Cracking the Kube: Solving the Mysteries of Stanley Kubrick through Archival Research

The Stanley Kubrick Archive at the University of the Arts in London opened in 2007, giving unprecedented access to hundreds of boxes of documentation accumulated by Kubrick throughout his career. (A copy of my research into Kubrick’s photography is included in one box, presumably printed out by someone in Kubrick’s office.) The archive has transformed Kubrick scholarship, with a new focus on the primary sources available there. This has led to revisionist accounts of Kubrick’s working methods, most notably Mick Broderick’s Reconstructing Strangelove and James Fenwick’s Stanley Kubrick Produces.

In his new book Cracking the Kube: Solving the Mysteries of Stanley Kubrick through Archival Research, Filippo Ulivieri goes a stage further: he not only corrects the persistent misconceptions about Kubrick’s life and work, he also identifies their origins. And Ulivieri’s findings are groundbreaking: “Kubrick deliberately crafted his own distinctive persona,” he writes. The legends surrounding Kubrick — his obsessive secrecy, his perfectionism, his eccentricities — were the result of strategic self-mythologising by the director: “what we know about him is in fact a mythology of his own design”.

This conclusion, based on a detailed analysis of hundreds of published interviews with Kubrick, is one of numerous revelations in Cracking the Kube. The book also features a uniquely comprehensive survey of Kubrick’s unmade films (of which there were more than eighty), including the first complete account of Kubrick’s pre-production of A.I. (prior to its development by Steven Spielberg). Ulivieri also fully explores Kubrick’s collaborations with the writers Anthony Burgess, Stephen King, and Frederic Raphael for the first time, and writes a nuanced defence of Raphael’s controversial Kubrick memoir Eyes Wide Open.

Cracking the Kube is the product of extensive archival research, and Ulivieri has also interviewed many of Kubrick’s closest collaborators. Aside from its impeccable scholarly credentials, the book is also incredibly well-written. Ulivieri’s first book, Stanley Kubrick e me, was published in English translation as Stanley Kubrick and Me. He is also a co-author of 2001 between Kubrick and Clarke (2001 tra Kubrick e Clarke) which, like Cracking the Kube, was self-published. He writes that there are “over a hundred books” on Kubrick’s films, and at least half of these are on Dateline Bangkok’s bookshelves.

SK13: Kubrick’s Endgame

Stanley Kubrick died in March 1999, and his final film, Eyes Wide Shut, was released posthumously four months later. have always surrounded the film’s post-production, as Kubrick was known for making alterations to his films right up to — and sometimes even after — their theatrical releases. Kubrick screened Eyes Wide Shut for its stars Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman in the days before he died, but this was not the final cut, and subsequent changes were made by the studio after his death. (Full disclosure: having seen a workprint of Eyes Wide Shut, this is not mere speculation on my part.)

In their book on Eyes Wide Shut, Nathan Abrams and Robert Kolker dismiss rumours about the film’s state of completion as “ultimately irrelevant and certainly counterproductive to our understanding of the film and the pleasure we take from it”, though in their Kubrick biography they call the issue “the most serious controversy of Kubrick’s career”. Tony Zierra clearly agrees with the latter position, and his new documentary SK13: Kubrick’s Endgame attempts to clear up some of the questions regarding Eyes Wide Shut’s post-production.

In a voiceover narration, Zierra describes the reaction to Eyes Wide Shut when the film was screened for Cruise, Kidman, and the Warner Bros. studio heads: “It was widely reported that the private screening in New York was a success, that what was shown that night was Kubrick’s final cut, and the studio executives were happy. But after years of research, I discovered that what happened after the screening contradicted what was publicly reported. Although the two stars were enthusiastic, the film everybody was waiting to see for years was viewed by the studio executives as shockingly bad”.

