A book Stanley Kubrick didn’t want anyone to read is being published
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
It's about Leon Vitali, the actor who played Lord Bullingdon (the neurotic brother of Lady Lyndon) in Barry Lyndon. After filming Barry Lyndon, he quit acting and became Kubricks personal assistant / factotum for over 20 years. Although some would say he was Kubrick's personal slave. It is utterly shocking to see how badly Kubrick treated him at times. Vitali did the work of 4-5 assistants, completely neglected his family, destroyed his health, spend the best years of his life re-cutting scenes until 5 in the morning while listening to Kubrick's violent tantrums, and ended his successful acting career for him. But apparently he was paid so little by Kubrick that he ran into financial trouble after the director's death. Yet for some mysterious reason, he remained completely loyal to his master until his own death in 2022.
I’m not saying that is what happened to Vitali, but I think it’s the open question being alluded to.
It is important to be aware and concerned about cultures or industries that foster cult like personality leaders.
It's very clear that many, many people would give up nearly anything -- including years of their lives -- to work with someone as talented as Kubrick. Is that crazy? I wouldn't do it, but others would.
There is nothing wrong in loyalty. What is wrong is unilateral loyalty.
In my view, if there is one I’ve yet to encounter it.
Which would suggest it’s largely the responsibility of each individual to decide what is important to themselves, and how much of themselves they’re prepared to sacrifice in pursuit of said thing.
For some, perhaps works of art that hold meaning for millions of people over many, many years would qualify. For others, it’s a highly paid dev job. I suspect the difference between the two (and all others) “exists” more in the eye of the beholder than folks on any side of the equation would care to accept.
You see it as unilateral loyalty. Perhaps he saw it as something different, or at least lived his life with both eyes open to his own experience. The only thing we can both say for sure is that we will never know for certain.
Sadly all that almost looks like "grateful to be abused".
It's her son from the first marriage.
He didn't like it, didn't sign off on it, and the book was never published.
I don't know many artists who would enjoy the prospect of justifying their art to someone who was skeptical of its merit from the start.
Not saying Kubrick did the right thing, just that it seems very on-brand for most people in his position.
Very. Who knows how many hours of sweat he poured into it, only to get it shelved when it was done.
This, IMHO, is a good reason to recommend everyone read The Mom Test at some point in their adult life.
What probably happened was that the author got the initial agreement from Kubric by being so persistent that Kubric agreed just to make them go away. A lukewarm reception from someone is just their polite way of saying "no".
It is not. These things aren’t comparable. Most people will get nothing out of that book.
> What probably happened was that the author got the initial agreement from Kubric by being so persistent that Kubric agreed just to make them go away.
Why speculate to excuse Kubrick and victim blame Hornick, when the answer is in the article? He was commissioned to write the book:
> He had been commissioned to write the very first book on Kubrick by cinema specialist The Tantivy Press more than 50 years ago.
I disagree with this. Even if you're not trying to build a business, almost everyone would benefit from the ability to distinguish a "Yes (but not really - we just want you to leave)" and a "Yes (we're in agreement)".
Most people can't tell the difference between the two.
> Why speculate to excuse Kubrick and victim blame Hornick, when the answer is in the article? He was commissioned to write the book:
I'm not trying to excuse anyone, I'm just saying that there is probably more to this than we heard, and one possibility is that the author interpreted a lukewarm signal as a yes, when in reality almost all lukewarm "yes"'s are "no"'s.
> He had been commissioned to write the very first book on Kubrick by cinema specialist The Tantivy Press more than 50 years ago.
That just moves the problem by a single degree - maybe it was the Tantivy Press that pestered Kubrick until he said yes to make them go away.
PS I do not understand why parent, latexr, was downvoted so heavily. He's making an argument, and it's clear his making it in good faith, not merely being a jackass. I don't think that type of argument should be downvoted.
Art can be morbid. Like an ongoing disaster that unfolds before us, we can't look away sometimes.
Like if someone hired you to do a Web Site, and there was of course some stipulation that you get to review it. Then you complain the buttons are the wrong color and just reject the whole thing.
I know it's a cliché to harp on about the ending of 2001, but it really does make a lot more sense after having read the book, which in turn makes the movie a lot more enjoyable.
