CONFESSIONS OF A KUBRICK NUT, PART 3 IN 3D, THE FINAL CHAPTER!

Before continuing with this blog post, you should probably read PART ONE and PART TWO. All done? Thanks! - Jerky

Okay, so, where were we? Ah yes… the Internet circa, roughly, 1995. I was spending an inordinate amount of time participating in newsgroup discussion threads on all sorts of topics… but for the most part, I was on alt.movies.kubrick. I made a few friends there, and one or two enemies, but all in all it was an excellent virtual hangout, where the topics ran the gamut from the highest of high culture to the lowliest of current events, all of which we were somehow able to relate to something we’d seen in one or more of Stanley Kubrick’s films.

Some of the more interesting conversations that took place at AMK have been archived for posterity at a number of websites – sites which I have decided to include in their very own section here at KubrickU. You can find them under the heading TOP KUBRICK LINKS. There, you’ll find all of the most useful Kubrick-related websites, including a few obvious ones (IMDB, Wikipedia), and a few more outré selections (the Overlook Hotel site, the Kubrick-Floyd Synchronicities Site). All are worth spending some time on.

The high traffic levels and high quality of the discussions at AMK were particularly noteworthy when one considers that Kubrick fans had been suffering through nearly a decade’s worth of unbroken silence, with nothing but a few scant crumbs of industry gossip to keep our hopes alive. And then, like a thunderous revelation brought down from the mountaintop by bloody-eyed Zarathustra, himself, it happened… Kubrick finished weighing his options and made a decision, and a new Kubrick film was definitely on its way!

Needless to say, Eyes Wide Shut was the object of some high-octane speculation from the get-go. Every step of the way, every aspect of the production was gleefully picked apart by we (mostly) well-intentioned obsessives. And boy howdy, was there ever a lot to pick apart. Considering who was involved with this film – and considering all the myriad cast shuffles, shooting schedule extensions, script revisions and re-shoots – you could hardly blame us for believing that Eyes Wide Shut was either going to be one of the greatest movies ever made, or a fiasco of epic proportions.

In the middle of all this, Kubrick won the D.W. Griffith award from the Director’s Guild of America (DGA). He couldn't attend the ceremony to accept the award himself – indeed, considering the legends that had risen up around him since he left the United States back in the early 60’s, nobody could have expected him to – but he did send a video acceptance speech that, for a great many of us younger Kubrick fans, was the first time we’d heard the man’s speaking voice*… and its soft, slightly nasal, Bronx-inflected tone was almost as big a shock as the dramatic change in his appearance since the last time he was photographed, a dozen years previous.

And then, on March 7, 1999, over four months before Eyes Wide Shut was set to be released and just days after he’d shown an assembly cut to an assortment of Warner Bros honchos, Stanley Kubrick died of a massive heart attack in his sleep.

I can still remember where I was when I first heard the news. I was sitting in my living room at home when I got a call from my friend and fellow Kubrick fanatic Luis, owner of Suspect Video and Culture. “Did you hear the news?” he asked. “Stanley Kubrick died.”

I went cold, and a sort of denial crept over me. I thanked Luis for telling me, then hung up and turned on CNN. Not that I suspected Luis of pulling a nasty trick on me, but I needed to see the news for myself before I could believe it.

It didn’t take long. News of Kubrick’s death was at the top of the news cycle, where it belonged, so the story was repeating and being updated, every hour on the hour.

Needless to say, this was bad news… very bad news, indeed.

It was a terrible blow, obviously, to his family and loved ones. And it was also a great loss to world cinema, as evinced by the plethora of encomiums that poured from his peers’ word processors, fattening specialty film magazines from every corner of the globe to the point of bursting with special features and “collectors” issues dedicated to the man’s life and work.

But it was particularly bad news for Eyes Wide Shut. Because, as any Kubrick fan worth his salt could tell you, Stanley worked on his films until the last possible moment… and, on more than one occasion, beyond it. With four freaking months of post-production left to go before Eyes Wide Shut’s premiere, no amount of promises from panicking Warner Bros brass could sway me from my belief that Kubrick’s final film was forever, tragically, doomed to being unfinished.

