Stanley Kubrick Had All the Props from 2001: A Space Odyssey Destroyed So They Couldn’t Be Reused in Bad Sci-Fi Movies
After 2001: A Space Odyssey wrapped, Stanley Kubrick did something that feels less like a post-production decision and more like the final act of a Bond villain: he had all the sets and props destroyed. The glowing monolith? Gone. The EVA pods? Scrapped. The sleek interior of the Discovery One, with its antiseptic beauty and unsettling symmetry? Bulldozed into oblivion.
Not archived. Not sold. Not donated. Destroyed.
Why? Because Kubrick didn’t want other filmmakers using his meticulously crafted future-porn in bad sci-fi movies. He didn’t want to flip through the channels one day and see HAL 9000’s eye repurposed as a discount robot in some low-budget alien sex comedy called Space Lust IV. He wanted control. Not just over his own film—but over what his film could become in the hands of other people.
And it’s such a Kubrick thing to do.
Because Stanley Kubrick wasn’t just a director. He was the cinematic equivalent of a paranoid architect who not only draws the blueprint and builds the house—he burns it down after the open house so no one else can rent it. His version of perfection didn’t allow for reuse. Or homage. Or even nostalgia. If 2001 was going to be the Rosetta Stone of science fiction cinema, it had to stay singular. Untouched. Monolithic.
But here’s the weird part. By erasing the physical artifacts of 2001, Kubrick made the movie even more legendary. You can’t visit the set. You can’t buy a screen-used helmet on eBay. You can’t touch the film in a literal sense—so it only exists in the abstract. As memory. As myth. He didn’t just make a movie. He made a relic, and then made sure no one could chisel off a souvenir.
Which raises a question that only someone like Kubrick would take seriously: who owns the future?
Because 2001 wasn’t just a film about space. It was a prophecy dressed as a screensaver. It’s not just beautiful. It’s eerily plausible. The silence. The design. The terrifying calm of it all. And Kubrick knew that. He knew that in the wrong hands, his clean, cryptic vision of the cosmos could become kitsch. A punchline. A clearance-bin Star Trek clone with stock sound effects and actors in bubble helmets.
So he wiped the slate clean. Burned the evidence. Locked the door to the future and swallowed the key.
You could call it obsessive. You could call it pretentious. But maybe—just maybe—it was the last truly punk-rock move in sci-fi cinema. Because Kubrick wasn’t afraid of being copied. He was afraid of being mediocre by association.
And in the end, 2001: A Space Odyssey didn’t just invent the future.
It monopolized it.
Actress Katherine Heigl made the lowest grossing movie of all time called Zyzzyx Road, which grossed $30 in its opening weekend and 10 of that was refunded, so the final domestic box office gross was $20
In 2006, a movie starring Katherine Heigl—then America’s favorite intern on Grey’s Anatomy—and Tom Sizemore—perpetually playing sweaty, shell-shocked men with secrets—made $30 at the box office. That’s six tickets. Two of which were refunded because the makeup artist who bought them asked nicely.
The film, Zyzzyx Road, is named after a real, barely-there road in the Mojave Desert, the kind of place that feels like it was built by mistake and left untouched out of superstition. The movie itself is a low-budget thriller about a guy covering up a murder. It has all the hallmarks of a straight-to-DVD bin filler at Blockbuster, if Blockbuster still existed and if anyone had ever heard of this thing.
But here’s the kicker: it was never meant to be seen in the U.S. The film’s creators only intended it for overseas distribution—cheap thrills for foreign markets where Tom Sizemore still had pull. But thanks to a Screen Actors Guild rule, any U.S. film under $2.5 million not released straight to video had to play in a U.S. theater. So they rented one screen in Dallas, played it once a day at noon for a week, and called it a “release.” The marketing budget was $0. The press coverage: nonexistent. The entire affair: weirdly existential.
The plot thickens when you realize this wasn’t a money laundering scheme or an elaborate troll—it was a strategic move. The producer, Leo Grillo, reportedly wanted to show Zyzzyx Road on paper so he could get funding for future projects. You don’t have to succeed. You just have to look like you’re trying.