With The Shining, you really need to read the book to fully understand the back-story to Jack's issues, and Danny's premonitions. I was amazed at how much the movie left out, and after reading the book, the movie is so much better.
I’d argue it is a masterpiece _because_ of that uneasiness and befuddlement and that is one of the ways it leaves a mark on you.
Triggers cinemaphiles to hear a director that’s supposed to be ome of the finest being called incompetent, but I can’t see how it’s defendable. He failed at the _one thing_ a film is supposed to do.
You do know that in the case of 2001, the movie and book were done simultaneously, right? There’s no failure of adaptation because it wasn’t one. It makes no sense to fault the movie by comparing with the book in this case.
> He failed at the _one thing_ a film is supposed to do.
Which is what? Entertain? Make a profit? Be culturally relevant to an extent that is still felt decades later?
There is no rule which says a movie has to be a coherent linear story that spoon feeds you to be significant, good, or artistically relevant.
Yes, I know that. I don't see how it makes it a nonsensical comparison though. One form was done well, the other incompetently. It's not like they marketed it as "hey, you really need both for the full experience".
>> He failed at the _one thing_ a film is supposed to do.
> Which is what? Entertain? Make a profit? Be culturally relevant to an extent that is still felt decades later?
To convey something in the audio/visual format. It doesn't get more basic. Whether that's for pure entertainment, artistic intent, whatever.
> There is no rule which says a movie has to be a coherent linear story that spoon feeds you to be significant, good, or artistically relevant.
Neither is there anything saying that you're safe from criticism if your work isn't coherent either. There was a very clear, coherent story to 2001, and Kubrick failed to convey it.
Perhaps the key here is what YOU don't see, not the merit of the film.
2001 was ranked the 6th greatest movie of all time in the Sight and Sound poll, which is probably the world's most respected poll of industry professionals.
And it was ranked #1 by their poll of directors: https://www.bfi.org.uk/sight-and-sound/directors-100-greates...
Could it possibly be that these directors know something you don't?
For my own part, it's been my favorite movie since I first saw it in 1968 and I've probably seen it 20 times since then.
I’m not sure I understand your position. He’s a bad filmmaker because you preferred the book’s ending?
P.S. I've seen the movie countless times (never high), and sometimes I'll put it on as simply moving wallpaper.
I’ll never forget a documentary I saw on martial arts film editors. They will deliberately cut the very frame where a fist would touch an actor's face. And not at all because it was badly choreographed. Instead, they realized that the strongest punch is the one you never see. It’s the one you complete with your imagination. And there’s no competing with that.
Likewise, leaving some of the plot to be inferred by the audience is a powerful narrative mechanism.
https://www.amazon.com/Lost-World-2001-Arthur-Clarke/dp/0451...
They do not in any way require that, at all.
The odd thing about it is how it conserved the atmosphere of the book superbly, while also deviating so drastically in a very selective way.
Now, specifically:
In the book, the hotel itself is much more of a living thing of its own, with its own sentience, not just a haunted building. In the movie, it's more just a sinister building with a terrible past, now filled with malevolent ghosts.
The Wendy of the book is a tough, scrappy fighter who shows enormous resourcefulness in protecting her son both from his increasingly deranged father and also the deeply evil hotel that wants to eat the boy's soul. In the movie, Kubrick, for fuck knows what reasons, turned her into a partly hysterical, mousy shrew that saves herself and her son more by luck than by tough effort. This was one of the two things Stephen King most hated about the movie version, he felt that one of his good, tough characters was destroyed by Kubrick for no good reason at all..
The other thing King most hated in the film was the characterization of Jack Torrance. He tried to convince Kubrick not to use Nicholson because he felt the guy had far too sinister a presence in general. The novel Jack on the other hand was a mostly normal, likable guy slowly made insane by the hotel. The movie version was more of an already unpleasant man with repressed insanity trying to preserve some goodness, and failing horribly with the help of the hotel's evil spirits.
Having read a lot of his writing about writing, and having spent a lot of time (especially in my formative years) reading his writing, I think my understanding of his writing would sound totally foreign to him.
Like, I think he's got a lot of issues with father's and sex, to be blunt. I think Kubrick found a similar reading and built an excellent film around it. I think that King wrote an excellent novel about those themes precisely because he could do that with no self-consciousness, completely unburdened by that reading.
