July 2012 - LIFE

LIFE on the Set of ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’

January 16, 2020July 24, 2012 by

Few movies are as polarizing as Stanley Kubrick’s sui generis 1968 sci-fi opus, 2001: A Space Odyssey. A good number of film critics and movie buffs argue that it’s an indispensable cinematic masterwork. Others admire its technical brilliance and the uncompromising strength of Kubrick’s vision, but find the movie’s impenetrable philosophy—whatever it might be—forbidding, or off-putting, or both. And then there are those (few, and not terribly convincing) naysayers who deride 2001 as little more than self-absorbed, emotionally sterile twaddle not far removed from an elaborate, unfunny hoax.

But even the film’s most strident critics acknowledge that there’s something about Kubrick’s strange, insular onscreen universe that commands our attention.

Here, LIFE.com offers a series of photos from the set of 2001 pictures that suggest the astonishing lengths to which Kubrick was willing to go in order to make his vision a reality. That the futuristic technology he envisioned feels authentic today speaks volumes about the man’s intellect, his dedication to the details of his craft and the boundless capacity for the human imagination to not only see, but to shape what’s to come.

Liz Ronk edited this gallery for LIFE.com. Follow her on Twitter at @LizabethRonk.

Stanley Kubrick on the set of 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Dmitri Kessel The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Actors Keir Dullea and Gary Lockwood listened to Stanley Kubrick on set of 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Dmitri Kessel The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Stanley Kubrick on the set of 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Dmitri Kessel The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Gary Lockwood and Keir Dullea on the set of 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Dmitri Kessel The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Keir Dullea on the set of 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Dmitri Kessel The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Keir Dullea and Gary Lockwood on the set of 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Dmitri Kessel The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Stanley Kubrick on the set of 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Dmitri Kessel The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Keir Dullea on the set of 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Dmitri Kessel The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Gary Lockwood on the set of 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Dmitri Kessel The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Keir Dullea on the set of 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Dmitri Kessel The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Stanley Kubrick on the set of 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Dmitri Kessel The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Keir Dullea and Gary Lockwood on the set of 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Dmitri Kessel The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Keir Dullea on the set of 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Dmitri Kessel The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Director Stanley Kubrick lined up a shot through a camera on the set of 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Dmitri Kessel The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Gary Lockwood on the set of 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Dmitri Kessel The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Stanley Kubrick on the set of 2001: A Space Odyssey with a Polaroid camera.

Dmitri Kessel The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Stanley Kubrick on the set of 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Dmitri Kessel The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Detroit Burning: Photos From the 12th Street Riot, 1967

January 16, 2020July 22, 2012 by

Decades ago, during the long, hot summer of 1967, the city of Detroit erupted in one of the deadliest and costliest riots in the history of the United States. Reportedly sparked by a police raid on an unlicensed bar on July 23, the conflagration lasted four terrifying days and nights, left scores dead and hundreds injured, thousands arrested, untold numbers of businesses looted, hundreds of buildings utterly destroyed and Detroit’s reputation in tatters.

The reasons behind the riot, of course, are far thornier—socially, economically, racially —han a mere raid on a gin joint. While Detroit in the mid-Sixties had a larger black middle class than most American cities its size—thanks in large part to strong unions, high employment and the thriving, all-powerful auto industry—it was hardly a model of racial harmony. (During World War II, for example, Detroit was the scene of an infamous race riot caused in large part by tensions between whites and blacks over jobs in auto plants that were churning out tanks, planes and other war-related goods.)

But the 1967 eruption, also known as the 12th Street riot, was remarkable not only for how long it lasted, but for the force that the city, state and federal authorities brought to bear in an effort to impose order on a city in flames. Then-governor George Romney sent in thousands of National Guard troops, while President Lyndon Johnson eventually ordered paratroopers from the 82nd Airborne on to the streets.

Long before even a semblance of calm was restored, however, chaos reined, and horrific tales of assaults, beatings, robberies and killings poured out of the city including allegations, later reported on by the great journalist John Hersey, that Detroit police officers murdered three young black men at a Detroit motel in the midst of the riots.

Throughout it all, photographer Lee Balterman (who died in March 2012 at the age of 91) was there, recording the terrible scene. Here, LIFE.com presents a selection of his most powerful pictures, most of which were never published in LIFE, chronicling one of the bleakest chapters in American history four days that stunned a nation and left scars on a great city that are still seen and felt today.

Determined to protect their property, both African-American and white store owners brought out weapons and stood ready to use them.

Lee Balterman/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Detroit, July 1967.

Lee Balterman/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Police evacuated an apartment building in search of sniper suspects during the riots.

Lee Balterman/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Detroit, July 1967.

Lee Balterman/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

A family took a walk in a neighborhood devastated by rioting.

Lee Balterman/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

The aftermath of the riots, Detroit, 1967.

