Friday, December 17, 2010

2001: Seventeen Missing Minutes?


  • In a Kansas salt mine, deep underground, there exists a repository of national significance. Part of this repository contains original reels of classic and contemporary films. One of these films is Stanley Kubrick's 2001. However when film historian Douglas Trumbull gained access to the film archives he found more than just the original cut but seventeen here-to-fore unseen minutes of the movie.

According to the Boing Boing article:
  • The film originally premiered at 160 minutes. After the premiere, director 'Stanley Kubrick' removed about 19 minutes' worth of scenes and made a few changes:
  • Some shots from the "Dawn of Man" sequence were removed and a new scene was inserted where an ape pauses with the bone it is about to use as a tool. The new scene was a low-angle shot of the monolith, done in order to portray and clarify the connection between the man-ape using the tool and the monolith.
  • Some shots of Frank Poole jogging in the centrifuge were removed.
  • An entire sequence of several shots in which Dave Bowman searches for the replacement antenna part in storage was removed.
  • A scene where HAL severs radio communication between the "Discovery" and Poole's pod before killing him was removed. This scene explains a line that stayed in the film in which Bowman addresses HAL on the subject.
  • Some shots of Poole's space walk before he is killed were removed.
IMOB article on various versions IO9 article on lost footage

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