THE KUBRICK PARTS OF THE PETER SELLERS DOC

KUBRICK NEWS IN BRIEF ~ MARCH 6, 2017

Recognize the Shining Twin on the left? That's none other than Bruce Willis, hand-in-hand with his assistant, Stephen J. Eads, as they skip towards director M. Night Shyamalan’s annual "Shyamaween" party in Philadelphia. Shyamaween is an annual charity event to raise money for the M. Night Shyamalan foundation, the director’s organization that combats poverty.

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From the ridiculous to the sublime: Matthew Woodson's new painted poster for 2001: A Space Odyssey is a real beauty.

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Jamie Stangroom interviews Louise and Lisa Burns, better known as The Shining Twins, and they're just as charming today as they were creepy 40 years ago!

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Anybody know where we can find a copy of the new documentary short that accompanied the UK theatrical re-release of The Shining late last year? I've looked around but so far have had no luck. If any of you run across it, please send it my way!

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Check out this whining, repetitive idiocy about how that mean old baddy Stanley Kubrick tortured Shelly Duvall on the set of The Shining and how nobody would stand for that sort of treatment nowadays. Yes, well, considering the state of film today...

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So Tony Zierra, the director of Filmworker, the documentary about Leon Vitali, has decided that his next documentary is going to be about Eyes Wide Shut.  Titled “SK13,” it will offer an inside look at the making of the film. Zierra says the appeal is that it is the one film of Kubrick’s that people are still divided on: “The one movie that I feel is the wrinkle in Kubrick’s filmography is Eyes Wide Shut. The people that love him always say, ‘He’s a genius, but I’m not sure what the hell that movie was about.'” No release date for the documentary has been announced as yet.

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If you're a fan of Mr. Robot, you're probably already aware that this is a show where the Kubrick references fly fast and thick. This Hollywood Reporter article does a great job of breaking down all the many, many homages and references to Kubrick films found in the third episode of the third season of the show.

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Any fellow font fanatics out there? I've always loved fonts and typefaces, and Kubrick's films have always been a source of beautiful treatments of text, so I love this short history of Futura, the first font to land on the Moon! It also, not so coincidentally, was a font featured prominently in the early promotional materials for 2001: A Space Odyssey.

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The Guardian catches up with Danny Lloyd and helps him dispel a few rumors that have sprung up due to his absence from the movie biz after what should have been a star-making role in The Shining. This is a really comprehensive interview and is well worth the time and attention of any and all fans of The Shining or Kubrick in general. Lots of great tidbits to be had here. Too bad they weren't able to get into the recently developed theory that Danny is actually the villain in both the film and the novel! To learn more about this surprisingly convincing theory (or, if you're so inclined, to poke holes in it), then check out this essay.

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Now here's an interesting project! The Shining 237 is Susan Kruglinska's podcast wherein she and a number of guests dissect The Shining in discrete two minute, thirty-seven second chunks. And guess what? Turns out there's a shocking amount of material to explore, including a bunch of stuff that was new to me, despite watching this movie well over a hundred times over the years. A wealth of material for Kubrick scholars. Definitely this is one to bookmark and return to with regularity.

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In a KNIB full of Shining related links, this last one, from The Stranger, may be the most interesting: experimental musician Corey Brewer discusses creating a soundtrack to go along with everybody's favorite weirdo pomo film experiment, The Shining Forward and Backward, Simultaneously, Superimposed (about which more here). You can actually listen to this score at Brewer's bandcamp page, sans imagery of course. It's actually pretty impressive and makes for great nightmare fuel, if you're into that sort of thing.

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This University of Chicago overview of a new course they offer that covers the history and cultural legacy of "the Nuclear Age" has got me to thinking... can any such course really be complete if it doesn't include both a viewing and a discussion about Dr Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb? Lucky for the students at U Chicago, this course has both.

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And speaking of university courses, how about this Rollins College class, as described in their independent school paper, The Sandspur?

For those with darker tastes, 'The Madness of Stanley Kubrick' may satisfy. The Psychology Department’s Dr. Paul Harris has been fascinated with the films of Stanley Kubrick ever since watching the original release of 2001: A Space Odyssey as a boy. 

