Star Dreck [Review]

2010, the sequel to Stanley Kubrick's 2001, is an epic shuttle to nowhere.

by James Wolcott

As scientists on a Soviet-American search for the monolith's secrets,
Lithgow (l.) and Scheider flail about in 2010's zero atmosphere.

The black monolith of Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, that domino without a dot, makes a return visit on 2010, joined by other monoliths that dance and converge like iron filings magnetized by the swirling cosmos. (The uncharitable might say that those monoliths look like swarms of shaving stubble being sucked down a drain.) Written, produced, and directed by Peter Hyams (who it seems wasn't up to any of those tasks), 2010 lacks the eerie quiet and zero-gravity drift of Kubrick's visionary expedition; it isn't a light-streaming hallucination. 2010 is a message movie - a peacenik plea for the United States and Russia to mend their differences so that both may witness a fruitful awakening. It's the greening of the universe, with a monolith sitting in the new Garden of Eden.


This swampy Eden looks like the lush spot where Spock was planted at the end of Star Trek II, and 2010 has the frowning, constipated look Star Trek had when it was trying to think. But even with a heavy brow, the Star Trek movies have some personality and bits of business, lightening moments of bad acting. 2010 has hatchet-faced Roy Scheider, whose taut tendons and orange-brown complexion suggest an Indian war chief who has just endured a purification ritual and emerged cruelly honed. Perhaps if he simply let go a little, he'd have something of William Shatner's relaxed, potty appeal. Here, his zippers look too tight.


For a movie that intends to be a celestial climb toward enlightenment, ascending through colors into blinding white light, 2010 doesn't offer much to enthrall the eye. Even the monolith lacks the iconic, hovering majesty that it had in the first adventure - this slab isn't worthy of fear or worship. No, the pleasures of 2010 are primarily aural: the harsh, rapid inflections of Helen Mirren's Russian accent (Mirren plays a cosmonaut); the hurried, frightened breathing of John Lithgow as he space walks above one of Jupiter's moons; the courteous, plaintive misgivings of HAL the computer; the playful clicks of a pair of dolphins. But the tiny, amusing distractions to the ear are of little help, because most of the time we're face to face with the movie's ponderous, immovable boredom.

In Capricorn One (1978), a pop thriller about a faked moon landing, Hyams showed some narrative zip and made amusing, functional use of TV rock heads like James Brolin and Hal Holbrook. 2010 doesn't have any of that Flying Tigers acceleration; its themes and incidents come neatly sliced. Scenes in which Scheider dotes on his son can be filed under Domestic Human Interest, conversations about U.S.-Soviet tensions in Central America belong in the Topical Political Comment folder, and so on. The exposition is so slow and redundant (everything in the opening titles is reexplained in later conversations) that it's as if Hyams feels compelled to update the story at intervals for latecomers in the audience. Cinematically, 2010 is a small step for a man, a giant step back for mankind.


Except for Roy Scheider's grimacing, the actors tend to coast, and who can blame them? Madolyn Smith, too good for this material, is stuck on Earth playing the Loyal Wife Back Home while the pouty, punk newcomer Natasha Shneider (who's described in the publicity as "a classically trained Russian rock'n'roll star" - well, awwwright!) is stuck in a module and clings to Scheider's warrior chest. Keir Dullea, looking as young as yesterday, reprises his role from 2001, but he might as well have sent in a body double, for all he has to do. The cast is carry-on luggage on this epic space shuttle to nowhere. 2001 swept the heavens clean of untidy human life, but its pristine, balletic vision at least seemed to derive from Stanley Kubrick's austere moodiness. 2010 doesn't derive from anything. It's an impersonal hosanna to peace with a big-bang miracle finish issuing from the skies like a greeting card from God. The monolith is the stamp on the envelope.

