Arthur C. Clarke, one of the science fiction genre's most revered writers, has died at his home in Sri Lanka at age 90. Clarke was one of the most prolific forces in science fiction writing and helped elevate its status in the literary world. He went on to write more than 100 books and became a commentator on the Apollo space program along with Walter Cronkite. British by birth, Clarke had lived in Sri Lanka since 1956. Clarke reached new heights of fame when he collaborated with Stanley Kubrick on the screenplay for 2001: A Space Odyssey. The much-debated, esoteric MGM production was released in 1968 to weak box-office, but within a year had become a highly successful film with the flower power generation when its ad campaign was changed to promote it to the hippie culture. The two men shared an Oscar nomination for the script and Clarke published a novelization of the screenplay, which had been based in part on his 1948 short story The Sentinel. Clarke went on to write several sequels to the film.
On a personal level, some years ago I interviewed Roger Caras for a documentary I was writing for Sony's DVD release of Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove. Caras had befriended Kubrick when he was in charge of Columbia's marketing department. Kubrick persuaded Caras to leave his cushy job to act as a consultant on a forthcoming movie about exploration of space. Kubrick only had fuzzy ideas about the script and took Caras to his favorite restaurant, Trader Vic's in The Plaza Hotel in New York City. There, he scribbled some cartoons on cocktail napkins that depicted man's first meeting with aliens, an element he wanted to base 2001 on, but would later drop. It was Caras who suggested to Kubrick that he contact his friend Arthur C. Clarke to get advice about the project and possibly collaborate with him. Caras gave Kubrick a copy of The Sentinel and Kubrick was duly impressed. He contacted Clarke in Sri Lanka and the two agreed to meet. They ultimately would join for a historic film collaboration. Upon telling me this story, Caras (who passed away shortly thereafter) went to a filing cabinet and took out a folder. He said that Kubrick and Clarke were the only two men he ever met who could literally be called geniuses. He knew that their prospective collaboration would insure that anything they created should be preserved. Out of the file, he produced the cocktail napkins from Trader Vic's that still bore Kubrick's cartoons showing his concepts for 2001 - four years before the film would actually be released.- Lee Pfeiffer