title: Sex Pistols

text: Vicious debuted with the band at London's Notre Dame Hall on 28 March. In May, the band signed with Virgin Records, their third new label in little more than half a year. This was around the time that Lydon personally enlisted Dennis Morris as the band's official photographer, with Morris being constantly by their side for around 7 months. Virgin was more than ready to release "God Save the Queen", but new obstacles arose. Workers at the pressing plant laid down their tools in protest at the song's content. Jamie Reid's now famous cover, showing Queen Elizabeth II with her features obscured by the song and band names in cutout letters, offended the sleeve's plate makers. After much talk, production resumed and the record was finally released on 27 May.


title: Sex Pistols

text: The scabrous lyrics—"God save the queen/She ain't no human being/And there's no future/In England's dreaming"—prompted widespread outcry. Several major chains refused to stock the single. It was banned not only by the BBC but also by every independent radio station, making it the "most heavily censored record in British history". Rotten boasted, "We're the only honest band that's hit this planet in about two thousand million years." Jones shrugged off everything the song stated and implied—or took nihilism to a logical endpoint: "I don't see how anyone could describe us as a political band. I don't even know the name of the prime minister." The song, and its public impact, are now recognised as "punk's crowning glory".


title: Sex Pistols

text: The Virgin release had been timed to coincide with the height of Queen Elizabeth's Silver Jubilee celebrations. By Jubilee weekend, a week and a half after the record's release, it had sold more than 150,000 copies. On 7 June, McLaren and the record label arranged to charter a private boat and have the Sex Pistols perform while sailing down the River Thames, passing Westminster Pier and the Houses of Parliament. The event, a mockery of the Queen's river procession planned for two days later, ended in chaos. Police launches forced the boat to dock, and constabulary surrounded the gangplanks at the pier. While the band members and their equipment were hustled down a side stairwell, McLaren, Westwood, and many of the band's entourage were arrested. In critic Sean O'Hagan's description, the Pistols had set off the "last and greatest outbreak of pop-based moral pandemonium".


title: Sex Pistols

text: With the official UK record chart for Jubilee week about to be released, the "Daily Mirror" predicted that "God Save the Queen" would be number one. As it turned out, the record placed second, behind the Rod Stewart single "I Don't Want to Talk About It" in its fourth week at the top. Many believed that the record had actually qualified for the top spot, but that the chart had been rigged to prevent a spectacle. McLaren later claimed that CBS Records, which was distributing both singles, told him that the Sex Pistols were actually outselling Stewart two to one. There is evidence that an exceptional directive was issued by the British Phonographic Institute, which oversaw the chart-compiling bureau, to exclude sales from record-company operated shops such as Virgin's for that week only.


title: Sex Pistols

text: Attacks on punk fans rose and in mid-June Rotten was assaulted by a knife-wielding gang outside Islington's Pegasus pub, causing tendon damage to his left arm. Jamie Reid and Paul Cook were beaten up in other incidents; three days after the Pegasus assault, Rotten was attacked again. According to Cook, after the God Save The Queen single and the Bill Grundy incident, the Pistols were public enemy number one, and there was a rivalry between gangs of rockabillies or Teddie Boys and the punks which resulted in many fights. A tour of Scandinavia, planned to start at the end of the month, was delayed until mid-July. In Oslo, Lydon posed for photographs by making the Nazi salute while wearing a sweater with a Swastika. During the tour, a Swedish interviewer told Jones that "a lot of people" regarded the band as McLaren's "creation". Jones replied, "He's our manager, that's all. He's got nothing to do with the music or the image...he's just a good manager." In another interview, Rotten professed bafflement at the furore surrounding the group: "I don't understand it. All we're trying to do is destroy everything." At the end of August came SPOTS—Sex Pistols on Tour Secretly, a surreptitious UK tour with the band playing under pseudonyms to avoid cancellation.


title: Sex Pistols

text: McLaren had wanted for some time to make a movie featuring the Sex Pistols. Julien Temple's first major task had been to assemble "Sex Pistols Number 1", a 25-minute mosaic of footage from various sources, much of it refilmed by Temple from television screens. "Number 1" was often screened at concert venues before the band took the stage. Using media footage from the Thames incident, Temple created another propaganda-like short, "Jubilee Riverboat" (aka "Sex Pistols Number 2"). During summer 1977, McLaren had been making arrangements for the feature film of his dreams, "Who Killed Bambi?", to be directed by Russ Meyer from a script by Roger Ebert. After a single day of shooting, 11 September, production ceased when it became clear that McLaren had failed to arrange financing.


title: Sex Pistols

text: Since the spring of 1977, the three senior Sex Pistols had been returning to the studio periodically with Chris Thomas to lay down the tracks for the band's debut album. Initially to be called "God Save Sex Pistols", it became known during the summer as "Never Mind the Bollocks". According to Jones, "Sid wanted to come down and play on the album, and we tried as hard as possible not to let him anywhere near the studio. Luckily he had hepatitis at the time." Cook later described how many of the instrumental tracks were built up from drum and guitar parts, rather than the usual drum and bass.


title: Sex Pistols

text: Given Vicious's incompetence, Matlock had been invited to record as a session musician. In his autobiography, Matlock says he agreed to "help out", but then suggests that he cut all ties after McLaren issued the 28 February "NME" telegram announcing Matlock had been fired for liking the Beatles. According to Jon Savage, Matlock did play as a hired hand on 3 March, for what Savage describes as an "audition session". In his autobiography, Lydon claims that Matlock's work-for-hire for his ex-band was extensive—much more so than any other source reports—seemingly to amplify a putdown: "I think I'd rather die than do something like that." Music historian David Howard states unambiguously that Matlock did not perform on any of the "Never Mind the Bollocks" recording sessions.


title: Sex Pistols

text: It was Jones who ultimately played most of the bass parts on "Bollocks"; Howard calls his rudimentary, rumbling approach the "explosive missing ingredient" of the Sex Pistols' sound. Vicious's bass is reportedly present on one track that appeared on the original album release, "Bodies". Jones recalls, "He played his farty old bass part and we just let him do it. When he left I dubbed another part on, leaving Sid's down low. I think it might be barely audible on the track." Following "God Save the Queen", two more singles were released from these sessions, "Pretty Vacant" (largely written by Matlock) on 1 July and "Holidays in the Sun" on 14 October. Each was a Top Ten hit.


title: Sex Pistols

text: "Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols" was released on 28 October 1977. "Rolling Stone" praised the album as "just about the most exciting rock & roll record of the Seventies", applauding the band for playing "with an energy and conviction that is positively transcendent in its madness and fever". Some critics, disappointed that the album contained all four previously released singles, dismissed it as little more than a "greatest hits" record.


title: Sex Pistols

text: Containing both "Bodies"—in which Rotten utters "fuck" six times—and the previously censored "God Save the Queen" and featuring the word "bollocks" (popular slang for testicles) in its title, the album was banned by Boots, W. H. Smith and Woolworth's. The Conservative shadow minister for education condemned it as "a symptom of the way society is declining" and both the Independent Television Companies' Association and the Association of Independent Radio Contractors banned its advertisements. Nonetheless, advance sales were sufficient to make it an undeniable number one on the album chart.


title: Sex Pistols

text: The album title led to a legal case that attracted considerable attention: a Virgin Records store in Nottingham that put the album in its window was threatened with prosecution for displaying "indecent printed matter". The case was thrown out when defending QC John Mortimer produced an expert witness who established that "bollocks" was an Old English term for a small ball, that it appeared in place names without causing local communities erotic disturbance, and that in the nineteenth century it had been used as a nickname for clergymen: "Clergymen are known to talk a good deal of rubbish and so the word later developed the meaning of nonsense." In the context of the Pistols' album title, the term does in fact primarily signify "nonsense". Steve Jones off-handedly came up with the title as the band debated what to call the album. An exasperated Jones said, "Oh, fuck it, never mind the bollocks of it all."


title: Sex Pistols

text: After playing a few dates in the Netherlands—the beginning of a planned multinational tour—the band set out on a Never Mind the Bans tour of Britain in December 1977. Of eight scheduled dates, four were cancelled due to illness or political pressure. On Christmas Day, the Sex Pistols played two shows at Ivanhoe's in Huddersfield. Before a regular evening concert, the band performed a benefit matinee for the children of "striking firemen, laid-off workers and one-parent families." These were the band's final UK performances for more than eighteen years.


title: Sex Pistols

text: In January 1978, the Sex Pistols embarked on a US tour, consisting mainly of dates in America's Deep South. Originally scheduled to begin a few days before New Year's, it was delayed due to American authorities' reluctance to issue visas to band members with criminal records. Several dates in the North had to be cancelled as a result. Though highly anticipated by fans and media, the tour was plagued by in-fighting, poor planning and physically belligerent audiences. McLaren later admitted that he purposely booked redneck bars to provoke hostile situations. Over the course of the two weeks, Vicious, by now heavily addicted to heroin, began to live up to his stage name. "He finally had an audience of people who would behave with shock and horror", Lydon later wrote. "Sid was easily led by the nose."


title: Sex Pistols

text: Early in the tour, Vicious wandered off from his Holiday Inn in Memphis, looking for drugs. When he was ultimately found, he received a beating from the security team hired by Warner Bros., the band's American label. He subsequently appeared with the words "Gimme a fix" on his chest—accounts vary as to whether the words were written or carved there. During a concert in San Antonio, Vicious called the crowd "a bunch of faggots", before striking an audience member across the head with his bass guitar. In Baton Rouge, he received simulated oral sex on stage, later declaring "that's the kind of girl I like". Suffering from heroin withdrawal during a show in Dallas, he spat blood at a woman who had climbed onstage and punched him in the face. He was admitted to hospital later that night to treat various injuries. Offstage he is said to have kicked a photographer, attacked a security guard, and eventually challenged one of his own bodyguards to a fight—beaten up, he is reported to have exclaimed, "I like you. Now we can be friends."


title: Sex Pistols

text: Rotten, meanwhile, suffering from flu and coughing up blood, felt increasingly isolated from Cook and Jones, and disgusted by Vicious. Steve Jones and Paul Cook “couldn’t stand being around Johnny and Sid anymore. You couldn’t turn round for a minute without Sid starting a fight … Then on top of that you had Rotten, who was on his own trip and basically thought he was God by that stage.”


