Anyone who has seen Stanley Kubrick’s seminal masterpiece 2001: A Space Odyssey will probably agree with me that 17 more minutes of that film would likely be excruciating. The film already has been cut down to 141 minutes from its original 160 to help pick up the slow pace; adding 17 minutes right back would probably cause some people’s heads to explode.

According to Forgotten Silver, those 17 minutes do exist, discovered by Douglas Trumbull and David Larson while they were researching their now cancelled documentary about the 1968 film, 2001: Behind the Infinite - The Making of a Masterpiece. It seems like it would have been a very interesting look back at the film and the process behind Kubrick’s mad genius, but not only will we not get to see the film, but Warner Bros. has no idea what to do with the new footage they have the rights to. Will we be seeing an extended cut of the film get released sometime in 2011, or will we simply get a press release pointing us to a YouTube link?

While 17 extra minutes of that film could potentially be mind numbing, it will still be interesting to see what else Kubrick had up his sleeve for 2001. The movie itself could have been executed a bit better, but the story and its characters still resonate with us even if the film’s view of the future didn’t quite match our own. Hopefully we’ll get to check all of this stuff out sooner rather than later. Here’s a brief look at what we’ll be missing in the documentary.