In Rome, D’Alessandro visits a museum exhibition of Kubrick’s personal effects and finds that every item signifies a fleeting moment shared with the late master: handwriting he had recopied, a string he had tied to Kubrick’s Eyemo camera. It’s as much Stanley’s gallery as Emilio’s. He can’t resist reaching out to grasp the past, his past, these artifacts from a distant age. A museum attendant stops him. “Come on,” he tells the attendant. “I must have already touched it millions of times! If you had any idea how much cat’s pee I’ve cleaned away from under there, you wouldn’t stand so close!”
My first intimation of Stanley Kubrick's interest in adapting my novel A Perfect Spy for the big screen came when he called me up, wanting to know why I had turned down his offer for the movie rights. I had turned down Stanley Kubrick? I was amazed and horrified. We knew each other, for Heaven's sake! Not well, but enough.
Why hadn't he called me to tell me he was interested? And most extraordinary of all: what did my film agent think he was up to, not telling me he had an offer from Kubrick, then signing up the book with BBC television? Stanley, I said, I'm going to check this out at once and I'm going to get right back to you. D'you happen to know when you made this offer? As soon as I'd read the book, of course, David: why would I hang around?
My agent was as mystified as I was. There'd only been one film offer for A Perfect Spy apart from the BBC; but it was so trifling he hadn't thought to bother me with it. A Dr Feldman, I think his name was, of Geneva wished to acquire an option on the movie rights to my novel as a teaching tool for a course on book-into-film. It was a competition thing. The student who came up with the best screenplay would have the pleasure of seeing a minute or two of his work realized on the big screen. For the two-year option on the movie rights of A Perfect Spy, Dr Feldman and his colleagues were prepared to offer a five-thousand-dollar honorarium.
I was on the brink of calling Kubrick to assure him that his own offer had never reached me, but something held me back, so I called instead a big wheel in the studio Kubrick sometimes worked with: my friend John Calley. Calley gave a happy chuckle. Well, that sure as hell sounds like our Stanley all right. Always afraid his name is going to bump up the asking price.I have to say, if that story didn't put a smile on your face, then you probably aren't much of a Kubrick fan!
I was in my cutting room around 1 in the morning, and [Kubrick] strolls in smoking a cigarette and says, “Can I watch?” I said: “Yeah, you can watch. You wanna see a Jew go down? Stand there.” That was the night I coined the expression, “You cannot polish a turd.” And then Kubrick looked at me and said, “You can if you freeze it.”
Even before its release, the 1960 film epic “Spartacus” was dogged by rumors of tension on the set, with star-producer Kirk Douglas butting heads with MGM, and a young Stanley Kubrick replacing director Anthony Mann after a week of shooting. On April 17, 1959, the Los Angeles Times’ Phillip K. Scheuer reported after a visit to the set that the “only fighting goes on before cameras,” and that Kubrick is “reasonably in control of a situation still potentially explosive.”
The brief seemed simple enough: a space that balanced sophistication with star appeal, the latter particularly important given that Three Six Zero represents some of America’s biggest music, film, television and literary celebrities. Think Calvin Harris, Travis Scott, Brett Easton Ellis, Deadmau5 and Frank Ocean. ‘My background is in film,’ Schaedler says, referencing his stage design and production work at the Grammys for Daft Punk, Kanye West and Pharrell Williams, as well as set design on Burton’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and the Harry Potter films. ‘So I have always thought of space as a sequential experience. It’s important for us to consider how the space unfolds as you walk through it. On this project, Stanley Kubrick and his use of one-point perspective for the strong visual and emotional impact in The Shining and 2001: A Space Odyssey was an inspiration.’
The Kubrickian influence is distinctive, particularly in the way the individual rooms and spaces, each designed almost like a set piece, have a symmetry and spatial depth. The conceit is a dramatic one and the tone is set the moment you step into the lobby – an austere volume lined on each side with a floating leather-clad bench, and dominated by a solid monolith of a reception desk with a black satin finish. Overhead hangs a flat chandelier in the form of a diamond-shaped trellis, a motif repeated in the open-plan office space and in the artists’ lounge.
Stanley Kubrick directed the moon landing for NASA.
To believe this is true one must first believe a much larger conspiracy theory: That the moon landing was faked. Let’s take that at face value for a moment and dive into a sub-conspiracy that suggests Kubrick was hired to direct the footage used to trick the world into believing a man walked on the moon. Theorists say 2001: A Space Odyssey provided a model for NASA, which is why Kubrick was brought in by the space agency.
But it’s another movie that makes the strongest case for this whole story being true. The Shining is rife with clues that Kubrick did indeed direct the moon landings, according to theory’s chief proponent, Jay Weidner. He says Jack Torrance represented Kubrick himself. His deal with the manager of the Overlook Hotel, which represented America (red, white, and blue; built on an Indian burial ground), references Kubrick’s own deal with the U.S. government to help fake the moon landing. The snowstorm that traps the Torrance family in the Overlook is the Cold War, and the bears throughout the hotel symbols of Russia.
