An All-Time Great Composer Trashed One Specific Element Of A Stanley Kubrick Sci-Fi Classic

Elmer Bernstein is one of the greatest composers in the history of film scoring. He broke in writing music for Z-grade schlock like "Cat-Women of the Moon" and "Robot Monster" (forever in the conversation for The Worst Movie Ever Made) and quickly hit the A-list with his scores for "The Man with the Golden Arm," "The Ten Commandments," and "Some Came Running." In a career that spanned over 50 years, he dabbled in every imaginable genre, earning 14 Academy Award nominations (winning only one) without ever overtly repeating himself (a hazard for many movie composers).

How versatile was Elmer Bernstein? He could rouse us with his plucky theme for "The Great Escape," break our hearts with his soaring "To Kill a Mockingbird" score, and find classical grandeur in the frat-boy hijinks of "National Lampoon's Animal House."

He scored Martin Scorsese's luscious "The Age of Innocence" and two ludicrous "Billy Jack" movies. Bernstein could do anything. So if he wanted to be a world-class crank on occasion, you let the man vent. That said, you'd expect a guy who (I'm assuming) had to sit through "Leonard Part 6" more than once to have at least a professional respect for what Stanley Kubrick accomplished with Johan Strauss' "The Blue Danube" in "2001: A Space Odyssey."

But no. Bernstein hated the choice of music and the movie in general — though he did allow that Kubrick's cheeky use of Strauss' waltz might've worked better for him had he been baked out of his gourd.

According to an interview excerpted in Jeanine Basinger and Sam Wasson's 768-page tome "Hollywood: The Oral History," Bernstein admitted to booing at the end of performances he didn't like and said he particularly abhorred Kubrick's game-changing science fiction masterpiece. "[I] had to walk out of the theater for a few minutes at one point because I got so infuriated by the ridiculousness of it," he said.

To Bernstein's credit, he expressed his distaste for the film and its score to the notoriously exacting director. Alas, he didn't walk away with a clearer grasp of what Kubrick was up to. Per Bernstein:

"[T]he use of the "Blue Danube Waltz" made me very sorry that I wasn't stoned when I was in the picture. Maybe it would have been fine. But just sitting there, normal-like, it was positively infuriating, it was so ludicrous, asinine, totally unrelated, and unless it was designed to be, to me it was like writing "F***" on the bathroom wall or something in the girls' dormitory, or something like that. It was just stupid. It was unrelated and smart-assed and dumb."

I'm no Elmer Bernstein, but I would argue that Kubrick's use of Strauss to accompany the balletic sight of a space shuttle docking with a gently spinning space station is utterly exhilarating. I've also seen the film multiple times on the big screen in 70mm, and no one has ever booed.

I'm also fairly certain that a good portion of the audience at all of these screenings were stoned on something, so maybe Bernstein had a point. And maybe that's how he survived "Leonard Part 6."