How does a movie become a “clas­sic”? Expla­na­tions, nev­er less than utter­ly sub­jec­tive, will vary from cinephile to cinephile, but I would sub­mit that clas­sic-film sta­tus, as tra­di­tion­al­ly under­stood, requires that all ele­ments of the pro­duc­tion work in at least near-per­fect har­mo­ny: the cin­e­matog­ra­phy, the cast­ing, the edit­ing, the design, the set­ting, the score. Out­side first-year film stud­ies sem­i­nars and delib­er­ate­ly con­trar­i­an cul­ture columns, the label of clas­sic, once attained, goes prac­ti­cal­ly undis­put­ed. Even those who active­ly dis­like Stan­ley Kubrick­’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, for instance, would sure­ly agree that its every last audio­vi­su­al nuance serves its dis­tinc­tive, bold vision — espe­cial­ly that open­ing use of “Thus Spake Zarathus­tra.”

But Kubrick did­n’t always intend to use that piece, nor the oth­er orches­tral works we’ve come to close­ly asso­ciate with mankind’s ven­tures into realms beyond Earth and strug­gles with intel­li­gence of its own inven­tion. Accord­ing to Jason Kot­tke, Kubrick had com­mis­sioned an orig­i­nal score from A Street­car Named Desire, Spar­ta­cus, Cleopa­tra, and Who’s Afraid of Vir­ginia Woolf com­pos­er Alex North.

At the top of the post, you can see 2001’s open­ing with North’s music, and below you can hear 38 min­utes of his score on Spo­ti­fy. As to the ques­tion of why Kubrick stuck instead with the tem­po­rary score of Strauss, Ligeti, and Khatch­a­turi­an he’d used in edit­ing, Kot­tke quotes from Michel Cimen­t’s inter­view with the film­mak­er:

How­ev­er good our best film com­posers may be, they are not a Beethoven, a Mozart or a Brahms. Why use music which is less good when there is such a mul­ti­tude of great orches­tral music avail­able from the past and from our own time? [ … ]  Although [North] and I went over the pic­ture very care­ful­ly, and he lis­tened to these tem­po­rary tracks and agreed that they worked fine and would serve as a guide to the musi­cal objec­tives of each sequence he, nev­er­the­less, wrote and record­ed a score which could not have been more alien to the music we had lis­tened to, and much more seri­ous than that, a score which, in my opin­ion, was com­plete­ly inad­e­quate for the film.

North did­n’t find out about Kubrick­’s choice until 2001’s New York City pre­miere. Not an envi­able sit­u­a­tion, cer­tain­ly, but not the worst thing that ever hap­pened to a col­lab­o­ra­tor who failed to rise to the direc­tor’s expec­ta­tions.

For more Kubrick and clas­si­cal music, see our recent post: The Clas­si­cal Music in Stan­ley Kubrick’s Films: Lis­ten to a Free, 4 Hour Playlist

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in Decem­ber 2014.

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Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch a New­ly-Cre­at­ed “Epi­logue” For Stan­ley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey

1966 Film Explores the Mak­ing of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (and Our High-Tech Future)

James Cameron Revis­its the Mak­ing of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey

Rare 1960s Audio: Stan­ley Kubrick’s Big Inter­view with The New York­er

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on cities, lan­guage, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

As a famous first, Frank Zappa’s 1971 film 200 Motels set a stan­dard for hun­dreds of wacky exper­i­men­tal, B‑movies to come. The first full-length film shot entire­ly on video­tape, the cheap alter­na­tive to film that had thus far been used pri­mar­i­ly for TV shows and news broad­casts, the movie exploit­ed the medium’s every pos­si­bil­i­ty. “If there is more that can be done with video­tape,” wrote Roger Ebert in his review at the time, “I do not want to be there when they do it.”

The movie is not only a “joy­ous, fanat­ic, slight­ly weird exper­i­ment in the uses of the col­or video­tape process”; it is also a visu­al encap­su­la­tion of Zappa’s most com­i­cal­ly juve­nile, most musi­cal­ly vir­tu­osic sen­si­bil­i­ties, with Ringo Star play­ing “Zap­pa as ‘a very large dwarf,’” the Moth­ers of Inven­tion play­ing them­selves, Kei­th Moon appear­ing as a nun, the Roy­al Phil­har­mon­ic Orches­tra tak­ing abuse from Zap­pa, and a series of row­dy, raunchy mis­ad­ven­tures piled one atop the oth­er.

“It assaults the mind with every­thing on hand,” Ebert both mar­veled and half-com­plained. “Video­tape report­ed­ly allowed Zap­pa to film the entire movie in about a week, to do a lot of the edit­ing and mon­tage in the cam­era and to use cheap video­tape for his final edit­ing before trans­fer­ring the whole thing to a sur­pris­ing­ly high-qual­i­ty 35mm image.” As the mak­ing-of doc­u­men­tary below notes, the movie was edit­ed with­out “the use of com­put­er facil­i­ties,” and its lay­ers of effects helped invent new aes­thet­ic forms which now feel quite famil­iar.

Hyper­ki­net­ic, sur­re­al­ist, and bizarre, 200 Motels is a mélange of ani­ma­tion, musi­cal per­for­mance, crude jokes, and “a kind of mag­i­cal mys­tery trip,” wrote Ebert, “through all the motels, con­cert halls, cities, states and groupies of a road tour.” It was not beloved by crit­ics then (though Ebert gave it 3 out of 4 stars) and still gets a mixed recep­tion. It may or may not be the “kind of movie you have to see more than once,” giv­en its full-on sen­so­ry assault.

But Zappa’s exper­i­men­tal tour de force is essen­tial view­ing for Zap­pa fans, and also for stu­dents of the video­tape aes­thet­ic that has become an almost clas­sic style in its own right. We can see in 200 Motels the roots of the music video—Zappa was a decade ahead of MTV—though, for bet­ter or worse, its “whim­si­cal­ly impen­e­tra­ble plot­line and absur­dist sub-Mon­ty Python humor,” as Ian Git­tens writes at The Guardian, “were met with wide­spread baf­fle­ment and it sank with­out a trace.”

In the 80s, how­ev­er, 200 Motels found new life in a for­mat that seemed well suit­ed to its look, VHS. Then it found a home on the inter­net, that Val­hal­la of ancient video of every kind. A tout­ed DVD boxset, it appears, will not be com­ing. (Seems the dis­trib­uter has been slapped with a “wind­ing up order” of some kind.) But you can find it on disc, “intact and with the cor­rect aspect ratio” as one hap­py review­er notes.

What­ev­er medi­um you hap­pen to watch 200 Motels on, your expe­ri­ence of it will very much depend on your tol­er­ance for Zappa’s brand of scat­o­log­i­cal satire. But if you’re will­ing to take Roger Ebert’s word for such things, you should try to see this odd­ball piece of movie his­to­ry at least once.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Frank Zap­pa Explains the Decline of the Music Busi­ness (1987)

Hear the Musi­cal Evo­lu­tion of Frank Zap­pa in 401 Songs

Frank Zappa’s Amaz­ing Final Con­certs: Prague and Budapest, 1991

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness.