Embedded Files
All the HALs
All the HALs
So how many HAL faceplates appear on screen? Narratively the ship must have had other interfaces in unseen rooms, but in terms of the actual film we can see the following: either seven or eight devices on the Discovery, and one on an EVA pod.
Centrifuge HAL. This faceplate is the main one in the film. It’s on a console inside the centrifuge, and is surrounded by video screens.
Incidentally, note how the centrifuge HAL is lit by an external spotlight, the position of which is never visually explained in the film. It’s obviously just there to look cool and illuminate the HAL prop so the audience can see it clearly. Especially since the light levels had to be adjusted to compensate for the screens.
This behind the scenes photo by Dmitri Kessel shows that HAL was lit by a snooted spotlight shining through a metal plate gobo with a rectangular slot cut into it.
Pod bay HAL. This faceplate is built into the lab bench inside the pod bay.
Pod bay anteroom. The small starboard anteroom, which contains the bottom of the ladder used to access the pod bay, has a HAL faceplate and workstation. The room is called the “Athena” room in the Johnson blueprints, which is a reference to HAL’s earlier name.
Cockpit HAL. The cockpit, bridge, or flight deck (depending on your point of view as to the most appropriate Earthbound metaphor for the Discovery) has a HAL faceplate facing the astronauts’ seats and beneath the window.
Rotating corridor, or “hub” or “hublink”. The white cylindrical corridor which leads to the centrifuge has a HAL faceplate attached to the rotating end wall. Dizzying.
Brain room door. The metal door that leads to HAL’s brain chamber has a faceplate above it. This area, incidentally, is the white padded chamber situated behind the main cockpit seen earlier in the film.
Though the faceplate is never shown face-on in the film, we know that it has the same proportions as all the other faceplates because behind the scenes photos of it exist, including one unpublished near face-on view in the Kubrick Archives.
Brain room interior, to the right of the glowing transparent memory modules.
EVA pod HAL. The EVA pod seen in the space scenes is equipped with a HAL video lens, but it has no frame or speaker grille since there is no sound in space. The EVA pods seen in the pod bay do not have this lens: a continuity error. In fact, the shot below is an extra-detailed EVA pod panel which differs from the full-sized pod in space; a second continuity error!
Centrifuge communications panel. This panel is discussed in detail in the “long tall HAL” section below.
Other possible HALs?
There are also scenes such as the moment where Bowman, inside the EVA pod, confronts HAL with Poole’s corpse. But the pod is directly in front of the cockpit, and we do not know of any HAL faceplates that would be able to see the pod from that position. I suppose the brain room door camera might have been able to see the pod at the edge of the frame, but that would sort of be pushing it.
Is it possible that there were supposed to be HAL cameras, maybe without speaker grilles, elsewhere? For example, there’s a small cylindrical black object on the axle of the centrifuge, which would certainly be a good place for a camera. It’s never clearly shown in the movie, but the behind the scenes photo below shows something that looks suspiciously like a fisheye lens in that cylinder.
How many HAL faceplates were made?
How many HAL faceplates were made?
We don’t know. The rest of this section is thus entirely conjecture. I think it’s unlikely that there was a single golden prop that got moved around. We do know that there were at least two, since one shot in the pod bay scene shows two faceplates simultaneously.
I suspect there were multiple props. But not one for each and every set, since not all sets existed contemporaneously. They probably unscrewed the plates and transferred them to another set before striking it, while filming was going on on a third. That was possible since all but one of the plates seem to have been identical. In fact, one of the set blueprints published by Adam Johnson shows a HAL faceplate, with different proportions from the final design, in the “Athena” anteroom to the pod bay. It’s labelled “INTER-CHANGEABLE BUG-EYE PANEL FROM CENTRIFUGE ETC”.
Were there lenses attached to each plate? Probably not. The film had a sizeable budget, but the Nikkor 8mm lenses were expensive, and I doubt there'd be much point in having every set sit there idle with a costly lens when they were so easily moved.
This photo of Kubrick taking a lighting test Polaroid, using a massive Polaroid Pathfinder Land Camera (probably a model 110A), clearly shows an empty HAL lens socket behind him. This was during filming inside the centrifuge set. You can see the stepped interior of the socket, designed to accommodate the Nikon lens. The fact that it’s empty does lend support to the “they moved lenses around” theory.
Another minor supporting detail: the lens seen in the deleted Pentomino game sequence is rotated to a different position than the same faceplate as seen in the chess game sequence. Why would you turn the lens if not to move it in or out?
Finally, we know that there were at least two lenses as well as faceplates since the pod bay view above shows both.
Communications: the long tall HAL?
Communications: the long tall HAL?
There is one faceplate that never made the final cut of the film. This one had different proportions, with a much longer speaker grille, and was built into a centrifuge workstation. Was this one also a HAL?