While Zierra doesn’t provide any evidence to back up that bold claim, his film does feature revealing new interviews with former Warner Bros. executive Julian Senior and Eyes Wide Shut cinematographer Larry Smith, who hint at the unease surrounding the film’s post-production. Like Abrams and Kolker, Zierra found production documents in the Kubrick Archive listing the changes required to the film. It has been previously reported, for instance, that the voice of the character played by Abigail Good was later redubbed by Cate Blanchett, and SK13 includes a rare recording of Good’s original audio track.

The documentary also contains other exclusive material, including a brief appearance by Kubrick in actress Marie Richardson’s audition video. Extracts from Michel Ciment’s interviews with Kubrick are played at several points in the film. Some of these Ciment clips were also featured in Grégory Monro’s earlier documentary Kubrick by Kubrick (Kubrick par Kubrick). At one point, SK13 uses artifical intelligence to recreate Kubrick’s voice, though the disclaimer that the recording is AI-generated is buried among the end credits.

Although it raises important issues about the release of Eyes Wide Shut, SK13’s analysis of Kubrick’s thirteenth feature film is hard to take seriously. It points out continuity errors as if they had some special significance — they don’t — and identifies unconvincing hidden symbols in the film’s props. Bizarrely, Zierra seems to believe that an accidental split-second reflection of a crew member was a deliberate artistic choice of Kubrick’s, and he presents this as a major revelation (which it certainly isn’t). SK13 ultimately has too many echoes of the implausible conspiracy theories in Rodney Ascher’s documentary Room 237.

Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining

Taschen published The Stanley Kubrick Archives as a limited coffee-table book in 2005. Then, in 2009, came their collector’s edition of Kubrick’s Napoleon, limited to 1,000 copies: ten volumes inside one enormous book. Another collector’s edition followed in 2014: the making of Kubrick’s 2001, limited to 1,500 copies in a metal slipcase. Of course, these books were far from cheap, though last year’s collector’s edition on the making of Kubrick’s The Shining (limited to 1,000 copies) cost a prohibitive $1,500 (almost as much as the other three titles combined).

Fortunately, a year after its release, Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining is now available in a more modest edition, costing around a tenth of the original price. (How times have changed: this version is the same price as the limited edition of The Stanley Kubrick Archives was in 2005.) The new edition consists of two heavy volumes in a slipcase: a book of rare photographs (including a few taken by Kubrick, and numerous shots from deleted scenes) styled to look like a scrapbook; and The Making of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, a definitive 900-page day-by-day account of the film’s production (with an extensive bibliography though no footnotes).

Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining is a collaboration between writer J.W. Rinzler and Pixar director Lee Unkrich, and benefits both from Rinzler’s expertise as a writer of making-of books (such as The Making of Alien), and Unkrich’s passionate interest in The Shining. (He wrote the introduction to Danel Olson’s book, also titled Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining.) The original collector’s edition also included a reproduction of the film’s continuity script and other supplemental material.

The Magic Eye: The Cinema of Stanley Kubrick

Banned by Stanley Kubrick! Finally released after more than fifty years! In this case, the hyperbole is true: Kubrick blocked the publication of Neil Hornick’s The Magic Eye: The Cinema of Stanley Kubrick in 1969, and it was published for the first time last month.

Hornick was commissioned by Peter Cowie’s Tantivy Press to write the first book on Kubrick’s films, and Kubrick agreed to cooperate, though he drew up a prohibitive contract giving him the right to veto anything in the manuscript that he disliked. Famously, Kubrick was a control freak, and he was demanding final cut on Hornick’s book.

Cowie had planned to release a series of books on major filmmakers, modelled on A Ribbon of Dreams, his own monograph on Orson Welles. He would eventually commission and publish works on a handful of (mostly European) directors, though Kubrick would not be among them.

Once Hornick had finished his manuscript and submitted it to Kubrick, he received a lawyer’s letter informing him that the director “does not approve” of its contents. Months went by, with Kubrick declining to clarify his objections, and refusing to return the manuscript. As Cowie was bound by the contract, Hornick was forced to abandon the project.