(Illustration by Melissa Grimes. Originally published in Texas Montly, January 1985)

Add 16 Years to '2001' and the Result is '2010'

by Aljean Harmetz


HOLLYWOOD

“How do you continue a classic?” asks Peter Hyams. The answer, says Mr. Hyams, who is currently directing 2010, a sequel to 2001: A Space Odyssey, is: with a great deal of anxiety and awe.

It was in the spring of 1968 that 2001, Stanley Kubrick's half-satiric, half-reverent vision of the bland and depersonalized future of the human race was thrust at movie audiences accustomed to science-fiction movies containing gigantic bugs, decaying monsters or malevolent aliens.

Though Mr. Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke, the respected science-fiction author, who had co-written the screenplay, had envisioned a cinematic parallel to Homer's “Odyssey,” and though critics were divided in their opinions, there was no mistaking the reaction of audiences.

Despite its mystical ending and deliberate tedious stretches designed to demonstrate the boredom of space flight, 2001: A Space Odyssey, was the fifth most successful box-office attraction in a year dominated by The Graduate. Since then, it has been reissued twice and earned M-G-M a total of more than $24 million in North American theaters.

“When I first saw 2001, says Mr. Hyams, “I was 25 years old. It was like finding a note in a bottle that said, 'There are no limits, no parameters, except your imagination ...' “

Since 2001 was made nearly a decade before the success of a movie almost automatically triggered a sequel, it has taken 16 years for MGM/UA to follow 2001 with 2010.

Now, at 41, Mr. Hyams, the writer-director of such science-fiction adventures as Outland and Capricorn One, is pitting himself against a classic.

The crew of the Leonov.

In 2010, which stars Roy Scheider, John Lithgow, Bob Balaban and Helen Mirren, a team of American and Russian scientists put aside their political differences to travel to Jupiter in search of the astronauts of 2001 and to find the meaning of the mysterious black monoliths created by some superhuman intelligence.

When Mr. Hyams was approached a year ago by Frank Yablans, the vice-chairman of MGM/UA, his first reaction to the prospect of directing the sequel was to call Stanley Kubrick, whom he had never met, to ask for his blessing. “He said it was O.K. with him,” Mr. Hyams says.

But it is clear that for Mr. Hyams making a sequel to 2001 is an emotional minefield. “No matter what I do on 2010 I can't live up to people's expectations. But it's desperately important to me that Arthur Clarke and Stanley Kubrick feel what they started 18 years ago isn't besmirched,” Mr. Hyams says.

“Nobody in his right mind can rip off 2001 or be stupid enough to think he can do what Kubrick did.”

Mr. Hyams urgently explains that his movie is not poetry, that it is “very, very accessible,” “a thriller with a beginning, middle and end,” “a hopeful and emotional movie with a focus very different from Kubrick's focus.”

But an hour later, all the wisps of anguish have been tucked away. Striding the set and shouting orders at his crew, Mr. Hyams is a brusque and peremptory movie director.

On MGM/UA's Stage 15, the largest sound stage in Hollywood, the spaceship that has been sent to discover what happened to the astronauts of 2001 sprawls like an inert plastic starfish. Unlike the Enterprise of Star Trek, with its mile-long corridors and ballroom-sized bridge, the Leonov of 2010 is narrow and cramped.

Made of gray plastic, the Leonov – named for Aleksei A. Leonov, a Soviet cosmonaut and friend of Mr. Clarke – has ominously low ceilings. Most of the available space is crammed with dials and levers. Computer-generated images compete with data readings on the nine monitor screens above control panels eerily backlit by fluorescent tubing.

“Our ship is no Holiday Inn,” says Mr. Hyams, whose production is expected to cost more than $20 million. “The last consideration is comfort. My image for the spaceship was the submarine in Das Boot.”

“We were building Das Spaceship,” says Albert Brenner, the production designer for 2010. “With the real space shuttle Columbia, the engineers put in a facility for a human whenever they could find a bit of space. The spaceship in 2001, the Discovery, was 800 feet long and looked like it was designed by an interior designer.”

