moved to @paulhackett

Two great cities may be destroyed, millions of innocent people killed. What do we say to them, Mr. Chairman? “Accidents will happen”? I won’t accept that! All I know is that as long as we have weapons… men are responsible. We’re responsible for what happens to us. Today we had a taste of the future. Do we learn from it, or do we go on the way we have? What do we do, Mr. Chairman? What do we say to the dead?

“Powerful lights permitted high camera speeds, crucial in capturing the high-speed alchemy of surface tension, color change, and chemical reaction that [Kubrick and his collaborators] were after. The overcranked camera shooting at seventy-two frames per second produced a smoothly nuanced “galactic” slow motion as they used toothpicks to drip blobs of white paint into the ink-thinner mixture. Reacting to the banana oil, the paint sent ersatz star flows and galactic tendrils streaming into cosmic space. A macro lens made an area the size of a playing card look like a nebula light years across. Parts of what would become the film’s trippy Star Gate sequences were conjured in this way on the Upper West Side in 1965, with Kubrick himself manning the camera…”

“There’s no hope now!”

The machines rose from the ashes of the nuclear fire. Their war to exterminate mankind had raged for decades, but the final battle would not be fought in the future. It would be fought here, in our present. Tonight…