And somehow, in failing harder than anything has ever failed at the box office, Zyzzyx Road became immortal. Not for its story, its stars, or its filmmaking—but because it holds the world record for the lowest-grossing movie of all time. It beat out British horror flick Storage 24 (which made $72) and even a sci-fi film by the guy who directed The Blair Witch Project, which raked in a whopping $95 before vanishing.
Back to the Future Almost Starred Eric Stoltz—And They Shot for Weeks Before Firing Him
There’s an alternate timeline where Back to the Future was a weird, kind of depressing indie film about a teenage boy who accidentally invents time travel and then spends two hours sulking about it in 1955.
That version of Back to the Future starred Eric Stoltz.
And for five full weeks in 1984, that version was very real.
Stoltz was cast as Marty McFly, wore the puffy vest, said the lines, slapped Biff in the diner. The crew filmed full scenes, multiple locations, day after day. He wasn’t bad, per se—he just wasn’t… fun. And that’s a problem when you’re making a movie about time travel via a DeLorean with a flux capacitor. A movie like that only works if the lead treats the situation like an improv sketch written by a 14-year-old genius hopped up on Cherry Coke. And Stoltz, God bless him, treated it like Death of a Salesman.
So after 5 weeks—and around $3 million—the director Robert Zemeckis went to Steven Spielberg and said something like, “Hey, so… this isn’t working.” They fired Stoltz. Quietly. Brutally. They brought in Michael J. Fox, who was already starring in Family Ties, and began reshooting the entire thing—often at night, while Fox worked days on the sitcom.
Now, think about that. Not just the cost or the logistics. Think about the reality distortion field required to admit, five weeks in, that you cast the wrong guy. Most movies can’t even admit their third act sucks. These guys looked at hours of finished footage and said, “We’re not just going to recast. We’re going to erase this man from cinematic history like he never existed.”
This isn’t just a trivia fact. It’s a metaphysical commentary on how success and failure are less about execution and more about tone. Stoltz was doing what actors are trained to do: commit fully. But the energy was off. It was like casting Daniel Day-Lewis as Ferris Bueller—technically impressive, but profoundly unsettling.
Weirdly, you can still see the ghost of Stoltz in the final cut. Some wide shots. A punch or two. A few frames where the silhouette is just a little too tall. He’s the cinematic equivalent of a phantom limb.
But maybe the strangest part is this: Back to the Future isn’t just about time travel. It’s about course correction. About fixing mistakes before they become permanent. It’s about doing something you think is right and realizing later that it totally wasn’t. Which means that recasting Stoltz wasn’t just a production decision—it was thematically perfect. The movie corrected its own timeline.
One of the Most Iconic Lines in Robocop Wasn’t Intentional
If you’ve ever watched RoboCop—and if you haven’t, I honestly don’t know what you’ve been doing with your life—you remember the line.
“Bitches leave.”
It’s not just a line. It’s a moment. A hard pivot. A throat punch of pure, distilled villainy delivered by the sociopathic Clarence Boddicker (played with sleazy genius by Kurtwood Smith) as he saunters into a cocaine-fueled, hot-tub-and-suit-jacket 1980s dystopia party. He walks in, surveys the scene, and drops it:
“Bitches leave.”
It’s abrupt. It’s cruel. It’s darkly hilarious in that way only RoboCop can pull off—where you’re not sure if you’re supposed to laugh, be appalled, or both. And for decades, it’s lived in the cultural ether like a viral meme from a time before memes existed. You’ll find it on t-shirts, GIFs, and deep in Reddit threads that veer between ironic detachment and genuine admiration for the film’s jagged weirdness.
But here’s the part that elevates it from iconic to cosmically bizarre:
Director Paul Verhoeven is Dutch. Cinematographer Jost Vacano is German. Neither of them had any clue the line “bitches leave” might carry, let’s say, a certain weight in American English. According to the actors on set, Verhoeven kept saying it while blocking the scene—repeating it rhythmically, like he was directing traffic or calling cues at a burlesque show:
“Yeah, then he says ‘bitches leave’… then the bitches leave… no wait, maybe the bitches don’t leave yet… should the bitches leave now or when he gestures?”