“The spaceship in 2001 looked like the GE Kitchen of Tomorrow,” says Syd Mead, the visual futurist who designed the Leonov's lumpy exterior, encrusted with tubes and plates bolted together.

It is not a lovely exterior. For the ship's interior, however, cramped does not necessarily mean ugly. In the medical bay, the six cryogenic chambers for the scientists who will spend most of the 14-month trip to Jupiter in frozen sleep look like children's beds modeled after race cars, complete with stripes.

Syd Mead's console design for the Leonov.

If Arthur Clarke, who co-wrote 2001 from his short story The Sentinel, doesn't like 2010, it will be partly his own fault. Between Sept. 16, 1983 and April 15, 1984, he corresponded almost daily with Mr. Hyams by computer from his home in Sri Lanka. Since night in Sri Lanka is day in Los Angeles and vice versa, each man went to his computer in the morning to find the questions the other man had asked or answered overnight.

Having arrived at a somewhat slower speed – from Sri Lanka to London by SwissAir, London to New York by Concorde, by shuttle to Washington and then another plane to California, Mr. Clarke was strolling the plastic floors of the Leonov two weeks ago, a cheerful, burly man wearing a yellow T-shirt advertising one of his businesses, underwater skin-diving safaris off the coasts of Sri Lanka.

Mr. Hyams's script has been adapted from Mr. Clarke's 1982 novel, 2010: Odyssey Two. The search that is the basic premise of the novel is intact. However, Mr. Hyams is focusing on a subtext about the politics of Russians and Americans having to get along together.

Mr. Clarke – who has just recovered from an encounter with “a nasty parasite; it's virtually impossible to avoid parasites in Sri Lanka,” he says blithely – called the writing of 2010 almost accidental. He had written and published a movie outline based on another of his books and had discovered “that you can get in 10 pages all the guts of a novel without the hard work of having to write a novel. Having found out how satisfying a movie outline was as an exorcism, I wrote an 8- or 10-page sequel to 2001 and sent it to my agent to send to Omni or Playboy. He sent it straight back and said, 'You have to write the novel.' And I suddenly realized that I wanted to!”

On Stage 30, where Esther Williams used to swim, stuntmen fly across the chasm that was once her swimming pool. Beyond are the bright red cellophane brains of HAL 9000, the soft-voiced computer who was the most human character in 2001. And perhaps the most human emotion in that movie was HAL's terror as he was destroyed by the astronaut Dave Bowman.

For 2010, Douglas Rain, the Canadian actor who was the voice of HAL in 2001, was in and out of MGM/UA before one frame of the film was shot. The actors in the new movie react to his prerecorded voice.

But another ghost from 2001 did roam the sets for a week. Keir Dullea – the Dave Bowman who turns into a star child at the end of 2001 – says he had “the same feeling I had at my 30th high school reunion. The people were different but the campus was exactly the same. The most poignant scene for me was having the voice of HAL to work with: two disembodied voices in a set from 18 years ago.”

His part in 2010, Mr. Dullea says, is “the character everybody talks about for the first two acts, who finally appears in the third.” Like Mr. Rain, Mr. Dullea is often approached by fans of the first movie. They are usually people, he says, who want him to explain the film's ending. He has come to consider the ending a comment on the “cyclical” nature of existence. “The existence of man is a bone in the eye of eternity,” he says. “A caveman throws a bone in the air, and in the wink of an eye it turns into a spaceship. My character, as he ages, reaches up in the same fashion the caveman did.”

Sometimes the other actors in 2010 envied Mr. Dullea his role as a disembodied voice.

“Our space suits were unbelievably heavy because they were designed to be worn in a weightless environment,” says John Lithgow, who plays Curnow, an American rocketry expert who panics during a space walk. “They weighed 100 pounds. We hung like sausages on unbelievably heavy leather harnesses. We couldn's sit down because our suits wouldn't let us bend at the pelvis. They lowered us to the ground and we lay there like knights who'd fallen off their horses. Then someone would come around and put a pillow under our heads.”

