I: Researching HAL

Looking for HAL

From a story perspective there were obviously multiple HAL 9000 faceplates in the film 2001: a Space Odyssey. Most cabins aboard the Discovery One spacecraft must have had a computer interface located on a wall somewhere, allowing the omnipresent AI to keep an eye on proceedings across the ship. Each interface supposedly provided a steady stream of visual and auditory data back to the HAL brain room.

I think it’s worth pointing out here how revolutionary such a design concept was. In the 1960s people still tended to think of computers and related systems as being analogues of the human – a brain, two eyes, ears... arms and legs in the case of robots. The idea of distributed data gathering via camera/microphone/speaker faceplates, piping data to a brain room, was quite incredible.

Of course, to be utterly pedantic, the faceplates obviously weren’t HAL 9000 as such – that would have narratively constituted the computer’s CPU hardware, its programming, the contents of its memory, and its many interfaces – but it’s convenient to call the plates “HAL”.

The props

The faceplate props were simple aluminium frames, containing a perforated speaker grille, an internally illuminated camera lens, and a HAL 9000 logo. That much has been known since the film came out in 1968, but specifics have only come into public knowledge in the past decade and a half or so. This page describes the sources of information I drew upon for my research.

“Many designs for HAL were worked up. Final design took shape at the last minute, as most things do in a film. You wait as long as you can to see if anyone comes up with anything better, and you choose what seems best.”

    — Stanley Kubrick, quoted in Jerome Agel’s The Making of Kubrick’s 2001.

The evidence

There are no surviving production-made and screen-used props of HAL 9000 known to exist and available for public viewing. So the evidence to hand consists of the following.

Screencaps

Stills captured from original film footage are obviously essential. Unfortunately, the HAL faceplates are mostly seen at a distance throughout the film, so we don’t have detailed views of them. There are closeup views of the baleful crimson lens, but those are so tightly framed you can’t see anything other than the lens itself. Incidentally the majority of those red lens closeup shots were just still frames inserted into the film. Only the brief closeup of HAL’s eye during the playback of the BBC 12 interview – “the most reliable computer ever made” – is actual moving footage! (ie: it has gate weave)

Until recently screenshots were fuzzy and basically all we had, but the release of the Blu-ray/HD 4K scan has been invaluable. It provides us with far more detail than low-rez VCR, DVD and even Blu-ray 1080p screenshots. In particular, there’s one brief shot of the main HAL faceplate in the centrifuge which affords the most information.

This picture, which is cropped from the scene when HAL warns Bowman of the pending AE-35 failure, is as close as the camera gets to the entire prop in the film. I refer to this image as the “4K photo” in this document. And here it is.

Yep. That’s one of the best views we have of a HAL faceplate in the whole movie. It gives us fair detail, and since it was shot almost straight-on, it also gives us the panel’s proportions and relative sizing.

On-set Stills

Documentary photos taken during production give us a few glimpses of HAL, but sadly there are no known closeups. That I’ve seen, anyway. We only get shots like this.

My theory is that the set photographers, not having seen the finished film obviously, had no idea how important HAL 9000 and his faceplates were to the story. Accordingly they didn’t take lots of close-up shots of the camera eyes, since they simply didn’t know how iconic the character one day would be.

The Ordway/Johnson blueprint

This one is our Rosetta stone. Author and 2001 researcher Adam K. Johnson has published a pair of books – 2001: the Lost Science, volumes 1 and 2 – which document the work Frederick Ordway III did for the film. Ordway and Harry Lange were the chief designers of most of the futuristic props and artefacts seen in the film. And fortunately for posterity, Ordway squirrelled away a lot of original visual source material documenting his labours. If he hadn’t done so we would have considerably less historical evidence available to us!

Ordway donated his archives to a US military and aerospace museum in Alabama, which does not make its material available to the general public. I imagine it must be filed away in a Raiders of the Lost Ark type of warehouse, probably guarded by Top Men. So we’re fortunate that Johnson was able to publish much of it in his two books.

Volume 1 includes a production blueprint depicting a face-on view of the HAL 9000 faceplate, and a photo of the logo decal. The ratios of the blueprint’s dimensions match the proportions of the screen-seen HAL props.

Incidentally, the first release has been out of print for some years, and so the books have been commanding sky-high prices on auction sites. Fortunately another printing was released in 2021, and so both volumes were available again for a couple of years.

In the US you can buy them via Monsters in Motion.

In Canada you can buy them via Apogee Prime.