title: Sex Pistols

text: On 14 January 1978, during the tour's final date at the Winterland Ballroom in San Francisco, a disillusioned Rotten introduced the band's encore saying, "You'll get one number and one number only 'cause I'm a lazy bastard." That one number was a Stooges cover, "No Fun". At the end of the song, Rotten, kneeling on the stage, chanted an unambiguous declaration, "This is no fun. No fun. This is no fun—at all. No fun." As the final cymbal crash died away, Rotten addressed the audience directly—"Ah-ha-ha. Ever get the feeling you've been cheated? Good night"—before throwing down his microphone and walking offstage. He later observed, "I felt cheated, and I wasn't going on with it any longer; it was a ridiculous farce. Sid was completely out of his brains—just a waste of space. The whole thing was a joke at that point... [Malcolm] wouldn't speak to me... He would not discuss anything with me. But then he would turn around and tell Paul and Steve that the tension was all my fault because I wouldn't agree to anything."


title: Sex Pistols

text: On 17 January, the band made their way separately to Los Angeles. McLaren, Cook and Jones prepared to fly to Rio de Janeiro for a working vacation. Vicious, in increasingly bad shape, was taken to Los Angeles by a friend, who then brought him to New York, where he was immediately hospitalised. Rotten flew to New York, where he announced the band's break-up in a newspaper interview on 18 January. Virtually broke, he telephoned the head of Virgin Records, Richard Branson, who agreed to pay for his flight back to London, via Jamaica. In Jamaica, Branson met with members of the band Devo, and tried to install Rotten as their lead singer. Devo declined the offer, which Rotten also found unappealing.


title: Sex Pistols

text: Cook, Jones and Vicious never performed together again live after Rotten's departure. Over the next several months, McLaren arranged for recordings in Brazil (with Jones and Cook), Paris (with Vicious) and London; each of the three and others stepped in as lead vocalists on tracks that in some cases were far from what punk was expected to sound like. These recordings were to make up the musical soundtrack for the reconceived Pistols feature film project, directed by Julien Temple, to which McLaren was now devoting himself. On 30 June, a single credited to the Sex Pistols was released: on one side, notorious criminal Ronnie Biggs sang "No One Is Innocent" accompanied by Jones and Cook; on the other, Vicious sang the classic "My Way", over both a Jones–Cook backing track and a string orchestra. The single reached number seven on the charts, eventually outselling all the singles with which Rotten was involved. McLaren was seeking to reconstitute the band with a permanent new frontman, but Vicious—McLaren's first choice—had sickened of him. In return for agreeing to record "My Way", Vicious had demanded that McLaren sign a sheet of paper declaring that he was no longer Vicious's manager. In August, Vicious, back in London, delivered his final performances as a nominal Sex Pistol: recording and filming cover versions of two Eddie Cochran songs. The bassist's return to New York in September put an end to McLaren's dreaming.


title: Sex Pistols

text: After leaving the Pistols, Johnny Rotten reverted to his birth name of Lydon, and formed Public Image Ltd. (PiL) with the former Clash member Keith Levene and school friend Jah Wobble. The band went on to score a UK top-ten hit with their debut single, 1978's "Public Image". Lydon initiated legal proceedings against McLaren and the Sex Pistols' management company, Glitterbest, which McLaren controlled. Among the claims were non-payment of royalties, improper usage of the title "Johnny Rotten", unfair contractual obligations, and damages for "all the criminal activities that took place". In 1979, PiL recorded the post-punk classic "Metal Box". Lydon performed with the band through 1992, as well as engaging in other projects such as Time Zone with Afrika Bambaataa and Bill Laswell.


title: Sex Pistols

text: Vicious, relocated in New York, began performing as a solo artist, with Nancy Spungen acting as his manager. He recorded a live album, "Sid Sings," backed by the Idols, featuring Arthur Kane and Jerry Nolan of the New York Dolls; it was released in 1979. On 12 October 1978, Spungen was found dead in the Hotel Chelsea room she was sharing with Vicious, with a stab wound to her stomach and dressed only in her underwear. Police recovered drug paraphernalia from the scene and Vicious was arrested and charged with her murder. In an interview at the time, McLaren said, "I can't believe he was involved in such a thing. Sid was set to marry Nancy in New York. He was very close to her and had quite a passionate affair with her." The actor and heroin dealer Rockets Redglare, who delivered pills to the apartment, has been mentioned as a possible alternative to Vicious as Spungen's killer.


title: Sex Pistols

text: While free on bail, Vicious smashed a beer mug in the face of Patti Smith's brother Todd Smith, and was arrested again on an assault charge. On 9 December 1978 he was sent to Rikers Island jail, where he spent 55 days and underwent enforced cold-turkey detox. He was released on 1 February 1979; some time after midnight, following a small party to celebrate his release, Vicious died of a heroin overdose. He was twenty-one years old. Reflecting on the event, Lydon said, "Poor Sid. The only way he could live up to what he wanted everyone to believe about him was to die. That was tragic, but more for Sid than anyone else. He really bought his public image."


title: Sex Pistols

text: On 7 February 1979, just five days after Vicious's death, hearings began in London on Lydon's lawsuit. Cook and Jones were allied with McLaren, but as evidence mounted that their manager had poured virtually all of the band's revenue into his beloved film project, they switched sides. On 14 February, the court put the film and its soundtrack into receivership—no longer under McLaren's control, they were now to be administered as exploitable assets for addressing the band members' financial claims. McLaren, with substantial personal debts and legal fees, took off for Paris to sign a record deal for an LP of standards, including "Non, je ne regrette rien". A month later, back in London, he disassociated himself from the film to which he had devoted so much time and money. McLaren went on to carry out a one-month consultancy for Adam and the Ants and manage their offshoot Bow Wow Wow. In the mid-1980s he released a number of successful and influential records as a solo artist.


title: Sex Pistols

text: "The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle", the soundtrack album for the still-uncompleted film, was released by Virgin Records on 24 February 1979. It is mostly composed of tracks credited to the Sex Pistols; there are the new recordings with vocals by Jones, Vicious, Cook, and Ronnie Biggs, as well as Edward Tudor-Pole, who recorded a scene for the Sex Pistols' film. McLaren himself takes the mic for a couple of numbers. Several tracks feature Rotten's vocals from early, unissued sessions, in some cases with re-recorded backing by Jones and Cook. There is one live cut, from the band's final concert in San Francisco. The album is completed by a couple of tracks in which other artists cover Sex Pistols classics.


title: Sex Pistols

text: Four Top Ten singles were culled from the "Swindle" recordings, one more than had appeared on "Never Mind the Bollocks". The 1978 "No One Is Innocent"/"My Way" was followed in 1979 by Vicious's cover of "Something Else" (number three, and the biggest-selling single ever under the Sex Pistols name); Jones singing an original, "Silly Thing" (number six); and Vicious's second Cochran cover, "C'mon Everybody" (number three). Two more singles from the soundtrack were put out under the Pistols brand—Tudor-Pole, among others, singing "The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle" and a Rotten vocal from 1976, "(I'm Not Your) Steppin' Stone"; both fell just shy of the Top Twenty. On 21 November 1980, the final "new" studio recordings attributed to the Sex Pistols were released by Virgin: "Black Leather" and "Here We Go Again", recorded by Jones and Cook during the mid-1978 "Swindle" sessions, were paired as one of a half-dozen 7-inch records (the other five reconfiguring previously released material) sold together as "Sex Pack".


title: Sex Pistols

text: The Sex Pistols film was completed by Temple, who received sole credit for the script after McLaren had his name taken off the production. Finally released in 1980, "The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle" still largely reflects McLaren's vision. It is a fictionalised, farcical, partially animated retelling of the band's history and aftermath with McLaren in the lead role, Jones as second lead, and contributions from Vicious (including his memorable performance of "My Way") and Cook. It incorporates promotional videos shot for "God Save the Queen" and "Pretty Vacant" and extensive documentary footage as well, much of it focusing on Rotten. In Temple's description, he and McLaren conceived it as a "very stylized...polemic". They were reacting to the fact that the Pistols had become the "poster on the bedroom wall of the day where you kneel down last thing at night and pray to your rock god. And that was never the point... The myth had to be dynamited in some way. We had to make this film in a way to enrage the fans". In the film, McLaren claims to have created the band from scratch and engineered its notorious reputation; much of what structure the loose narrative has is based on McLaren's teaching a series of "lessons" to be learned from "an invention of mine they called the punk rock".


title: Sex Pistols

text: Cook and Jones continued to work through guest appearances and as session musicians. In 1980, they formed the Professionals, which lasted for two years. Jones went on to play with the bands Chequered Past and Neurotic Outsiders. He also recorded two solo albums, "Mercy" and "Fire and Gasoline". Now a resident of Los Angeles, he hosts a daily radio program, "Jonesy's Jukebox." Having played with the band Chiefs of Relief in the late 1980s and with Edwyn Collins in the 1990s, Cook is now a member of Man Raze. Following the Rich Kids' break-up in 1979, Matlock played with various bands, toured with Iggy Pop, and recorded several solo albums. He is currently a member of Slinky Vagabond.


title: Sex Pistols

text: The 1979 court ruling had left many issues between Lydon and McLaren unresolved. Five years later, Lydon filed another action. Finally, on 16 January 1986, Lydon, Jones, Cook and the estate of Sid Vicious were awarded control of the band's heritage, including the rights to "The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle" and all the footage shot for it—more than 250 hours. That same year, a fictionalised film account of Vicious's relationship with Spungen was released: "Sid and Nancy", directed by Alex Cox. In his autobiography, Lydon lambastes the film, saying that it "celebrates heroin addiction", goes out of its way to "humiliate [Vicious's] life", and completely misrepresents the Sex Pistols' part in the London punk scene.


title: Sex Pistols

text: The original four Sex Pistols reunited in 1996 for the six-month Filthy Lucre Tour, which included dates in Europe, North and South America, Australia and Japan. The band members' access to the archives associated with "The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle" facilitated the production of the 2000 documentary "The Filth and the Fury". This film—directed, like its predecessor, by Temple—was formulated as an attempt to tell the story from the band's point of view, in contrast to "Swindle"s focus on McLaren and the media. In 2002—the year of the Queen's Golden Jubilee—the Sex Pistols reunited again to play the Crystal Palace National Sports Centre in London. In 2003, their Piss Off Tour took them around North America for three weeks.