“They laid us flat like cords of wood,” says Elya Baskin, a Russian actor who came to the United States in 1976 and who recently played the prominent role of a circus clown who wants to defect in Moscow on the Hudson.

In Russia, he said, “The Government tells moviemakers what should and shouldn't be done. In America, the market tells you. So there's the same percent of good films and bad films in each country. Actors are privileged people in Russia, so people in the movie industry here and there look the same – a little bit phony, a little bit cool.”

Mr. Lithgow, who has been nominated for an Academy Award as best supporting actor for the last two years for his performances as a transsexual in The World According to Garp and as a timidly adulterous banker in Terms of Endearment has a catalogue of “the other hideous things they exposed us to on 2010.”

“The cryogenic sleeptank suits had a fishnet effect with brass beads at all the junctions. It was like sitting or walking on pebbles and my body would be crisscrossed with red welts at the end of the day. The days we had to wallow around in yellow tempera pigment, we'd wear surgical masks until the moment of shooting. They refrigerated the set for an entire day so one character could explode with vapor when he opened his faceplate.”

Then he smiles and adds, “With actors, the more you suffer, the more interesting you think it is.”


(Originally published in New York Times, June 17, 1984) Source

On the Set of 2010

Launching a spectacular odyssey through the worlds of Arthur C. Clarke's imagination as realized by director Peter Hyams - and you're invited.

By LEE GOLDBERG


By itself, there's nothing interesting about the two-story, yellow plywood ball which occupies a blue-draped corner of MGM's cavernous stage 30. But if you squint, and use a little imagination, the sunlit soundstage suddenly becomes deep space. You are floating beside the sulphur-stained, derelict Discovery as the spacecraft performs its carousel spin in front of an ominous black shape set against the stars like a tombstone.

This is just a part of novelist Arthur C. Clarke's captivating vision, a story which began more than 15 years ago with director Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey and now continues in 2010, a cinematic sequel based on Clarke's bestselling follow-up. Director Peter (Outland) Hyams (STARLOG #85) adapted Clarke's novel and, now armed with a $25 million bankroll, he has assembled an international crew of actors, artisans and technicians to capture the long-awaited saga on film.

Hyams, in attempting to follow 2001, has assumed a seemingly impossible task. 2001 was a landmark motion picture, a science fiction filmmaking experience as no one had ever seen it before. Clarke and Kubrick created a sweeping, philosophical movie which traced mankind from its infancy to its first contact with life from another world. Utilizing state-of-the-art special effects and a classical music score, 2001 had a depth and intensity far beyond the cartoonish cinematic science fiction which had dominated the movie screens for decades.

But the technological wizardry that made 2001 unique is commonplace in films today. The streamlined, sterilized look of Kubrick's spacecraft has also been eclipsed by the familiar sight of NASA vehicles during the Apollo landings and the space shuttle flights. And the use of Richard Strauss' "Zarathustra" theme to characterize the majesty of space is itself now a cliché. All Hyams has left to work with from 2001 is the story and the questions it left unanswered.

"I don't think it's possible to repeat 2001. The first time is the first time. When I saw 2001, it blew my mind just like it did everyone else's," recalls 2010 star Roy (Blue Thunder) Scheider. "But the choice Kubrick made to make it particularly dull, deliberately dull, in that very modern situation, was a wonderful conceit which can only work once when you see the film for the first time. After that, the characters just become very, very dull. Peter was right to avoid that idea. You can't pull the same stunt twice."

The real task facing Hyams, who is also doubling as cinematographer and producer, is to imbue 2010 with enough original and compelling qualities so that the film can stand on its own merits while still measuring up to the classic example set by its predecessor.

Hyams has, in consultation with Clarke, altered the storyline of 2010. One of the film's crew members promises that moviegoers can expect the sequel to be "exciting and full of action, something you couldn't say about 2001. While 2001 was more cerebral, 2010 will be more accessible."

