This is a movie that just makes me happy. We discovered it just last year and watched it over and over. It's a movie that has been neglected for far too long, lost among the heavy hitters among Christmas movies like Miracle on 34th Street, It's a Wonderful Life" and "White Christmas".

Production on 2001: A Space Odyssey began in 1965 when Stanley Kubrick contacted author (and legitimate scientist) Arthur C. Clarke with the idea of collaborating to create "the proverbial good science fiction movie". Using Clarke's short story "The Sentinel" as a foundation, the idea was to release film and a novelization in tandem. The collaboration went well at first,  but Kubrick soon grew impatient with Clarke's need to flesh out concepts in detail while Clarke complained about Kubrick's endless revisions and outward disorganization,  commenting that Stanley used a black hole for a filing system. In the end,  the story is mainly Kubrick's even though the credits list also Clarke. The novel differs from the film in a couple
major ways.