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It is important to understand the far-reaching appeal of the 1960s space race not only because it contributed to the reasons the film was made, but also because it established a frame for the for the film’s initial release. On May 25, 1961, President John F. Kennedy gave one of his most memorable and influential speeches, calling for the United States to land a man on the moon before the end of the decade. Having been humiliated by the Soviet Union in their attempts to launch an astronaut into orbit, the young National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) was committed to winning the race to the moon, no matter what the financial cost. With very few exceptions, they had the support of the American public, who not only eagerly followed every launch but also made the young men of the astronaut corps national heroes. Hundreds of thousands of people were directly involved in making the components and devices that would be necessary to perform the Herculean task of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to Earth. At the same time, American film studios were going through a transition that played a key role in the production and initial release of 2001. The introduction of television in the 1950s, the collapse of the studio system following the 1948 Paramount antitrust decrees, and the creative stagnation caused by the blacklisting of many actors and screenwriters had dealt a serious blow to the prestige of American cinema. Many studios took enormous gambles during the 1950s and 1960s, spending lots of money on experimental widescreen and color technology that would allow them to create big screen epics far larger in scale than anything television could offer. Some, like Ben-Hur, Dr. Zhivago, and The Sound of Music were fantastic successes; others, like Cleopatra and The Fall of the Roman Empire, were tremendous failures. By 1970, various corporate conglomerates had bought out most of the major studios, ultimately shifting their emphasis toward profit making and away from artistic expression. For a brief time during the mid-sixties, however, studios in transition often encouraged filmmakers to experiment with different techniques in an attempt to capture a rapidly changing audience. By the mid-1960s, members of the Baby Boomer generation began to have great clout in Hollywood. Bonnie and Clyde, starring Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway, was one of the first films to achieve success among a youth audience. The success of Bonnie and Clyde was nothing, however, compared to that of Mike Nichol’s The Graduate, which upon its initial release in December 1967 became one of the top ten domestic box office grossing films of all time. Starring Dustin Hoffman as a disenchanted college graduate who has an affair with the older wife of one of his parents’ friends, the film was one of the first articulations of the generation gap to make its way to the silver screen. The fresh young Baby Boomer audience not only exerted tremendous power over the box office, but also over critical expectations as a new generation of film critics began to enter the mainstream. Next: Kubrick and Clarke |
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