And then – as if the prospect of Stanley Kubrick’s final film being unfinished at the time of his death wasn’t bad enough – The Powers That Be stepped in and began doing their best to turn tragedy into travesty.

First they went after the film’s explicit “orgy” sequence, digitally pasting a bunch of ridiculous, crudely composed figures over sex scenes no more explicit than what you could watch nightly on Cinemax pay cable at the time. Much to my shocked chagrin, there were apologists for this disgusting censorship even among many self-declared Kubrick fanatics. “It doesn't matter!”, I can recall some of them explaining. “Kubrick knew he had to deliver an R-rated movie… so he definitely would have wanted it that way!”

Next, a handful of British Hindus complained about the fact that some of their “religious” music was playing over that same orgy scene. So what did Warner Bros do? They immediately caved and replaced the music. And what did the apologists say? “It doesn't matter! It’s just one piece of music! Surely if Stanley were alive and was told that his musical choice had hurt someone’s feelings, he would have made a similar change!” One repeated refrain heard at AMK was about how other films had suffered far worse fates, so who were Kubrick fans to complain about a few little… um… “tweaks”?

Sad to say, but in those days, I was finding precious little evidence of the “rabid devotion” that Kubrick was alleged to inspire among his fanatical cult of admirers.

Maybe it was denial. Maybe some of them were having a hard time coming to terms with the possibility that a movie they’d waited so long for – five bloody years! – might not be “the real deal”. I don’t know. I’m no psychologist. But I do know that I would rather have an unfinished Kubrick film than a Kubrick film finished by a committee who then try to pass it off as “100 percent Kubrick”. And that’s exactly what I believe we've got with Eyes Wide Shut. I was afraid that might be the case in the weeks leading up to its release, and as I walked out of the theater on opening day I felt as though my worst suspicions had just been confirmed.

Does that mean I believe Eyes Wide Shut to be worthless? Not at all! I’m actually thankful for it. There are things in and about it that I dearly love, and I look forward to sharing some of the intriguing thoughts and theories that I've come across over the years in my quest to try and figure out what really happened behind the scenes – both pre- and posthumously – on Stanley Kubrick’s final film.

And so there you have it… an all-too-wordy breakdown of my life as an unrepentant Kubrick Nut! Sure, there’s more to the Kubrick story beyond Eyes Wide Shut and the aftermath of its release. There’s Steven Spielberg’s unjustly-maligned completion of Kubrick’s long-gestating return to cinematic science-fiction, A.I. There also remains a lot to be said about Kubrick’s ongoing influence on all of the arts, which, if anything, has only increased since his death.

And then, thanks in part to high-gloss documentaries like the surprise hit Room 237 (and a vast array of far less ritzy D.I.Y. videos on Youtube and the like), there’s the sudden, somewhat shocking rise of Kubrick conspiracy theories, which has resulted in his films becoming some of the most important and widely-discussed subjects of paracultural, or esoteric, analysis in recent times. I hope to bring you some interesting reportage on these subjects in the coming days, weeks, months and years.

Keep watching this space!

*not counting, of course, his Hitchcockian voice-over role as Murph, with whom Cowboy attempts to secure armored vehicle support while crossing through the Vietnamese city of Hue, in Full Metal Jacket. Prior to that, the only chance we’d have had to hear Kubrick’s voice was in Vivian Kubrick’s documentary The Making of The Shining (1980), which originally aired on British TV and on pay TV in the USA, and didn’t become commercially available until a special edition DVD release of The Shining in 2006.

CONFESSIONS OF A KUBRICK NUT PART 2

Is this a Kubrick Crazy Stare I see before me?

After going back and reading what I wrote in Part 1, I thought it might be a good idea to clear up a couple things. First, as an obsessive-compulsive individual with an addictive personality, I have obsessed over a great many artists and their work over the years. Stanley Kubrick hardly stands alone. This should probably go without saying, but I’m saying it now, anyway. I’m almost as big a Frank Zappa Freak, for instance, as I am a Kubrick Nut. Almost.

