scenes that were deleted from the final film. These include a schoolroom on the moon base—a painting class that included Kubrick's daughters, additional scenes of life on the base, Floyd buying a bush baby from a department store via videophone for his daughter, 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 the non sequitur of HAL's response to Bowman's question, and notably a close-up shot of Bowman picking up a slipper during his walk in the alien room—the slipper can still be seen behind him in what was then the next shot. The most notable cut was a 10-minute black-and-white opening sequence featuring interviews with actual scientists, including Freeman Dyson, discussing extraterrestrial life, which Kubrick removed after an early screening for MGM executives. The actual text survives in the book The Making of Kubrick's 2001 by Jerome Agel. If the music intro and outro are included, 29 minutes of film have been excised from the theatrical version.
Though it should never be watched immediately after “The Empire Strikes Back” (as I foolishly did right after the first public Dallas screening of "Empire" back in 1980) “2001” remains one of my all-time favorites. I want to see what Kubrick’s design team put together for those additional scenes on Clavius!
Find all of eagletransporter.com’s story on the matter here.