The scene that this theory relies on most heavily is the one that sees Danny Torrance rise from the hotel carpet, which looks like a NASA launchpad, wearing an Apollo 11 sweater. He approaches a room, No. 237, that represents the moon. We know this because the moon is 237,000 miles from the earth, theorists say (it’s actually 238,000 miles away, on average). Kubrick went out of his way to make this reference by changing the room number from 217, its number in Stephen King’s novel. Another noteworthy change is making the daughters of the hotel’s previous caretaker twins. It was only one child in the book, changed in the film to represent Gemini, the NASA mission that preceded Apollo.
This theory was given new life in late 2015 when a video surfaced with what was claimed to be footage of Kubrick admitting his role in the faked moon landings. The video was fake.The rest of this article contains plenty more entertaining idiocy of this nature, and even a couple that managed to give me a bit of a chill down the old spine. Your mileage may vary, but I still recommend giving it at least a quick look-over. Enjoy!
On this fifteenth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, we remember the innocents murdered that day, the courage of police and firefighters, the deliberately shocking brutality of the act, and the wounded lives left in its wake. Osama bin Laden is dead, but Islamist terrorism lives on, the Middle East has descended into seemingly unending war and chaos, and a toxic mix of religion and tribalism fans the flames. We feel the heat even in America, where religious and racial xenophobia fuel the candidacy of an authoritarian demagogue.
We have plenty to mourn, but this eulogy is for something else that died on 9/11. It may seem trivial at first, especially against the backdrop of the lives lost on that day, but this is a different kind of loss. It was an alternate version of the year 2001, and a piece of our American spirit, of our genius and hope, died with it on 9/11. For me it lives on in a memory of another fifteenth anniversary.
I was fifteen years old when I first saw Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey in 1968...I realize it's a lot to ask from some of you to read something that was published in The Huffington Post, but why not go ahead and make an exception this one time? It's a really good essay!
I had great relationships with everyone. But Stanley kubrick and I became friends. I used to go to his house at midnight and discuss events related to the film over turkey sandwiches. This evolved into a discussion after he had fired his fourth composer. At that time I suggested that he use many of the pieces of music that became part of the movie 2001 Space Odyssey. This includes the now well known theme song.Is Cantwell really taking credit for Kubrick's decision to abandon Alex North's completed score and go with the temporary tracks instead? If he really is the one who came up with this idea, this is the first I've heard of it.
At the height of my so-called “fame” I remember a conversation I had at a party I had with one of London’s top paparazzi photographers. He and others had taken many pictures of me which had featured in leading British publications and whatever foreign publication they could tout pictures to increase their cash flow via syndication.I said to him, “Thank you for not following me to my flat or camping outside my door – that scenario must be awful for some celebs.” His response? “Well you haven’t done anything bad yet…”It's an interesting, somewhat eye-opening read, blessedly free of pathetic confessional or pity mongering emotional manipulation. Davis roped a whirlwind and enjoyed the ride. Bravo!
"A YouTube user who creates video essays has been hit with a punishing lawsuit after selecting Stanley Kubrick as a subject matter and uploading his work to YouTube. UK-based Lewis Bond from Channel Criswell is being targeted by the music publishers behind the 1971 classic A Clockwork Orange who want huge damages for willful infringement."
Stanley Kubrick’s classic sci-fi epic, 2001: A Space Odyssey, is a fictional transcendence of classic Greek mythos through the ubiquity of the motion picture camera. As the film’s title suggests, this is Greek philosopher Homer’s The Odyssey told on the grandest of scales and sparing no expense that 20th Century cinema had to offer. According to philosopher Carl Jung, myths are the “culturally elaborated representations of the contents of the deepest recess of the human psyche: the world of the archetypes.”
As such, 2001 makes tremendous leaps forward in longstanding narrative traditions that have been passed down from the epitome of Western culture. This was Kubrick, after all, and he wasn’t going to give the viewer an easy time or spoon feed answers to the cryptic symbolism. The film is ostensibly draped in ambiguity, and it leads down a path that rejects materialism in favor of spiritual enlightenment. The final act is overly concerned with the impact that light has on the body; how illumination can take a lifetime to understand and transform decaying flesh into the Übermensch.This essay is well worth your time. And you just might learn a few things along the way!
Having heard people say that there isn’t much going on in 2001 or simply not “getting it,” what follows is a small breakdown of the big thematic material that makes up the masterpiece.
"They’re just boy-girl, night-fun,” Kubrick praised, “leading up to pouring the beer, all in 30 seconds, beautifully edited and photographed. Economy of statement is not something that films are noted for.”Well, according to this lengthy SlashFilm oral history: "That piece published on a Sunday. The following day—after interested parties tracked down who was responsible for these spots—the phone of fashion photographer turned commercial director Jeremiah Chechik started rining off the hook."
