I was told—we all were—that Stanley Kubrick was the greatest director who ever lived, a genius.
In Los Angeles, while I was growing up, this was one of our native truths universally acknowledged, like don’t be a screenwriter. Of the latter, I didn’t need to be told why. A movie-loving boy on his way to an East Coast liberal arts university, already planning his return to Los Angeles to begin a career (as would so many of his peers) in the movies, I understood that the auteur theory was no theory; it was fact. Writers outlined movies, directors made them. Therefore, be a director. Of all directors, be Kubrick.
Though he lived in England for much of his adult life, Kubrick loomed over my early Los Angeles life. His films—as much as the prevailing estimation of them—informed my idea of quality, and because film, to me, was experience, Kubrick’s world infused mine.
Talk film with Sam Wasson and Alta Journal at Book Passage Corte Madera on Thursday, December 14 at 6 p.m. Pacific time.
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It was true of all of us—and all of us boys—without exception. We all knew 2001: A Space Odyssey shot by shot; we knew the stories behind the shots, how difficult they were to achieve, which only deepened our admiration. We read, and derided, Nabokov’s novelistic Lolita screenplay (written on my very own street, Mandeville Canyon Road!), and upon questioning, we grew to admire the strange casting and ultimately the performance of Ryan O’Neal in Barry Lyndon. When it came to Kubrick, like scholars of the Talmud, we did not doubt; God could not be wrong. If we asked why, it was only to reaffirm the answer given to us at birth, passed down from the Valhalla judges, Lucas, Spielberg, Scorsese. They, too, had grown up with Kubrick. How much, I wondered, had they learned from him? How much, in pursuit of their own selves, had they deviated from his example? I think of those children, raised by dysfunctional parents, who psychologists say have to love their “protectors” or else go insane. If we found a hole in Kubrick, we would surely have to face the hole in ourselves.
In this, we were clearly not alone. Judging by YouTube, Letterboxd, and other parts of the internet where cinephilia tips into cinemania, tens of thousands of people are neurotically preoccupied with Stanley Kubrick. They are obsessed in the truest sense of that word: they, like teenagers penciling his name with endless hearts in their composition books, cannot stop pining. Where devotees of Hitchcock and Ford and Welles (and others) seem to be satisfied with the extant critical material on their directors, there are infinitely more hours of analysis videos on The Shining, Dr. Strangelove, Eyes Wide Shut, and the rest of Kubrick’s oeuvre than the collected run time of his 13-feature corpus. Does that suggest his work is more worthy or more obscure?
Back before the internet handed fanatics the mic, what we boys didn’t understand about Kubrick’s later work, the sex and violence we were too young to have experienced firsthand, we characterized as entrées into the adult world. Tempted by the horrors of The Shining, we were made cooler by the forbidden comedy of A Clockwork Orange, and made men, we thought, by R. Lee Ermey, the gunnery sergeant of Full Metal Jacket who inspired us to echo, “This is my rifle! This”—grabbing crotch as only a teenage boy could—“is my gun!” Never mind that my own gun had never seen actual combat.
That did not matter. I believed—and still believe—that movies, because of cutting, motion, and photorealism, can be more lifelike than any other art form and thus are the closest we can come to actual experience without having to have the actual experience. Movies can offer, at their best, wisdom without the suffering, a new memory acquired. In that sense, Kubrick did grow me up—or started to. He showed me images from the adult world ahead. And his style was so bold that I felt, if not deepened by emotion, awed by stature.
In preparation for the next chapter of my life, I went to Dutton’s Books in Brentwood and bought the Fiske Guide to Colleges and Stanley Kubrick: A Biography, by John Baxter, which furnished me with more to admire about my hero. I placed the Kubrick bio on my bookshelf next to my other books about directors as if to show my future self to myself.
You know he’s got a new movie?” asked my friend Dave.
“Of course I know!”
That was about all I or almost anyone else knew about Eyes Wide Shut in 1999, though by then Kubrick had been shooting it for over a year, in England. Who else but our man would be so scrupulous? Who else but a movie Michelangelo would be accorded so much ceiling? That Kubrick had been thinking about the script—or Traumnovelle, the book on which it was supposedly based—for a rumored 20 or 30 years prior to production struck us as yet another demonstration of his genius. Who but a master would be so heedless of time and money? Who but the archetypal auteur would have the guts, taste, and purity of vision to leave Hollywood—my town—as Kubrick had, for Europe?
This last effusion was Dave’s, not mine.
“Guts?” I asked.
“Guts! Guts!” His fists were in the air.
“To leave…Hollywood?”
“He lives in a manor house! In England!”
“But he’s financed by Warner Bros.”
“So?”
“So, he didn’t really leave Hollywood, did he?”
Dave was from New York, as he’d constantly remind me. With my own shiny black car, my parents’ pool, and their movie star friends, I was from Hollywood. I had heard it for years. Those people—my people!—were fake. They were shallow. All they knew was movies. They knew nothing of “real life.”
