According to an interview excerpted in Jeanine Basinger and Sam Wasson’s 768-page tome “Hollywood: The Oral History,” Bernstein admitted to booing at the end of performances he didn’t like and said he particularly abhorred Kubrick’s game-changing science fiction masterpiece. “[I] had to walk out of the theater for a few minutes at one point because I got so infuriated by the ridiculousness of it,” he said.

To Bernstein’s credit, he expressed his distaste for the film and its score to the notoriously exacting director. Alas, he didn’t walk away with a clearer grasp of what Kubrick was up to. Per Bernstein:

“[T]he use of the “Blue Danube Waltz” made me very sorry that I wasn’t stoned when I was in the picture. Maybe it would have been fine. But just sitting there, normal-like, it was positively infuriating, it was so ludicrous, asinine, totally unrelated, and unless it was designed to be, to me it was like writing “F***” on the bathroom wall or something in the girls’ dormitory, or something like that. It was just stupid. It was unrelated and smart-assed and dumb.”

I’m no Elmer Bernstein, but I would argue that Kubrick’s use of Strauss to accompany the balletic sight of a space shuttle docking with a gently spinning space station is utterly exhilarating. I’ve also seen the film multiple times on the big screen in 70mm, and no one has ever booed.

I’m also fairly certain that a good portion of the audience at all of these screenings were stoned on something, so maybe Bernstein had a point. And maybe that’s how he survived “Leonard Part 6.”