“Every Kubrick film is unpredictable,” said Harris. “[A]nd every Kubrick film contains some element of madness as well.” This intersession will explore five Kubrick films, looking at “mentally ill characters in a mentally ill society—where’s the madness? Is it in the characters, or the context the society is in?” 

Harris, however, makes clear the distinction between madness and real mental illness. “Madness is fictitious,” he noted. “[The class] will be looking at Kubrick and how he uses madness as a dramatic tool.” In drawing the line between true mental illness and literary madness, this class serves well the purposes of those interested in psychology, film, sociology, and so on.

Definitely a course I would have loved to take, if I was still a student! Although I figure if I took it now, I'd probably ace it, considering I've spent most of my adult life steeping in Kubrick's films, as well as scholarship about his films.

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John Mollo, who won an Oscar for his costuming work on Star Wars (the man created Darth Vader's iconic "look") and was one of the men whom Kubrick relied on to make sure the costumes in Barry Lyndon were perfectly appropriate to the era, down to every last ribbon of lace or ivory button, passed away near the end of last year. May he rest in peace.

KUBRICK NEWS IN BRIEF ~ SEPT 30, 2017

Full Metal Jacket turned 30 years old this summer. Commemorate the milestone by reading this excellent Birth/Movies/Death retrospective by Jacob Knight. And dig that crazy artwork, man!

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Once you're done checking out the above article, you should also give this awesome audio retrospective on the Task&Purpose podcast a listen. Entitled "To the Everlasting Glory of Full Metal Jacket", this podcast is created by, and geared towards, veterans and currently serving members of the American military, which makes for a great perspective on this cinematic masterpiece.

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And finally re: FMJ, check out this Collider article in which Matthew Modine discusses two major scenes that were cut from the final version of the film, and this CinemaBlend article about a scene inspired by R.Lee Ermey's dirty poetry. Combine all of this with a fresh viewing of the flick, and you will have properly celebrated the 30th anniversary of Kubrick's most underrated flick, the immortal Full Metal Jacket.

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Here's a funny little thing to watch...

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In this Movie Pilot overview, Eric Hanson explores Kubrick's oeuvre in terms of his accomplishments as a translator of literature into cinema, and the various conflicts and controversies that have arisen from his relationships with many of the authors whose work he has adapted. This piece is, unfortunately, short and insubstantial. Hanson doesn't even address the extremely interesting history of Kubrick's relationships with Calder Willingham, Jim Thompson, Vladimir Nabokov, or Gustav Hasford! So please don't mistake me linking to this article as giving it my seal of approval. I do NOT. However, it does point future article writers towards what I believe could be a very intriguing topic for exploration. Who knows? I might just write such an article myself for this blog.

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This little video tells the viewer how to use (and get away with breaking) the 180 degrees rule.

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You know, when it comes to oddball ways directors have scraped together money for their projects, Kubrick hustling chess games to scam unwitting potzers out of their pocket change barely even qualifies, especially when compared with what Robert Rodriguez did to finance his films. But hey, it's Kubrick, so I suppose he makes the above-linked list based the quality of his oeuvre and the pull that the authors suspected including him would have on movie geeks, in terms of getting eyeballs directed towards their article. I guess their scam worked, seeing as they got my attention.

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During the course of researching and writing his book Reconstructing Strangelove, Inside Stanley Kubrick's Nightmare Comedy, author Mick Broderick uncovered a long hidden plan by Kubrick to relocate his entire family to Australia if ever it became obvious that a nuclear war was about to start... as well as the hilarious reason why Kubrick eventually gave up on his plans:

The American director had set up accounts, transferred funds, organised visas and investigated film projects in anticipation of his move. 

However, he cancelled when he discovered he would have to share a bathroom on the ship that would take him to Australia. 

“Famous for not flying, Stanley had bought tickets for the ocean liner. But when he found out he would have to share a bathroom the trip was off,” says Broderick. 

“The idea of spending months at sea sharing toilet space with complete strangers was intolerable; he would much rather face thermonuclear war.”

