Sixties City - Bill Harry's Sixties - articles from the creator of iconic 60s music paper Mersey Beat


Sixties City presents a wide-ranging series of articles on all aspects of the Sixties, penned by the creator of the iconic 60s music paper Mersey Beat

Arguably, the best science fiction film ever made. Stanley Kubrick’s tour de force creates a genuine cinematic experience in which the music and images have a profound effect on the audience. Defying conventions, the first sentence is not spoken until thirty minutes into the film and the ending is left to the imagination of the viewer. Kubrick had the idea for such a film at the back of his mind for some time before joining forces with sci-fi writer Arthur C. Clarke to loosely adapt the author’s short story ‘The Sentinel’ into a movie that was originally going to be called ‘Journey Beyond the Stars'. ‘2001’ is a total experience and the music is an important part of the whole, with Richard Strauss' inspiring ‘Also sprach Zarathustra’, composed in 1896 and inspired by Friedrich Nietzsche's philosophical 1883–1885 novel 'Thus Spoke Zarathustra' in the ‘Dawn of Man’ sequence. Another Strauss, Johann Straus II, composed ‘The Blue Danube’ waltz which is heard as the Orion space craft weaves its magic way towards the space wheel. The ‘Corridors of Light’ sequence was so breathtaking that certain people equated it with the experience induced by drugs such as LSD and on its first re-release, the film was promoted as ‘The Ultimate Trip'.

The film begins on the plains of Africa when the apelike hominids face extinction by the stronger creatures of tooth and claw. Humankind itself seems likely to be nipped in the bud in the early stages of its evolution. An alien monolith is discovered by one of the man-apes who, when he touches it, experiences a transcendence which leads him to develop intelligence and guide his people to take control and master their hostile environment. As he tosses a bone into the sky, we are transported thousands of years into the future where Dr. Heywood Floyd (William Sylvester) travels aboard the Orion space craft on his way to the Moon. He stops at the orbiter Hilton Hotel within a gigantic space wheel before boarding the Aries shuttle craft on his final journey to Earth’s satellite. In the area of the Clavius crater another monolith has been found. During excavations in Tycho crater the monolith, imposing, vibrating, emits a signal aimed at Jupiter. Eighteen months later the massive interplanetary craft 'Discovery' has set out on its journey to Jupiter with four astronauts resting in suspended hibernation in a hibernaculum whilst two crewmen, Frank Poole (Gary Lockwood) and David Bowman (Keir Dullea) attend to the day-to-day duties which take little of their time as the smooth running of the ship is in the hands of Hal 9000 (Heuristically programmed ALgorithmic computer), the world’s most advanced computer (voiced by Douglas Rain).

The artificial intelligence gradually begins to take over the ship and, when the two humans realise this, Hal decides to destroy them. After shutting down the life support systems in the hibernaculum he kills Poole by ordering a space pod to crush him whilst the astronaut is outside the ship mending an antenna. Bowman, trapped outside the Discovery, uses his ingenuity to blast his way into an air lock and make his way to Hal’s brain, which he partially dismantles. A message informs him of his mission to investigate the alien signal. Reaching Jupiter he is transformed by another monolith floating in space, is hurled through a star gate and undergoes a transcendence which turns him into a 'Star Child', the next major step in human evolution. Kubrick left the ending enigmatic, having changed the original finale in which the Star Child causes orbiting H-bombs to explode and thus destroy the world. There were many changes in the ideas that led up to the final film, some of which are outlined in several books ranging from ‘The Making of 2001’ to Clarke’s ‘The Lost Worlds of 2001'. The malevolent Hal, for instance, was originally set to be a computer called Athena, with a woman’s voice.

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HAL starts the mission as a reliable crew member who maintains ship functions and engages with the human crew on an equal footing. In the film, Frank Poole plays chess against HAL whose artificial intelligence is shown to triumph easily. However, as time goes by, HAL starts to show small signs of malfunction resulting in the decision to shut HAL down in order to prevent more serious problems occurring. The events leading to the shut down decision differ between the book and film versions. In the book, HAL makes minor and undetected mistakes in his analysis of chess games, raising suspicions of his possible malfunctioning. In the film, Bowman and Poole discuss disconnecting HAL's cognitive circuits when he seems to be in error when reporting a fault in the spacecraft's communications antenna. Although they attempt to conceal what they are saying, they are not aware that HAL can read their lips.

Faced with the prospect of shut down, HAL decides to kill the astronauts in order to protect his programmed directives and uses one of the Discovery's EVA pods to kill Poole while he is outside the ship carrying out repairs to the antenna. Poole is pulled away into deep space by his safety tether which is still attached to the pod. Without a space helmet, Bowman uses another pod in an attempt to rescue Poole but HAL locks him out of the ship telling Bowman "This mission is too important for me to allow you to jeopardise it". Bowman avoids HAL's system control, getting back inside the ship by manually opening an emergency airlock with his service pod's clamps, detaching the pod door using its explosive bolts. Jumping across empty space, Bowman reenters Discovery and re-pressurises the airlock. He begins to revive the hibernating crew but fails as HAL vents the ship's atmosphere into space, killing the awakening crew members and nearly killing Bowman, who saves himself by finding an emergency chamber which has its own oxygen supply and a spare space suit. In both versions, Bowman then makes plans to shut down the computer.