At the same time that Kubrick was stalling over Hornick’s manuscript, film critic Alexander Walker was also writing a book about the director. Unlike Hornick’s, Walker’s work — Stanley Kubrick Directs — was just the puff piece Kubrick was looking for, and he cooperated extensively with Walker. Stanley Kubrick Directs was published with Kubrick’s endorsement, while The Magic Eye was shelved until this year.

Kubrick’s decision to abruptly turn his back on one author (Hornick) and switch his attention to a rival (Walker) would be repeated years later during the pre-production for AI. Kubrick worked with several collaborators on the AI script, one after the other, cutting off contact with each in turn. Ian Watson, Brian Aldiss, and Sara Maitland have all subsequently revealed how Kubrick summarily dispensed with their services once he had found a replacement writer.

The Magic Eye now includes a timeline of the protracted legal case, and a foreword by Filippo Ulivieri, author of 2001 Between Kubrick and Clarke (2001 tra Kubrick e Clarke) and Stanley Kubrick and Me (Stanley Kubrick e me). Ulivieri notes that Kubrick’s delaying tactics were similar to his treatment of Arthur C. Clarke: he refused to approve the manuscript for Clarke’s novel 2001 until after the film was released, keeping Clarke and his publisher in limbo.

Show Me the Movies!Recommended by Martin Scorsese

Doc Club and Pub will show a short season of Martin Scorsese’s favourite films (as part of their Show Me the Movies! strand), including Stanley Kubrick’s 2001, starting later this month. 2001 will be shown on 25th and 28th April, and 4th May. It has previously been shown at Arcadia in 2022, at the Scala in 2017, and at the Thai Film Archive in 2013.

Kubrick:An Odyssey

Two rival biographies of Stanley Kubrick were published almost simultaneously in 1997. John Baxter and Vincent LoBrutto’s books were both unauthorised accounts, though LoBrutto’s was considerably more accurate than Baxter’s. They are now joined by a third major Kubrick biography, Nathan Abrams and Robert P. Kolker’s Kubrick: An Odyssey, which was released earlier this year.

The previous biographies were published before the release of Eyes Wide Shut — the subject of another Abrams and Kolker book — making Kubrick the first biography to cover the director’s entire career. (The authors previously dismissed Eyes Wide Shut’s state of incompletion at the time of Kubrick’s death as “ultimately irrelevant”, though in their biography they take it more seriously, calling it “the most serious controversy of Kubrick’s career”.)

Kubrick is particularly significant as the first biography based on material from the Kubrick Archive, making it more reliable than its predecessors. When Kolker and Abrams occasionally veer into speculation, though (“perhaps...”), they are on shakier ground, and their regular references to the significance of Kubrick’s Jewish identity (a thesis developed by Abrams) feel forced.

Kolker and Abrams are also the first Kubrick biographers to receive cooperation from the director’s family. The book benefits substantially from this level of access, but it’s also a double-edged sword: Kubrick’s brother-in-law, Jan Harlan, who acted as a liason, sometimes attempted to steer the authors in directions that contradicted their own research. (All the writers can do is to ask rhetorically, “as with so much in Kubrick’s life, which version is true?”)

Kubrick has a bibliography and a comprehensive index, but there are no footnotes, and quotes often appear in the text without attribution. This makes it needlessly difficult to identify the sources of quotations, beyond those that are familiar from other publications. (Kubrick joins more than sixty other Kubrick books on the Dateline Bangkok bookshelves.)

Fear and Desire (4k blu-ray)

Stanley Kubrick’s debut feature film, Fear and Desire, will be released by Kino Lorber on UHD and blu-ray next week in its original version, which is nine minutes longer than the theatrical cut. Kino Lorber previously issued the theatrical version of Fear and Desire — and one of Kubrick’s short films, The Seafarers — on blu-ray and DVD in 2012. The same transfer was issued on blu-ray and DVD by Eureka! in 2013. (The Eureka! discs included not only Fear and Desire and The Seafarers, but also Kubrick’s other shorts, Day of the Fight and Flying Padre.)

