On September 11 of 2014, I wrote this blog post in appreciation of beloved London hairdresser Leonard Lewis, more fondly remembered by we Kubrick fans as the subject for that most memorable of movie title cards: "Hair by Leonard". Just this week, the legendary stylist who coiffed everyone from Twiggy to the Beatles has passed on. He was 78... and no doubt fabulous to the last.
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Here's a video of some bunnies re-creating Clockwork Orange in under a minute's time. They manage to get a surprising amount in there!
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In Eastern University's The Waltonian, Billy Faulkner has penned an essay on "Mental Illness and the Arts: The Case of Shelley Duvall". Being the work of a student, it is short on substance and packed with factual errors (check out how badly Faulkner messes up the context of the shooting schedule for The Shining), but hey... it's short, so why not read it?
Watch this Hollywood Reporter video to see Manchester by the Sea director Kenneth Lonergan talk about Kubrick's influence on his work. http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/as-ways-make-a-film-as-are-films-says-manchester-by-sea-writer-director-kenneth-lonergan-writer
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Looks like the mega-budget science fiction wannabe epic Passengers is more Interstellar than Arrival when it comes to living up to the promise of 2001: A Space Odyssey. At least, that's what the critics seem to be saying. I'm still kind of curious about it.
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And let's finish off this edition of Kubrick News In Brief (the KNIBs!) with yet another gorgeous piece of Shining artwork... and what do you know! Once again, we're bringing you the work of Michael Whaite! This guy is a next level illustrator, an Omega Mutant artistic talent.
Apparently, P90X feels like traumatic moments from some of Pop Culture's most familiar films, including a bunch from this website's raison d'etre, as well as a couple from another personal favorite, David Cronenberg, and one flick I couldn't quite place (the one with the dude chained to a burning tree). Enjoy!
The Hollywood legend who helped make Paths of Glory such an incredible, unforgettable anti-war statement (and, to be fair, probably helped to make Spartacus not quite as awesome as it could have been) has achieved a milestone that few of us can ever hope to reach... 100 years on this stupid wet rock hurtling through the frozen blackness of space!
And yes, I know, going as far back as his autobiography, he's made a habit of occasionally spouting off some ignorant, bitter baloney about the object of this blog's obsessive affection. And yet still, it is with great pleasure--and a momentary setting aside of that whole Natalie Wood thing--that we here at Kubrick U wish a hearty Mazel Tov to the ragman's son! L'chaim, you handsome sunofabitch!
H. Perry Horton's Film School Rejects article, I Am a Camera: The Photos of Stanley Kubrick in the Films of Stanley Kubrick, pretty much serves only as an introduction to Candice Drouet's short but fascinating video, entitled "Kubrick: Photos and Films", in which she juxtaposes old photographs from Kubrick's LOOK Magazine days with scenes from his films, and which you can watch here and now...
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Kubrick fans might do well to keep an eye out for Connor Provenzano's upcoming documentary, Focused Life, in which he examines the yogic concept of kundalini as it pertains to the fine art of paying attention, something which has become vitally important in recent years, thanks to the unchecked evolution and spread of psycho/cybernetic mechanisms of control, both online and off, in recent years. In an interview with SLUG Magazine, Provenzano, when asked about his major film influences, replied: "Stanley Kubrick is one that has a big influence on a lot of filmmakers, but he’s also had a huge influence on me. The risks that he was taking with his stylistic elements were really beautiful and intense. What I realized later was that a lot of filmmakers who were influenced by Kubrick were those that I was naturally drawn to. It’s almost like there’s this lineage of influence that I feel like I’m a part of." I'll know I'll be keeping my eyes peeled!
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Did you know that the Minnesota Opera Company put on a musical stage production of The Shining this year, composed by Paul Moravec with libretto by Mark Campbell, and that it got really good reviews? You used to be able to hear the whole thing online for free, but unfortunately that was a time-sensitive offer that has already run out. At this link, however, you will find a photo-filled, scene-by-scene breakdown of the entire opera. As soon as the audio becomes available again, I will be posting it here.