He focuses on craft, which is great and has made some terrific literature. At the same time, I think he too-easily dismisses reading text at any deeper level. That's great for writing but less helpful for digging up what makes the writing good. Similarly, it's helpful for living our day to day lives but less helpful for getting us out of dysfunctional patterns.
Most writers know the score in this respect: unauthorized coverage is harder-hitting and may be more accurate, whereas authorized coverage has inside scoops, but is unlikely to be allowed to contain very critical barbs.
The author was hired to do a 'nice' book, and was pretty nice but the customer was a Prima donna and rejected it anyway.
Think we've all encountered bad customers like this.
'There are good things in Lolita. But in too many respects it squanders, impoverishes and conventionalises its source material, draining it of its complexity, nymphetry and eroticism.'
It's valid criticism, because it's a point of view, but I wouldn't expect anything quite that harsh in a collaborative work.
Dead people have no right to privacy in law as I understand it.
Not a lawyer, not in the economies involved in this.
"it depends"
It seems he contributed, so I assume otherwise.
Grim reminder to better control privacy while we are still alive.
Copyright generally lasts 70 years after the death of the creator or after the first year of publication, depending on the type of material and/or when it was first published: Artistic works, including photographs, Dramatic works.
https://copyright.unimelb.edu.au/shared/basic-principles-of-...
And dead people don't have rights past what they have decided on inheritance and even this can be sometimes overturned by justice. This is the reason wealthy people sometimes give their wealth to a foundation but if the foundation doesn't find a way to make it sustainable and money runs out it also ends up dissolved regardless of the cause it was bound to serve.
But without seeing the contract, we don't really know. Perhaps it only bound the original publisher, and not the author, but some other contract had bound the author to only publish through that publisher, and that publication contract is no longer in force. Who knows, the article doesn't tell us.
Apart that he was a film maker, I don’t know anything about him. If anything, this thread thrown more claims on the person than I have ever read before, as I couldn’t care less about topics that can perfectly fit gossip magazines.
Plus not being a doctor, I’m not even qualified to make a compelling diagnosis.
All that said, clichés don’t come from anywhere, and tyrannic personalities who destroy everybody around them as sure as they get social glorification for practicing some art is a well established one, so I wouldn’t be surprised that it would be the case. However I would rather have Picasso coming to my mind.
If you’re the one organising 30 to 50 people on a set with a good many of them also being egos (think actors for example), you have to make hard decisions and to certain extent be that unpopular leader.
On the other hand, there also plenty of soft spoken directors that use soft power to manage a set.
Just want to point out that directing isn’t an easy job at times and how that gets handled various from director to director.
I think anyone who has read Nabokov's novel would agree that Lolita really isn't a great adaptation of the book. I think it is by far Kubrick's weakest film. There is a deep cynic darkness to the book that the movie misses completely. In later interviews, Kubrick always tried to downplay this and only admitted that the movie lacked eroticism:
> "If I could do the film over again, I would have stressed the erotic component of their relationship with the same weight Nabokov did," the director admitted. "But that is the only major area where I believe the film is susceptible to valid criticism."
I sometimes wonder how a Lolita movie by Francis Ford Coppola would've turned out (maybe with Gene Hackman).
You can’t go inside, mind. It is surrounded by lots of farm and woodlands, however, so theres that.
There is a famous interview on French TV where Nabokov says as much (in French) [0]
[0] https://www.ina.fr/actualites-ina/mon-archive-preferee/mon-a...
I have never read the book or seen the file but the work is very interesting to me as when it get brought up people will start claiming all sorts of things from it.
I think the most insane from my point of view was when I heard/saw(can't remember if online or in person) an argument that all men are perverted and want to rape children. The proof was quotes from Lolita....
The case study of Lolita is interesting because there are two competing readings. The fact that the character is often associated to seduction and jailbait in popular culture is arguably symptomatic of a culture of blaming the victims of this kind of crimes. Obviously not all men are perverts but I sometimes wonder if those of us who aren't don't underestimate the number of those who are.
Note that Nabokov was credited as the screenplay writer for the movie (Kubrick is uncredited). https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0056193/fullcredits/
That would be a hagiography, not a serious artistic critique.
It seems more than fair to point out that Kubrick was touchy and thin-skinned. You could argue that it's an inseparable part of his overall genius -- but only if you're allowed to criticise him in the first place!