Furthermore, I was a great fan of John Carpenter, George Romero and David Cronenberg early on… and it’s probably no coincidence that all three share with Kubrick the distinction of having directed adaptations of novels by Stephen King. Throughout Junior High and High School, I read everything King wrote, along with a steady stream of horror, fantasy and science fiction novels, not to mention a vast array of popular science books, books about the supernatural, the occult and cryptozoology, “true crime” exposés and conspiracy theories, all either borrowed from or read at my local library… God bless that place.

Meanwhile, at school, I was being exposed to ever more interesting “required reading”. George Orwell’s 1984 and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World both left lasting impressions, as did Frankenstein, Moby Dick, and the short works of Poe, Hawthorne and Mark Twain.

I graduated High School in 1988 and, between then and 1993, I attended Mount Allison University, a small undergraduate school in New Brunswick, Canada, where I earned a B.A. in English Literature and Philosophy. This was still back in the prehistoric days before the Internet, so I had to rely on friends, faculty, film club and (again) the library to help broaden my horizons. It was during this time that I developed a taste for the works of Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Roman Polanski, Brian DePalma, David Lynch and Werner Herzog.

It was also during this time that, thanks to my good friend Mark Gibson, I finally got to see A Clockwork Orange, which disturbed me in a way that I’d never been disturbed by a movie before. As a horror fan, I’d seen far greater violence perpetrated on far more sympathetic victims, but I’d never seen anything quite so… would the word be wanton? Let’s check the dictionary…

wan-ton (adj) 1. of a cruel or violent action; deliberate and unprovoked. “sheer wanton vandalism” synonyms: deliberate, willful, malicious, spiteful, wicked, cruel. 2. (archaic) play, frolic.

Yes, “wanton” just about covers it. The “Home” invasion scene in particular left me feeling numb with shock. In subsequent viewings, I’ve come to appreciate Clockwork’s value as jet-black satire, but it has never lost its profoundly subversive undercurrent of social dread. Roger Ebert memorably criticized the film thusly: “An ideological mess, a paranoid right-wing fantasy masquerading as an Orwellian warning.” I think, in his own way, Ebert “got” A Clockwork Orange, but he didn’t much care for its message.

Regardless of my jarring encounter with Clockwork, my university years were a comparative low point for my Kubrick obsession. I was busy with other things, obviously – grappling with the history of world philosophy and the vast richness of the Anglo literary tradition, from its early beginnings to its latest, post-modern manifestations. For the first of what would eventually be many times, I performed the cliched rite of watching 2001: A Space Odyssey while stoned on pot. This (and other, straight viewings) served to rectify my earlier distaste for the film. What once seemed slow and plodding now seemed deliberate, conscious… achieving an icy cold perfection all its own. Also, I don’t think I need waste anyone’s time going over all the ways in which 2001 was a ground-breaker in terms of world cinema.

In 1993, after graduation, I moved to Toronto and almost immediately got onto the Internet, where one of the first places I visited was the alt.movies.kubrick newsgroup. There I found dozens of like-minded Kubrick fanatics and spent countless hours reading their opinions, sharing my own, and generally enjoying their virtual company. This is also around the time I started going to Toronto’s landmark Suspect Video and Culture store, whose owner, Luis Ceriz, is as huge and obsessive a Kubrick nut as yours truly.

It’s thanks to Suspect Video and their director-centric shelving system that I got to watch Paths of Glory and The Killing – unmitigated masterpieces, both – as well as the flawed but still magnificent Lolita and Barry Lyndon, all in short order. I even rented and watched Killer’s Kiss a couple of times, and secured a barely watchable 7th generation copy of the suppressed Fear and Desire via Something Weird Video.

It was during these first, heady alt.movies.kubrick/Suspect Video days that I began having dreams about Stanley Kubrick. I know, I know... but it wasn't all the time or anything. It’s probably happened a dozen times total over the years, with only three of those dreams being worth remembering.