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Vivian Kubrick made a surprise appearance at a screening of The Shining organized by the Cucalorus Film Festival in Wilmington, North Carolina last month, alongside two of the people responsible for helping Kubrick achieve the now iconic "look" of the film, Steadicam originator Garrett Brown and camera wizard (and Wilmington native) Joe Dunton. As part of her appearance, Vivian showed 10 minutes of previously never seen footage from the shooting of her BBC documentary "The Making of The Shining", in which she gives a tour of part of the film's set to visiting Japanese businessmen. Again, should that footage ever appear online, you can be sure that I will be linking to it here at Kubrick U!
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Is that a monolith on your planet? Or are you just happy to see me? The indefatigable conspiracy and alien-hunter "Tyler", of SecureTeam10, claims to have discovered a massive, miles-high "monolith" on the surface of the planet Murcury. Follow the link to read more, and to see a 20 minute video detailing why this anomaly isn't a "doorway", as first thought by those who stumbled across it, but indeed, is a monolith, as made famous in Kubrick's film 2001: A Space Odyssey. We report, YOU decide!
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Noted Kubrick fan Bilge Ebiri over at VULTURE (and it's nice to see that he's still doing these think pieces despite having scored a new gig as lead film critic for The Village Voice) asks a question with particular relevance to the object of our obsessive affections: What Happens When Filmmakers Raid Dead Directors' Unmade Projects? The impetus for asking this question is True Detective helmer Carey Fukunaga taking up Kubrick's unmade passion project Napoleon as a multi-episode series for HBO, but Ebiri clues the reader in to a number of other interesting projects, both past and future. Well worth the read.
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After Moonwalkers and Operation Avalanche -- never mind Room 237, Dark Side of the Moon, and a host of "documentaries" by Youtube auteurs -- does the world need yet another movie exploring the idiot notion that we never went to the moon and that Stanley Kubrick secretly filmed the hoaxed footage on a soundstage in London? I guess we're about to find out.
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Britney Spears' new video, "Slumber Party", features sequences at a party that Britney, herself, asked the director to make "like a younger version of Eyes Wide Shut". Forgive me for sharing it here with you all, but hey, it falls under my "collecting Kubrick related ephemera" mandate...
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I have yet to read Kubrick's erstwhile manservant Emilio D'Allesandro's memoir, Stanley and Me: Thirty Years by His Side, but this Los Angeles Review of Books critique by Zack Sigel really makes me want to, even though it manages to tease out a far less than flattering image of Kubrick from D'Allesandro's fawning tribute. After a perhaps somewhat overly psychoanalytic parsing of D'Allesadro's account, Sigel does manage to point out an anecdote that managed to draw a smile through the fog of cynicism:
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!”
The video series "Lessons from the Screenplay" examine what makes Kubrick and co-writer Diane Johnson's version of Stephen King's The Shining so damn creepy, paying special attention to the writing process.
As they say in France, "les gouts ne se discutent pas" (which is a polite way of saying there's no accounting for people's taste), but this "mixed universe" painting by Clinton Neuhaus that combines tropes from Kubrick's The Shining with Tobe Hooper's Poltergeist is kind of incredible, and probably not in the ways that the artist intended. But hey... you can be the judge of that. Here it is, in all its ghastly glory.
For a quarter century, the city of Toronto's finest film school was not located in any of its many institutes of higher learning, but in a couple of gloriously grimy video rental shops called Suspect Video and Culture.
Sadly, a massive blaze destroyed their Queen Street location in 2008, and now the greed of real estate developers has doomed the flagship store on the southwest edge of the Honest Ed's building at Bloor and Bathurst.
Suspect's proprietor and resident cinema guru Luis Ceriz, who also spearheads the annual Horror-Rama convention in Toronto, is a close personal friend, and I can attest to his bona fides as one of the most ardent and vocal Kubrick fans to be found anywhere on God's green Earth.
It is with a mix of pride and sorrow that I share with you now Stuart F. Andrews' recent two part documentary about/tribute to this beloved institution.
From The Creators Project: "We go behind the scenes of Operation Avalanche, a faux-documentary narrative following CIA agents tasked with faking the moon landing. As part of the research and creating a believable fake, the agents visit the set of Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, blurring all boundaries between film and reality. By framing their film as a period documentary, these filmmakers created a unique challenge for themselves: How to have their characters interact with the real Kubrick in archival footage? Here, we see how director Matt Johnson and his team were able re-create this meta world from archival stills with amazing ingenuity and creativity, virtual space, 3D projections, and green screens."