title: Sex Pistols

text: On 9 March 2006, the band sold the rights to their back catalogue to Universal Music Group. An anonymous commentator for Australian newspaper "The Age" called this a "sell out". In November 2006, the Sex Pistols were inducted to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. The band rejected the honour in coarse language on their website. In a television interview, Lydon said the Hall of Fame could ""Kiss this!"" and made a rude gesture. According to Jones, "Once you want to be put into a museum, Rock & Roll's over; it's not voted by fans, it's voted by people who induct you, or others; people who are already in it."


title: Sex Pistols

text: The Sex Pistols reunited for five performances in the UK in November 2007. In 2008, they undertook a series of European festival appearances, titled the Combine Harvester Tour. In August, after performing at the Dutch festival A Campingflight to Lowlands Paradise, Lowlands director Eric van Eerdenburg declared the Pistols' performance "saddening": "They left their swimming pools at home only to scoop up some money here. Really, they're nothing more than that." That same year, they released the DVD "There'll Always Be An England", recorded at their Brixton Academy appearance on 10 November 2007. In 2010, Fragrance and Beauty Limited announced the release of an authorised Sex Pistols scent. According to a statement from the cosmetics firm, "the fragrance exudes pure energy, pared down and pumped up by leather, shot through with heliotrope and brought back down to earth by a raunchy patchouli." The band signed with Universal Music Group in 2012 to re-release "Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols".


title: Sex Pistols

text: On 30 October 2018, former Sex Pistols members Steve Jones and Paul Cook joined up with Billy Idol and Tony James, both formerly of another first wave English punk rock band Generation X, to perform a free entry gig at The Roxy in Hollywood, Los Angeles under the name Generation Sex, playing a combined set of the two former bands' material.


title: Sex Pistols

text: The Sex Pistols are regarded as one of the most groundbreaking acts in the history of popular music. The "Trouser Press Record Guide" entry on the Sex Pistols remarks that "their importance—both to the direction of contemporary music and more generally to pop culture—can hardly be overstated". "Rolling Stone" has argued that the band, "in direct opposition to the star trappings and complacency" of mid-1970s rock, came to spark and personify one of the few truly critical moments in pop culture—the rise of punk." In 2004, the magazine ranked the Sex Pistols No. 58 on its list of the "100 Greatest Artists of All Time". Leading music critic Dave Marsh called them "unquestionably the most radical new rock band of the Seventies."


title: Sex Pistols

text: Although the Sex Pistols were not the first punk band, the few recordings that were released during the band's brief initial existence were singularly catalytic expressions of the punk movement. The releases of "Anarchy in the U.K.", "God Save the Queen" and "Never Mind the Bollocks" are counted among the most important events in the history of popular music. "Never Mind the Bollocks" is regularly cited in accountings of all-time great albums: in 2006, it was voted No. 28 in "Q" magazine's "100 Greatest Albums Ever", while "Rolling Stone" listed it at No. 2 in its 1987 "Top 100 Albums of the Last 20 Years". It has come to be recognised as among the most influential records in rock history. An AllMusic critic calls it "one of the greatest, most inspiring rock records of all time".


title: Sex Pistols

text: The Sex Pistols directly inspired the style, and often the formation itself, of many punk and post-punk bands during their first two-and-a-half-year run. The Clash, Siouxsie and the Banshees, the Adverts, Vic Godard of Subway Sect, and Ari Up of the Slits are among those in London's "inner circle" of early punk bands that credit the Pistols.


title: Sex Pistols

text: The Sex Pistols' 4 June 1976 concert at Manchester's Lesser Free Trade Hall was to become one of the most significant and mythologised events in rock history. Among the audience of merely forty people or so were many who became leading figures in the punk and post-punk movements: Pete Shelley and Howard Devoto, who organised the gig and were in the process of auditioning new members for the Buzzcocks; Bernard Sumner, Ian Curtis and Peter Hook, later of Joy Division; Mark E. Smith, later of The Fall; punk poet John Cooper Clarke and Morrissey, later of The Smiths. Anthony H. Wilson, founder of Factory Records, saw the band for the first time at the return engagement on 20 July.


title: Sex Pistols

text: Among the many musicians of a later time who have acknowledged their debt to the Pistols are members of the Jesus and Mary Chain, NOFX, The Stone Roses, Guns N' Roses, Nirvana, Green Day, and Oasis. Tim Mohr links Western radio airplay of the Sex Pistols as helping create the whole East German punk movement. Calling the band "immensely influential", a London College of Music study guide notes that "many styles of popular music, such as grunge, indie, thrash metal and even rap owe their foundations to the legacy of ground breaking punk bands—of which the Sex Pistols was the most prominent."


title: Sex Pistols

text: According to Ira Robbins of the "Trouser Press Record Guide", "the Pistols and manager/provocateur Malcolm McLaren challenged every aspect and precept of modern music-making, thereby inspiring countless groups to follow their cue onto stages around the world. A confrontational, nihilistic public image and rabidly nihilistic socio-political lyrics set the tone that continues to guide punk bands." Critic Toby Creswell locates the primary source of inspiration somewhat differently. Noting that "[i]mage to the contrary, the Pistols were very serious about music", he argues, "the real rebel yell came from Jones' guitars: a mass wall of sound based on the most simple, retro guitar riffs. Essentially, the Sex Pistols reinforced what the garage bands of the '60s had demonstrated—you don't need technique to make rock & roll. In a time when music had been increasingly complicated and defanged, the Sex Pistols' generational shift caused a real revolution."


title: Sex Pistols

text: Although much of the Sex Pistols' energy was directed against the establishment, not all of rock's elder statesmen dismissed them. Pete Townshend of the Who said:


title: Sex Pistols

text: When you listen to the Sex Pistols, to "Anarchy in the U.K." and "Bodies" and tracks like that, what immediately strikes you is that "this is actually happening." This is a bloke, with a brain on his shoulders, who is actually saying something he "sincerely" believes is happening in the world, saying it with real venom, and real passion. It touches you and it scares you—it makes you feel uncomfortable. It's like somebody saying, "The Germans are coming! And there's no way we're gonna stop 'em!"


title: Sex Pistols

text: Along with their abundant musical influence, the Sex Pistols' cultural reverberations are evident elsewhere. Jamie Reid's work for the band is regarded as among the most important graphic design of the 1970s and still influences the field in the 21st century. By the age of twenty-one, Sid Vicious was already a "t-shirt-selling icon". While the manner of his death signified for many the inevitable failure of punk's social ambitions, it cemented his image as an archetype of doomed youth. British punk fashion, still widely influential, is now customarily credited to Westwood and McLaren; as Johnny Rotten, Lydon had a lasting effect as well, especially through his bricolage approach to personal style: he "would wear a velvet collared drape jacket (ted) festooned with safety pins (Jackie Curtis through the New York punk scene), massive pin-stripe pegs (modernist), a pin-collar Wemblex (mod) customised into an Anarchy shirt (punk) and brothel creepers (ted)." Christopher Nolan, director of the Batman movie "The Dark Knight", has said that Rotten inspired the characterisation of The Joker, played by Heath Ledger. According to Nolan, "We very much took the view in looking at the character of the Joker that what's strong about him is this idea of anarchy. This commitment to anarchy, this commitment to chaos."


title: Sex Pistols

text: The Sex Pistols were defined by ambitions that went well beyond the musical—indeed, McLaren was at times openly contemptuous of the band's music and punk rock generally. "Christ, if people bought the records for the music, this thing would have died a death long ago," he said in 1977.


title: Sex Pistols

text: He claimed that the Sex Pistols were his personal, Situationist-style art project: "I decided to use people, just the way a sculptor uses clay." "Punk became the most important cultural phenomenon of the late 20th century", McLaren later asserted. "Its authenticity stands out against the karaoke ersatz culture of today, where everything and everyone is for sale... [P]unk is not, and never was, for sale." They were something with which "to sell trousers", as McLaren said in 1989; a "carefully planned exercise to embezzle as much money as possible out of the music industry", as Jon Savage characterises McLaren's core theme in "The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle"; "cash from chaos" as the movie repeatedly puts it.


title: Sex Pistols

text: Lydon, in turn, dismissed McLaren's influence: "We made our own scandal just by being ourselves. Maybe it was that he knew he was redundant, so he overcompensated. All the talk about the French Situationists being associated with punk is bollocks. It's nonsense!" Cook concurs: "Situationism had nothing to do with us. The Jamie Reids and Malcolms were excited because we were the real thing. I suppose we were what they were dreaming of." According to Lydon, "If we had an aim, it was to force our own, working-class opinions into the mainstream, which was unheard of in pop music at the time."


title: Sex Pistols

text: Toby Creswell argues that the "Sex Pistols' agenda was inchoate, to say the least. It was a general call to rebellion that falls apart at the slightest scrutiny." Critic Ian Birch, writing in 1981, called "stupid" the claim that the Sex Pistols "had any political significance... If they did anything, they made a lot of people content with being nothing. They certainly didn't inspire the working classes." While the Conservative triumph in 1979 may be taken as evidence for that position, Julien Temple has noted that the scene inspired by the Sex Pistols "wasn't your kind of two-up, two-down working class normal families, most of it. It was over the edge of the precipice in social terms. They were actually giving a voice to an area of the working class that was almost beyond the pale." Within a year of "Anarchy in the U.K." that voice was being echoed widely: scores if not hundreds of punk bands had formed across the country—groups composed largely of working-class members or middle-class members who rejected their own class values and pursued solidarity with the working class.


title: Sex Pistols

text: It may be that in the mind of their self-celebrated Svengali...the Sex Pistols were never meant to be more than a nine-month wonder, a cheap vehicle for some fast money, a few laughs, a touch of the old "épater la bourgeoisie". It may also be that in the mind of their chief terrorist and propagandist, anarchist veteran...and Situational artist McLaren, the Sex Pistols were meant to be a force that would set the world on its ear...and finally unite music and politics. The Sex Pistols were all of these things.


title: Sex Pistols

text: A couple of years before, Marcus had identified different roots underlying the band's merger of music and politics, arguing that they "have absorbed from reggae and the Rastas the idea of a culture that will make demands on those in power which no government could ever satisfy; a culture that will be exclusive, almost separatist, yet also messianic, apocalyptic and stoic, and that will ignore or smash any contradiction inherent in such a complexity of stances." Critic Sean Campbell has discussed how Lydon's Irish Catholic heritage both facilitated his entrée into London's reggae scene and complicated his position for the ethnically English working class—the background his bandmates had in common.