2001 star Keir Dullea agrees. "It's a different style, and it has more plot than 2001 but it dovetails very well."

"I think the film's plot will be much clearer than in 2001," Scheider says. "There's a story you can hook onto here and ride to the end, which you couldn't do in 2001."

Director Hyams explains, "The feeling of sheer terror, this is basically Arthur C. Clarke's story. It's a book he has written and a story he wanted to tell, I can only try to tell that story to the best of my ability, and hopefully please Arthur. In essence, I'm a tailor, and it's Arthur's suit. I have to fit that suit to a different body—a film—and obviously a different form of art than Arthur's book."

"I'm happy with the changes that Peter has made with 2010," adds actor Bob (Close Encounters of the Third Kind) Balaban, who plays HAL's creator in the sequel. "I like to think of the book as an outline for a good movie. Based on the script and the actors working on this film, 2010 could really be an exciting movie and not just, you know, 'ta-da, here's the sequel.' "


Past Odysseys

The material artifacts of Clarke's tales lay scattered about the mammoth soundstage 30. HAL, the coldly efficient computer who murdered astronaut Frank Poole (Gary Lockwood), and the sleeping Discovery crew, and doomed David Bowman (Keir Dullea) to an uncertain fate, is a harmless wooden box full of red plastic strips and fluorescent lights. The exterior and partial interior of the Leonov pod bay rises from a grimy pit that once, long ago, was filled with bright blue chlorinated water, allowing Esther Williams and a dozen swimsuit-clad starlets to frolic for the cameras. And off to one corner is the Discovery pod bay set where the legacy of 2001 and the promise of 2010 will meet.

The sets for 2010, says Peter Hyams, are
designed to appear functional and practical.

Just a few steps away, in another huge soundstage, the new environs of 2010 reside safely outside the shadow of memories from 2001. Here is the entire interior set of the Leonov, the Russian vessel which journeys to Jupiter to investigate the fate of the Discovery and astronaut David Bowman, whose last message - "My god, it's full of stars!" - continued to perplex scientists long after he disappeared into the monolith.

The Leonov is crewed by a team of U.S. and Soviet scientists. The U.S. scientists are Heywood Floyd (Scheider), who uncovered the lunar monolith; Walter Curnow (John Lithgow), an engineer and expert on the Discovery design; and Dr. Chandra (Balaban), journeying to fix HAL, his malfunctioning creation. The Russian crew is headed by Tanya Kirbuk (Helen Mirren of Excalibur), the Leonov commander (whose name is "Kubrick" spelled backwards) and engineer Max Brailovsky (Elya Baskin).

In addition to Baskin, the Soviet contingent includes several expatriate Russian actors. Among them are Vladimir Skomarovsky, once Best Soviet Actor in his home country; Savely Kramarov, the popular star of 42 Russian comedies; and Natasha Shneider, the lead singer of a "Western" style Russian rock'n'roll band before she emigrated to New York, and began a new American group, "White Russian."

Keir Dullea reappears in the Discovery pod bay as an ethereal David Bowman, Douglas Rain once again gives HAL his voice, and author Arthur C. Clarke turns up in a cameo on a Washington, D.C. park bench.

"I guess I have sort of proprietary interest in 2010," Dullea says of his second turn as Bowman. "I'm very glad I could be a part of it." Makeup expert Michael Westmore, who transformed actor John Lone into a Neanderthal for Iceman, will supervise Dullea's physical agings and regressions.

This is the big movie on the MGM lot, so despite the fact that it's based on a well-read book, everyone is "hush-hush" about the film. The set is closed. Guards stand watch both inside and outside the soundstages. Those few authorized visitors must wear dated, laminated identification cards that change color daily. The lone exception was England's Prince Andrew, who visited Los Angeles during the shooting and was conducted on a royal tour of the sets by Roy Scheider. The Prince's press entourage was left outside to stare at the grey soundstage and gape at the leotard-clad Fame dancers strolling to work.