You know what, folks? If you don't think this qualifies as classic, Strangelove-level comedy in a Kubrick vein all on its own, I don't know what to tell you.

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Speaking of interesting books, Robert Koller's The Extraordinary Image: Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick, and the Reimagining of Cinema explores the obsessions of Hitchcock, Kubrick, and Welles, based on the ways in which they expanded the use of sound in cinema. Based on this lengthy, academically rigorous review, it looks very much worth checking out.

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Apparently, people are saying The Weekend's latest video, for a song called "Secrets", was influenced or inspired by Kubrick in some way. I'm not so sure about that, but you can be the judge. Here's the vid:

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Illustrator Brian Sanders offers a rare glimpse into Stanley Kubrick's creative process. Here's an example of the kind of illustrations you'll find at this link.

KUBRICK NEWS IN BRIEF ~ FEB 25, 2017

How awesome do NASA's new tailored Starliner astronaut suits look, right?! Designed by Boeing, to be worn by astronauts going to and from the International Space Station on their new Starliner transport ship beginning in 2018, i09 wasn't kidding around when they said the suits were "straight out of 2001: A Space Odyssey"! And they're not just stylish... they'll keep you alive! New features include an upgraded helmet, which is incorporated into the spacesuit, touchscreen-sensitive gloves, and built-in ventilation. Think they'll come in a size XXXXXXL?

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Feast your eyes on this custom drum kit based on the carpet patterns in The Shining!

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If any of you Kubrick fanatics out there have some spare change burning a hole in your pockets, the man's French vacation house in the Dordogne valley, about five hours south of Paris, has been put up for sale at an eminently reasonable $1.6 million. Photos and other details are available at the link. If you're reading this and you do end up buying it, kindly invite me over, as I speak the language and am a pretty decent cook, and I've been told I'm not too bad of a conversationalist, to boot!

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Last month, Michael Moorcock--another man whose work I greatly admire--wrote an intriguing essay about Kubrick's relationship with Arthur C. Clark for the New Statesman. Entitled "The Odd Couple of Science Fiction", the piece gained some notoriety on social media over a passing mention about Clark being "brought to tears" at the film's premiere over some of the changes Kubrick had made to the story without telling him. Of course, in context, this betrayal comes across as a lot less dramatic than the online click-hunters would have us believe. Anyway, it's a great remembrance that every fan of both Clark and Kubrick owes it to themselves to read. It's full of great insights and interesting moments, and Moorcock even addresses the sordid rumors about Clark's sexual proclivities in as decisive and definitive a manner possible at this late (i.e. posthumous) date. There is one moment that Moorcock relates that I'd like to share with you all, and it comes from the essay's conclusion:

I have one other memory of that visit to the 2001 set. After being given a tour of the studio by the MGM publicist, I was led towards Kubrick's office just as the director entered the main building. I prepared to meet the man who had contacted me a year or so earlier. I had many questions. Perhaps he would confirm some of my guesses.
Kubrick's eyes went straight to me and did not leave me as he spoke brusquely to the publicist.
"Get these people off the set," he said.
We were never face to face again.

Not very flattering to Stanley, for sure, but the authenticity of this account gives credence to everything that comes before.

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A short film, entitled Kubrick by Candlelight, aims to recreate the filming of Kubrick's Barry Lyndon in Ireland. Here's the film's Kickstarter, where you can learn more about the project. In this interview with the Irish Film and Television Network, director David O'Reilly--whose day job involves location scouting for such A-list projects as Star Wars: Rogue One--discusses all of the complexities and challenges of filming the project in the Irish midlands, as well as the lengths he and his crew went in order to be as true as possible to the source material. Finally, though there isn't much here of interest to Kubrick fans, here's a video of cast member Al Foran having fun impersonating various celebrities while in full costume and makeup:

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In this interview with the UK Independent, UNKLE's James Lavelle reminisces about his acclaimed project from last year, Daydreaming with... Stanley Kubrick, which saw more than 60 artists participate in a celebration of Kubrick's work, held at Somerset House. He also discusses his latest venture, Daydreaming with UNKLE presents... THE ROAD: SOHO. It looks pretty interesting. All my UK peeps, go check it out!

