HOLLYWOOD — He vaulted to screen stardom a generation ago in Stanley Kubrick’s science fiction epic "2001: A Space Odyssey," stealing scenes with his mesmerizing stare, tranquil voice and neurotic behavior.
He had no face, but he had a name: HAL 9000. He had a birthplace: the HAL plant in Urbana, Ill. And a birth date: Jan. 12, 1992 (although the novel "2001" claims it was 1997).
He was never nominated for an Academy Award for best actor, but the American Film Institute voted him the 13th-greatest Hollywood screen villain of all time.
Not bad for a camera lens.
Now a Georgia man named Kirk Wooster claims to own the famous movie prop that was used as HAL, the murderous computer depicted in Kubrick’s landmark 1968 film, and is offering it for sale at $250,000.
But is the large Fairchild-Curtis 160-degree F2 ultrawide-angle lens really HAL, or another lens posing as HAL? Opinions vary, even among crew members who worked on the movie with Kubrick in England. Complicating matters is the fact that Kubrick, cinematographer Geoffrey Unsworth and John Alcott, who provided additional photography, are dead.
And the lens isn’t talking.
Witness evidence and other materials suggest that a Fairchild-Curtis lens was indeed used by Kubrick on the set of "2001." But was it HAL?
Wooster surmises that after production ended, the lens was returned to the United States and stored in a box for 30 years without people giving much thought to its potential worth until he purchased it in 1999 and began his research. Wooster said he was always interested in Kubrick’s film and bought the lens when a friend offered to sell it to him.
"This is a piece of cinema history that would have vanished if I hadn’t taken an interest in it," said Wooster, a 65-year-old commercial helicopter pilot and producer of large-format films who lives in Woodstock, Ga., about 30 miles north of Atlanta. He claims to have turned down offers of $100,000 for his lens.
Wooster has a letter from Jimmy Dickson, a technical animation specialist on "2001" who also worked for Graphic Films on "To the Moon and Beyond," which states that Wooster’s lens was the one used as HAL on "2001."
But in a recent interview, Dickson indicated he had doubts. He recalled that the Fairchild-Curtis lens was used on the set of "2001," but whether it was for HAL’s point-of-view shots is not clear. His uncertainty grew after he discussed the matter with Douglas Trumbull, who was one of four special photographic effects supervisors on the film.
In a detailed e-mail on the subject, Trumbull said, "any claim by Kirk that the Fairchild-Curtis lens was used for the HAL (point-of-view) shots is just not true."
He contended that the Fairchild-Curtis image would fill the entire frame of Kubrick’s 70mm movie, whereas the point-of-view shots of HAL are round and have vignetted dark spaces to the left and right of the 70mm frame. Therefore the point-of-view lens would have to have been smaller.
But Wooster counters with a June 1968 article in American Cinematographer magazine that shows a photo of HAL looking at an astronaut. This shot, the article said, was achieved "with (a) Fairchild ‘bug-eye’ type extreme wide-angle lens covering a field of almost 180 degrees."
Although not taking sides, Frewin, Kubrick’s assistant, recalls that the director used a 160-degree "mapping lens" borrowed from Fairchild-Curtis for HAL’s point-of-view shots and later returned to the optical company. Frewin said Kubrick also used a "normal, commercially available Nikon fish-eye lens" for other HAL shots.
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