The comms station
The “communications module,” as it’s referred to in Adam Johnston’s book, can be glimpsed during the Poole jogging scene and the scene when Bowman walks with his sketchpad, but since the whole thing is recessed, the apparent faceplate is obscured. However, we know the plate existed because the prop is clearly visible in making-of photos and film footage, as seen in the low-resolution screengrab below.
More detailed photos reveal that the setup was supposed to be a videophone, a bit like the “Picturephone” seen on the Space Station V set, only with data storage options, no phone dialling or credit card slot, and advanced radio controls. A key clue is in the upper right corner – it’s the (pre Saul Bass) Bell System logo, used by the American phone operating company at the time. The Picturephone seen earlier bears the same logo.
Here’s a good view of the whole videophone workstation, revealing some awesome detail. The top panel has clock data: “Universal Time”, “Light Distance to Earth”, and “Elapsed Mission Time” readouts, complete with actual Nixie tubes. The display under the main video screen reads “Transmission Number”. It’s kind of funny since the Picturephone set has Nixie tube clocks to Floyd’s left, with various cities such as “Bombay” (as it was then called), “Sydney”, “San Francisco”, “Tokyo”, and others. Space Station V has earthly bonds; Discovery One is venturing into the unknown!
Of course, it wouldn’t have been a true realtime Picturephone setup – because of transmission delays it would basically have been a video voicemail station. Even the Earth-Mars speed of light time delay can be up to 24 minutes, and by the time the Discovery got to Jupiter it would be a 30-50 minute delay, depending on the orbital position of the planets. That would definitely make for a tedious conversation!
The button groups on the lower section are labelled “Antenna”, “Transmit”, “Remote”, “Transmit” again, and “Receive”.
While fully constructed and assiduously detailed, this workstation was never shown in the film. Frank’s phone call is displayed during his sunbed session, saving him the bother of sitting in front of the phone for a purely one-way message. And the calls from mission control are viewed on the main HAL computing station, probably so that both astronauts can be shown sitting in front of it.
Almost all known photos of this station (the Kubrick Archives contain several Polaroid continuity photos of it) show an empty round socket with no camera lens. And so for a long time there wasn’t enough evidence to say with certainty whether this was a HAL lens.
The case for this being a HAL faceplate
I can now tell you that I was able to locate a high-resolution image in the Archives showing the communications console, and it clearly has a fisheye lens installed!
So – does this answer the question?
The case against this being a HAL faceplate
Maybe. Nonetheless, this faceplate is still definitely an odd one out.
As noted above, it has an extra-long speaker grille. The top part seems to have the same proportions as the other faceplates, but the grille is about 2.25x longer.
There’s no HAL 9000 logo on this faceplate, even though everything else on the console is labelled.
No other camera is visible anywhere on the communications workstation. The only spot you could put a Picturephone camera is that empty socket.
It seems surprising that it was a dual-purpose HAL/videophone camera. 2001 was designed in the 1960s, and the idea of computers being flexible and multifunction devices hadn’t yet percolated down to user interface design. The technical panels seen in the film definitely reflect the then-current assumption that you’d have to have specific panels for specific features and functionality.
The communications workstation is basically next to the HAL workstation. If you’re going to have a second HAL camera inside the centrifuge you’d think you’d put it some distance away from the main HAL setup, for better coverage.
The telescope/astronomy module seems to have a camera housed on a large aluminium plate, much like one I think would fit on this station.
The socket appears to be a simple stepped rim. The known HAL socket (seen later in the “How many HAL faceplates were made?” section) has a more complex stepped internal structure which evidently accommodates an actual Nikon lens.
As a total aside, the vertical video storage panels, which are labelled 1 through 5 on the left and A through E on the right, are marked using Letraset Grotesque 9 Outline. Which is the same font used on the HAL 9000 logo itself.
So. Was it a HAL lens? Well, one final point is that although the Archives photo clearly shows a wide angle lens, it seems to have a lower rim than the Nikkor 8mm f/8 lens, and it looks like it’s aluminium. Versus the taller rim of the HAL lens, which had a black barrel. It might also have been a bit flatter than the Nikkor lens.
So maybe it was seen as a video-only lens and not a true HAL lens. Or maybe it was a dual purpose comms/HAL lens. Who can say? Sadly the only people who knew for sure are no longer with us.
2010: Odyssey Two
2010: Odyssey Two
I don’t cover the HAL faceplate props from 2010: The Year We Make Contact, the 1984 non-Kubrick sequel, in this article. Mainly because they were crudely made and only resembled the original 2001 props in the most cursory of fashions.
Why did 2010’s filmmakers go to the effort and expense of replicating the original sets, and then come up with a HAL prop that looks like this? They’re so wildly different it’s like they watched the movie, got drunk, drew a few sketches on napkins, and built the movie props and sets based on that.
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