A lovely little short documentary covering the oft overlooked contribution of Kubrick's childhood neighborhood buddy, James B. Harris, who bet the bank on his buddy's vision, and went on to forge his own path in cinematic history. This makes me want to see The Bedford Incident and scan it for potential Kubrick contributions!
Can a one minute video montage provide sufficient evidence to convince you that Steven Spielberg was purposefully copying Stanley Kubrick's style when he devised the visual style palette for the misunderstood and underappreciated A.I.? The self-declared film geeks at Slash Film, AV Club and Nerdist seem to differ on the subject, though they all saw fit to feature Candice Drouet's video n their sites (just as I am doing now). As for myself, I figure if there's ever a time when it's okay to swipe a few Kubrick motifs, it's when you're finishing one of the man's long-gestating passion projects.
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In this hilarious mini-memoir for the Financial Review, legendary spy novelist John Le Carre regales readers with an abbreviated version of his myriad Hollywood adventures, including a number of run-ins with this blog's raison d'etre. Here is one particularly amusing interaction...
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!
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Did you folks know that, according to Jerry Lewis, he was the first person to offer up the now common witticism about it being impossible to polish a turd? That's according to Slate's history of the idiom, which includes Lewis' account, in which our man Stanley plays an important supporting role:
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.”
Whether this actually happened or not, it certainly has the ring of truth!
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.”
Much more at the link.
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When Hip Hop impressario Jay Z needed to pimp out the new West Hollywood digs for his Three Six Zero management company, he chose Optimist Design for the job. And when Optimist Design's chief architect Tino Schaedler needed a jolt of design inspiration, he turned to Stanley Kubrick. As partially explained in this Wallpaper.com article:
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.
I know it's probably Jay Z's intention to keep those Illuminati suspicions burning for as long as humanly possible, and building himself his very own James Bond villain lair is probably a great way to maintain that narrative. Mazel-Tov!
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And speaking of the Illuminati, here's Vulture's rundown of the 70 Greatest Conspiracy Theories inPop Culture History! From "Paul is dead!" to "Stevie Wonder isn't blind!" with a lot of Illuminati in between. This is no mere bullshit "listicle", friends... author Adam K. Raymond didn't just churn out this project like some desperate SEO-blinded blog-hack might, looking to pay for next month's ration of Soylent while expending the least possible effort and giving the least possible fucks. This is some substantial reading material. Unfortunately, if you're not big into the parapolitical side of the entertainment industry, you've got to wade through an awful lot of dubious claims about even more dubious "talents" before reaching the bit about how - you guessed it - Stanley Kubrick secretly shot the moon landing, and confessed to doing so "in code" in his film version of the Stephen King novel The Shining. Here is that section in its entirety.
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!
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Golly gee! Does this new commercial for Xiaomi's Mi Mix "edgeless" smartphone seem kind of familiar to you? I mean, give it a look, and maybe you can tell me!
Mmm... nope. I'm just not getting it, myself. Thank GOD there's the good people at Mashable, who appear to be willing to explain it all to my dumb, befuddled cracker mind. Thanks, guys!
A blurb from Kubrick (as well as one from Martin Scorsese) appears near the start of this absolutely stunning trailer for the digitally remastered version of Abel Gance's silent masterpiece, Napoleon. Now, I realize that Kubrick also famously declared the film to be "really terrible" and "a crude motion picture" as far as story goes, but I suspect that might have had more to do with his own pet obsession, still a distinct possibility at the time of his being quoted, of bringing the Great Corsican's life to the screen. I can't imagine any fan of cinema finding the above trailer anything less than astonishingly good. That bit when "La Marseillaise" begins to play... shivers.
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If a review of Kubrick's version of The Shining begins: "Everyone remembers their first Stephen King experience. Mine was hunkering down in a corner of the basement of an empty house, feverishly turning the pages of The Shining", you can be pretty sure that review is going to have a title not unlike "The Shining Has Lost Its Shine - Kubrick Was Slumming in a Genre He Despised". And you can also pretty much guarantee it's going to be utter shit, just like this Guardian retro review by Anne Billson.
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Our next offering is entitled 2001: A Hate Odyssey, but don't worry; unlike the previous entry, above, this one doesn't feature the blinkered opinions of a cinematic philistine cracking her swinish teeth upon the pearls cast before her (Anne Billson can fuck right off). Instead, this essay by author and computational biologist John C. Wathey - written in early September of this year - mixes up a heady cocktail of social observation, historical analysis, religious criticism, and cinematic appreciation. It begins:
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!
