One day I was walking around toward Stage 3 and I saw this airplane -- they were making Battle of Britain or The Dirty Dozen I think it was, because they had a whole bunch of football players there from the NFL that were portraying the dirty dozen. Jim Brown was there, and I walked by this plane and thought, "That really looks familiar." I saw Stanley later on for lunch, and I said, "You know, they got a plane out there that looks like the bomber in Doctor Strangelove." He says, "What? Where?" I said, "Right over by Stage 3. They're setting it up for The Dirty Dozen or something." So he says, "Come on. Show me," and we ran over and he looks at it and he said, "Oh, my God!" You could just visualize Slim Pickens hanging out of that thing. Stanley just freaked. He called the studio and said, "You can't do this." At that point he began to realize that he had a lot of stuff that he'd shot in England on other projects that was in jeopardy of being used again, so from then on he instituted a policy of destroying everything.

WM: Slash and burn.

CP: Slash and burn so nobody could use anything that we built again, including a lot of the models, some of which were actually salvaged I guess. It's funny because you don't know how to think about props in a movie. They become valuable; antique collectors pick them up. People sell autographed stuff. You see all this stuff and you get a kind of scummy feeling about it. You don't know how to think about something that is, you might say, a second-generation celebrity, in that there is a cliché that has to do with people who are famous because they are famous and they are usually on the cover of People magazine. Don't ask me to name names.(laughs) The idea of celebrity in America, and possibly other places, is to me a little warped. (laughs) It is a little frustrating because it isn't a matter of envy that actors get all the glory and all the money for speaking lines that someone else writes. No one knows who writes a picture unless they are famous for something else. So as a one-time would-be writer and someone who has done a lot of writing (and I'm sure you can sympathize with this), I have a lot more respect for the writer anytime than I do for somebody who follows after to perform it.

WM: One last question about 2001. Is the pacing all Kubrick's? The Stargate sequence is really long; it is leisurely and grand and sort of builds and has a whole dynamic of its own. It's much longer than any kind of special-effect sequence would be in any other movie that I can think of.

CP: Everything in that film was Stanley's. Although we did storyboards and planned everything out, we never really had a sense of how long the overall film would be. We estimated it to be pretty close to what the first release was, which was 2 1/2 to almost 3 hours. There was an intermission. Though I once asked Ray Lovejoy, who was the editor and everything else in the office, I asked him some naive question about a rough cut and he looked at me kind of cross-eyed and said, "Stanley doesn't do rough cuts," (laughs) and I said, "Oh, really. That's a new one on me." Of course he makes rough cuts, everyone does -- by definition it's pretty hard to start with a finished product! But I watched 2001 being cut (because our offices were all right together, so we were cutting in the same little building). It was going on all the time. He would be cutting one sequence before it was finished, while we were working on another sequence, and obviously it was episodic, but Stanley had the last say on the timing of everything.

Also, the sequences were done out of order. The last sequence shot was "The Dawn of Man," which ended up being the first sequence in the film. It was entirely different from anything else, so it was shot with an entirely different frame of reference. Prior to that, the last sequence was really the ending, which was the bedroom scene. The Stargate sequence that proceeded that was made all through '67. The first stuff that we shot, in December of '65, mostly at Shepperton because they had the biggest sound-stage in England, was the block, the monolith sitting in the big excavation, the TMA1 site, the Tycho Magnetic Anomaly One. We shot the film, I remember, Wally Veevers had the film in the can from that set in December of '65, latent film images that were not developed, locked off cameras, a lot of footage, and Doug and I had to put earth and stars in that later on. It sat in a can on the roof of the lab building for two years, exposed film, undeveloped, and we finally got around to doing the mock-up plaster work for the horizon and put the stars and the Earth in there, and we said, "Gee, I wonder how this footage is going to work." We had some test footage and it looked okay. Would it be steady? Would the color have changed? Because people are not in the habit of leaving film in the can for two years. But it was perfect. Perfect. One of the things that I did was to keep track of all those things, the footage, the film itself, the negative. We had a lot of stuff up on the roof in a vault that you had to walk across a board on the roof to get to it. Kind of bizarre. (laughs)

WM: So what did you do after 2001?

CP: Well, I worked on a novel that I am still working on after 30 years, but I don't take it seriously. The trouble with writing is that I always sort of enjoyed treating it as a kind of cartoon. I like the fact that I started out as a cartoonist more or less, advertising art and commercials not withstanding, so I guess what writing I've done has been sort of verbal cartoons, sort of tongue-in-cheek maybe. I felt that if I wrote really serious stuff, which I have a drawer full of, when I'd look at it later, my mind set was so different that I thought, "This is crap." So I guess I didn't have to be a writer for any particular reasons. My verbal skills were sufficient so that now I entertain myself by constructing crosswords. I started high class crosswords last year. I have had several in the Wall Street Journal, a couple in the Washington Post. Crossword construction has been the hobby that has replaced stamp collecting. It's an unappreciated craft, because it's exceptionally difficult and there are only a few people who are really good at constructing crosswords, by that I mean the Sunday puzzles, the good ones that are always entertaining because of the theme. That's kind of replaced any thoughts of making a movie someday.