title: Sex Pistols

text: Critic Bill Wyman acknowledges that Lydon's "fierce intelligence and astonishing onstage charisma" were important catalysts, but ultimately finds the band's real meaning lies in McLaren's provocative media manipulations. While some of the Sex Pistols' public affronts were plotted by McLaren, Westwood, and company, others were evidently not—including what McLaren himself cites as the "pivotal moment that changed everything", the clash on the Bill Grundy "Today" show. "Malcolm milked situations", says Cook, "he didn't instigate them; that was always our own doing." Matlock later wrote that at the point when he left the band, it was beginning to occur to him that McLaren "was in fact quite deliberately perpetrating that idea of us as his puppets... However, on the other hand, I've since found out that even Malcolm wasn't as aware of what he was up to as he has since made out." By his absence, Matlock demonstrated how crucial he was to the band's creativity: in the eleven months between his departure and the Pistols' demise, they composed only two songs.


title: Sex Pistols

text: Music historian Simon Reynolds argues that McLaren came into his own as an auteur only after the group's break-up, with "The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle" and the recruitment of Ronnie Biggs as a vocalist. Much subsequent commentary on the Sex Pistols has relied on taking seriously McLaren's onscreen proclamations in the film, whether lending them credence or not. As music journalist Dave Thompson noted in 2000, "[T]oday, "Swindle" is viewed by many as the truth" (despite the fact that the movie purveys, among other things, a completely illiterate Steve Jones, a talking dog, and Sid Vicious shooting audience members, including his mother, at the conclusion of "My Way"). Temple points out that McLaren's characterisation was intended as "a big fucking joke—that he was the puppetmeister who created these pieces of clay from plasticine boxes that he modeled away and made Johnny Rotten, made Sid Vicious. It was a "joke" that they were completely manufactured." (In his final onscreen scene in the film, McLaren declares that he was planning the Sex Pistols affair, "Ever since I was ten years old! Ever since Elvis Presley joined the army!" [1956 and 1958, respectively].) Temple acknowledges that McLaren ultimately "perhaps took this too much to heart."


title: Sex Pistols

text: According to Pistols tour manager Noel Monk and journalist Jimmy Guterman, Lydon was much more than "the band's mouthpiece. He's its raging brain. McLaren or his friend Jamie Reid might drop a word like 'anarchy' or 'vacant' that Rotten seizes upon and turns into a manifesto, but McLaren is not the Svengali to Rotten he'd like to be perceived as. McLaren thought he was working with a tabula rasa, but he soon found out that Rotten has ideas of his own". On the other hand, there is little disagreement about McLaren's marketing talent and his crucial role in making the band a subcultural phenomenon soon after its debut. Temple adds that "he catalyzed so many people's heads. He had so many just extraordinary ideas". Though, as Jon Savage emphasises, "In fact, it was Steve Jones who first had the idea of putting the group, or any group, together with McLaren. He chose McLaren, not vice versa."


title: Sex Pistols

text: Musicians other than the band members who recorded songs with Steve Jones and Paul Cook on "The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle":


title: 2001: A Space Odyssey (film)

text: 2001: A Space Odyssey is a 1968 epic science fiction film produced and directed by Stanley Kubrick. The screenplay was written by Kubrick and science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke, and was inspired by Clarke's 1951 short story "The Sentinel" and other short stories by Clarke. Clarke also published a , in part written concurrently with the screenplay, after the film's release. The film stars Keir Dullea, Gary Lockwood, William Sylvester, and Douglas Rain, and follows a voyage by astronauts, scientists and the sentient supercomputer HAL to Jupiter to investigate an alien monolith.


title: 2001: A Space Odyssey (film)

text: The film is noted for its scientifically accurate depiction of space flight, pioneering special effects, and ambiguous imagery. Kubrick avoided conventional cinematic and narrative techniques; dialogue is used sparingly, and there are long sequences accompanied only by music. The soundtrack incorporates numerous works of classical music, by composers including Richard Strauss, Johann Strauss II, Aram Khachaturian, and György Ligeti.


title: 2001: A Space Odyssey (film)

text: The film received diverse critical responses, ranging from those who saw it as darkly apocalyptic to those who saw it as an optimistic reappraisal of the hopes of humanity. Critics noted its exploration of themes such as human evolution, technology, artificial intelligence, and the possibility of extraterrestrial life. It was nominated for four Academy Awards, winning Kubrick the award for his direction of the visual effects. The film is now widely regarded as one of the greatest and most influential films ever made. In 1991, it was deemed "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" by the United States Library of Congress and selected for preservation in the National Film Registry.


title: 2001: A Space Odyssey (film)

text: In a prehistoric veldt, a tribe of hominins is driven away from its water hole by a rival tribe. The next day, they find an alien monolith has appeared in their midst. They then learn how to use a bone as a weapon and, after their first hunt, return to drive their rivals away with it.


title: 2001: A Space Odyssey (film)

text: Millions of years later, Dr. Heywood Floyd, Chairman of the United States National Council of Astronautics, travels to Clavius Base, an American lunar outpost. During a stopover at Space Station 5, he meets Russian scientists who are concerned that Clavius seems to be unresponsive. He refuses to discuss rumours of an epidemic at the base. At Clavius, Heywood addresses a meeting of personnel to whom he stresses the need for secrecy regarding their newest discovery. His mission is to investigate a recently found artefact, a monolith buried four million years earlier near the lunar crater Tycho. As he and others examine the object, it is struck by sunlight, upon which it emits a high-powered radio signal.


title: 2001: A Space Odyssey (film)

text: Eighteen months later, the American spacecraft "Discovery One" is bound for Jupiter, with mission pilots and scientists Dr. David "Dave" Bowman and Dr. Frank Poole on board, along with three other scientists in suspended animation. Most of "Discovery"s operations are controlled by HAL, a HAL 9000 computer with a human personality. When HAL reports the imminent failure of an antenna control device, Dave retrieves it in an extravehicular activity (EVA) pod, but finds nothing wrong. HAL suggests reinstalling the device and letting it fail so the problem can be verified. Mission Control advises the astronauts that results from their twin 9000 computer indicate that HAL has made an error, but HAL blames it on human error. Concerned about HAL's behaviour, Dave and Frank enter an EVA pod so they can talk without HAL overhearing. They agree to disconnect HAL if he is proven wrong, but HAL follows their conversation by lip reading.


title: 2001: A Space Odyssey (film)

text: While Frank is outside the ship to replace the antenna unit, HAL takes control of his pod, setting him adrift. Dave takes another pod to rescue Frank. While he is outside, HAL turns off the life support functions of the crewmen in suspended animation, killing them. When Dave returns to the ship with Frank's body, HAL refuses to let him back in, stating that their plan to deactivate him jeopardises the mission. Dave releases Frank's body and, despite not having a spacesuit helmet, exits his pod, crosses the vacuum and opens the ship's emergency airlock manually. He goes to HAL's processor core and begins disconnecting HAL's circuits, despite HAL begging him not to. When the disconnection is complete, a prerecorded video by Heywood plays, revealing that the mission's objective is to investigate the radio signal sent from the monolith to Jupiter.


title: 2001: A Space Odyssey (film)

text: At Jupiter, Dave finds a third, much larger monolith orbiting the planet. He leaves "Discovery" in an EVA pod to investigate. He is pulled into a vortex of coloured light and observes bizarre cosmological phenomena and strange landscapes of unusual colours as he passes by. Finally he finds himself in a large neoclassical bedroom where he sees, and then becomes, older versions of himself: first standing in the bedroom, middle-aged and still in his spacesuit, then dressed in leisure attire and eating dinner, and finally as an old man lying in bed. A monolith appears at the foot of the bed, and as Dave reaches for it, he is transformed into a foetus enclosed in a transparent orb of light floating in space above the Earth.


title: 2001: A Space Odyssey (film)

text: After completing "Dr. Strangelove" (1964), director Stanley Kubrick told a publicist from Columbia Pictures that his next project would be about extraterrestrial life, and resolved to make "the proverbial good science fiction movie". How Kubrick became interested in creating a science fiction film is far from clear. Biographer John Baxter notes possible inspirations in the late 1950s, including British productions featuring dramas on satellites and aliens modifying early humans, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's big budget CinemaScope production "Forbidden Planet", and the slick widescreen cinematography and set design of Japanese kaiju (monster movie) productions (such as "Godzilla" and "Warning from Space").


title: 2001: A Space Odyssey (film)

text: Kubrick obtained financing and distribution from the American studio Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer with the selling point that the film could be marketed in their ultra widescreen Cinerama format, recently debuted with their "How the West Was Won".<ref name="Baxter 1997 https://archive.org/details/stanleykubrickbi00baxt/page/200 200"></ref> It would be filmed and edited almost entirely in southern England, where Kubrick lived, using the facilities of MGM-British Studios and Shepperton Studios. MGM had subcontracted the production of the film to Kubrick's production company to qualify for the Eady Levy, a UK tax on box-office receipts used at the time to fund the production of films in Britain.


title: 2001: A Space Odyssey (film)

text: Kubrick's decision to avoid the fanciful portrayals of space found in standard popular science fiction films of the time led him to seek more realistic and accurate depictions of space travel. Illustrators such as Chesley Bonestell, Roy Carnon, and Richard McKenna were hired to produce concept drawings, sketches, and paintings of the space technology seen in the film. Two educational films, the National Film Board of Canada's 1960 animated short documentary "Universe" and the 1964 New York World's Fair movie "To the Moon and Beyond", were major influences.


title: 2001: A Space Odyssey (film)

text: According to biographer Vincent LoBrutto, "Universe" was a visual inspiration to Kubrick. The 29-minute film, which had also proved popular at NASA for its realistic portrayal of outer space, met "the standard of dynamic visionary realism that he was looking for." Wally Gentleman, one of the special-effects artists on "Universe", worked briefly on "2001". Kubrick also asked "Universe" co-director Colin Low about animation camerawork, with Low recommending British mathematician Brian Salt, with whom Low and Roman Kroitor had previously worked on the 1957 still-animation documentary "City of Gold". "Universe"s narrator, actor Douglas Rain, was cast as the voice of HAL.