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The Cinematheque series entitled This is Going to Hurt - A Cinema of Cruelty has come and gone already, closing its doors at the end of September, but the commercial they put together for it is so beautiful, and features images from so many of my favorite movies - both Kubrick and non - that I wanted to share it here with all of y'all. Hope you enjoy it as much as I do!
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In an OuterPlaces.com article covering a recent Reddit "Ask Me Anything" (AMA) session by special effects legend Colin Cantwell, the following response is quoted:
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.
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Australian psychedelic rock band Tame Impala's new video is visually stunning, thanks to an assist from our man Stan in the form of tons of footage from his most iconic film. Watch it here and see for yourself how it all works out.
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And finally for this update, this Kubrick mini-biography for the Daily Star Weekend website is pretty skimpy and slapdash, but it does have one thing to recommend it... this nifty sketch of our man Stan by artist Yafiz Siddiqui. It was new to me, and I'll wager it was new to you, too!
Thanks to the fine folks at IndieWire for bringing to our attention the fact that Jon Ronson's 49 minute documentary Stanley Kubrick's Boxes, which first aired in 2008, has finally found its way online. And in glorious Vimeo quality, no less! I've been waiting a while to see it, myself. Watch along with me, why don't you?
I can remember that, as a Kubrick fan in the late 80's and early 90's, there wasn't much material available to quench my curiosity about the man and his work. Sure, a trip to the library would yield the occasional classic, like 1973's Stanley Kubrick Directs, by Alexander Walker, or Michel Ciment's 1983 landmark tome,Kubrick, both since updated and re-released in handsome editions available at Amazon.com and Amazon.ca, depending... and if you find and buy them via the links I just provided, I get a couple shekels tossed into my beggin' cup! So please, be nice.
Then came the late 90's, when media obsessions over the rumor-riddled shooting of Eyes Wide Shut and the on again, off again possibility of another science fiction epic from Kubrick in the form of A.I. led to the publication of a pair of decent, workmanlike biographies by John Baxter and Vincent Lobrutto (my personal favorite of the two). Then Stanley died, Eyes Wide Shut and A.I. came out, and things were quiet for a while on the book front.
And suddenly, a couple years ago, a new Kubrick publishing boom began. I'm not sure what sparked it - maybe the traveling memorabilia exhibit being such a hit? maybe a critical mass of Kubrick fans finally started earning some serious money and didn't mind plunking down 100$ for a quality book? - but whatever the reason, it happened. There are a TON of quality Kubrick-related books out there these days. Books of all sorts, from serious-minded scholarly tomes, to giant, super-impressive coffee table books meant to impress your friends and neighbors.
Hopefully, yours truly will get to review some of these books in the coming months, but for today, I would just like to refer you to this Digital Bits column by Bill Hunt in which he provides in-depth reviews and analysis for three of the most recent (and most gorgeous) books about 2001: A Space Odyssey from the last couple years.
The books reviewed in this column include Adam K. Johnson’s 2001: The Lost Science – The Frederick I. Ordway III Collection, which was published in 2012 by Apogee, Reel Art Press’s The 2001 File: Harry Lange and the Design of the Landmark Science Fiction Film from 2015, written by the noted film historian Sir Christopher Frayling, and finally, Taschen’s The Making of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, also published in 2015.
That last one, which is pictured above, and which I recently purchased - and will soon review - is essentially a mass market version of the massive, super-elite Limited Edition version that was released by Taschen a year earlier, retailing for over 1,200$... which STILL doesn't make it the most expensive Kubrick book on the market! That honor goes to the Limited Edition version of Taschen's Napoleon: The Greatest Film Never Made, which retails for 3,000$. Or, at least, it did, before Taschen sold out.
Anyway, by the time you're done reading Bill's column, you will have to agree with him that there's never been a better time to be a fan of Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey!
As Johnathan Barkan reports at Bloody Disgusting, the fine mixologists behind the Youtube channel Distinguished Spirits have come up with a cocktail that was "directly inspired by Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 Stephen King book-to-film adaptation of The Shining." They have decided to call their drink the "Redrum", and it's literally a rum-based drink with a rich, red coloring. Kind of on the nose, but whatever. Seems like it would be pretty tasty.
