WM: Well, I thought not, but he was so passionate about things.

CP: We were trying to figure out a way to get him to work on it because he had worked on a show I did in New York, and oddly enough, the thing he was most interested in contributing to the film was sound. At that point in his career he had started doing a lot of sound work, music, and he was hoping to get involved in that aspect of it. Doug and I were interested in the slit scan process, although we hadn't really gotten into it. There came a point on 2001 when we were trying to devise a couple of effects that needed some sort of stop-motion smearing effect. We fiddled around with some things, but then Doug went off and bought a Mechano set. The British have incredible engineers. You can get stuff there that is just remarkable. For about £100, we bought this huge kit, like a tinker toy sort of thing, with which you could build just about any kind of mock up of a mechanical device. Doug actually built a little analog mechanical computer out of it. One thing led to another and he ended up using the same bug-eyed camera that we had used to make the dome show for the New York World's Fair, which we had coincidentally brought over with us, and built this big machine to do time lapse on a very large scale. A five foot slit with stuff passing through it, artwork on a big conveyor belt -- and that is how the stargate sequence came about, because we were looking for something besides the wet paint stuff that Stanley had done in New York, which was really his primer for the film, no pun intended. It was a paint effect that was done by a couple of guys from the Carolinas called Effects Y'All. They had done this sort of carnival medium of oil and water. They used different kinds of paint and chemicals and shot it at about 60 frames a second. The stuff was terrific. They shot an awful lot of stuff in New York in '65 and that was some of the stuff he'd shown me in '65 before the production started in England.

A model of the space station used in "The Blue Danube Waltz" section of 2001. Courtesy of Con Pederson.

It was really beautiful. Most of what we saw became the foundation of the Stargate sequence in 2001. One good story about that: Stanley got those guys, or one of them, back over to England to Borehamwood at MGM where they took a big chunk of Stage 5 and built a big enclosure with a kind of airlock, like a regular dark room. Wouldn't let anybody in. They didn't want anybody to know how they were doing this stuff, no matter where they were. They spent about a month, shooting and shooting and shooting the same exact effects of paint swirling and that sort of thing. They had thousands of feet of new stargate material. Finally, they just closed it down, decided we had enough so we could pick what we needed. Well, later on Stanley's wife, my wife, and I sat down and culled through several hours of that stuff and I don't think we used a single frame of all that stuff that they'd shot in England. Everything that was shot in New York magically just seemed to work so much better, and we never knew why. It was just amazing looking, and we didn't have to do anything to it. Although we did use some of it, and retreated it optically. In fact, we spent about a year making what we called 'purple hearts,' which were colorized versions of different effects that were composited sort of primitively together.

That whole Stargate sequence replaced what originally was a trip through the cosmos to see where the extraterrestrials were coming from. We had toyed with the idea of the extraterrestrials being defined and explained by a narrator. We thought of different narrators and I suggested a guy named Doug Raine who had done a film on astronomy in Canada that was really great. I got the film and Stanley liked Doug's voice, but it turned out that he had to have a new voice for Hal, the computer, which was originally a woman called Athena in the first version. Anyway, Hal 9000 needed a voice and Stanley tried quite a lot of people for it, and didn't care for any of the voices. At that point, we threw out the narrator -- decided it was going to be too preachy, too stodgy to have a narrator, and too much of a documentary -- so we tried Doug Raine as the voice of the computer and the rest is history: he was perfect for it! But originally he would have been the narrator of the film: there was even a prologue in black-and-white, along the lines of Cinerama, where you started in black-and-white and open up, which is by now a well-entrenched cliché, to mix a metaphor. For that we shot Carl Sagan, and a lot of the eminent astronomers of the time, talking about the cosmos. That whole thing was thrown out -- again it was too dry, too didactic. Went through a lot of permutations, there was a stack of scripts. Arthur Clarke would come from Ceylon and spend a few weeks until he'd get worried about taxes and then he'd have to leave the country and go on tour. It was entertaining.

I wish now I'd kept some of that stuff. I didn't keep anything from the picture. When we were still planning to do a lot of other-worldly stuff, I spent several months just painting pseudo-Bonestall "science fiction" things. I don't know what happened to those. They were probably destroyed, because everything Stanley could, he destroyed. We had all these scripts and one particular script I really wish I'd kept -- I had no interest in keeping that stuff at the time -- but in this one, the first page, if you turned it over, there was all this scribbling on it that was obviously written during a conversation that Stanley was having with Arthur and up at the top there were a lot of doodles and in this scribbling handwriting were sort of ideas: there was "2001" here and "an odyssey" there, and then "an odyssey in space," and there were all these little trial balloons and down at the bottom there was "2001: A Space Odyssey" underscored a couple of times, all of this in Stanley's ball-point. I just realized a few years later that I should have kept that. He burned everything that he could for a reason.