A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

Who were other candidates for composing the music of the original Star Wars movie? Besides John Williams? None. George Lucas, who had a keen understanding of the intimate relationship between movie imagery and music, planned to follow Stanley Kubrick’s example in 1968’s  2001: A Space Odyssey  and use different compositions of classical music throughout the film. A little Holst here, a little Wagner there, some Tchaikovsky in this bit, and so on. One of the original ideas that Lucas had for the Star Wars - which was based on his use of rock 'n' roll songs in American Graffiti , was to use different classical music compositions to match the visuals. And in fact, during the early stages of assembling the film after principal photography was complete, Lucas created a "temp track" that consisted of pieces such as Gustav Holst's Mars: The Bringer of War from his suite of tone poems The Planets.  This approach worked well for  2001,  but it’s ...

Pros:  2010's  cast, including Roy Scheider and Helen Mirren. Good script. Great visuals. Cons:  Real life rendered its Cold War political undertones obsolete. In the years after the 1968 release of Stanley Kubrick's landmark science-fiction film  2001: A Space Odyssey,  he and collaborator Arthur C. Clarke were asked many questions about how it was conceived, how the realistic special effects had been done, why did Kubrick decide to use classical music pieces in the soundtrack, and if HAL was a punny jab at IBM's corporate name. Another question that followed both the director and the writer for years was  Will you ever do a follow-up to  2001 ? Kubrick, of course, wasn't interested in doing a sequel and generally stayed away from science fiction; the only other set-in-the-future projects he ever envisioned after  2001  were  A Clockwork Orange  and penning the basic story idea for ...

Pros: Good, if sometimes flawed, visuals; nice mix of sound and image; not kid stuff Cons: Slow-paced; no stereotypical space battles; no easily-interpreted ending It's hard to believe that 50 years have passed since Metro Goldwyn Mayer released director Stanley Kubrick's enigmatic-yet-somehow-captivating science fiction classic, 2001: A Space Odyssey, a serious (if not very prophetic) look at a future that could have been but wasn't. Conceived by Kubrick and the renowned science fiction author (and inventor) Arthur C. Clarke as the "proverbial good science fiction movie" in 1964 and involving a long production process that lasted nearly three years, 2001 tackles several Big Topics, including the notion that human evolution may have been given a boost by extraterrestrial intelligence, the dangers of mixing national security interests with scientific exploration, and the strange double-edged sword of humanity's dependence on technology (a them...