Lee Balterman/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

A Detroit police officer stood guard over a grocery store looted during race riots.

Lee Balterman/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Detroit, July 1967.

Lee Balterman/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

This family moved after the Detroit race riots.

Lee Balterman/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

A statue of Jesus Christ was smeared with brown paint during the riots.

Lee Balterman/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

The aftermath of the Detroit riots, July 1967.

Lee Balterman/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

The aftermath of the riots in Detroit, 1967.

Lee Balterman/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

The aftermath of the riots, Detroit, 1967.

Lee Balterman/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Martin and Lewis: Rare and Classic Photos of Madcap Comedy Stars

August 17, 2021July 20, 2012 by

There’s a storied tradition in show business that involves two seemingly incompatible but ultimately inextricable buddies. It’s almost always two men, who turn out to be far more entertaining when they’re together than when they’re apart. Laurel and Hardy, Abbot and Costello, Hope and Crosby, Penn and Teller, Gibson and Glover (for those who enjoy Gibson’s stock, “unpredictable crazy guy” characterizations) and on and on. At the risk of oversimplifying the ineffable chemistry that makes stars of some folks and also-rans of so many others, the dynamic driving these unlikely partnerships can be roughly represented as “straight man and clown,” with laughs arising, in large part, from the obvious friction between the near-lunacy (or idiocy) of the latter and the long-suffering patience of the former.

But no mismatched duo in showbiz history so reliably or profitably convulsed eager-to-roar audiences as Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis in the middle part of the 20th century. For ten years (in fact, for almost exactly ten years, from July 25, 1946, to late July 1956), Martin and Lewis performed their manic magic on nightclub stages, the radio, television and the silver screen.

Here, LIFE.com offers a series of photos by Ralph Morse, most of which never ran in LIFE magazine, of the berserk superstars at their most frantic, during a series of shows at New York’s Copacabana club in 1949.

With Martin playing his suave but jokey singer role to perfection and Lewis acting like a cross between a vaudevillian chimpanzee and a sugar-addled 8-year-old, the pair positively owned the entertainment world for the better part of a decade. In the early 1950s, especially, the two were nothing less than the most popular showbiz act in America, selling out theaters and legendary nightclubs, making hit movies and guest-starring on countless TV variety shows. They worked nonstop, with an act that drew much of its energy and its appeal from the fact that the two were very, very close friends. (They would famously fall out after the act broke up in 1956, and even more famously reconcile in later years, before Martin died in the mid-1990s.)

As LIFE told its readers in an August 1951 issue:

During a personal appearance tour to promote their newest movie, That’s My Boy, the young comedy team of Martin and Lewis made history inside and outside theaters in new York, Detroit and Chicago. The tour began at New York’s paramount Theater, where the comedians were guaranteed $50,000 a week plus 50% of the the theater’s profit over $100,000. This meant that rapid audience turnover was the key to a big take, but after their first show few patrons budged from their seats. Lewis finally got the happy fans out of the theater by advising them that the next performance (free) would be presented from the dressing-room window.

From that time on the comedians put on short alfresco acts after each stage show, and the ruse worked so well jamming traffic but emptying and refilling the house that they repeated it, sometimes in windows, sometimes on fire escapes, everywhere they went. Indoors or out, the kind of bedlam that distinguished their tour was wilder than anything provoked by Bob Hope at his zaniest or Frank Sinatra at his swooniest. Clowning outrageously, throwing themselves and their clothes about with maniacal energy, they broke up their audiences, broke all attendance records and nearly broke themselves down.

After four weeks Martin and Lewis had earned $260,000 in the theaters, establishing them as the highest paid act in show business… The comedians, who have been together five frantic years, already are planning more movies, more TV shows and more nightclub appearances. Asked why they bother when their income (the 1951 gross should reach $1.5 million) will go mostly for taxes), Lewis replies, “The government needs tanks.”

Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, New York, 1949.

Ralph Morse Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis at the Copacabana, 1949.

Ralph Morse Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis at the Copacabana, 1949.

Ralph Morse/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis at the Copacabana, 1949.

Ralph Morse Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Original caption: “At Copa, Martin (under hat) and Lewis (falling at right) barge in on quartet and end on the floor in late show called ‘3 A.M. Mayhem.'”

Ralph Morse Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis at the Copacabana, 1949.

Ralph Morse Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis at the Copacabana, 1949.

Ralph Morse/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis at the Copacabana, 1949.

Ralph Morse Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Photographer Spotlight: Fritz Goro and His Eye for Science

August 9, 2021July 10, 2012 by

Capturing the utter weirdness and wonder of science through photography is a very tall order. Making those photographs beautiful is even more difficult. Or rather, it’s a near-impossibility unless the photographer making those pictures is named Fritz Goro.

