In his lifetime Arthur C. Clarke participated in film, television, radio and other media in a number of different ways.
James Randi later recounted that upon seeing the premiere of 2001 for the first time, Clarke left the theatre in tears, at the intermission, after having watched an eleven-minute scene (which did not make it into general release) where an astronaut is doing nothing more than jogging inside the spaceship, which was Kubrick's idea of showing the audience how boring space travels could be.
[2] Clarke shared a 1969 Academy Award nomination with Stanley Kubrick in the category Best Writing, Story and Screenplay – Written Directly for the Screen for 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Because of the political environment in America in the 1980s, the film presents a Cold War theme, with the looming tensions of nuclear warfare not featured in the novel.
[4][5] Titled The Odyssey File: The Making of 2010, and co-authored with Hyams, it illustrates his fascination with the then-pioneering medium of email and its use for them to communicate on an almost daily basis at the time of planning and production of the film while living on opposite sides of the world.
Clarke's award-winning novel Rendezvous with Rama (1972) was optioned for filmmaking decades ago, but this motion picture is in "development hell" as of 2012.
[7] After years of no progress, Fincher stated in an interview in late 2007 (in which he also credited the novel as being influential on the films Alien and Star Trek: The Motion Picture) that he is still attached to helm.
[11] Clarke appeared in 2010, first as the man feeding the pigeons while Dr. Heywood Floyd is engaged in a conversation in front of the White House.
Later, in the hospital scene with David Bowman's mother, an image of the cover of Time portrays Clarke as the American President and Kubrick as the Soviet Premier.
In 1994, Clarke appeared in a science fiction film; he portrayed himself in the telefilm Without Warning, an American production about an apocalyptic alien first contact scenario presented in the form of a faux newscast.
In September 2007, he provided a video greeting for NASA's Cassini probe's flyby of Iapetus (which plays an important role in 2001: A Space Odyssey).
[16] In 1994 Mike Oldfield recorded an album called The Songs of Distant Earth, based on Clarke's novel of the same name.
In 1984 a text adventure computer game with pictures, based on Clarke's 1973 novel Rendezvous with Rama, was made by Trillium (later known as Telarium).