Hal mostly appears as a camera lens containing a red and yellow dot, with similar units located throughout the ship. In the film, HAL's central core appears as a space full of brightly lit modules mounted in arrays from which they can be inserted or removed. Bowman shuts HAL down by removing modules one at a time. As he does this, HAL's consciousness slowly degrades and finally reverts to material that was programmed into him early in his memory such as announcing the date he became operational: "I am a HAL 9000 computer. I became operational at the H A L plant in Urbana, Illinois, on the 12th of January 1992".

When HAL's logic finally ceases to exist he begins singing the song 'Daisy Bell' as he gradually deactivates (the first song sung by a computer, which Clarke had observed at a text-to-speech demonstration). HAL's final action is to play the prerecorded message from Mission Control which reveals the true reasons for the mission to Jupiter. In the film, HAL quotes himself as becoming operational on 12th January 1992. In earlier screenplays the activation year was 1991 and was changed to 1997 in Clarke's subsequent novel, published in conjunction with the movie. Also in the novel, the mission was heading to Saturn.

Clarke stated that he had considered 'Autonomous Mobile Explorer 5' as a name for the computer, changing this to 'Socrates' when writing early drafts. In later drafts this becomes 'Athena', a computer with a female personality, before settling on HAL 9000. HAL Communications Corporation is actually a real corporation, with facilities located in Urbana, Illinois, which is where the movie HAL identifies himself as being activated. The former president of HAL Communications, Bill Henry, has stated that this is merely a coincidence: "There was not, and never has been, any connection to 'Hal', Arthur Clarke's intelligent computer in the screen play '2001', later published as a book. We were very surprised when the movie hit the Coed Theatre on campus and discovered that the movie's computer had our name. We never had any problems with that similarity - 'Hal' for the movie and 'HAL' (all caps) for our small company. But, from time-to-time, we did have issues with others trying to use 'HAL'. That resulted in us paying lawyers. The offenders folded or eventually went out of business".

During rehearsals, while searching for a suitably androgynous voice, Kubrick asked Stefanie Powers to provide the voice of HAL 9000 so that the actors had something to react to. On the set, British actor Nigel Davenport played HAL. When it came to post-production dubbing HAL Kubrick had originally considered Martin Balsam, but felt that he "just sounded a little bit too colloquially American", so he was replaced with Douglas Rain, who "had the kind of bland mid-Atlantic accent we felt was right for the part". Rain was only handed HAL's lines instead of the full script, and recorded them across a day and a half.

After the release of the film, fans noticed that HAL was a one-letter shift from the name IBM leading to speculation that this was a dig at the large computer company, something that has been denied by both Clarke and 2001 director Stanley Kubrick. In his book 'Lost Worlds of 2001' Clarke stated " ...about once a week some character spots the fact that HAL is one letter ahead of IBM, and promptly assumes that Stanley and I were taking a crack at the estimable institution ... As it happened, IBM had given us a good deal of help, so we were quite embarrassed by this, and would have changed the name had we spotted the coincidence". IBM were consulted during the making of the film and their logo can be seen on props in the film, including the Pan Am Clipper's cockpit instrument panel and on the lower arm keypad on Poole's space suit.

The cast included Leonard Rossiter, Ed Bishop, Penny Brahms and Edwina Carroll. The 9000th of the asteroids in the asteroid belt, 9000 Hal, discovered on 3rd May 1981, by E. Bowell at Anderson Mesa Station, is named after HAL 9000.

Bill Harry attended the Liverpool College of Art with Stuart Sutcliffe and John Lennon and made the arrangements for Brian Epstein to visit The Cavern, where he saw The Beatles for the first time. Bill was a member of 'The Dissenters' and the founder and editor of 'Mersey Beat', the iconic weekly music newspaper that documented the early Sixties music scene in the Liverpool area and is possibly best known for being the first periodical to feature a local band called 'The Beatles'. He has worked as a high powered publicist, doing PR for acts such as Suzi Quatro, Free, The Arrows and Hot Chocolate and has managed press campaigns for record labels such as CBS, EMI, Polydor. Bill is the critically acclaimed author of a large number of books about The Beatles and the 60s era including 'The Beatles Who's Who', 'The Best Years of the Beatles' and the Fab Four's 'Encyclopedia' series. He has appeared on 'Good Morning America' and has received a Gold Award from the British Academy of Songwriters, Composers and Authors.

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