Now, there are few things quite so boring as another person’s dreams, so I won’t torture you with the details. Suffice it to say that, as a veteran lucid dreamer, I collect dreams the way some people collect comic books, and I definitely count those Kubrick dreams among my favorites. Anyway, I think what kicked them off was the welcome news that Kubrick was hard at work on not one, but TWO new films – the mysterious Eyes Wide Shut, and the long-gestating sci-fi epic followup to 2001, A.I.!

Yes, it was very exciting to be a Kubrick fan in Toronto circa 1994-1999.

End of Part 2…

STANLEY KUBRICK ANSWERS A QUESTION - A COMIC

Read the rest of this comic here...

CONFESSIONS OF A KUBRICK NUT, PART 1

I have a confession to make: I’m obsessed with Stanley Kubrick.

I suppose it’s obvious. Most people don’t go around starting up blogs without damn good reason. My damn good reason for starting up a Stanley Kubrick blog is the fact that I’m obsessed with the man and his movies. Obsessed. Full stop.

There are many different varieties of Kubrick fan. Some have one favorite film that they obsess over, and they can take or leave the rest. Others are fans of that three-film span, from Strangelove to Clockwork, during which time Kubrick clearly both a) was at the peak of his powers and b) had his thumb on the pulse-point of the global zeitgeist, making him the most important director of that cinematic time period.

And then there are the obsessives, the fanatics, those of us for whom Kubrick's singular vision, uncompromising will, and peculiar philosophical bent combine to form a potent mix that can fairly be called a cult of personality. It is with some small regret that your humble blogger counts himself part of the latter, but hey... if I denied it, I'd be lying.

This doesn't mean that I think Kubrick or his films are perfect. Far from it. But it does mean is that, for me, even the flaws are fascinating.

I've had this obsession – to a greater or lesser degree – ever since I first sat frozen in terror on the living room floor while a commercial for The Shining seared itself onto my brain, way back in 1979. I was nine years old at the time, a Famous Monsters, Mad Magazine and Marvel Comics reader on the verge of making the quantum leap to Fangoria, National Lampoon and Stephen King novels. I had no idea who Stanley Kubrick was, nor what The Shining was supposed to be about. But that commercial… Holy crap.

Of course, it would be years before I’d get to see The Shining during its network television premiere on ABC in late 1983. By that time, I’d read the Stephen King novel on which it was based, and was well aware that King, and almost every voice in organized horror fandom, didn’t much care for Kubrick’s version.

And yet, despite the fact that King was an early hero whose opinion carried significant weight with me, as I sat in the dark watching The Shining through splayed fingers, I understood instinctively what I hadn't yet developed the tools to grasp intellectually: this was a film like no other; a masterpiece of Modern horror.

To backtrack just a bit, probably the first Kubrick film that I ever watched was Spartacus, which was a staple of Easter weekend programming back in the 1970’s and early 1980’s. It was one of my father’s favorite movies (along with Shane), and I remember thinking it was terribly thrilling and tragic, almost as good as The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939)… but not quite. And of course, never mind Stanley Kubrick; I probably didn't even know what a director was.

My next Kubrick film was most likely 2001: A Space Odyssey, which was broadcast on PBS one afternoon in 1982. I’d like to say that I sat, rapt and awestruck by its cinematic majesty, but, as I recall, it bored me nearly to tears. I remember that, even at the age of 12, I was aware of its reputation as a great science fiction film – if not the greatest. So I stuck with it. But it just seemed so incredibly, damnably slow. My opinion of that film, it should probably go without saying, has matured over the years.

It was around this time that our family got a VCR, and I’m not too proud to admit that, for a few years, my film diet mostly consisted of franchise horror movies, titty-filled teen comedies, ninja revenge epics and the occasional porno. The Thing, Dawn of the Dead, Up In Smoke, and Pink Floyd The Wall were particularly popular repeat rentals at our house.

I was also, by this time, a movie “cheap night” regular, going to the local Cinema du Centre – or the Fox Theater across the river, in Madawaska, Maine – every Tuesday, rain or shine, whether the movie was great or garbage. Probably the best “serious” film I’d seen up to that point was Jean-Jacques Annaud’s version of Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose. But there was one film genre above all others that united us lads in the giddy exaltation of a higher patriotic calling, and that was… the Vietnam movie.

