THE MAKING OF KUBRICK’S 2001: Read Jerome Agel’s 1970 Book Online

Read The Making of Kubrick’s 2001. Jerome Agel‘s The Making of Kubrick’s 2001, originally published 1970, can now be read online. The out-of-print book on Stanley Kubrick‘s 2001: A Space Odyssey. The book has been fully digitized, and you can read it on your computer, smartphone, and tablet now.

On The Making of Kubrick’s 2001:

There have been countless words written about Stanley Kubrick’s visionary masterpiece 2001: A Space Odyssey — some good, some bad — but after 45 years, this superb book remains the only one you’ll ever really need. It is such a shame that this book is out-of-print. It is filled with everything you ever wanted to know about 2001. It leads off with Arthur C. Clarke’s short story “The Sentinel” and closes with a complete reprint of Stanley Kubrick’s interview with Playboy magazine. In between are profiles, interviews with technical advisors, effects secrets revealed, letters to Stanley from the moviegoing public, as well as reviews of the film, both good and bad. A fascinating snapshot of a moment in history when the world was caught off guard by a motion picture. Search your local used book stores, like I did. If you’re a Kubrick fan, it’s worth the effort.

Two Amazon reviews on The Making of Kubrick’s 2001:

The first one:

I was expecting a puff piece that had only adjectives like “wonderful, spectacular” to describe its subject.

I was hoping to enjoy a handful of special-effects secrets– important in this truly (TRULY) ground-breaking film.

I got SO much more. There are negative (and positive) reviews that run into several pages, and go deep into both technique and subject matter. There is double or triple the usual volume of pictures, a real blessing…and with thorough descriptions. (Although, to be fair, I admit I have a murder contract out on the editor who decided to remove all “the” and “a” from the CAPTIONING for those pictures. It makes the captions horribly unreadable.)

Errr…back on track, eh ? There’s a discussion of alternate endings, and the text to the Arthur C. Clarke short story that was written at the same time as this script. There’s the ending and other snippets from the novel, which adds new depth to understanding the film.

Oh, and hordes of notes on production, stuff that was edited out of the final version, and the apparently endless mountains of alternate special effects which were discarded in favor of what we see today.

It makes me weep to think that my DVD of this movie lacks outtakes and deleted scenes, now that this book has shown me how much I’m missing. (For example, the original film as presented at its premiere, was at least 19 minutes longer.)

The second one:

…. [Agel]’s book is of note as the most illustrated book in this field. Although they’re all in black and white, the number is way beyond any other book’s attempt. This book is a standard paperback size, 368 pages with a 96 page photo insert. Most pages contain several images, some are full page, but the screen resolution of the images is quite fine, they are printed on fine white paper and thus the images are nicely detailed. The images in the insert are mostly scenes from the film, but they also include many behind-the-scenes peeks at some of the technical magic on screen. Apart from the insert, there are a few frames reproduced from the MAD magazine version of the film, also the instruction sheet from the Aurora model of the Pan Am Orion III Space Clipper. I can recommend this book for its text content alone, but the photo insert made it literally my constant companion through the 1970s. A bookshelf neighbour for Agel should be Piers Bizony’s ‘Filming the Future’, a larger book with a smaller number of larger, rarer, colour images.

Read The Making of Kubrick‘s 2001 here and leave your thoughts on it below in the comments section. For more Stanley Kubrick photos, videos, and information, visit our Stanley Kubrick Page, subscribe to us by Email, “follow” us on Twitter, or “like” us on Facebook.

Source: Cinephiliaandbeyond, Slashfilm