Victor Lyndon (1918-1996)
Production notes for 2001: A Space Odyssey
notes bound with three brads comprising 161pp. of mimeographed typescript on 81 leaves each mounted on linen guards, several stamped in green ink 'BOORUM & PEASE "NOTEAR" "®'
11¹⁄₂ x 10¹⁄₂ in. (29.2 x 26.5 in.)
1965

Extremely rare production notes from the most innovative film in science fiction, Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Toward the end of May 1965, Victor Lyndon, Associate Producer to Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, prepared a typescript of production notes based on a series of conferences held at Kubrick’s Polaris Productions office in New York. At that early stage, the film’s working title was 'Journey Beyond the Stars'. This complete copy of those momentous notes, on their original 1965 Boorum & Pease 'NOTEAR' sheets, is an incredibly rare and important survivor from the history of the production.

When 2001: A Space Odyssey was released in 1968, viewers had never seen anything like it before. ‘I felt it was necessary’, Kubrick told a journalist, ‘to make this film in such a way that every special effects shot in it would be completely convincing – something that had never before been accomplished in a motion picture.’ Kubrick was able to achieve such an unprecedented quality to his universe only through enormous effort and feverish attention to detail, collaborating with a team of astronomical artists, aeronautics specialists, and aerospace engineers to design his sets.

The special effects in 2001 were unthinkably ahead of their time, seeming even half a century later to have been a product of legitimate Hollywood magic, but this set of production notes offers a guide to the practical anatomy of Kubrick’s luminous, weightless world. Such iconic sequences as the ‘centrifuge walk’ on the Discovery One spaceship are outlined in multi-page descriptions, while other details of the film are apparently still in the process of being realised. One such detail is the design for the mutinous robot which in these notes is referred to as ‘Athena’, the original name for the character who would later become known as HAL.

In a 1968 interview, Kubrick mused that he had ‘never been able to decide whether the plot is just a way of keeping people’s attention while you do everything else’. As a two-and-a-half-hour film which only reserved 40 minutes of screen time for dialogue, 2001 seems to be Kubrick’s own investigation of this question. This extremely rare and detailed volume of production notes offers an extraordinary opportunity to understand how he managed to achieve the ‘everything else’ which makes 2001 so iconic.

Collection of John Hoesli (1919-1997), art director of 2001: A Space Odyssey, who gifted to the preset owner,
Piers Bizony, noted 2001 historian and author of 2001: Filming the Future.