'Dear Mr. Kubrick': Audience Responses to 2001: A Space Odyssey in the Late 1960s

Kramer, Peter (2009) 'Dear Mr. Kubrick': Audience Responses to 2001: A Space Odyssey in the Late 1960s. Participations: Journal of Audience and Reception Studies, 6 (2). pp. 1-20.

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Abstract

Stanley Kubrick’s highly unconventional Science Fiction epic 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) was one of the biggest hits of the late 1960s in the US. This success has traditionally been explained with reference to the film’s particular appeal to youth. This paper examines a wide range of letters sent to Kubrick by cinemagoers in the late 1960s, and identifies four types of audience responses to 2001: rejection, dialogue, celebration and appropriation. The paper concludes that the largely positive letters, together with additional research on the film’s box office performance, strongly suggest that 2001 was a success with very diverse audience segments, and that an optimistic belief in the possibility of fundamental personal and social transformation may have been at the root of this success.

Item Type: Article
Faculty \ School: Faculty of Arts and Humanities > School of Film and Television Studies (former - to 2012)
Faculty of Arts and Humanities > School of Art, Media and American Studies
UEA Research Groups: Faculty of Arts and Humanities > Research Groups > Film, Television and Media
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Depositing User: EPrints Services
Date Deposited: 01 Oct 2010 13:58
Last Modified: 21 Jul 2023 09:23
URI: https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/10097
DOI:

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