How many sound sources?

[garyrc]

I, too, loved 2001 a Space Odyssey, despite the trouble it got me into.

In 1968, after seeing it in 70 mm San Francisco, we drove down to San Jose, repeatedly, to see it on a deeply curved screen that was 85 feet across the chord of the arc. The 70mm projection there was impeccable, so we sat dead center in the front row. Even that close, it was sharp as a tack. The grain was about the finest we'd seen. The image was so large that we had to turn our heads to read the main title (which wrapped around us) and the edges of the picture were outside the area covered by my big eyeglasses. The 6 channel, ultra dynamic stereo was beyond belief.

Overwhelming! Dreaming-while-awake! No drugs were necessary!

The movie introduced me to Thus Spake Zarathustra; somehow I'd missed it before that time, even though I had been steeped in classical and contemporary orchestral music all my life.

The Goldsmith disk of the Alex North music is worth hearing. He constructed a more modern piece, clearly inspired by the dynamic emotional morphology of Zarathustra, which he evidently knew was on the temp track that turned out not to be temp at all. The North piece is outstanding, and has some of the numinous, hair-stands-up-on-the- back-of-the-neck quality of Zarathustra, but it's not Zarathustra. For all our sakes, I glad Kubrick went with the temp track.

I've often wondered whether it was dumb luck on Kubrick's part that he happened on Zarathustra. There is a three note motif in Bernard Herrmann's score for The Day The Earth Stood Still that is reminiscent of Zarathustra, speaking of emotional morphology, and Herrmann, dubbed "The Man Who Knows So Much" by orchestra members during the recording of The Man Who Knew Too Much, certainly knew Zarathustra. Perhaps it was a homage, and perhaps that score impressed the young (23) Kubrick, so that when he was looking for temp track material for 2001 a decade and a half later, Zarathustra sounded particularly "right."

2001 became part of us, so when a friend came back from Alaska with some 16mm film left over, he asked me to think up a three minute, or shorter, film we could make with the kind of double system stereo soundtrack we used to run with these films with a synchronized tape deck. Unfortunately, I did think of something.

The city streets are empty. A newspaper headline informs us that Marshall law has been declared; there is a 24 hour curfew [this was 1968, remember]. A low four octave rumble begins on the soundtrack, as the camera looks up at a tall, monolith-like building. More empty streets. A single peace picket walks back and forth. The Military Policeman is out of focus, and we hear the timpani of Zarathustra as, in slow motion, he comes into focus, rising out of a crouch, and swings his club in a wide circle over his head, bringing it down on the protester. With the repeating progression of the brass, and timpani, the sequence repeats. Suddenly, as the music builds, seams in his uniform start to burst, and long black hair bursts forth. Right at the most triumphant part of the music, hair shoots out of his head all over, and his helmut poofs up several inches on a mound of wiry hair. We catch a fleeting glimpse of his puzzled expression, through all that hair. In slow motion his club slips out of his lowered, hairy hand, and by the time it hits the sidewalk, it has become a tree limb. Obviously, this is a case of almost instantaneous devolution. During the last organ note, we see him, now an ape with traces of a uniform sticking to his fur, walking away from the camera, down the street, which is becoming the wilderness. As Gandhi said, "Violence makes man a beast."

O.K., we thought it was funny, especially the way this reversal of 2001's Dawn of Man went so precisely with the music. The police, who were watching from a concealed location, didn't agree. Somehow they thought we were faking news footage, and announced this theory to the Oakland Tribune; the newspaper bought it lock, stock, and ape-man-in-uniform. We got out of jail 24 hours later, with the charges dropped, none the worse for wear.

Recommended: The Lost Worlds of 2001 by Arthur C. Clarke, in which he acknowledges that, while the film depended on an idea in one of his earlier stories, the film and novel of 2001 were written simultaneously, "with feedback in both directions," and that much of the scenario was out of the mind of the ingenious "enfant terrible." At a conference on futurology, Clarke told us that when they started, Kubrick gave him a set of Joseph Campbell books, saying, "Here, read these."

Also see The Making of 2001, by Jerome Agel.