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Okay, so I've finally seen Passengers, Morten Tyldum's morally problematic deep space romance flick, and I have to say, I kinda dug it. And not because of the much ballyhoo'd Kubrick references, which, to be honest, pretty much boiled down to just the somewhat ghostly robot bartender in the vast ship's Shining-like ballroom bar. In this interview with Deadline Hollywood, however, Passengers sound editor Will Files explains how Kubrick inspired both he and the director:

I’m a big fan of Stanley Kubrick, and as it turns out, Morten is also a big fan. I’ve always liked the way Kubrick uses sound, as well as the image. He tends to have a sparse soundtrack—they tend to not be very cluttered— so we really wanted to try to use that, not maybe as a point of reference for how the actual sounds would sound, but in terms of the approach to the sound, keeping it elegant in its simplicity. We wanted everything to sound effortless, and like it was really there. A real sense of reality. As opposed to a film like Star Wars, which is all about being stylized for the point of having fun, this movie was all about being stylized for the point of giving the audience a certain feeling about this ship. We wanted this ship to really have a character.

So there you go. Personally, I thought Passengers was a somewhat intriguing story surrounded by an absolutely fantastic sensory spectacle, making it a very fitting second half of a double feature movie night alongside Prometheus. You can use the former to come down from the grisly exhaustion brought on by the latter, and also pretend that they take place in the same fictional universe!

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Here's a great video of Kubrick nut Peter Jackson telling the story about how fellow Kubrick fanatic Adam Savage helped him to understand just exactly how awesome his HAL-9000 prop from 2001 really was. This Nerdist article goes into a bit more detail.

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Guess which films take the Number One and Number Two spots on this Cheat Sheet list of authors who hated the movies made from their books? I'll give you two hints: One didn't like the fact that the last chapter was left out of the movie, and the other has been whining about it to whoever will listen for the better part of

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In this Telegraph UK account, Andrew Birkin describes going from being Stanley Kubrick's teaboy to being one his most trusted assistants. 

Kubrick had a horror of flying, so 2001 was made at MGM studios in Borehamwood. I was 19 when I started work as a runner. I was soon barred from the set because I got so distracted: the production office would send me to get 20 boxes of envelopes from the store and I would pass the set and be totally mesmerised and not come back for hours.

One night, Kubrick was having a meeting about the Dawn of Man sequence and I was on hand to supply cups of tea. Kubrick said, ‘Gee, fellas, I can’t believe there isn’t a desert in England.’ The art department said there wasn’t, but I said, ‘I know where there’s one.’
And Kubrick said, ‘Who are you?’ ‘I’m the tea boy; here’s your cup of tea, sir.’ I vaguely remembered seeing a picture of Formby Sands in an old geography book. The next day they sent me off to photograph it with a Polaroid. 

Unfortunately the picture in the book had been taken 40 years earlier when it was all sand and no trees – but if you ducked down low enough and avoided the nuclear reactor in one direction and the high-rise flats in another, it could still arguably look like a desert. 

Somebody told me to bump up the photos with production ideas, so I stayed up all night in a Liverpool hotel, then caught the milk train back to the studio, put the lot on Kubrick’s desk – and then dashed back up to Liverpool because I wanted it to look like a miracle.

And indeed at 11am I got a phone call: ‘Come back to the studio – we’re getting you a union ticket [almost impossible to get at that time], and Stanley has doubled your pay.’ I arrived back and was summoned into the conference room. 

There were the art department, looking sheepish, and Kubrick, who was really enjoying himself. ‘Hi,’ he said. ‘Andrew? Is that your name?’ Then he asked the art department why they’d spent £40,000 and many months looking for a desert when the tea boy had come up with one in 24 hours at a total cost of £10, six shillings and eight pence.

Birkin went on to a very successful, Kubrick-influenced career as a producer, writer and sometime director. Among his films, the most Kubrickean are The Burning Secret and Cement Garden, both of which he directed, and Perfume, which he co-wrote.  Kubrick had expressed interest in filming both The Burning Secret, based on a story by Stefan Zweig, and Perfume, based on the novel by Patrick Suskind.