The Randall/Jackson prop

In either 1971 or 1972 (I’ve heard both dates specified) what seem to be a HAL faceplate (minus the lens) and the brain room door key appeared for sale in a London Paddington junk shop, according to buyer Chris Randall. In 2010 he auctioned the items at Christie’s, where they went for £17,500 along with a Nikon lens. The winning purchaser appears to have been filmmaker and collector Peter Jackson in New Zealand.

The plate is an interesting object, since it matches what we see on-screen in some regards. However, it differs from the movie HALs in at least three key areas: its proportions are strange, its scratched HAL 9000 decal is more turquoise than the blue of the final logo, and its speaker grille isn’t the same.

The basic problem, of course, is that the object’s aspect ratio does not match any HAL seen on-screen or in any behind-the-scenes photo. The black plate and the speaker grille are both short, giving the panel a squat appearance.

Therefore the claim that it is “the original” HAL prop (with the unstated implication that it was both screen-used and the sole prop) is clearly unsupported by all evidence, and not just because at least two HAL faceplates were made for the film. It’s notable that the Christie’s description was extremely ambiguous, saying that it’s “believed” (they don’t say by whom) to have been “made as one of the front panels” in the film. Nowhere did they state that it was actually screen-used, no doubt because they simply cannot.

Conjecture: Assuming the HAL faceplate is a legitimate production-made object, which I think is likely given the craft that clearly went into its engineering and construction, it was probably a discarded design prototype. For example:

“Here’s HAL, Mr. Kubrick. What do you think?”

“Hmmm. No. Make it a couple inches taller, and make that sticker blue.”

(sotto voce) “Bollocks. Right, guv.”

If this theory is true, then the artefact can cast some light on how the original props were made, even though it wasn’t screen used itself. However, its design and construction cannot be taken as gospel, owing to these obvious differences.

In particular the black speaker grille on this artefact, which appears to be black-painted Veroboard electronic prototyping board, does not look anything like any of the grilles seen in the actual movie, and was certainly added later.

It’s a shame. Nobody would be happier than me if it had actually been a screen-used prop, since we could then get accurate data from the item.

By contrast, the beautifully machined aluminium brain room door key from that particular auction does look like the real screen-used deal.

EVA pod lens

The EVA pods have cameras on the front, so HAL can see what’s going on and pilot the vehicles remotely. The pods shown in space have black HAL-type lenses, as shown in the murder scene below. However, there is a continuity error – the pods sitting in the bay have smaller lenses in fluted silver tubes instead of a HAL-type lens. As always, the 4K release is extremely useful for examining the space scene pods and their HAL eyes.

Incidentally, the round recesses found all over the craft are also supposed to contain video camera lenses, as is the short cone on the pod’s roof. They’re often mistaken for recessed rocket thrusters, but archive photos show glass lenses inside the metal tubes at the base of each recess.

Karl Tate

Karl Tate has produced a lot of unpublished research into the design of the HAL 9000 faceplate, some of which went into commercial HAL replicas. He has kindly shared a lot of insights with me, helping this writeup immeasurably.

Amadeus Prokopiak

2001 researcher Amadeus Prokopiak posted a great deal of research into the HAL props, and the camera lens, to the Replica Prop Forum (RPF) website in 2011.

Replicas

Various people and companies have produced replicas over the years. There were the HAL (and SAL) approximations built for the 2010 sequel movie, collector Dennis Gilliam made one based on the Randall/Jackson prop that’s been exhibited at exhibitions over the years, and prop replica companies have made their own versions for sale. Many hobbyists have crafted their own versions or designed downloadable 3D models, and in 2020 an all-plastic kit was released by Moebius Models.

Finally, I've made my own replica - described in the last section.

All these replicas have varying degrees of accuracy, particularly those made years ago. Many fan-built prop replicas were made with only limited information as to what the originals looked like. Remember, all we used to have were blurry videotape shots and low-resolution printed books! And the commercial ones were obviously manufactured to fit specific price points. The Moebius kit, for example, has many errors that mostly seem related to keeping production costs low.

Today, however, we’re fortunate to have quite a bit of data to go on. And I’m freely publishing my findings here for anyone who wants to make their own prop replica!

I do not believe in hoarding information, Gollum-like, and cackling in the dark that I know something that nobody else does. Unless there are specific contractual reasons why I can’t mention something, I think everyone benefits from free information sharing, so long as that work is credited as best is possible!

II:   Ingredients of the Faceplate

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