By Edward Bayliss
Dan Richter arrived in the UK in the mid-1960s as ‘a 28-year-old, starving, mime teacher’, ready to absorb all that London, ‘the centre of everything new’, had to offer. Upon his arrival, he edited the avant-garde poetry review Residu, and performed in the 1965 International Poetry Incarnation at the Albert Hall amongst Beat Generation poets William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg. On October 24th, 1966 Richter first met Stanley Kubrick, the man who would select him for the role of Moonwatcher, the central ape in 2OO1: A Space Odyssey’s ‘Dawn of Man’ sequence (and ask him to choreograph it). From 1969-1973, Richter would become personal assistant to John Lennon and Yoko Ono, helping shoot the video for ‘Imagine’ at Tittenhurst Park, and later work with the Rolling Stones to produce their concert film, Ladies and Gentlemen, The Rolling Stones. Richter has since worked with production companies in LA, continued to teach mime, and has climbed over 600 North American peaks.
I met him on Zoom for a 45 minute discussion of his time from 1966-1968, and working with Stanley Kubrick on what many consider to be the most influential film ever made, 2OO1: A Space Odyssey.
It’s 10:00am LA time and the morning sunlight is coming across Dan’s sitting room, lighting his face kindly. He is 85 years old and undergoing chemotherapy for T-Cell Lymphoma. These facts do not show. His warm temperament and strong constitution translate easily through my laptop screen. I begin by asking him about his experience at the American Mime Theatre, his decision to travel to England, and how he came to be involved in 2OO1. Richter tells me he had ‘studied ballet’ and could ‘dance easily’ – he was a ‘natural, and could just do it’ – so that when he arrived at the American Mime Theatre under the tutelage of Paul Curtis, he was ‘the lead performer’ within a year. After four years, and having seemingly exhausted the potential that the AMT offered, Richter ‘wanted more’ and notes how ‘mime wasn’t as big in the States as it was in Europe’. Working in mime in the US had become a tireless exercise of going to ‘cocktail parties to flatter rich people so you could get grants […] There’s gotta be more!’, says Dan. Subsequently, he took a leave of absence to study ‘mimetic forms’ around the world, travelling to Berlin, Paris, Amsterdam, India, and Japan, where he made friends with Yoko Ono, who exposed Richter to ‘conceptual art’. ‘I did not want to go back to the States again, I wanted freedom […] to experiment, and live’, Dan adds triumphantly. After ‘falling in love with a woman who claimed to be a Russian princess in India’, he ‘followed her to Athens’ and ‘met all these poets’ which led him eventually to London where he began editing a poetry review, Residu, with his then wife Jill while beginning to teach acting classes. During his poetry reading with ‘Allen [Ginsberg] and all these crazy people’ at the Albert Hall, he met producer and poet Johnny Esam (who ‘was friends with a friend of Sir Arthur Clarke’). ‘Arthur [who co-wrote the screenplay of 2OO1] and Stanley Kubrick had realised they didn’t have the opening of the movie – they had shot all the live action, and they had tried all kinds of things […] and nothing worked’, Dan recalls. They hadn’t, as Richter explains, explored the possibility of using a mime to choreograph the now famous ‘Dawn of Man’ sequence. Johnny, a mutual friend of Dan and Arthur’s, knew that ‘Stanley was looking for a mime’, and set into motion the next two years of Dan’s life: ‘I know the best mime around, it’s Dan Richter.’
When Dan met Stanley soon after, he says that he ‘asked for a stage, a leotard, and a couple of towels to stuff in my shoulders and he [Stanley] was very impressed’, having witnessed an improvised ape performance from Richter. ‘I was offered the job on the spot. That’s how I got the job.’ Dan’s process of mime acting is very particular: ‘my training was that we developed movement from the acting process first – you start with the motivations and characters and feelings, and you extend those.’ For Richter, the objective of the character informs the activities of the character. This was the basis of Richter’s approach to embodying Moonwatcher.
The ‘Dawn of Man’ sequence is set in the Pleistocene epoch, about three million years ago; I ask him how he went about realising a time and place so far from him. Dan reminds me that archaeological discovery has come a long way since the 1960s: ‘In those days, very little was known […] I researched as much as I could, but I realised I had to make living creatures.’ Kubrick had located his ape species as the Australopithecine (discovered by Raymond Dart in the 1920s) who existed in South Africa at the time of the ‘Dawn of Man’s’ setting. Richter tells me that he ‘endlessly watched footage of Jane Goodall’s chimps and read about Diane Fossey’s gorillas and did piles of research.’ In his book, Moonwatcher’s Memoir, Dan goes into great detail of his interactions with ethologists, museums, the Royal Geographical Society and other bodies of information that would inform his understanding of the Australopithecine ape. Dan tells me that he ‘had to have a costume that would allow us to be expressive, not just the Michelin man with black hair all over you, all stuffed and puffed up.’ It was only with the assistance of now legendary make-up artist Stuart Freeborn (who would design and fabricate many key characters in the Star Wars franchise, including Yoda and Chewbacca), that they could realise a realistic costume that could function under dynamic movement.
