IV: The Different 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 seven devices.

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.

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?

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 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? Perhaps 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 sometimes moved lenses around” theory.

Another minor supporting detail: the lens seen in the deleted Pentomino 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?

The possible 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. Some people have suggested over the years that this was a HAL faceplate, but upon consideration I believe that it wasn’t.

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 it’s recessed, the apparent faceplate is obscured. We know the plate existed because the prop is clearly visible in making-of photos and film footage, as seen in the film screengrab below. And you can see why people think it was a HAL.

Detailed photos reveal that the setup was supposed to be a videophone, like the “Picturephone” seen on the Space Station V set, only with data storage options and advanced radio controls. A key clue is in the upper right corner – it’s the (pre Saul Bass) Bell System logo, used by American phone operating companies at the time. The Picturephone seen earlier bears the same logo.

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. So – was the socket meant for another HAL? Or was it meant to be a video camera and speaker/microphone grille for videophone usage only, and this photo was taken before they put in a tiltable space station-type camera into it?

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!

The buttons to the left are for the “Antenna” adjustment controls. Of course, it wouldn’t have been a true realtime Picturephone setup – because of transmission delays it would have been more like 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, all depending on the orbital position of the planets.

In the end, this workstation was never shown in the film. The phone call that Frank takes is displayed during his sunbed session, rather than having him sit 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.

In favour of the “this is a HAL” idea:

But these are the reasons I don’t believe this panel was meant to have a HAL camera:

However, without some form of smoking gun evidence (eg: a blueprint saying what the socket was meant for; a photograph showing the finished workstation with lens installed) I don’t think we’ll ever know for certain what the faceplate was meant to be.

The reason I’m harping on about this faceplate is because of the mythology that the HAL faceplates came in all kinds of different shapes and proportions. This workstation has been cited as an example. I argue that the comms station plate does not necessarily support this claim.

2010: Odyssey Two

I don’t cover the HAL faceplate props from 2010: The Year We Make Contact, the 1984 non-Kubrick directed 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.