“I am certain it will all come out right in the end”

It's now official, so I can post it here as well!

On July 22 I will take part in a symposium held by the Deutsches Filmmuseum in Frankfurt, Germany, in occasion of the '2001' official 50th anniversary exhibition, 'Kubrick’s 2001. 50 years A SPACE ODYSSEY' that will be hosted there from March 21 to September 16. Here's the full program: http://2001.deutsches-filmmuseum.de/veranstaltungen/

I will deliver a 45-minutes long presentation titled

 “I am certain it will all come out right in the end”:

The Kubrick-Clarke collaboration on '2001: A Space Odyssey' and beyond.

Here's the abstract:

The most celebrated of Stanley Kubrick’s artistic partnership, namely his work with Arthur C. Clarke on '2001: A Space Odyssey' (1968), has usually been discussed only through the lenses of the writer's published memoirs about the making of the movie. 

Mainly focused on the author’s struggle to come up with a satisfying plot and, perhaps most infamously, on his efforts to finalize a deal for the publication of the book that the two were concurrently writing, these works have contributed to a misunderstanding about the relationship between the writer and the director, that has often described in the general press as difficult or conflicted, true to the usual narrative about Kubrick the ‘dictatorial genius’. 

Actually, the two enjoyed a long friendship; the usually hard-to-please director said that his relationship with Clarke was one of the most “fruitful and enjoyable” he ever had, and when the director passed away in 1999, the writer said “My professional career owes more to Stanley than to anybody else in the world.”

By making use of the correspondence held in the Kubrick Archive and in the recently opened Arthur C. Clarke Collection in the Smithsonian Museum in Virginia, I will shed some light on the collaboration between the director and the writer on 2001, using as case histories the key points in the evolution of the plot and the issue over the publication of the book. 

I will also cover their (so far) largely ignored collaboration in the development of a screenplay based on Brian Aldiss’s short story 'Supertoys last all summer long' in the early Nineties (a project eventually brought to the screen by Steven Spielberg as 'A.I. : Artificial Intelligence'), to compare the two experiences and see if their attitudes, interests and working methods changed over time.

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So if you're planning to visit the exhibition, why don't you take your summer vacation on July and kill two birds with one stone? Not to mention that the two-day symposium will feature some great Kubrick scholars, like Filippo Ulivieri, James Fenwick (editor of the book Understanding Kubrick's 2001, for which I wrote a chapter) and Vincent Jaunas!