Today, fifty years ago, the movie that became '2001: A Space Odyssey' was announced for the first time. The New York Times, with a two-day advance on the release of the February 23, 1965 official press statement from MGM, revealed in an article titled "Beyond the Blue Horizon" that Stanley Kubrick was preparing to delve into the future with a movie to be called "Journey Beyond The Stars".
The Variety press release (from the February 22, 1965 issue)
As Peter Kramer points out in his great 2001 book from BFI, MGM's press released announced, (somewhat misleadingly as it turned out), that the film would have "a cast of international importance", and "be filmed in Switzerland and Germany" among the other settings.
As I wrote in my previous article about the many tentative titles of 2001, a 15-minute 70 mm. space documentary called Journey to the stars had already been shown at the Seattle World Fair in 1962; there is ample evidence, in the Kubrick Archive in London, showing that the director was aware of it and was interested in the camera techniques used to depict space and project it on a large screen.
The original press statement from February 23, 1965 appeared on Piers Bizony's "Filming The Future" and is now available here.
UPDATE Thanks to the blog Kubrick En Castellano, here are the scans of the Bizony book (pp.10 & 11) with the original MGM press release.
UPDATE Thanks to the blog Kubrick En Castellano, here are the scans of the Bizony book (pp.10 & 11) with the original MGM press release.
