According to Douglas Trumbull—special effects director for 2001: A Space Odyssey —Warner Bros has found seventeen minutes of edited footage from Stanley Kubrick’s sci-fi opus. The film—which was dropped from the final cut—was found in their Kansas salt-mine vault.
According to Trumbull, the footage is in perfect condition, but he doesn’t know what Warner wants to do with it. These are the scenes that were left out of the final version, according to IMDB:
• Some shots from the “Dawn of Man” sequence were removed and a new scene was inserted where an ape pauses with the bone it is about to use as a tool. The new scene was a low-angle shot of the monolith, done in order to portray and clarify the connection between the man-ape using the tool and the monolith.
• Some shots of Frank Poole jogging in the centrifuge were removed.
• An entire sequence of several shots in which Dave Bowman searches for the replacement antenna part in storage was removed.
• A scene where HAL severs radio communication between the “Discovery” and Poole’s pod before killing him was removed. This scene explains a line that stayed in the film in which Bowman addresses HAL on the subject.
• Some shots of Poole’s space walk before he is killed were removed.
Those scenes account for 19 extra minutes, which were included in 160-minute premiere. [WorstPreviews via It's Full of Stars]
David Culliford
Monday, December 20, 2010 at 10:24 AMI wonder if this mean we will get a new “special edition” DVD/Blu-Ray edition….
Andre
Monday, December 20, 2010 at 6:58 PMI thought when Kubrick died all the extra footage and whatnot of all of his movies was burnt, honestly I hope this never sees the light of day, just in respect of a dead man
Simon Reidy
Tuesday, December 21, 2010 at 5:23 PMI’d love to see these scenes, but only as special features. NOT re-edited back into the film.
Kubrick obviously left them out for a reason, but they would be fascinating to see all the same.