2001: A Space Odyssey EVA Pod Original Maquette!

Hey everybody, Adam Savage at The Prop Store Mothership outside of London with Stephen Lane. How are you, my friend? Very good, thanks, Adam. Great to see you, man. Dude, it is so hard to concentrate when I am in any space that you have curated. Thank you. I think that's a compliment, isn't it? Well, I think I get a little bit of a glimpse of what it's like when people come to my cave. Right. And I'm sure you have this. People walk in and you start talking. They're like, I'm gonna need a minute to just take in everything around me, right? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Well, this is an environment we create once a year. It's the prop store, the entertainment memorabilia, it's the preview exhibition. This is the big thing for us, a huge amount of effort. And it is a year's worth of curation to do it as well. I mean, it takes a year to find all these wonderful treasures. It is. Every now and then you get to go to a museum where a really rare bunch of stuff is on display. And you're like, wow. And as you like gaze upon it and sort of zoom in, it gets more and more amazing what you see. That's what I'm experiencing here. I'm looking in these cabinets and like every specific thing is some iconic piece. This auction feels like one of the, it's full of some really special things. Thanks, man. And here is one in which I didn't even know this existed. This is a model of one of the pods from Stanley Kubrick's 2001. Correct, yes. Now, is this, I'm just gonna make a guess here because I haven't read the catalog entry, is it looks like this was a maquette with which they were working out some of the form or is this an actual shooting piece? No, you're correct. So this is an art department maquette. So this is the miniature that was built, constructed, amazingly handcrafted out of wood. Out of wood? I know, I can see this thing and I see the bandsaw marks in these. How much time would it have taken to do that? You compare that today with 3D printing, you know, tweak it a little bit, output another one. This one was a real work in progress. Interesting backstory to this as well, actually. This was actually gifted by Stanley Kubrick to a sound engineer who was working on the film. That has been with him ever since filming. It sat on the top of his fridge freezer in his kitchen for 40 plus years. So when we got this, when we got to this, when we saw this for the first time, it was grease and then dust, then grease, then dust, then grease, then dust. And it was like yellow, just had a yellow hue to it. And so we did a very, very careful cotton bud clean up with it, took it all the way back and as we did that, it revealed all these marks and pencil marks, yeah, all these drawings where they were working out how the detailing was actually gonna be on the finished filming miniature in full size. I mean, that's just astonishing to have that come to life and present for us. I can't believe it. And when you're doing this, you're using like distilled water and Q-tips and stuff, like a real art restorer just to pull these layers off? Exactly, yeah. It's all about, you know, consideration of the artifact, what's not gonna damage or in any way distort what it is that we have in hand, but how do we bring it back? And it's something that we do on a lot of occasions. So there's a few things that are really making me so happy about this piece. One is, as I look at these, you can just see these were done on a bandsaw or with a handsaw, you know, they're very crude, but I have absolutely built models like this and then sat there with an art director and a pencil making marks. Yeah, we kept doing some stuff over here. You can see, I mean, famously the window of the pod has the same kind of detailing, but that's a pain in the butt, so they just drew it with pencil here. Yeah, no, isn't it? And I'm assuming it's gonna have had, you can see where the arms at one point were mounted on there, had just been unfortunately lost over time, maybe when it got moved off the fridge freezer at some point, but it's just astonishing, isn't it? And we've got the back here. Yeah, and actually this is the reason why the sound engineer was given this by Kubrick, because he was doing the sound for the door, and he was saying, I want this to inspire you to get this sound right. You've gotta go away and engineer the sound for this effect, this is the pod. And it just stayed with him. He had it there sitting on his desk all through production. Again, amazingly, we found in the Tash and Kubrick archives book, there's a shot of the production office, and this is sitting on the table, and Kubrick is looking right at it, this very miniature. How cool is that? That is really incredible. And when it comes to Kubrick and sound, I saw that you have a lovely replica of the, well, I don't know if it's a replica, of the 2001 Clavius suit, the silver one. Yes, it is a replica. I wish it was an original, but yes, it's a replica. And one thing I discovered when I commissioned a replica of that, that helmet, the moment I put on that helmet, I realized, oh, all of Dave Bowman's breathing at the end of 2001 is recorded in the helmet. Because you can hear the sound artifacts of the breathing, and then I found it in a book. It's true, that's Kubrick's breathing. I love that. One of the more undiscussed aspects of the models from 2001 is how few of them survived today. Kubrick was very clear about wanting his movies to stand on their own, and famously destroyed much of the original production-used pieces from the film. Yeah, I think there's a lot of conversation about why they got destroyed, and I think there was an instance where it got to the point where the production company had been paying for storage for these assets for months, if not years. And it was just like, what are we gonna do with these things? Stanley, do you wanna take over the cost for this? And Stanley was like, from what I understand, he was like, no, I'm not paying for it. And at that point, somebody made the decision, take them to the skip, take them to the dump, and that's where they mainly went. So it's really rare to see things like this that have survived, and it's just really off the back of it, as I say, being gifted at that time to the sound engineer, and him saying, you know what, that's a great memento. I'm gonna hold onto that rather than throw it away. Let's keep it, and thank goodness. And I'm so grateful that your delicate restoration process revealed all of these incredible bits of history in the pencil parts. And I think it's worth looking down into the mirror. So what we've had done here is we built the support stand for it as well with a mirror base, because I just love the detailing on the underside. You know, you got the whole thruster built into that as well. Look at that, you're right. And it's all there, and I mean, how intricate is that? The way that that's actually been machined out of there and then fixed into place. I love that aspect of it as well. So it's where we sort of considered, okay, it just needs something minimalist to present it, but at the same time, you've gotta show that detail off, which really helps it. When I walked in, I'm highly sensitized to the super rare, and 2001 was one of my favorite moves. I walk in and I saw this, and I just, it's like being in the presence of a Leonardo da Vinci to me, because it feels like it's that rare. Oh, I get it, man. Yeah, I'm with you. It's an astonishing thing that has survived, really. Part of me wants to rebuild the stuff out of wood, right? Out of wood and polychrome, and just make it all fit back together. What a remarkable, remarkable piece. Just such a rare artifact. Yeah, another one of these is not gonna show up. That's it, it's gonna be the one. Yeah.