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Speaking of long lost Kubrick stuff, Cinephilia And Beyond brings us an interview with Kubrick from 1980, conducted by Vincente Molina Foix, and reprinted for the first time ever in that must-have Taschen tome, The Kubrick Archives. Purchase from the link!

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Goddamnit, here's yet another book I'm going to have to pick up, read, and write a review for: Kubrick's Game, which the linked i09.com review compares favorably to Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code and Ernie Cline's Ready Player One. Compounding my misery over this is the fact that I, myself, have long wanted to tackle such a project. Thanks, procrastination--and also, most likely, a lack of the necessary talent and know-how--for ruining yet another life goal.

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In this Cumberland Pennsylvania Sentinel "Senior Moment" op-ed piece, William Parkinson describes the time he and his navy shipmates watched Dr. Strangelove: or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb for the first time, the year it was released:

The audience was aghast. Moviegoers packing the theater at the U.S. Naval Facilities in Yokosuka, Japan, were literally stunned as Peter Sellers, playing the mentally deranged and physically crippled Dr. Strangelove, rose from his wheelchair to proclaim the benefits of global destruction — to the president of the United States — and shouting, “Mein Führer! I can walk!” There followed a cascade of nuclear explosions that blew the world to bits. 

That evening in 1964, the crowd that slowly left the theater was strangely silent; obviously disturbed by what they had witnessed on the screen. They had expected a comedy, of sorts, but coming less than a year after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, the growing concern — and involvement — in the war in Vietnam and increasing sabre rattling by the Soviet Union, the sailors, Marines and their families wandering into that night more than half a century ago had been shaken. 

Stanley Kubrick’s “Dr. Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb,” played differently with a military and naval audience than it did with the critics back in the states or with the hometown movie house crowd. Those of us then in uniform had lived for years with the harshest of realities — that things could vanish in a nuclear instant. Such were the facts of the Cold War.

The rest of it is really great, too, comparing Kubrick's terrifyingly educational satiric take on the the technocratic Powers That Be to today's far more (apparently) chaotic situation, in the hope of finding either some answers, or a direction in which to look for them. The search goes on.

 

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And finally for today's edition of the KNIB's, I present 2001's HAL-9000 and Her's Samantha, having an interesting chat about love, consciousness, and human nature. Enjoy!

Reflections of HAL and Samantha - 2 channel video installation from Tillmann Ohm on Vimeo.

KUBRICK NEWS IN BRIEF ~ SEPTEMBER 3, 2016

Playing catch-up here at Kubrick U, here's a London Guardian article from July featuring an interview with artist Philip Castle about his awesome airbrush illustrations that featured so prominently in the Clockwork Orange posters and promotional campaign. Castle also painted the Full Metal Jacket poster, and did a bunch more illustrations for that film, but most of it went unused (see above). Not to worry, though... most of it appears in Taschen's absolutely essential Stanley Kubrick Archives, which was recently re-released in a smaller, ridiculously affordable edition! Buy it from this link if you're in Canada, or this link if you're in the USA, and I'll get a few shekels in my beggin' cup!

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Speaking of ACO, the New York Post reports that a galley proof copy of the book Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange featuring hand-written marginalia by Kubrick himself has come up for auction, and lawyers for Kubrick's estate are warning any potential buyers that publishing such an artifact for mass consumption would probably be a very bad idea, lawsuit-wise. The Belfast Telegraph had a more thorough (and timely) report, but I haven't been able to find any news about the auction results. If anybody out there knows anything, clue me in!

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In the inaugural entry of a recent Washington Post series on "all the ways America could come to an end", writer Sonny Bunch examines all the ways that Dr Strangelove scrambled the brains of audiences and more serious-minded critics, alike. It's a short, punchy piece, and my favorite bits are definitely when Bunch quotes clearly upset entertainment industry (key word there) trade columnists, like Bosley Crowther, who said of the film: "Somehow, to me, it isn’t funny. It is malefic and sick." Somebody ought to come up with a word describing when someone simultaneously gets the point, and yet also thoroughly fails to realize that they have gotten it. Leave suggestions for such a word in the comments section, please!