title: 2001: A Space Odyssey (film)

text: After pre-production had begun, Kubrick saw "To the Moon and Beyond", a film shown in the Transportation and Travel building at the 1964 World's Fair. It was filmed in Cinerama 360 and shown in the "Moon Dome". Kubrick hired the company that produced it, Graphic Films Corporation—which had been making films for NASA, the US Air Force, and various aerospace clients—as a design consultant. Graphic Films' Con Pederson, Lester Novros, and background artist Douglas Trumbull airmailed research-based concept sketches and notes covering the mechanics and physics of space travel, and created storyboards for the space flight sequences in "2001". Trumbull became a special effects supervisor on "2001".


title: 2001: A Space Odyssey (film)

text: Searching for a collaborator in the science fiction community for the writing of the script, Kubrick was advised by a mutual acquaintance, Columbia Pictures staffer Roger Caras, to talk to writer Arthur C. Clarke, who lived in Ceylon. Although convinced that Clarke was "a recluse, a nut who lives in a tree," Kubrick allowed Caras to cable the film proposal to Clarke. Clarke's cabled response stated that he was "frightfully interested in working with [that] "enfant terrible"", and added "what makes Kubrick think I'm a recluse?" Meeting for the first time at Trader Vic's in New York on 22 April 1964, the two began discussing the project that would take up the next four years of their lives. Clarke kept a diary throughout his involvement with "2001", excerpts of which were published in 1972 as "The Lost Worlds of 2001".


title: 2001: A Space Odyssey (film)

text: Kubrick told Clarke he wanted to make a film about "Man's relationship to the universe", and was, in Clarke's words, "determined to create a work of art which would arouse the emotions of wonder, awe ... even, if appropriate, terror". Clarke offered Kubrick six of his short stories, and by May 1964, Kubrick had chosen "The Sentinel" as the source material for the film. In search of more material to expand the film's plot, the two spent the rest of 1964 reading books on science and anthropology, screening science fiction films, and brainstorming ideas. They created the plot for "2001" by integrating several different short story plots written by Clarke, along with new plot segments requested by Kubrick for the film development, and then combined them all into a single script for "2001". Clarke said that his 1953 story "Encounter in the Dawn" inspired the film's "Dawn of Man" sequence.


title: 2001: A Space Odyssey (film)

text: Kubrick and Clarke privately referred to the project as "How the Solar System Was Won", a reference to how it was a follow-on to MGM's Cinerama epic "How the West Was Won". On 23 February 1965, Kubrick issued a press release announcing the title as "Journey Beyond The Stars". Other titles considered included "Universe", "Tunnel to the Stars", and "Planetfall". Expressing his high expectations for the thematic importance which he associated with the film, in April 1965, eleven months after they began working on the project, Kubrick selected "2001: A Space Odyssey"; Clarke said the title was "entirely" Kubrick's idea. Intending to set the film apart from the "monsters-and-sex" type of science-fiction films of the time, Kubrick used Homers "The Odyssey" as both a model of literary merit and a source of inspiration for the title. Kubrick said, "It occurred to us that for the Greeks the vast stretches of the sea must have had the same sort of mystery and remoteness that space has for our generation."


title: 2001: A Space Odyssey (film)

text: Originally, Kubrick and Clarke had planned to develop a 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. In a 1970 interview, Kubrick said:


title: 2001: A Space Odyssey (film)

text: In the end, Clarke and Kubrick wrote parts of the novel and screenplay simultaneously, with the film version being released before the book version was published. Clarke opted for clearer explanations of the mysterious monolith and Star Gate in the novel; Kubrick made the film more cryptic by minimising dialogue and explanation. Kubrick said the film is "basically a visual, nonverbal experience" that "hits the viewer at an inner level of consciousness, just as music does, or painting".


title: 2001: A Space Odyssey (film)

text: The screenplay credits were shared whereas the "2001" novel, released shortly after the film, was attributed to Clarke alone. Clarke wrote later that "the nearest approximation to the complicated truth" is that the screenplay should be credited to "Kubrick and Clarke" and the novel to "Clarke and Kubrick". Early reports about tensions involved in the writing of the film script appeared to reach a point where Kubrick was allegedly so dissatisfied with the collaboration that he approached other writers who could replace Clarke, including Michael Moorcock and J. G. Ballard. But they felt it would be disloyal to accept Kubrick's offer. In Michael Benson's 2018 book "Space Odyssey: Stanley Kubrick, Arthur C. Clarke, and the Making of a Masterpiece", the actual relation between Clarke and Kubrick was more complex, involving an extended interaction of Kubrick's multiple requests for Clarke to write new plot lines for various segments of the film, which Clarke was expected to withhold from publication until after the release of the film while receiving advances on his salary from Kubrick during film production. Clarke agreed to this, though apparently he did make several requests for Kubrick to allow him to develop his new plot lines into separate publishable stories while film production continued, which Kubrick consistently denied on the basis of Clarke's contractual obligation to withhold publication until release of the film.


title: 2001: A Space Odyssey (film)

text: Astronomer Carl Sagan wrote in his 1973 book "The Cosmic Connection" that Clarke and Kubrick had asked him how to best depict extraterrestrial intelligence. While acknowledging Kubrick's desire to use actors to portray humanoid aliens for convenience's sake, Sagan argued that alien life forms were unlikely to bear any resemblance to terrestrial life, and that to do so would introduce "at least an element of falseness" to the film. Sagan proposed that the film should simply suggest extraterrestrial superintelligence, rather than depict it. He attended the premiere and was "pleased to see that I had been of some help." Sagan had met with Clarke and Kubrick only once, in 1964; and Kubrick subsequently directed several attempts to portray credible aliens, only to abandon the idea near the end of post-production. Benson asserts it is unlikely that Sagan's advice had any direct influence. Kubrick hinted at the nature of the mysterious unseen alien race in "2001" by suggesting that given millions of years of evolution, they progressed from biological beings to "immortal machine entities" and then into "beings of pure energy and spirit" with "limitless capabilities and ungraspable intelligence".


title: 2001: A Space Odyssey (film)

text: In a 1980 interview (not released during Kubrick's lifetime), Kubrick explains one of the film's closing scenes, where Bowman is depicted in old age after his journey through the Star Gate:


title: 2001: A Space Odyssey (film)

text: The script went through many stages. In early 1965, when backing was secured for the film, Clarke and Kubrick still had no firm idea of what would happen to Bowman after the Star Gate sequence. Initially all of "Discovery"s astronauts were to survive the journey; by 3 October, Clarke and Kubrick had decided to make Bowman the sole survivor and have him regress to infancy. By 17 October, Kubrick had come up with what Clarke called a "wild idea of slightly fag robots who create a Victorian environment to put our heroes at their ease." HAL 9000 was originally named Athena after the Greek goddess of wisdom and had a feminine voice and persona.


title: 2001: A Space Odyssey (film)

text: Early drafts included a prologue containing interviews with scientists about extraterrestrial 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 breakdown for HAL. 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 exploding nuclear weapons carried by Earth-orbiting satellites, which Kubrick discarded for its similarity to his previous film, "Dr. Strangelove". The finale and many of the other discarded screenplay ideas survived in Clarke's novel.


title: 2001: A Space Odyssey (film)

text: Kubrick made further changes to make the film more nonverbal, to communicate on a visual and visceral level rather than through conventional narrative. By the time shooting began, Kubrick had removed much of the dialogue and narration. Long periods without dialogue permeate the film: the film has no dialogue for roughly the first and last twenty minutes, as well as for the 10 minutes from Floyd's Moonbus landing near the monolith until Poole watches a BBC newscast on "Discovery". What dialogue remains is notable for its banality (making the computer HAL seem to have more emotion than the humans) when juxtaposed with the epic space scenes. Vincent LoBrutto wrote that Clarke's novel has its own "strong narrative structure" and precision, while the narrative of the film remains symbolic, in accord with Kubrick's final intentions.


title: 2001: A Space Odyssey (film)

text: Principal photography began on 29 December 1965, in Stage H at Shepperton Studios, Shepperton, England. The studio was chosen because it could house the pit for the Tycho crater excavation scene, the first to be shot. In January 1966, the production moved to the smaller MGM-British Studios in Borehamwood, where the live-action and special-effects filming was done, starting with the scenes involving Floyd on the Orion spaceplane; it was described as a "huge throbbing nerve center ... with much the same frenetic atmosphere as a Cape Kennedy blockhouse during the final stages of Countdown." The only scene not filmed in a studio—and the last live-action scene shot for the film—was the skull-smashing sequence, in which Moonwatcher (Richter) wields his newfound bone "weapon-tool" against a pile of nearby animal bones. A small elevated platform was built in a field near the studio so that the camera could shoot upward with the sky as background, avoiding cars and trucks passing by in the distance. The "Dawn of Man" sequence that opens the film was filmed at Borehamwood by John Alcott after Geoffrey Unsworth left to work on other projects. The still photographs in the background for the Dawn of Man sequence were photographed in Namibia.


title: 2001: A Space Odyssey (film)

text: Filming of actors was completed in September 1967, and from June 1966 until March 1968, Kubrick spent most of his time working on the 205 special-effects shots in the film. He ordered the special-effects technicians to use the painstaking process of creating all visual effects seen in the film "in camera", avoiding degraded picture quality from the use of blue screen and travelling matte techniques. Although this technique, known as "held takes", resulted in a much better image, it meant exposed film would be stored for long periods of time between shots, sometimes as long as a year. In March 1968, Kubrick finished the "pre-premiere" editing of the film, making his final cuts just days before the film's general release in April 1968.


title: 2001: A Space Odyssey (film)

text: The film was announced in 1965 as a "Cinerama" film and was photographed in Super Panavision 70 (which uses a 65 mm negative combined with spherical lenses to create an aspect ratio of 2.20:1). It would eventually be released in a limited "roadshow" Cinerama version, then in 70 mm and 35 mm versions. Colour processing and 35 mm release prints were done using Technicolor's dye transfer process. The 70 mm prints were made by MGM Laboratories, Inc. on Metrocolor. The production was $4.5 million over the initial $6 million budget and 16 months behind schedule.


title: 2001: A Space Odyssey (film)

text: For the opening sequence involving tribes of apes, professional mime Daniel Richter played the lead ape and choreographed the movements of the other man-apes, who were mostly portrayed by his mime troupe.


title: 2001: A Space Odyssey (film)

text: Kubrick and Clarke consulted IBM on plans for HAL, though plans to use the company's logo never materialised.


