A San Francisco guy named Bob Bowman recently wrote the following to Roger Ebert: “Wouldn’t it be great if someone were to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the release of 2001: A Space Odyssey next year by striking new prints and showing the movie on IMAX screens across the country? What a fantastic experience that would be!” Ebert said that the idea “seems almost inevitable. And remember that the film was shot in 70mm, so it would look even better.”

I would do backflips over this. And Ebert is right — the process by which 35 mm films are transferred to IMAX has gotten pretty good, so a 70mm transfer would look even better. The precise 40th anniversary will be on 4.3.88 — less than seven months away. If this is being planned they’ve almost certainly already begun the work. I wrote a couple of p.r. people this morning to see if they know anything. Does anyone?

A new 2001 DVD is coming out a week and three days from now. A first-graph line in Ebert’s 1968 review sums it up nicely: “The fascinating thing about this film is that it fails on the human level but succeeds magnificently on a cosmic scale.”