The rejected Stanley Kubrick movie prop that became a 1977 monument to the Queen instead
Even though he was clearly an Anglophile, having established a home base in the United Kingdom in the early 1960s and staying put for the rest of his life and career, nobody would call Stanley Kubrick a royalist.
If anything, he was the opposite. Not that he vocally stated his opposition to the monarchy that lorded over his adopted country, but enough of Kubrick’s work was critical of the ruling classes, elites, states, authorities, and corridors of power that you can infer he wasn’t a huge fan of anyone at the top.
Like most things in the legendary auteur’s life, whether that’s personal, political, religious, or anything else, he kept his deepest beliefs and opinions largely to himself, which did nothing to prevent them from becoming endless sources of analysis and debate. However, what’s definitely true is that a rejected prop from one of his many seminal pictures ended up as a monument to Queen Elizabeth II.
Not on purpose, right enough, and Kubrick didn’t make the call, but it’s true nonetheless. As he tended to do, the filmmaker obsessed over every detail of 2001: A Space Odyssey, and rightly so, seeing as his 1968 sci-fi masterpiece became one of the most innovative and ambitious films of its era, not to mention one of the greatest and most influential ever made.
Onscreen, the monolith is a hulking black cuboid structure. As the most meticulous director of his era, and maybe any other era, too, it wasn’t as if Kubrick suddenly woke up one day and knew exactly what he wanted to look like. There was plenty of trial and error, and one of those errors wound up as a monument to the queen who’d become England’s longest-reigning monarch.
During development, the firm Stanley Plastics, coincidentally enough, was hired to build a 10-foot-tall, clear monolith out of acrylic, until Kubrick realised during camera tests that he didn’t fancy it being transparent, as you’d be able to tell, seeing as it was about as matte as matte gets in the picture.
After years spent gathering dust since he couldn’t find a use for it, when MGM closed its Herefordshire backlot in 1970, artist Arthur Fleischmann ended up in possession of the two-tonne block of acrylic, patiently biding his time until he could find a use for what was ostensibly a big, fuck-off piece of plastic with no discernible use. Or an obvious practical one, at least.
That would eventually change, though, when Fleischmann was commissioned to create a lasting monument to Queen Elizabeth II to celebrate the Silver Jubilee in 1977. He carved a crown into it, along with some nifty-looking sunbeams, and on June 5th of that year, the Queen unveiled it herself when it was displayed at London’s St Katharine Docks, where it’s been ever since.
If it hadn’t been for Kubrick dismissing the see-through monolith for 2001: A Space Odyssey in favour of its ultimate, and iconic, black design, then Fleischmann would have had to get his inspiration from somewhere else, because two-tonne slabs of acrylic don’t seem like the sort of thing you’d find lying around.