And Miguel Ferrer and Kurtwood Smith? Sitting nearby, losing their minds. Just cracking up. Because this wasn’t satire. This wasn’t some Quentin Tarantino edge-lord maneuver. It was Paul Verhoeven earnestly treating the phrase like it was a stage direction in Macbeth.
But here’s the thing—it works. It works so well that you forget how deeply absurd it is. Because RoboCop is a movie that lives in this uncanny valley between B-movie schlock and razor-sharp social satire. It’s cartoonish violence stitched over a deeply anti-corporate, anti-Reaganomics skeleton. And when Clarence Boddicker spits “bitches leave,” it’s not just a command—it’s a tone-setter. A thesis statement for how casually toxic and broken this world has become.
And the fact that the phrase survived multiple takes, post-production, and decades of hindsight? That’s what makes it beautiful. Because if anyone had stopped and said, “Hey, maybe that’s too harsh, or too weird,” we wouldn’t be talking about it now. We’d have some watered-down line like “Ladies, I think it’s time to go,” and the scene would have died on arrival.
Instead, we got a piece of accidental brilliance. A throwaway line uttered by a man who didn’t fully understand its implications, delivered by a character who absolutely did.
So yeah—maybe it’s offensive. Maybe it’s over-the-top. But that’s the point of RoboCop. It was never meant to be polite. It was meant to punch you in the face and then ask why you flinched.
John Cazale Acted in Only Five Movies and All Were Nominated for an Academy Award
There’s this fact I think about more than I probably should: John Cazale acted in exactly five movies. All five were nominated for Best Picture. Three of them won. Every single one is now considered canonically great.
Let me list them, because they read like a film studies syllabus designed by God:
-
The Godfather
-
The Conversation
-
The Godfather Part II
-
Dog Day Afternoon
-
The Deer Hunter
That’s it. That’s the résumé. That’s the entire filmography.
He never played a lead. He was never the coolest guy in the room. He didn’t have action figures or adoring teen fans. But he was in every room where cinema history was being made. He’s the connective tissue between Coppola’s paranoia, Pacino’s internal combustion, and De Niro’s early ferocity. If Hollywood were high school, John Cazale was the quiet kid in the back row who aced every test and then died before graduation.
Because that’s the other part. He died at 42. Bone cancer. By the time The Deer Hunter was released, he was already gone.
And here’s the kicker: he knew he was dying while filming it. He hid his illness so he could keep working. Meryl Streep—who was his partner at the time—advocated for him to stay in the film, despite the studio trying to fire him. Robert De Niro reportedly covered his insurance. Think about that. Your coworkers going to war just so you can finish the job, even as you’re quietly slipping away.
Cazale’s most famous character is probably Fredo Corleone, which is fitting, because Fredo is Hollywood’s most iconic loser. The overlooked brother. The weak link. The guy who, in any other story, would just quietly fade into the background—but here, he matters. He’s the wound in Michael’s armor. The human cost of being cold and calculated. When Michael kisses Fredo and says “I know it was you,” it’s not just betrayal. It’s Greek tragedy. And Cazale plays it like a man already half-haunted.
But maybe what’s most fascinating about Cazale isn’t the perfection of his filmography—it’s the fact that he never got to make a bad movie. He never stuck around long enough to get typecast in a romantic comedy with a CGI dog or do voiceover work for a DreamWorks sidekick named “Grumble.” There’s no decline. No embarrassing third act. Just five masterpieces, and a fade to black.
Which, of course, makes him seem larger than life. But that’s the paradox: he wasn’t larger than life at all. He was smaller. He was subtle. Nervous. Awkward. He was real. He looked like a guy who worked at a deli. His performances felt like they weren’t “acted,” they were just being. Like the camera caught someone thinking on film, and that was enough.
Maybe that’s why he sticks with us. Because in a business built on ego, Cazale had none. In a culture that rewards staying power, he left early. In a world obsessed with more, he gave us just enough.
John Cazale didn’t just appear in five perfect films. He reminded us that sometimes the most unforgettable people are the ones who never try to be unforgettable at all.
