Technologies in 2001: A Space Odyssey station window is clockwise when Floyd is greeted by a receptionist, but counterclockwise when he phones his daughter. Over fifty organizations contributed technical advice to the production, and a number of them submitted their ideas to Kubrick of what kind of products might be seen in a movie set in the year 2001. Much was made by MGM's publicity department of the film's realism, claiming in a 1968 brochure that "Everything in "2001: A Space Odyssey" can happen within the next three decades, and...most of the picture will happen by the beginning of the next millennium." Although the predictions central
2001: A Space Odyssey (film) artist.") John Simon felt it was "a regrettable failure, although not a total one. This film is fascinating when it concentrates on apes or machines ... and dreadful when it deals with the in-betweens: humans ... "2001", for all its lively visual and mechanical spectacle, is a kind of space-"Spartacus" and, more pretentious still, a shaggy God story." Eminent historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. deemed the film "morally pretentious, intellectually obscure and inordinately long ... a film out of control". In a 2001 review the BBC said that its slow pacing often alienates modern audiences more than it did upon