40th Anniversary of 2001:A Space Odyssey

Andre Lieven wrote:
I've heard that Chloris Leachman said similar things about some of her
best work on Blazing Saddles.


I kind of hate to tell you this, but that was Madeline Kahn in Blazing
Saddles....Cloris Leachman was in Young Frankenstein, and did do a
slam-dunk job in that part, although just about everyone else was out
shown by Gene Hackman's cameo as the blind man.
How he ended up in that movie is that he and Gene Wilder used to play
tennis together, and Hackman said he wanted to play some small part in
the movie. Wilder was amazed that he wanted anything to do with
something like that.
I love how they leave the Espresso scene to the viewer's imagination...
if he can wreak that much havoc with soup, just imagine him with live
steam. :-D



This isn't exactly helped by the fact that the people on the Moon in the
movie walk and move as if they are at full Earth gravity, rather than
1/6 G, so you might think they are on the surface of some other planet
that has near Earth strength gravity.


There were, after all, limits to 1968 SPFX technology. Plus, don't
forget,
as of 1968, no member of the public had yet seen humans walking on
the Moon, so there was nothing immediate to visually compare to.


Except other science fiction movies, and a lot of times they had people
jumping around in the low lunar gravity as a staple.
I think the Disney "Man In Space" series of programs made most people
realize that the gravity on the Moon was far lower, and you could leap
around.
Considering all the trouble Kubrick went to to simulate weightlessness,
leaving the low Gs out of the few lunar scenes was a little odd.

Pat