title: 2001: A Space Odyssey (film)

text: The film was edited before it was publicly screened, cutting out, among other things, a painting class on the lunar base that included Kubrick's daughters, additional scenes of life on the base, and Floyd buying a bush baby for his daughter from a department store via videophone. A ten-minute black-and-white opening sequence featuring interviews with scientists, including Freeman Dyson discussing off-Earth life, was removed after an early screening for MGM executives.


title: 2001: A Space Odyssey (film)

text: From early in production, Kubrick decided that he wanted the film to be a primarily nonverbal experience that did not rely on the traditional techniques of narrative cinema, and in which music would play a vital role in evoking particular moods. About half the music in the film appears either before the first line of dialogue or after the final line. Almost no music is heard during scenes with dialogue.


title: 2001: A Space Odyssey (film)

text: The film is notable for its innovative use of classical music taken from existing commercial recordings. Most feature films, then and now, are typically accompanied by elaborate film scores or songs written specially for them by professional composers. In the early stages of production, Kubrick commissioned a from Hollywood composer Alex North, who had written the score for "Spartacus" and also had worked on "Dr. Strangelove". During post-production, Kubrick chose to abandon North's music in favour of the now-familiar classical pieces he had earlier chosen as temporary music for the film. North did not learn that his score had been abandoned until he saw the film's premiere.


title: 2001: A Space Odyssey (film)

text: Kubrick involved himself in every aspect of production, even choosing the fabric for his actors' costumes, and selecting notable pieces of contemporary furniture for use in the film. When Floyd exits the Space Station5 elevator, he is greeted by an attendant seated behind a slightly modified George Nelson Action Office desk from Herman Miller's 1964 "Action Office" series. Danish designer Arne Jacobsen designed the cutlery used by the "Discovery" astronauts in the film.


title: 2001: A Space Odyssey (film)

text: Other examples of modern furniture in the film are the bright red Djinn chairs seen prominently throughout the space station and Eero Saarinen's 1956 pedestal tables. Olivier Mourgue, designer of the Djinn chair, has used the connection to "2001" in his advertising; a frame from the film's space station sequence and three production stills appear on the homepage of Mourgue's website. Shortly before Kubrick's death, film critic Alexander Walker informed Kubrick of Mourgue's use of the film, joking to him "You're keeping the price up". Commenting on their use in the film, Walker writes:


title: 2001: A Space Odyssey (film)

text: Detailed instructions in relatively small print for various technological devices appear at several points in the film, the most visible of which are the lengthy instructions for the zero-gravity toilet on the Aries Moon shuttle. Similar detailed instructions for replacing the explosive bolts also appear on the hatches of the EVA pods, most visibly in closeup just before Bowman's pod leaves the ship to rescue Frank Poole.


title: 2001: A Space Odyssey (film)

text: The film features an extensive use of Eurostile Bold Extended, Futura and other sans serif typefaces as design elements of the "2001" world. Computer displays show high-resolution fonts, colour, and graphics that were far in advance of what most computers were capable of in the 1960s, when the film was made.


title: 2001: A Space Odyssey (film)

text: Kubrick was personally involved in the design of the monolith and its form for the film. The first design for the monolith for the "2001" film was a transparent tetrahedral pyramid. This was taken from the short story "The Sentinel" that the first story was based on.


title: 2001: A Space Odyssey (film)

text: A London firm was approached by Kubrick to provide a transparent plexiglass pyramid, and due to construction constraints they recommended a flat slab shape. Kubrick approved, but was disappointed with the glassy appearance of the transparent prop on set, leading art director Anthony Masters to suggest making the monolith's surface matte black.


title: 2001: A Space Odyssey (film)

text: To heighten the reality of the film, very intricate models of the various spacecraft and locations were built. Their sizes ranged from about two-foot-long models of satellites and the Aries translunar shuttle up to the -long model of the "Discovery One" spacecraft. "In-camera" techniques were again used as much as possible to combine models and background shots together to prevent degradation of the image through duplication.


title: 2001: A Space Odyssey (film)

text: In shots where there was no perspective change, still shots of the models were photographed and positive paper prints were made. The image of the model was cut out of the photographic print and mounted on glass and filmed on an animation stand. The undeveloped film was re-wound to film the star background with the silhouette of the model photograph acting as a matte to block out where the spaceship image was.


title: 2001: A Space Odyssey (film)

text: Shots where the spacecraft had parts in motion or the perspective changed were shot by directly filming the model. For most shots the model was stationary and camera was driven along a track on a special mount, the motor of which was mechanically linked to the camera motor—making it possible to repeat camera moves and match speeds exactly. Elements of the scene were recorded on the same piece of film in separate passes to combine the lit model, stars, planets, or other spacecraft in the same shot. In moving shots of the long "Discovery One" spacecraft, in order to keep the entire model in focus (and preserve its sense of scale), the camera's aperture was stopped down for maximum depth-of-field, and each frame was exposed for several seconds. Many matting techniques were tried to block out the stars behind the models, with filmmakers sometimes resorting to hand-tracing frame by frame around the image of the spacecraft (rotoscoping) to create the matte.


title: 2001: A Space Odyssey (film)

text: Some shots required exposing the film again to record previously filmed live-action shots of the people appearing in the windows of the spacecraft or structures. This was achieved by projecting the window action onto the models in a separate camera pass or, when two-dimensional photographs were used, projecting from the backside through a hole cut in the photograph.


title: 2001: A Space Odyssey (film)

text: All of the shots required multiple takes so that some film could be developed and printed to check exposure, density, alignment of elements, and to supply footage used for other photographic effects, such as for matting.


title: 2001: A Space Odyssey (film)

text: For spacecraft interior shots, ostensibly containing a giant centrifuge that produces artificial gravity, Kubrick had a rotating "ferris wheel" built by Vickers-Armstrong Engineering Group at a cost of $750,000. The set was in diameter and wide. Various scenes in the "Discovery" centrifuge were shot by securing set pieces within the wheel, then rotating it while the actor walked or ran in sync with its motion, keeping him at the bottom of the wheel as it turned. The camera could be fixed to the inside of the rotating wheel to show the actor walking completely "around" the set, or mounted in such a way that the wheel rotated independently of the stationary camera, as in the jogging scene where the camera appears to alternately precede and follow the running actor.


title: 2001: A Space Odyssey (film)

text: The shots where the actors appear on opposite sides of the wheel required one of the actors to be strapped securely into place at the "top" of the wheel as it moved to allow the other actor to walk to the "bottom" of the wheel to join him. The most notable case is when Bowman enters the centrifuge from the central hub on a ladder, and joins Poole, who is eating on the other side of the centrifuge. This required Gary Lockwood to be strapped into a seat while Keir Dullea walked toward him from the opposite side of the wheel as it turned with him.


title: 2001: A Space Odyssey (film)

text: Another rotating set appeared in an earlier sequence on board the Aries trans-lunar shuttle. A stewardess is shown preparing in-flight meals, then carrying them into a circular walkway. Attached to the set as it rotates 180 degrees, the camera's point of view remains constant, and she appears to walk up the "side" of the circular walkway, and steps, now in an "upside-down" orientation, into a connecting hallway.


title: 2001: A Space Odyssey (film)

text: The realistic-looking effects of the astronauts floating weightless in space and inside the spacecraft were accomplished by suspending the actors from wires attached to the top of the set and placing the camera beneath them. The actors' bodies blocked the camera's view of the wires and appeared to float. For the shot of Poole floating into the pod's arms during Bowman's recovery of him, a stuntman on a wire portrayed the movements of an unconscious man and was shot in slow motion to enhance the illusion of drifting through space. The scene showing Bowman entering the emergency airlock from the EVA pod was done similarly: an off-camera stagehand, standing on a platform, held the wire suspending Dullea above the camera positioned at the bottom of the vertically oriented airlock. At the proper moment, the stage-hand first loosened his grip on the wire, causing Dullea to fall toward the camera, then, while holding the wire firmly, jumped off the platform, causing Dullea to ascend back toward the hatch.


title: 2001: A Space Odyssey (film)

text: The methods used were alleged to have placed stuntman Bill Weston's life in danger. Weston recalled that he filmed one sequence without air-holes in his suit, risking asphyxiation. "Even when the tank was feeding air into the suit, there was no place for the carbon dioxide Weston exhaled to go. So it simply built up inside, incrementally causing a heightened heart rate, rapid breathing, fatigue, clumsiness, and eventually, unconsciousness." Weston said Kubrick was warned "we've got to get him back" but reportedly replied, "Damn it, we just started. Leave him up there! Leave him up there!" When Weston lost consciousness, filming ceased, and he was brought down. "They brought the tower in, and I went looking for Stanley... I was going to shove MGM right up his... And the thing is, Stanley had left the studio and sent Victor [Lyndon, the associate producer] to talk to me." Weston claimed Kubrick fled the studio for "two or three days. ... I know he didn't come in the next day, and I'm sure it wasn't the day after. Because I was going to do him."


title: 2001: A Space Odyssey (film)

text: The coloured lights in the Star Gate sequence were accomplished by slit-scan photography of thousands of high-contrast images on film, including Op art paintings, architectural drawings, Moiré patterns, printed circuits, and electron-microscope photographs of molecular and crystal structures. Known to staff as "Manhattan Project", the shots of various nebula-like phenomena, including the expanding star field, were coloured paints and chemicals swirling in a pool-like device known as a cloud tank, shot in slow motion in a dark room. The live-action landscape shots were filmed in the Hebridean islands, the mountains of northern Scotland, and Monument Valley. The colouring and negative-image effects were achieved with different colour filters in the process of making duplicate negatives in an optical printer.


title: 2001: A Space Odyssey (film)

text: "2001" contains a famous example of a match cut, a type of cut in which two shots are matched by action or subject matter. After Moonwatcher uses a bone to kill another ape at the watering hole, he throws it triumphantly into the air; as the bone spins in the air, the film cuts to an orbiting satellite, marking the end of the prologue. The match cut draws a connection between the two objects as exemplars of primitive and advanced tools respectively, and demonstrates humanity's technological progress since the time of early hominids.


title: 2001: A Space Odyssey (film)

text: "2001" pioneered the use of front projection with retroreflective matting. Kubrick used the technique to produce the backdrops in the Africa scenes and the scene when astronauts walk on the Moon.


