//-----Original Message-----
//From: wells [mailto:s0ewoliv@titan.vcu.edu]
//Sent: Tuesday, September 07, 1999 10:40 PM
//To: Aaron S Michelson; Brian Behlendorf; idm@hyperreal.org; Danny Wyatt
//Subject: Re: (idm) Spielberg to direct Kubrick's AI (fwd)
//
//
//At 10:32 PM 9/7/99 -0400, Aaron S Michelson wrote:
//>Excerpts from mail: 7-Sep-99 RE: (idm) Spielberg to dire.. by "Danny
//>Wyatt"@arbitrary.
//>> Kubrick hired Chris Cunningham to do some preliminary designs.
//>
//>And Aphex was reportedly asked to score the film.
//>
//>Aaron
//
//I also heard rumors about scores of Jews and Tyranosaurus Rexes will
//written in the script as well.
//
//- wells oliver / s0ewoliv@titan.vcu.edu
//
Indeed, judging by the description below, this movie will be easliy ruined
if not made by someone with the almost inhuman mastery over film that
Kubrick had. And though the Aphex thing is probably a conflation of rumors
about _Neuromancer_, I think _AI_ would be the perfect place for Misters
Booth and Brown--who can so powerfully bring humanity to music repeatedly
described as inhuman--to prove themselves with a score.
(from
http://www.nytimes.com/library/film/071899kubrick-ai.html )
The Aldiss story behind "A.I." is "Super-Toys Last All Summer Long,"
published in 1969. It is about a withdrawn English boy named David and his
talking teddy bear, which is actually a robot that was given to the boy by
his worried parents for therapeutic purposes. At the end of the story, the
reader discovers that David is also a robot, a sophisticated model that is
supposed to behave like a real child but that can't please the childless
couple who purchased him, despite the teddy bear's coaching.
[...]
By now the story was filled with incident: David was the first of a new
model of robot able to feel emotions. He could be programmed to love the
couple that owned him, though he could not love others. David had been
acquired by an unhappy couple whose only child suffered from an incurable
disease and had been cryogenically preserved. The parents were not allowed
to have another child.
When a medical breakthrough allows the daughter to be thawed out and cured,
David becomes redundant, and after a period of intense sibling rivalry, the
mother decides to get rid of him. She sets David loose, but to assuage her
sense of guilt, she tells him that he can return when he becomes a real boy.
David's quest eventually takes him to a drowned New York City, where he
finds the Pinocchio booth at Coney Island, complete with a model of the Blue
Fairy, which David regards with reverential wonder. The story then jumps
ahead thousands of years, to a future in which robots populate the world and
humans are long extinct. David is discovered, his battery worn down, and
revived by these inheritors of the Earth, who regard him as a link with a
mythological past.
[...]
It was the relationship between David and his mother that most occupied
Kubrick and Ms. Maitland. An alcoholic whose Bloody Marys David would mix
for her in a vain attempt to win her affection, the mother was the emotional
center of the film.
At the story's conclusion, the robots that have inherited the Earth use
David's memories to reconstruct, in virtual form, the apartment where he had
lived with his parents. Because his memories are subjective, the mother is
much more vividly realized than the father, and his stepsister's room is not
there at all; it is just a hole in the wall.
For Ms. Maitland, the film would end with David preparing a Bloody Mary for
his mother, the juice a brighter red than in real life: "He hears her voice,
and that's it. We don't see him turn to see her." Kubrick, however, wanted a
coda in which the new race of robots, because of a technological limitation,
cannot keep the the mother alive after reviving her. The movie would end
with David in his mother's bedroom, watching her slowly disappear.