Actor Elya Baskin, who emigrated from Russia in 1976 and recently co-starred in Moscow on the Hudson, found the set's rigid security and the sense of importance inferred by it, stoked his confidence and creativity.

"Everyone, starting with Peter Hyams on down to the costume and prop people, are so confident that we're doing something meaningful and important," he says. "It's very impressive. They take this work very seriously. You can feel it, walking on the set, that 2010 is something with extra meaning for everyone involved. This is far from routine work. That feeling and working with such a cast gives me great confidence. I feel privileged."

Yet, despite the sense of importance attached to their work, Balaban says the emotional temperature on the set stayed comfortably warm.

"The atmosphere around here is rather pleasant," he says. "When you walk on some movie sets, you get an immediate impression that there is ice flowing in many people's veins. The atmosphere here is due to Peter, mostly, and it flows down from there. Everybody's attitude is that 2010 will be a long movie to shoot, a meaningful movie, so let's be smart, let's be happy and let's be as creative as possible."

The inside of the Leonov soundstage is dark. A hazy cloud of gritty smoke flows thickly over the floor. When Hyams first came on the set, a crew member recalls, the director took a deep breath, exhaled slowly and grinned, "Ahhh, smells like filmmaking." The smoke is spewed out frequently between takes by a machine which lets out a hacking, mechanical cough that grates on the ears. The camera doesn't see the smoke, but it plays on the light, adding atmosphere.

Hyams huddles in front of a video monitor several yards away from the cramped Leonov communications room set, where Roy Scheider and Bob Balaban prepare for a scene. The two actors are doing their part of the initial Discovery reconnaissance trip that Lithgow and Baskin, suspended in front of a blue screen, filmed a few days earlier.

Movie directing has become something of a video game with the Louma Crane that Hyams is using. It's a camera, on a telescopic crane, which can snake into the narrow Leonov corridors and follow the cast. Hyams controls the crane from a station where he can see through the camera's eye on a video screen. The Louma crane allows the director to create a more claustrophobic feel and squeeze into areas where a camera and crew cannot go. It will be extremely useful when Balaban enters HAL to bring the computer "back to life."


Future Plastics

Wandering through the Leonov set is an education in set-making and detail. Stop at an airlock, a control panel, one of the space pods, any place where there's fine print to read. Look closely. It's always going to be the operating instructions for the zero gravity toilet from an early scene in 2001. It's an in-joke moviegoers will never notice. The camera will see only indiscernible lines of type. But there are other details, which moviegoers can see, that are far more interesting. Production designer Albert Brenner, whose previous work includes Turning Point and Hyams' Capricorn One, is the man behind them.

The Leonov, Brenner stresses, is a differnt sort of ship than the Discovery. "We're machinery, floating hardware," he says. "The feel of the Leonov is entirely different [from that of the Discovery]. We had a problem with this film - we had to stay close to 2001 while also taking into account the audience's new visual sense. The Discovery is slick and streamlined with nothing showing. Audiences don't see space travel as something so sleek anymore. The Leonov is more like a flying tugboat or submarine."

"Hundreds of miles" of wiring, some serving a real function, others used only as set dressing, are strewn over the set's grey-and-white interior and plywood exterior. More than 120 TV monitors dot the Leonov's halls. Yet, Brenner says, that isn't even enough. The monitors serve double, sometimes triple, duty and are yanked out when the action changes locale to fill other portions of the Leonov set and part of the Discovery. The abundance of monitors and other instrumentation is visual futurist Syd (Blade Runner) Mead's responsibility.

"I gave Syd the sketches and he filled in the details," Brenner says. "You know, the TV sets, readouts and stuff. It was just a bunch of garbage in my sketches. Instrumentation is Syd's specialty."