The ape that Richter plays, Moonwatcher, acts as a kind of proto-representative of the Biblical Cain figure, becoming a symbol of the evolution of human nature through violence. This evolutionary movement across millions of years is delivered through the most famous match cut in film history, from Moonwatcher’s bone to the weapons satellite. I ask Dan if he was conscious of the gravity of this moment within the context of the film. ‘The script was very sparse, very sparse’, Dan reiterates. He adds that ‘Stanley rarely talked about the big stuff, the big ideas – he didn’t want to put ideas into your head that would get you trying to do stuff, he was always concerned with each beat at a time.’ Though this may have been the case, Richter does acknowledge that Kubrick and Clarke were aware of a ‘Killer Ape Theory’ developed by Robert Ardrey in 1961, which postulated the idea that ‘early man started to progress when he started killing, and set us on an evolutionary path that would lead to modern man […] that was a big idea in those days.’ In spite of my original question, Richter declares that ‘my concern is not to tell the story, my job is to have a character who has got an objective, who uses an activity to achieve that objective, and has what we call an adjustment which is how he feels doing that – you don’t want to get sucked into conceptual stuff.’ There must exist a ‘willing suspension of disbelief’ upon the consciousness of the audience, Richter advises, ‘and if you don’t have it, the chair becomes very uncomfortable.’
In his memoir, Dan describes the setting of the MGM studios at Elstree as being akin to Alice in Wonderland, or like a ‘great cathedral’, with elfish and pixyish characters working in and around the sets. I ask him why the studios, at first, had such an impression of mysticism about them. He tells me that ‘the MGM studios were built in the ‘30s, they had this classic, beautiful quality; it felt like you were visiting Orson Welles. There were all these people who were so good at so many things all going around – there were nine or eleven stages […] it was big.’ Dan pauses for a second, ‘it was just like being in a dream.’ With the words DAN RICHTER – DAWN OF MAN emblazoned across his new office door, he remembers thinking, ‘suddenly I had all this power […] everyone would be like, whataya think Dan?’ The incredible technical innovation that the production of 2001 provoked also contributed to the atmosphere of otherworldliness in Elstree Studios at the time. Dan mentions special effects supervisors Doug Trumbull and Con Pederson, saying of them, ‘it was just amazing; one of the things about 2001, was we actually invented new ways of doing things and technologies to do it.’ You don’t have to look far to identify such innovations; from front screen projection to centrifuge sets and zero gravity effects, the production behind 2001 really was pioneering.
Like the studio setting, it appears that at some moments Kubrick also impressed an aura of enchantment upon Dan. In his memoir, Richter draws attention to ‘the alchemy of Stanley’s art and process’ and describes the director as a ‘merlin’-like figure who ‘conjured’ this ‘wonderful, majestic film.’ Richter writes that Stanley has a ‘quality of otherness’. I have always been sceptical reading articles about Stanley which designate him, for example, as the ‘recluse’, the ‘phobic’, the ‘paranoid’, or the ‘museum piece’, so I ask Dan to expand on this comment. Dan says that Stanley’s office was a ‘teeny room’ and in it were ‘books, papers, drawings, and photographs piled to the ceiling, it was total chaos’. Despite all of this, Dan remembers seeing Stanley for the first time, a ‘frumpy little guy with a Bronx accent’, who was ‘very relaxed and immediately interested – I hear you know Allen Ginsberg’. Even though, as Richter tells me, ‘Kubrick is always the smartest guy in the room’, and often it feels as though ‘you’re playing checkers and he’s playing three-dimensional chess’, he had a casual manner about him with ‘a great sense of humour’ regularly ‘bumming cigarettes because Christiane [his wife] wouldn’t let him smoke.’ Kubrick surrounded himself with a young team who were willing to break their backs to support his vision: ‘If you could go along with it, it was an amazing ride, you know, on your way to eternity.’ However, Dan says grinning, ‘a lot of the older technicians had some issues with him, saying, we can’t do that guv, and, well, they wouldn’t be round for long – he didn’t suffer fools easily’, but adds urgently that ‘there were a lot of us in our twenties saying sure, let’s do it, let’s try to figure it out.’ For instance, Dan says, ‘Stanley’s assistant Tony Frewin was only sixteen or seventeen years old – Kubrick was surrounded by young people who wouldn’t question him.’ It is far from the truth to say that the director was exercising tyranny on set; in his memoir, Richter says that ‘Stanley’s behaviour wasn’t about control’, indeed, it is ‘people who don’t know him [who] portray him as a compulsive control freak’. Rather, Dan stresses that Kubrick would surround himself with people who offered ideas; he was ever-listening. Dan closes his assessment of Kubrick with the words, ‘he was a normal guy, but just happened to be a massive genius.’
After filming wrapped on 2001, Dan had very little to do with Stanley. I recall reading that Malcolm McDowell was a little hurt by this sharp cut-off of communications after the production of A Clockwork Orange was over. Indeed, Dan tells me that ‘you think you’re his best friend when you’re working with him, and then all of a sudden it seems like he doesn’t know you anymore.’ Dan would see Kubrick once more in his life. He looks up above his camera smiling: ‘I had designed and built a three-headed editing table for John and Yoko which I loaned to Stanley while he was shooting A Clockwork Orange in 1971 – I actually spent the day with him’, and in typical Kubrick character, ‘we talked about what kind of paper shredders we were using.’
