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David Bowie took a few drops of cannabis tincture before watching, and countless others dropped acid. Hippies may have saved “2001.” “Stoned audiences” flocked to the movie. Kubrick’s gleeful machinery, waltzing in time to Strauss, had bounded past an abundance of human misery on the ground. Renata Adler, in the Times, described the movie as “somewhere between hypnotic and immensely boring.” Its “uncompromising slowness,” she wrote, “makes it hard to sit through without talking.” In Harper’s, Pauline Kael wrote, “The ponderous blurry appeal of the picture may be that it takes its stoned audience out of this world to a consoling vision of a graceful world of space.” Onscreen it was 2001, but in the theatres it was still 1968, after all.

“2001” isn’t long because it is dense with storytelling it is long because Kubrick distributed its few narrative jolts as sparsely as possible. There is something almost taunting about the movie’s pace. “2001” is a hundred and forty-two minutes, pared down from a hundred and sixty-one in a cut that Kubrick made after those disastrous premières. A businessman overheard on his way out of a screening spoke for many: “Well, that’s one man’s opinion.” Strangelove, Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.” From the look of things, the Zeitgeist was not going to strike twice. It had been four years full of setbacks and delays since the director’s triumph, “ Dr. Kubrick, a doctor’s son from the Bronx who got his start as a photographer for Look, was turning forty that year, and his rise in Hollywood had left him hungry to make extravagant films on his own terms. The after-party at the Plaza was “a room full of drinks and men and tension,” according to Kubrick’s wife, Christiane. Clarke, Kubrick’s collaborator, was in tears at intermission.

Kubrick nervously shuttled between his seat in the front row and the projection booth, where he tweaked the sound and the focus. A sixth of the New York première’s audience walked right out, including several executives from M-G-M. In the annals of audience restlessness, these evenings rival the opening night of Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring,” in 1913, when Parisians in osprey and tails reportedly brandished their canes and pelted the dancers with objects. To hear more feature stories, download the Audm app for your iPhone.įifty years ago this spring, Stanley Kubrick’s confounding sci-fi masterpiece, “ 2001: A Space Odyssey,” had its premières across the country.