There is no room in the Leonov set for the traditional bulky movie lights - and that is intentional. "Peter likes to work with available light," Brenner explains. "Tight, claustrophobic set's aren't amenable to lighting. So, we turn on all the monitors and switches and that's it. Peter uses fast film. There's a tremendous amount of fluorescent and incandescent light. All the banks of plastic switches are lit from behind by fluorescent tubes. The light intensity is cut down by the colored plastic switches."

The Leonov is also a "wild set," meaning many sections are removable to allow the camera to poke through and film from several angles. Original plans to "shoot up through the floor," Brenner says, were scrapped. So, the set is on the ground. The corridor floors are simply hard, plastic, industrial pallets utilized for shipping materials.

Director Peter Hyams and production designer
Albert Brenner examine the Leonov model.

The Leonov flight deck, however, is suspended over a hole in the soundstage and built on an axle-like mount. In the flight deck, the chairs are refitted armor plated helicopter seats "that weigh a ton," Brenner groans. "We retro-fitted things onto them to give them this look. They're wonderful. At one point in the film, we must get away in a hurry. So, there's a rapid acceleration. When that happens, everything falls backwards under the force of the thrust. So, we strap the actors into those seats and take the entire set, turn it 90 degrees and let everything fall."

"But," he grins playfully, "the real secret to all of this is Joe's Plastic in Vernon, California. He gets scrap plastic from everywhere and recycles it. I found the place and acted like a kid in a candy shop. This ship is full of pieces from Joe's Plastic."

Brenner sweeps his hand expansively over the set, inviting visitors to look around at the details of the Leonov interior for "anything unusual." It isn't easy. And Brenner, smiling, knows it. "Right here," he points, "is a little device that's really one half of a ski tote. Those, over there, are small motor housings from lawn mowers. That brown object protruding from the wall is a child's car seat turned down and spray-painted. That, by the door, is a Sparklett's water bottle; that's a pool filter; and that, a car bumper."

Welcome to the future.

"Joe never thought he would be in the movie business," Brenner laughs, strolling through the Leonov's dark corridors. "I bought everything that looked interesting. I just pointed things out, I asked for 20 of those, a couple hundred of these. I had a huge mountain of plastic hauled down here. As the set was being built, I went through the rubble and picked out pieces, roamed around the set and put them on the wall."

"I had a picnic in my backyard last June where I served ice cream cones. The cones come in a box packed in styrofoam packaging. The packaging is interesting, something you would usually throw out without looking at it." Brenner grins. "I'll show it to you on the walls."

The entire Leonov set is littered with, well, litter – and liberally polished with several coats of imagination. Basking found it a fascinating contrast to Russian film making and a further incentive to give his best efforts to this role.

"In Russia, money is not limited. If a film requires a high budget, the government gives it. So, seeing a big set isn't such a big surprise, but to see such a masterfully crafted set ... I was really shocked when I saw the work Albert Brenner and Syd Mead have done. During the whole filming, I was still wandering around the set, touching things. I was very fascinated. And then Al took me to the special-effects place which was even more impressive. I tell you, working with such fine craftsmen and such experienced actors helps you do your very best."

Brenner began designing the sets while Hyams was still busy hammering out the screenplay. "I began working from the book, though the set is laid out for the screenplay's geography," the production designer notes.

Reconstructing the Discovery proved to be a challenge. "We had to go through a print of 2001, pull out frames, and work backwards from there because the blueprints for the original sets were destroyed," Brenner explains. "So, we pulled out maybe 50 frames and, based on the size of the people, we plotted out how large the set actually was. We've reconstructed the airlock, flight deck, corridor interior and pod bay. We've also done some exterior pieces of the Discovery's front ball and the spine which leads back from it to the engine."

As difficult as the task was, they were successful. "The sets from the Discovery have been reproduced exactly and I hadn't seen them in 10 years," says Dullea, remembering his days in 2001. "To walk on the set was like going through a time machine."

"This movie is going to be something," Keir Dullea notes, a strange smile creeping across his face. "Something wonderful."

(Originally published in Starlog Magazine. Copyright ©1984 Starlog.)