Oh, how my friends and I loved those Vietnam movies, then best exemplified by the likes of First Blood, Missing in Action, Hamburger Hill, and so on. Sure, there was the odd serious entry in the genre, like Platoon. But even that one, though critically lauded, was chock full of the brutal violence and epic heroism that made the genre so damned appealing to our testosterone-ravaged, teenaged brains.

And so, when we showed up en masse at the theater one Tuesday and saw that distinctive camouflaged helmet poster, most of us thought we knew what we were in for.

We had no idea what we were in for.

Much like one of Sgt Hartmann’s colorful threats, Full Metal Jacket unscrewed the tops off our skulls and rearranged our brains, forcing us to confront the very real, very messy, rigorously field-tested and ruthlessly implemented assembly-line process of dehumanization that was (and is) absolutely essential to effect the transformation of ordinary, everyday guys into relentless, amoral killing machines.

Furthermore, it made no obvious value judgments about this process, which made the whole exercise all the more terrifying… and effective. Full Metal Jacket impacted my 17-year-old mind with the force of a philosophical revelation.

I needed to find out more about this Stanley Kubrick guy. So I hit the local library where, in old hardback editions of The Film Yearbook, I learned that he’d directed Spartacus (a pleasant surprise), as well as a few that I’d never heard of – Killer’s Kiss (1955), The Killing (1956), Paths of Glory (1958), Lolita (1961), and Barry Lyndon (1975) – and two that I had heard of, but never seen: Dr. Strangelove or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964), and A Clockwork Orange (1971).

Of this lot, the only one I managed to hunt down in the year between the blooming of my Kubrick obsession and going away to college was Dr. Strangelove, which I borrowed from the lending library at the University of Maine in Fort Kent. 

Once again, I was completely blown away by a Kubrick film.

These days, it’s difficult to convey exactly how oppressive the late Cold War period was, living under the constant threat of total nuclear annihilation. The drumbeat of Evil Empire rhetoric from the ascendant Reagan/Thatcher conservative movement had many of us more sensitive types going numb with existential dread. What Kubrick “got” was how living under such conditions could sometimes feel like being caught in the middle of some vast, evil joke, waiting on a mushroom cloud-shaped punch-line. While Dr. Strangelove didn't solve anything, it certainly did hip us to certain previously unspoken realities about our predicament, and let us feel like we, too, were “in” on the joke. The fact that this movie came out so close to the Bay of Pigs disaster, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the assassination of JFK only makes it all the more incredible.

After multiple viewings of Dr. Strangelove, I became convinced that it was more than simply an inspired work of genius. True, it was undeniably that, but it was also something more. In my opinion, Kubrick’s Strangelove exhibits greatness on the same level as Dante’s Divine Comedy, Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, or Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. It is, quite simply, a World Historic work of art.

(End of Part One)

YET ANOTHER HIDDEN TREASURE IN THE SHINING

I must confess that, after decades of repeated viewings and years of obsessive analysis, I thought I was done coming across anything new and surprising in The Shining. Boy, was I wrong. For today, I have come across an almost personal connection to The Shining in the form of an artist whose work Kubrick managed to surreptitiously sneak throughout the Overlook hotel and elsewhere in the Shining universe.

The artist in question is Alex Colville, a Canadian artist who was educated at a small but prestigious Maritime undergraduate university called Mount Allison… the very school from which your humble blogger graduated with a B.A. in English and Philosophy in 1993… the very year that Colville’s early works and war art were exhibited at the university's own Owens Art Gallery before being sent out on a nationwide art tour! Indeed, Colville was present, acknowledged and honored during that year’s convocation ceremonies, and I got to shake the great man's hand. I even spent four out of my five years at "Mount A" living in an all-male dorm (Trueman House) that had a meeting hall featuring a huge mural painted by Colville.

See the essential Overlook Hotel blog for more information about where and how 4 of Colville’s paintings can be found hidden throughout The Shining. As for why Kubrick chose to highlight this artist’s work in his film… your guess is as good as mine.