A LIFE staffer for four decades, the German-born Goro approached every story he worked on with a creativity and a kind of inspired deliberateness that earned him laurels as one of the 20th century’s very greatest science photographers.

In fact, for many photography critics and scientists alike, he was at-once the most original and the most accomplished photographer of science who ever lived.

Trained in the Bauhaus School of sculpture and design, Goro worked in Germany until the early Thirties, when he and his wife fled the country after Hitler gained power and, as Goro put it, the two of them “had to start a new life.” That new life, it turned out, would center around photography including freelance work for a brand new magazine based in New York called LIFE.

Goro liked to say that his expertise was due at least in part to his own ignorance. He photographed subjects that “more knowledgeable photographers might have considered unphotographable…. I began to take pictures of things I barely understood, using techniques I’d never used before.”

He designed his own optical systems to capture (often for the first time, by anyone) everything from bioluminescence to the mechanisms behind the circulation of blood through a living body. He traveled the globe while shooting for LIFE the Antarctic, Mexican jungles, the Australian outback enduring brutal cold and searing heat; but more often than not, it was in the controlled, cool space of a laboratory or a studio that he crafted his most breathtaking, groundbreaking work.

When he died in 1986, at the age of 85, a former science editor at LIFE named Gerard Piel said of Goro that “it was his artistry and ingenuity that made [his] photographs of abstractions, of the big ideas from the genetic code to plate tectonics” so effective and so utterly memorable. Here, LIFE.com presents a selection of photographs that hint at the scope of Goro’s achievement while paying tribute to the boundless range of human intellect, curiosity and imagination.

A pair of 90-day-old cow fetuses clearly visible inside an amniotic sac, 1965.

Fritz Goro Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Fetus in an artificial womb, 1965.

Fritz Goro Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Molecular electronics, 1961.

Fritz Goro Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Sheep that survived an atom bomb test are studied for radiation poisoning, 1949.

Fritz Goro Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

An anesthetized monkey has its brain activity monitored, 1971.

Fritz Goro Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

A scientist uses a quartz rod as a light conductor to observe a frog’s organs, 1948.

Fritz Goro Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

An astronaut tests noise levels (coming from giant speakers) that mimic the high-decibel sound of a rocket launch, 1967.

Fritz Goro Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Inspecting machinery that forges a large magnet to be used in a cyclotron, or early atom smasher, 1948.

Fritz Goro Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Reactor dome is lowered, by means of a huge crane, into the reactor pit of the under-construction Shippingport Atomic Power Station in Pennsylvania, 1957.

Fritz Goro Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Lasers, 1963.

Fritz Goro Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

A radio telescope listens to sounds from space, 1951.

Fritz Goro Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Two perspectives of a single hologram, projected on screens when a laser passes through the hologram at different places, 1966. Hologram made by Juris Upatnieks.

Fritz Goro Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

A scientist holds a plastic block that he blasted with charged electric particle while investigating the notion of lightning as a rain trigger, 1962.

Fritz Goro Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

A speck of the world’s first plutonium, 1946.

Fritz Goro Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Blood circulating through a heart, 1948.

Fritz Goro Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Shipboard laboratory equipment used for measuring sea water to detect any traces of radioactivity after an atomic bomb test in Bikini lagoon, 1946.

Fritz Goro Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Representation of a segment of a DNA molecule, 1963.

Fritz Goro Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Burning a candle in a sealed flask of oxygen on a balance shows that matter can not be destroyed, 1949.

Fritz Goro Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

A model of a space capsule simulates the return to Earth in a NASA lab, 1961.

Fritz Goro Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Research on cigarette smoking and lung cancer, 1953.

Fritz Goro Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Demonstrating early fiber optics, 1960.

Fritz Goro Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Newly hatched larvae of the Tubularia, a plantlike animal, primed to float away and lodge on a rock or a seashore piling, 1969.

Fritz Goro Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

A leaf-cutter ant carries away rose fragments, 1947.

Fritz Goro Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

A three-foot-long Caribbean octopus sucks the meat out of its favorite prey, the blue crab, 1953.

Fritz Goro Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Fritz Goro on assignment off Bikini Atoll, shooting photographs for LIFE magazine, 1953.

Fritz Goro Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

More Like This

arts & entertainment

LIFE on the Set of ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’

Detroit Burning: Photos From the 12th Street Riot, 1967

Martin and Lewis: Rare and Classic Photos of Madcap Comedy Stars

Photographer Spotlight: Fritz Goro and His Eye for Science

LIFE’s Images of Classic Broadway

“Planet of the Apes” Goes to a ’70s Mall

Reality Radio Challenge: Keeping Your Mouth Shut For $1000

Jane Greer: The Actress Whose Career Howard Hughes Tried to Quash

What Became of This Rookie Class of RKO Starlets?

“DeMille’s Greatest”: Making The Ten Commandments

More Like This

Subscribe to the LIFE Newsletter