Worst of all, they were sellouts. That’s what “going Hollywood” means, after all. Kubrick, I knew for a fact, would never sell out, even if he was making a picture with Tom Cruise, one of the world’s most bankable movie stars, and his then-wife, Nicole Kidman. Despite how it might have looked, he had, by virtue of the power we vested in him, something up his sleeve.
Before I was to leave for college, Kubrick died, I broke up with my girlfriend, and I was invited to the L.A. premiere of Eyes Wide Shut. In my memory, these all occurred simultaneously.
I remember getting the news in the Los Angeles Times, on March 8, 1999: “Kubrick delivered his just-completed 13th and final feature film, Eyes Wide Shut, to Warner Bros. executives last week.” Terry Semel, Warners’ co-chair and co-CEO, said he had spoken to Kubrick the night before: “He felt really great about the film and I have to say we were really thrilled. It is an incredible picture.” The cause of death was still under investigation, but Semel joked, “Needless to say Stanley was not a fitness guy. He was into enjoying life and he did it to the fullest.” John Calley, who first worked with Kubrick on A Clockwork Orange, said he’d spoken with him days earlier, and the Times reported that Kubrick was in great spirits because Cruise, Kidman, and Warners executives who had just seen Eyes Wide Shut had liked it. “He was so happy we talked for an hour,” said Calley.
One did not have to be a detective to glean disingenuity in this lovefest. The picture is finished, everyone loves it, Kubrick was happy and laughing? Kubrick, who was never satisfied, was satisfied? The man who, in the very same article, was said not to ride in a car “without a helmet for fear of being in a car crash” and to have “no love of humanity” was described by Semel as being into enjoying life and doing it to the fullest?
Even without the spin, this timing was, at best, miraculous. At worst, it was suspect. The 20th century’s leading perfectionist, said to shoot upwards of 60 takes on a single shot, locked his picture—anguished years in the making—and then died?
Then there was the rewriting of history: “Most filmmakers show their early cut, the director’s cut, to the studio,” Semel said in the piece. “The studio gives input and then the director makes changes. That wasn’t the case with Stanley. When Stanley showed you the movie, his cut, that was the finished movie.” Sure, but what about the fact that he recut The Shining after the studio told him it was too long?
The Eyes Wide Shut premiere, at the then–Mann Village Theatre in Westwood, was like all those that came before it: bustling, bright, charged with expectation. But, like the cheery quotes in that Times story, fraught with grinning hesitation. It wasn’t just the mysterious death of Kubrick and the question, shared by many, about the readiness of the film; it was also the rumor, openly discussed in hushed tones, that something had happened to Cruise and Kidman, something unpleasant and personal, while they were making this movie.
I believed it. Growing up around the film industry, I knew that film sets could take on the themes of their fictional stories and characters. As comedies are often fun to make, intense stories can foster turbulent, even haunted productions. Imperious leadership, prolonged shoots, closed sets, locations far from home, and acute emotional investment by all involved create—and often should create—a ripe atmosphere conducive to fiction.
In the case of Eyes Wide Shut, there were rumors. And surely, some of these tall tales of on-set intrigues and breakdowns were just that. But a certain mood—hysterical disarray might be a way to put it—blurred into the on-screen fiction that night of the Los Angeles premiere. And that Eyes Wide Shut had been the longest production in anyone’s memory lent credence to the unease.
Settling into our seats, it was as if we all sensed the same thing: Something awful had happened in England during the making of Eyes Wide Shut. Now Kubrick was dead, and no one was talking.
To me, the film was soulless to the degree that I began to question, as never before, my view of the filmmaker who, I could see now, was capable, even gifted, at using craft to hide his uncertainty as an artist.
Eyes Wide Shut was so without human values that, watching it, I wondered how anyone who had lived, let alone a supposedly great filmmaker, could have mistaken such sterility for actual life. There were no performances, only colors, lights, sounds, the physics of film. Yes, there was the air of naughtiness, as if we were someplace adult, someplace “Hollywood” filmmakers—whatever that meant to Kubrick—allegedly feared to tread. But where? The story, so intentionally enigmatic, welcomed theories but refused understanding. The film’s defenders would call it dreamlike, a traumnovelle (or “dream story”) befitting its little-read source material, but if an artist’s job were simply to make dreams, we’d all be artists.
It was his final movie after a heralded career, and the ultimate perfectionist had delivered a dud of the rarest kind: a sham. Even Billy Wilder’s last film, the rancid Buddy Buddy, pointed to Billy Wilder, the master of “sweet and sour” now sour entirely, but Wilder nonetheless. In Eyes Wide Shut, Kubrick was absent. The genius—our genius—had failed, and spectacularly so.
Prompted by this tombstone of a career capstone, I found myself thinking back on Kubrick’s other films. Where was he ever present? As I browsed his work, his talent for technique and detail came through strongest, but what was the point of all that perfection? Of Lolita, based on perhaps the most sensuous source material of the 20th century, Andrew Sarris wrote that Kubrick emphasized “the problem without the passion, the badness without the beauty, the agony without the ecstasy.”