title: 2001: A Space Odyssey (film)

text: The technique consisted of a separate scenery projector set at a right angle to the camera and a half-silvered mirror placed at an angle in front that reflected the projected image forward in line with the camera lens onto a backdrop of retroreflective material. The reflective directional screen behind the actors could reflect light from the projected image 100 times more efficiently than the foreground subject did. The lighting of the foreground subject had to be balanced with the image from the screen, so that the part of the scenery image that fell on the foreground subject was too faint to show on the finished film. The exception was the eyes of the leopard in the "Dawn of Man" sequence, which glowed due to the projector illumination. Kubrick described this as "a happy accident".


title: 2001: A Space Odyssey (film)

text: Front projection had been used in smaller settings before "2001", mostly for still photography or television production, using small still images and projectors. The expansive backdrops for the African scenes required a screen tall and wide, far larger than had been used before. When the reflective material was applied to the backdrop in strips, variations at the seams of the strips led to visual artefacts; to solve this, the crew tore the material into smaller chunks and applied them in a random "camouflage" pattern on the backdrop. The existing projectors using transparencies resulted in grainy images when projected that large, so the crew worked with MGM's special-effects supervisor Tom Howard to build a custom projector using transparencies, which required the largest water-cooled arc lamp available. The technique was used widely in the film industry thereafter until it was replaced by blue/green screen systems in the 1990s.


title: 2001: A Space Odyssey (film)

text: The initial MGM soundtrack album release contained none of the material from the altered and uncredited rendition of Ligeti's "Aventures" used in the film, used a different recording of "Also sprach Zarathustra" (performed by the Berlin Philharmonic conducted by Karl Böhm) from that heard in the film, and a longer excerpt of "Lux Aeterna" than that in the film.


title: 2001: A Space Odyssey (film)

text: In 1996, Turner Entertainment/Rhino Records released a new soundtrack on CD that included the film's rendition of "Aventures", the version of "Zarathustra" used in the film, and the shorter version of "Lux Aeterna" from the film. As additional "bonus tracks" at the end, the CD includes the versions of "Zarathustra" and "Lux Aeterna" on the old MGM soundtrack album, an unaltered performance of "Aventures", and a nine-minute compilation of all of HAL's dialogue.


title: 2001: A Space Odyssey (film)

text: Alex North's unused music was first released in Telarc's issue of the main theme on "Hollywood's Greatest Hits, Vol. 2", a compilation album by Erich Kunzel and the Cincinnati Pops Orchestra. All of the music North originally wrote was recorded commercially by his friend and colleague Jerry Goldsmith with the National Philharmonic Orchestra and released on Varèse Sarabande CDs shortly after Telarc's first theme release and before North's death. Eventually, a mono mix-down of North's original recordings was released as a limited-edition CD by Intrada Records.


title: 2001: A Space Odyssey (film)

text: The film's world premiere was on 2 April 1968, at the Uptown Theater in Washington, D.C. with a 160-minute cut. It opened the next day at the Loew's Capitol in New York and the following day at the Warner Hollywood Theatre in Los Angeles. The original version was also shown in Boston.


title: 2001: A Space Odyssey (film)

text: Kubrick and editor Ray Lovejoy edited the film between 5 April and9, 1968. Kubrick's rationale for trimming the film was to tighten the narrative. Reviews suggested the film suffered from its departure from traditional cinematic storytelling. Kubrick said, "I didn't believe that the trims made a critical difference. ... The people who like it like it no matter what its length, and the same holds true for the people who hate it." The cut footage is reported as being 19 or 17 minutes long. It includes scenes revealing details about life on "Discovery": additional space walks, Bowman retrieving a spare part from an octagonal corridor, elements from the Poole murder sequence—including space-walk preparation and HAL turning off radio contact with Poole—and a close-up of Bowman picking up a slipper during his walk in the alien room. Jerome Agel describes the cut scenes as comprising "Dawn of Man, Orion, Poole exercising in the centrifuge, and Poole's pod exiting from "Discovery"." The new cut was approximately 143 minutes long, around 88 minutes for the first section, followed by an intermission, and 55 minutes in the second section. Detailed instructions were sent to theatre owners already showing the film so that they could make the specified trims themselves. Some of the cuts may have been poorly done in a particular theatre, possibly causing the version seen by viewers early in the film's run to vary from theatre to theatre.


title: 2001: A Space Odyssey (film)

text: According to his brother-in-law, Jan Harlan, Kubrick was adamant that the trims were never to be seen and had the negatives, which he had kept in his garage, burned shortly before his death. This was confirmed by former Kubrick assistant Leon Vitali: "I'll tell you right now, okay, on "Clockwork Orange", "The Shining", "Barry Lyndon", some little parts of "2001", we had thousands of cans of negative outtakes and print, which we had stored in an area at his house where we worked out of, which he personally supervised the loading of it to a truck and then I went down to a big industrial waste lot and burned it. That's what he wanted." However, in December 2010, Douglas Trumbull, the film's visual effects supervisor, announced that Warner Bros. had found 17 minutes of lost footage from the post-premiere cuts, "perfectly preserved", in a Kansas salt mine vault used by Warners for storage. No plans have been announced for the rediscovered footage.


title: 2001: A Space Odyssey (film)

text: The revised version was ready for the expansion of the roadshow release to four other U.S. cities (Chicago, Denver, Detroit and Houston), on 10 April 1968, and internationally in five cities the following day, where the shortened version was shown in 70mm format in the 2.21:1 aspect ratio and used a six-track stereo magnetic soundtrack.


title: 2001: A Space Odyssey (film)

text: By the end of May, the film had opened in 22 cities in the United States and Canada and in another 36 in June. The general release of the film in its 35 mm anamorphic format took place in autumn 1968 and used either a four-track magnetic stereo soundtrack or an optical monaural one.


title: 2001: A Space Odyssey (film)

text: The original 70-millimetre release, like many Super Panavision 70 films of the era such as "Grand Prix", was advertised as being in "Cinerama" in cinemas equipped with special projection optics and a deeply curved screen. In standard cinemas, the film was identified as a 70-millimetre production. The original release of "2001: A Space Odyssey" in 70-millimetre Cinerama with six-track sound played continually for more than a year in several venues, and for 103 weeks in Los Angeles.


title: 2001: A Space Odyssey (film)

text: As was typical of most films of the era released both as a "roadshow" (in Cinerama format in the case of "2001") and general release (in 70-millimetre in the case of "2001"), the entrance music, intermission music (and intermission altogether), and postcredit exit music were cut from most prints of the latter version, although these have been restored to most DVD releases.


title: 2001: A Space Odyssey (film)

text: In its first nine weeks from 22 locations, it grossed $2 million in the United States and Canada. The film earned $8.5 million in theatrical gross rentals from roadshow engagements throughout 1968, contributing to North American rentals of $16.4 million and worldwide rentals of $21.9 million during its original release. The film's high costs, in excess of $10 million, meant that the initial returns from the 1968 release left it $800,000 in the red; but the successful re-release in 1971 made it profitable. By June 1974, the film had rentals from the United States and Canada of $20.3 million (gross of $58 million) and international rentals of $7.5 million. The film had a reissue on a test basis on 24 July 1974 at the Cinerama Dome in Los Angeles and grossed $53,000 in its first week, which led to an expanded reissue. Further re-releases followed, giving a cumulative gross of over $60 million in the United States and Canada. Taking its re-releases into account, it is the highest-grossing film of 1968 in the United States and Canada. Worldwide, it has grossed $146 million across all releases, although some estimates place the gross higher, at over $190 million.


title: 2001: A Space Odyssey (film)

text: Upon release, "2001" polarised critical opinion, receiving both praise and derision, with many New York-based critics being especially harsh. Kubrick called them "dogmatically atheistic and materialistic and earthbound". Some critics viewed the original 161-minute cut shown at premieres in Washington D.C., New York, and Los Angeles. Keir Dullea says that during the New York premiere, 250 people walked out; in L.A., Rock Hudson not only left early but "was heard to mutter, 'What is this bullshit? "But a few months into the release, they realised a lot of people were watching it while smoking funny cigarettes. Someone in San Francisco even ran right through the screen screaming: 'It's God!' So they came up with a new poster that said: '2001 – the ultimate trip!


title: 2001: A Space Odyssey (film)

text: In "The New Yorker", Penelope Gilliatt said it was "some kind of great film, and an unforgettable endeavor ... The film is hypnotically entertaining, and it is funny without once being gaggy, but it is also rather harrowing." Charles Champlin of the "Los Angeles Times" wrote that it was "the picture that science fiction fans of every age and in every corner of the world have prayed (sometimes forlornly) that the industry might some day give them. It is an ultimate statement of the science fiction film, an awesome realization of the spatial future ... it is a milestone, a landmark for a spacemark, in the art of film." Louise Sweeney of "The Christian Science Monitor" felt that "2001" was "a brilliant intergalactic satire on modern technology. It's also a dazzling 160-minute tour on the Kubrick filmship through the universe out there beyond our earth." Philip French wrote that the film was "perhaps the first multi-million-dollar supercolossal movie since D.W. Griffith's "Intolerance" fifty years ago which can be regarded as the work of one man ... "Space Odyssey" is important as the high-water mark of science-fiction movie making, or at least of the genre's futuristic branch." "The Boston Globe" review called it "the world's most extraordinary film. Nothing like it has ever been shown in Boston before or, for that matter, anywhere ... The film is as exciting as the discovery of a new dimension in life." Roger Ebert gave the film four stars in his original review, saying the film "succeeds magnificently on a cosmic scale." He later put it on his Top 10 list for "Sight & Sound". "Time" provided at least seven different mini-reviews of the film in various issues in 1968, each one slightly more positive than the preceding one; in the final review dated 27 December 1968, the magazine called "2001" "an epic film about the history and future of mankind, brilliantly directed by Stanley Kubrick. The special effects are mindblowing."