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I don't watch the show, myself, but according to Slate, the final episode of the most recent season of the "autismsploitation" TV series Mr Robot featured an extended "homage" to Stanley Kubrick's films, including Eyes Wide Shut, The Shining, and Dr. Strangelove. This should come as little surprise to the show's fans, as creator Sam Esmail, who claims he used to hold Kubrick movie marathons at his suburban home when he was a teen, declared in an interview with Vulture that “one of the biggest influences on the show is Stanley Kubrick in general.”

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Last but not least comes word that incredibly ballsy Canadian wunderkind Matt Johnson's circuitous moon landing mockumentary-cum-satire Operation Avalanche - filmed under highly illegal circumstances on location at NASA for fuck's sake - is just about ready to invade the hearts and minds of Kubrickophiles, parapolitical paranoids, prank fans and lovers of good, old fashioned conspiracy thrillers the world over. No Moonwalkers, here, folks! You've got to shake that shambling waste of celluloid right out of your ganglia by, first, taking a look at Operation Avalanche's great new trailer...

...and then, viddy this joint Sundance interview with Johnson, his editor and producer, wherein they detail the ridiculous lengths to which they went in order to achieve absolute versimilitude... and maximum cinematic legend status. Much as I hate to admit it about one so young, but this Johnson kid is the real deal, in yer old pal Jerky's opinion. Check out his Kevin Smith-enabled The Dirties for a taste of his raging early potential.

10 YEARS AGO - LOST KUBRICK PROFILE FINALLY PUBLISHED

Terry Southern, photographed by Stanley Kubrick

From the introduction by Nile Southern, son of author Terry Southern...

This is really the story of two killings. 

In the summer of ’62, my father received a fateful assignment from Esquire to interview Stanley Kubrick whose film Lolita was about to be released. Terry admired Paths of Glory, The Killing, and Spartacus and, despite the list of canned (mostly trivial) questions from Esquire, engaged Kubrick in a provocative discussion about film, literature, and eroticism. After submitting the piece through his agent, it was clear Esquire wanted something more “gossipy” on Kubrick. … As the interview languished at Esquire, Terry began working on the screenplay for Dr. Strangelove, and in 1963 asked Esquire if he could do a piece on the movie.Incorporating bits of the squelched interview, he found the time to write the article during filming.

In the piece that follows, Terry introduces the reader (and the masses) to Kubrick, this revolutionary film, and the all-important (and ever looming) topic of the day: nuclear annihilation. Much to his astonishment, the editors dismissed the article as a “puff piece” and prodded him to go more gonzo. ... Terry protested, quite presciently, that this was one of those “rare instances where something genuinely great was at hand.” He wrote back: I have obviously failed to persuade you as to the phenomenal nature of the film itself — i.e. that it is categorically different from any film yet made, and that it will probably have a stronger impact in America than any single film, play, or book in our memory. To say that the piece is a “puff” is, to my mind, like saying that a piece about thalidomide babies is “downbeat.”

Read the rescued Esquire piece, as finally published in FilmMaker Magazine, 40 years after it was written, HERE.

LONG-LOST 20 MIN KUBRICK-NARRATED STRANGELOVE PROMO!

This is just incredible.

The blog Cinephilia And Beyond has amassed an amazing assortment of documents and videos related to Stanley Kubrick's satirical magnum opus, Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. This includes a never-before-seen-or-heard "promo reel" put together by Kubrick during the production - using some takes that ended up on the cutting room floor - apparently designed to assuage the rattled nerves of the film's (understandably) skittish financial backers.  You have to watch this thing to believe it.

Also, you absolutely have to visit the above link, which is a true treasure trove of Strangelove-related goodies, including multiple versions of the script, color photos of the shoot (some taken by Kubrick himself, others by Peter Sellers!) and more stuff than I can jam into this space without puking in my own mouth out of how jealous I am that I didn't put it together first! Go... just, go!

I'll start you off with the first part of the aforementioned promo reel. You need to go to the above link to see the rest, and check out all the other great stuff they've got.