Stanley Kubrick has influenced me more than any other director. For some reason his intensely detailed and seemingly accurate portrayals of life appealed to me long before I could understand what the heck was going on. I slept through the my first screening of 2001 at the Ziegfeld Theater in Manhattan (I mean I was seven at the time), but preceded to watch the film at least a dozen times and even wrote a paper on it for no one, like a 13 page type written commentary just for me (I wish I still had that thing). I was also riveted by A Clockwork Orange in its sinister, naughty look at things unsaid, I was ten years old when it came out and it was the first racy film, (given an X rating at the time) that my mom would not take me to see. Lucky for me my pal’s parents owned the arty Heights Cinema in Brooklyn Heights where I grew up. We snuck in and watched it anyway, multiple times. I even fall into the severe minority of folk who believe “Eyes Wide Shut” is Kubrick’s greatest work and the darkest most compelling look at a human being slide into the abyss that has ever danced across the silver screen. All the while I read, re-read, saved and made scrapbooks of news clippings and photos of Kubrick’s oeuvre. If I am not mistaken it was through an article about his working relationship with the camera operation that led me to say at a ripe old age of ten, “That’s what I want to do for a living”. So Stanley has remained my most cherished filmmaker.
And it is with great fallderall that I place a blog entry on the man Stan. As it turns out there has been a flurry of Kubrick in my recent internet wanderings, giving added excitement to this particular post as it is the first time I am blogging to something that would have previously been posted to my website Interactivehank.com as one of my “current obsessions”. Here it becomes just another blog entry, as I have always envisioned it to be. A freaky chance to explore what fun it is to be inside the mind of Hank. Right now that mind is telling me: “Write about Stanley Kubrick”.
The items in question are: (in order of appearance, but not necessarily in interest)
1. A movie entitled “Color Me Kubrick” in which John Malkavich plays someone pretending to be Stanley Kubrick. I did not see it, just the trailer. From what I have been told, it may be enough.
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2. An amazing documentary, or fakeumentary, or mockumentary, or whatever they are called entitled “Dark Side of the Moon“, that over the course of an hour makes a very good case for Stanley Kubrick staging and directing NASA’s first moon landing in exchange for the camera lens he “had to have” in order to shoot certain scenes of Barry Lyndon using only candlelight. It is worth watching the first 5-10 minutes if you think I am kidding. (alas, after much searching, I cannot find a copy of this film anywhere, and the site that was hosting it has had it removed as well as from Google Video, both quite recently??
Webiste Exclusive!
I posted on a website called “Conspiracy Theory” and within a day I had someone uploading a fresh copy of this fakeumentary. If you click on the image above a new browser window will load and the film will play. It is 195 megs and the whole thing has to load before it start, sorry. I will fix that when I get home from a vacation on 7/5/07.)
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[quicktime width=”400″ height=”300″]https://www.interactivehank.com/docs/movs/SHINING_FINAL.mov[/quicktime]
3. A very inventive and surprising re-make of a Shining trailer, guaranteed to warm the cockles of your heart
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4. One of the great mysteries Kubrick is what his working methods were like. He was considered tyrannical, obsessive, paranoid, a perfectionist, all the great attributes of a truly gifted film director. There is so little about how he worked because he kept it that way. I even know people that worked on his last two films and they really don’t like to talk about it much. That is why I loved watching this documentary, made by his daughter Vivian when she was seventeen years old during the making of “The Shining”, it is the only footage I have ever seen of Kubrick at work. The documentary appeared as one of the extra’s on the relatively recent box set of DVD’s of Kubrick’s work. It is currently available on Youtube in four nine minute segments:
part one
part two
part three
part four
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5. And last, but not least. Here is a gem of untold wonder. The meeting of two of the greatest minds in my own personal persona, Stanley Kubrick and Jack Kirby. From a comic book fan site: “In 1976 Kirby adapted one of the greatest SF films of all time – 2001: A Space Odyssey (in a magazine-sized Marvel Treasury Edition). This was followed by a ten-issue comic series which went well beyond the movie. Now nearly forgotten by all but Kirby aficionados, his 2001 comics are among the weirdest and most controversial aspects of the 2001 franchise”. The comics themselves are available for very cheap on eBay if interested, but what brought this item to my attention were some nice high quality scans I came across from the first issue, basically tracking the storyline of the film. I put them in a .pdf file and , well , here ya go.
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Of course within minutes of finishing the first draft of this post I discovered a much more robust and ultimately hipper version of Kubrick listing on my very own favorite uber arty design website that I love going to to find incredibly entertaining content, Coudel Partners. Here is their Kubrick list and here are two times I just had to share right up front:
A book by the guy named Kristan Horton who re-constructed frames from Dr. Strangelove after watching the film more than 700 times out of household objects. There is an interview and an excerpt from the book here. I ordered it immediately (not available on Amazon). Oh, here is an even cooler way to look at excerpts online.