No wonder, I thought, that this man lived in an English manor researching, making phone calls, playing with his dogs. Isolated, he could shoot, in his mind, take after take after take without having to engage the spiraling miasma of reality or the unruliness of what most artists seek: sudden emotion, theirs or others’. No wonder he spent so much time on the phone. His was a long-distance call to the world itself.
The post-premiere party was held uncustomarily far from the theater, at the former Chasen’s, a once beloved Hollywood restaurant, emblematic of a people and their culture, that I doubt Kubrick would have ever visited by choice.
Wandering about on my own—the restaurant had closed for good; the party, I believe, was in the parking lot—I kept my eyes peeled for the few figures from Kubrick’s life who were sure to know something, but as soon as I spotted Bob Daly, Warners’ other co-chair and co-CEO, I reconsidered even asking questions. Why would he, if he knew the truth, tell me anything?
I wasn’t the only one looking for answers. Ellen DeGeneres—she was there with Anne Heche—mistaking me for someone else, tapped my shoulder as I was thinking of tapping Daly’s and took up the line of questioning with me.
“Can I ask you? Do you know what happened to Stanley?”
“No, I—I didn’t know him.”
“Did anyone here know him?”
I didn’t know whether she was joking or seriously asking, but I didn’t have time to find out. Somewhat abruptly, Heche pulled away, DeGeneres excused herself, and a friend of my girlfriend—no, ex-girlfriend—appeared.
“You can’t just break up with someone. Not like that.”
“Not like how?”
“On the phone.”
“I’m—I—”
“She’s a person, you know. You can’t just flip a switch. She’s not a machine. Just because you’re going to college—”
She ran off. Or I did. I ended up inside the former restaurant, its famous booths all empty, face-to-face with Heche, who had been crying in the dark.
“Are you OK?” I asked, stupidly. I don’t think I had ever been alone with a crying woman before.
I knew from the movies that some gesture of gallantry was in order. You were supposed to reach inside your jacket pocket for a handkerchief. But I had no handkerchief. I had no jacket. I was 18. She was 30 and part of one of the most famous couples in the world.
“I’m sorry,” she might have said. “I’m fine. Thank you.”
In the two or three silent seconds that followed, a lifetime of film stills shuffled just beneath my awareness, each a suggested way forward—HisGirlFridayAnnieHallTheLadyEveMeetJohnDoeAShotintheDark. How does one best behave here? Film is 100 years old, and none of life’s surprises wait for us to sufficiently linger.
“I—” I stuttered, with all the feeling I could muster. “I hope you are OK.”
I was Jimmy Stewart. Grasping for experience, I instinctually braced myself with Frank Capra.
Years later, back in Los Angeles, doing research for a book, I interviewed a dancer who, I was surprised to discover, had dated Kubrick after he’d made The Killing, around 1956, ’57. He loved to eat at Frascati, she told me, and he was waiting on Dore Schary to give him an assignment at MGM. Finally, Kubrick couldn’t wait any longer.
“I’m going to Europe to make a film,” he said to her. “And you know I like to concentrate on my work.” At least he didn’t tell her over the phone.
He was a strange man, she thought, but special. Very interested in the Civil War. And his second wife, like her, had been a dancer.
When Kubrick came back to Hollywood, he called her and screened, just for the two of them, the film he’d made in Europe, Paths of Glory.
“I met someone I like,” he said. It was Christiane Harlan, soon to be Christiane Kubrick.
“My blessings,” she said.
They met again later in London. She opened the closet in his apartment, and hanging there was one suit with a single pair of shoes underneath it.
“That’s it, Stanley?”
“I don’t need any more.”
She and I kept talking. Our conversation turned, inevitably, to the end of Kubrick’s life.
“He was a strange man,” she repeated. “But I think success gives liberty to strangeness.”
“Is that Hollywood?”
She’d been born here. Her father, something of a strange man himself, had been in the movie business. “For good and for bad,” she concurred.
“So, Kubrick was more Hollywood than he thought,” I said.
She smiled at the irony. “When he was doing Spartacus, I said, ‘Jesus, Stanley, why are you doing this? A Kirk Douglas extravaganza?’ Can you guess what his answer was? He wanted to be accepted by the Hollywood mainstream.”
We spoke of Eyes Wide Shut.
“I think Stanley got tired,” she speculated. “I didn’t know him then, but that’s my feeling.”
She looked off. “It doesn’t surprise me that it would be his last.”
“What do you mean?”
“I have my own thoughts about Stanley,” she said.
I waited for her to say more.
“Turn your machine off.”
I did.
Looking back on that moment—on a crisp, sunny day in L.A., the kind our detractors claim as proof of our superficiality—my mind reels, obsessively, with Kubrick theories. And not, for once, about the man’s work.•
L.A.-based writer Sam Wasson is the author of several acclaimed works of nonfiction, including Fifth Avenue, 5 A.M.: Audrey Hepburn, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, and the Dawn of the Modern Woman; Fosse; The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood; and most recently The Path to Paradise: A Francis Ford Coppola Story.
