MGM

The history of cinema is just brimming with stories about producers, directors and studios arguing over what movies should be about and how they should be made. Often these clashes end in shoot-outs with directors gasping their last in dust outside the saloon. Or are we confusing these stories with westerns again, and they actually end in a struggle of egos and contracts?

Either way, the history of 2001: A Space Odyssey has some interesting, albeit bloodless, history behind it.

The American studio Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) bankrolled the film, and production concerns were handed to Stanley Kubrick Productions. MGM financed and distributed the project because they'd previously had success with Kubrick's Lolita. They'd also had their eyes on working with Arthur C. Clarke, so the pairing proved a dynamic duo for the studio.

Since the director owned the production studio, Kubrick was mostly able to make the movie he wanted to make—although some interesting stipulations were made by MGM during the contract drafting stage. According to James Chapman and Nicholas Cull, the studio envisioned the film as a major event and required that it be released in "Cinerama, the widest of widescreen formats." MGM also retained the right to approve the three main actors. (Source)

Chapman and Cull noted an odd line in the contract that stated the screenplay "'shall be of at least as high quality as the screenplays prepared by Mr. Kubrick for the motion pictures Lolita and Dr. Strangelove.'" Chapman and Cull don't mention exactly how MGM planned to control this quality standard—maybe they had a proto-Rotten Tomatoes lying around—and even Kubrick puzzled over what specifically this requirement meant.

Finally, Kubrick feared that 2001's props would be used in subsequent films, ultimately diminishing his film's value. The MGM-produced Forbidden Planet (1956) had suffered such a fate, and the film's Robby the Robot prop would be used in several TV shows and movies, making him a kitsch pop culture icon and a bit of an in-joke. So Kubrick had many of 2001's sets and assets destroyed after filming (Source).