title: 2001: A Space Odyssey (film)

text: Others were unimpressed. Pauline Kael called it "a monumentally unimaginative movie." Stanley Kauffmann of "The New Republic" described it as "a film that is so dull, it even dulls our interest in the technical ingenuity for the sake of which Kubrick has allowed it to become dull." The Soviet film director Andrei Tarkovsky found the film to be an inadequate addition to the science fiction genre of filmmaking. Renata Adler of "The New York Times" wrote that it was "somewhere between hypnotic and immensely boring." "Variety"'s Robert B. Frederick ('Robe') believed the film was a "[b]ig, beautiful, but plodding sci-fi epic ... A major achievement in cinematography and special effects, "2001" lacks dramatic appeal to a large degree and only conveys suspense after the halfway mark." Andrew Sarris called it "one of the grimmest films I have ever seen in my life ... "2001" is a disaster because it is much too abstract to make its abstract points." (Sarris reversed his opinion upon a second viewing, and declared, ""2001" is indeed a major work by a major artist.") John Simon felt it was "a regrettable failure, although not a total one. This film is fascinating when it concentrates on apes or machines ... and dreadful when it deals with the in-betweens: humans ... "2001", for all its lively visual and mechanical spectacle, is a kind of space-"Spartacus" and, more pretentious still, a shaggy God story." Historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. deemed the film "morally pretentious, intellectually obscure and inordinately long ... a film out of control". In a 2001 review, the BBC said that its slow pacing often alienates modern audiences more than it did upon its initial release.


title: 2001: A Space Odyssey (film)

text: "2001: A Space Odyssey" is now considered one of the major artistic works of the 20th century, with many critics and filmmakers considering it Kubrick's masterpiece. Director Martin Scorsese has listed it as one of his favourite films of all time. In the 1980s, critic David Denby compared Kubrick to the monolith from "2001: A Space Odyssey", calling him "a force of supernatural intelligence, appearing at great intervals amid high-pitched shrieks, who gives the world a violent kick up the next rung of the evolutionary ladder". By the start of the 21st century, "2001: A Space Odyssey" had become recognised as among the best films ever made by such sources as the British Film Institute (BFI). "The Village Voice" ranked the film at number 11 in its Top 250 "Best Films of the Century" list in 1999, based on a poll of critics. In January 2002, the film was voted no. 1 on the list of the "Top 100 Essential Films of All Time" by the National Society of Film Critics. "Sight & Sound" magazine ranked the film 12th in its greatest films of all-time list in 1982, tenth in 1992 critics poll of greatest films, sixth in the top ten films of all time in its 2002 and 2012 critics' polls. editions; it also tied for second place in the magazine's 2012 directors' poll. The film was voted no. 43 on the list of "100 Greatest Films" by the prominent French magazine "Cahiers du cinéma" in 2008. In 2010, "The Guardian" named it "the best sci-fi and fantasy film of all time". The film ranked 4th in BBC's 2015 list of the 100 greatest American films.


title: 2001: A Space Odyssey (film)

text: On review aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes, the film has a "Certified Fresh" rating of 92% based on 115 reviews, with an average rating of 9.30/10. The site's critical consensus reads: "One of the most influential of all sci-fi films – and one of the most controversial – Stanley Kubrick's "2001" is a delicate, poetic meditation on the ingenuity – and folly – of mankind." Review aggregation website Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, has assigned the film a score of 84 out of 100, based on 25 critic reviews, indicating "universal acclaim".


title: 2001: A Space Odyssey (film)

text: The film won the Hugo Award for best dramatic presentation, as voted by science fiction fans and published science-fiction writers. Ray Bradbury praised the film's photography, but disliked the banality of most of the dialogue, and believed that the audience does not care when Poole dies. Both he and Lester del Rey disliked the film's feeling of sterility and blandness in the human encounters amidst the technological wonders, while both praised the pictorial element of the film. Reporting that "half the audience had left by intermission", Del Rey described the film as dull, confusing, and boring ("the first of the New Wave-Thing movies, with the usual empty symbols"), predicting "[i]t will probably be a box-office disaster, too, and thus set major science-fiction movie making back another ten years". Samuel R. Delany was impressed by how the film undercuts the audience's normal sense of space and orientation in several ways. Like Bradbury, Delany noticed the banality of the dialogue (he stated that characters say nothing meaningful), but regarded this as a dramatic strength, a prelude to the rebirth at the conclusion of the film. Without analysing the film in detail, Isaac Asimov spoke well of it in his autobiography and other essays. James P. Hogan liked the film but complained that the ending did not make any sense to him, leading to a bet about whether he could write something better: "I stole Arthur's plot idea shamelessly and produced "Inherit the Stars"."


title: 2001: A Space Odyssey (film)

text: In 1969, a United States Department of State committee chose "2001" as the American entry at the 6th Moscow International Film Festival.


title: 2001: A Space Odyssey (film)

text: "2001" was ranked 15th on the American Film Institute's 2007 "100 Years ... 100 Movies" (22 in "1998"), was no. 40 on its "100 Years, 100 Thrills", was included on its "100 Years, 100 Quotes" (no. 78 "Open the pod bay doors, HAL."), and "HAL 9000" was the no. 13 villain in "100 Years... 100 Heroes and Villains". The film was also no. 47 on AFI's 100 Years ... 100 Cheers and the no.1 science fiction film on AFI's 10 Top 10. "2001" was the only science fiction film to make "Sight & Sound" 2012 list of the ten best films, and tops the Online Film Critics Society list of greatest science fiction films of all time. In 2012, the Motion Picture Editors Guild listed the film as the 19th best-edited film of all time based on a survey of its membership. Other lists that include the film are "50 Films to See Before You Die" (#6), The Village Voice 100 Best Films of the 20th century (#11), the "Sight & Sound" 2002 and 2012 Top Ten poll (#6), and Roger Ebert's Top Ten (1968) (#2). In 1995, the Vatican named it one of the 45 best films ever made (and included it in a sub-list of the "Top Ten Art Movies" of all time.) In 1998, "Time Out" conducted a reader's poll and "2001: A Space Odyssey" was voted as #9 on the list of "greatest films of all time". "Entertainment Weekly" voted it no. 26 on their list of "100 Greatest Movies of All Time". In 2017, "Empire" magazine's readers' poll ranked the film 21st on its list of "The 100 Greatest Movies". In the "Sight & Sound" poll of 480 directors published in December 2022, "2001: A Space Odyssey" was voted as the Greatest Film of All Time, ahead of "Citizen Kane" and "The Godfather".


title: 2001: A Space Odyssey (film)

text: Since its premiere, "2001: A Space Odyssey" has been analysed and interpreted by professional critics and theorists, amateur writers, and science fiction fans. In his monograph for BFI analysing the film, Peter Krämer summarised the diverse interpretations as ranging from those who saw it as darkly apocalyptic in tone to those who saw it as an optimistic reappraisal of the hopes of mankind and humanity. Questions about "2001" range from uncertainty about its implications for humanity's origins and destiny in the universe to interpreting elements of the film's more enigmatic scenes, such as the meaning of the monolith, or the fate of astronaut David Bowman. There are also simpler and more mundane questions about the plot, in particular the causes of HAL's breakdown (explained in earlier drafts but kept mysterious in the film).


title: 2001: A Space Odyssey (film)

text: A spectrum of diverse interpretative opinions would form after the film's release, appearing to divide theatre audiences from the opinions of critics. Krämer writes: "Many people sent letters to Kubrick to tell him about their responses to "2001", most of them regarding the film—in particular the ending—as an optimistic statement about humanity, which is seen to be born and reborn. The film's reviewers and academic critics, by contrast, have tended to understand the film as a pessimistic account of human nature and humanity's future. The most extreme of these interpretations state that the foetus floating above the Earth will destroy it."


title: 2001: A Space Odyssey (film)

text: Some of the critics' cataclysmic interpretations were informed by Kubrick's prior direction of the Cold War film "Dr. Strangelove", immediately before "2001", which resulted in dark speculation about the nuclear weapons orbiting the Earth in "2001". These interpretations were challenged by Clarke, who said: "Many readers have interpreted the last paragraph of the book to mean that he (the foetus) destroyed Earth, perhaps for the purpose of creating a new Heaven. This idea never occurred to me; it seems clear that he triggered the orbiting nuclear bombs harmlessly...". In response to Jeremy Bernstein's dark interpretation of the film's ending, Kubrick said: "The book does not end with the destruction of the Earth."


title: 2001: A Space Odyssey (film)

text: Regarding the film as a whole, Kubrick encouraged people to make their own interpretations and refused to offer an explanation of "what really happened". In a 1968 interview with "Playboy" magazine, he said:


title: 2001: A Space Odyssey (film)

text: In a subsequent discussion of the film with Joseph Gelmis, Kubrick said his main aim was to avoid "intellectual verbalization" and reach "the viewer's subconscious." But he said he did not strive for ambiguity—it was simply an inevitable outcome of making the film nonverbal. Still, he acknowledged this ambiguity was an invaluable asset to the film. He was willing then to give a fairly straightforward explanation of the plot on what he called the "simplest level," but unwilling to discuss the film's metaphysical interpretation, which he felt should be left up to viewers.


title: 2001: A Space Odyssey (film)

text: For some readers, Clarke's more straightforward novel based on the script is key to interpreting the film. The novel explicitly identifies the monolith as a tool created by an alien race that has been through many stages of evolution, moving from organic form to biomechanical, and finally achieving a state of pure energy. These aliens travel the cosmos assisting lesser species to take evolutionary steps. Conversely, film critic Penelope Houston wrote in 1971 that because the novel differs in many key aspects from the film, it perhaps should not be regarded as the skeleton key to unlock it.


title: 2001: A Space Odyssey (film)

text: Carolyn Geduld writes that what "structurally unites all four episodes of the film" is the monolith, the film's largest and most unresolvable enigma. Vincent LoBrutto's biography of Kubrick says that for many, Clarke's novel supplements the understanding of the monolith which is more ambiguously depicted in the film. Similarly, Geduld observes that "the monolith ... has a very simple explanation in Clarke's novel", though she later asserts that even the novel does not fully explain the ending.


title: 2001: A Space Odyssey (film)

text: Bob McClay's "Rolling Stone" review describes a parallelism between the monolith's first appearance in which tool usage is imparted to the apes (thus 'beginning' mankind) and the completion of "another evolution" in the fourth and final encounter with the monolith. In a similar vein, Tim Dirks ends his synopsis saying "[t]he cyclical evolution from ape to man to spaceman to angel-starchild-superman is complete."


title: 2001: A Space Odyssey (film)

text: Humanity's first and second encounters with the monolith have visual elements in common; both the apes, and later the astronauts, touch it gingerly with their hands, and both sequences conclude with near-identical images of the Sun appearing directly over it (the first with a crescent moon adjacent to it in the sky, the second with a near-identical crescent Earth in the same position), echoing the Sun–Earth–Moon alignment seen at the very beginning of the film. The second encounter also suggests the triggering of the monolith's radio signal to Jupiter by the presence of humans, echoing the premise of Clarke's source story "The Sentinel".