See a 13-Year-Old Steven Soderbergh's Nerdy Letter to the Editor About '2001: A Space Odyssey'

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Steven Soderbergh (AP Photo/Lionel Cironneau)

Earlier this year, Steven Soderbergh dared to touch a cinematic work of art that many film lovers consider untouchable: Stanley Kubrick’s seminal 1968 sci-fi head trip, 2001: A Space Odyssey. As part of a series of re-edits of classic movies he’d been posting on his website, Extension 765, the writer, director, editor and cinematographer unveiled a new cut of 2001, one that reduced Kubrick’s 140-minute opus to a mere 110 minutes. (That version has since been taken offline at the request of Warner Bros. and Kubrick’s estate.) In a post that accompanied his re-edit, Soderbergh explained his controversial decision thusly: “Maybe this is what happens when you spend too much time with a movie: you start thinking about it when it’s not around, and then you start wanting to touch it.”

So how much time has Soderbergh spent with 2001, exactly? The director pegged it at four decades, and evidence has emerged to back up that claim. Via his not-so-secret Twitter handle @Bitchuation, Soderbergh recently posted a photo (one that was later picked up by a Reddit user) of a letter to the editor printed in a 1976 issue of the Baton Rouge-based magazine, Gris Gris. The letter takes the magazine’s capsule review of 2001 to task for misstating the name of the actor playing one of the monkeys in the opening “Dawn of Man” sequence. “If you read Stanley Kubrick: A Film Odyssey, you would see that the monkey…was actually played by Daniel Richter.”

“I am an avid fan of films and Stanley Kubrick, especially A Clockwork Orange,” continues the author. The name of this “avid fan of films?” Steven Soderbergh, of course, who was all of 13 years old when he fired off his sternly-worded missive. “We appreciate Mr. Soderbergh’s vigilance,” Gris Gris responds, with a healthy dose of Southern politeness, even offering the young man the bone that Richter wielded as a weapon while in his onscreen monkey garb. Keep an eye on @Bitchuation’s Twitter feed. If he posts a picture of that bone, we’ll know he took them up on their offer.