Fear and Desire was originally titled Shape of Fear, and had a running time of seventy minutes. In his book Stanley Kubrick Produces, James Fenwick reported that Shape of Fear was shown at the Venice Film Festival in 1952. Film historian Gian Piero Brunetta subsequently discovered correspondence between Kubrick and the festival’s director confirming that the film was shown out-of-competition at Venice.

For its US theatrical release, Kubrick cut nine minutes of footage to increase the film’s pace, and it was retitled Fear and Desire to target the sexploitation market. (Arguably the same mistake was made in 1999, when Eyes Wide Shut was marketed as an erotic thriller.) Kubrick made Fear and Desire independently, and controlled the rights to its distribution after its initial theatrical run. Apparently embarrassed by the film, he sought to prevent it from being shown again, though there were occasional unauthorised screenings in the 1990s.

Kubrick’s decision to cut Fear and Desire was not unusual for the director. He also removed two minutes of footage from Paths of Glory before its theatrical release, and may have deleted a scene from Killer’s Kiss at actress Irene Kane’s request. He cut nineteen minutes from 2001 after its premiere, and removed the climactic custard pie fight from Dr. Strangelove. (The custard pie footage is held in the archive of the British Film Institute, though the Kubrick estate does not allow access to it.) Thirteen minutes were deleted from Spartacus after its premiere. Most famously, Kubrick deleted an epilogue from The Shining and released the film outside the US in a version twenty-five minutes shorter than the American cut.

Until the 2012 blu-ray and DVD releases, the only version of Fear and Desire available on video was a bootleg VHS sold via eBay. This transfer had been duplicated so many times that the image was barely watchable. The difference between the VHS edition and the new Kino Lorber 4k restoration is like night and day, and the company’s forthcoming UHD and blu-ray set will also include 4k restorations of all three of Kubrick’s short films, making it the definitive presentation of the director’s early work.

Weekly Screening no. 1Nitade Movie ClubBarry Lyndon

Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon will be shown at Chulalongkorn University next week. The screening, organised by Nitade CU Movie Club, will be at the Faculty of Communication Arts. The film depicts the rise and fall of a rogue who inveigles his way into high society before being cast out in disgrace — coincidentally, it will be shown on 22nd August, the day that former prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra is planning to return to Thailand.

There has been a revival of critical interest in Barry Lyndon over the last decade, with three documentaries on the making of the film: the radio programme Castles, Candles, and Kubrick; an episode of the TV programme Hollywood in Éirinn; and Making Barry Lyndon on the Criterion blu-ray. There is also a book on the film, The Making of a Masterpiece, by Alison Castle.

Arcadia Rooftop Cinema

Bangkok’s new Arcadia bar, run by journalist Todd Ruiz, is launching a weekly Rooftop Cinema programme of open-air film screenings. One of the first films will be Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece 2001, showing on 18th December, followed by the classic action movie Die Hard on Christmas Day.

2001 has previously been shown at the Scala cinema in 2017 and at the Thai Film Archive in 2013. Die Hard was screened at Cinema Winehouse in 2019 and at Bangkok Screening Room in 2019.

Keep ’em in the East:Kazan, Kubrick, and the Postwar New York Film Renaissance

Ironically, some of the greatest films from the so-called New Hollywood era (The Godfather, The French Connection, Annie Hall) were made on location in New York rather than in Los Angeles. New York City established a film commission in 1966 (the first in the country), leading to an immediate and dramatic increase in film production, which has since become known as the New York film renaissance. Richard Koszarski’s Keep ’em in the East: Kazan, Kubrick, and the Postwar New York Film Renaissance offers a revisionist history of the 1940s and ’50s New York film scene, arguing that the roots of the renaissance stretch back long before 1966.

Koszarski discusses the documentary-like police procedural thrillers filmed on the streets of New York (The House on 92nd Street, The Naked City, Boomerang!), demonstrating that, although this style evolved alongside Neo-Realism, it was not directly influenced by Italian cinema. Only one Neo-Realist film, Rome, Open City (Roma cittá aperta), had been released in the US during the peak period of the New York docu-dramas, thus their similar modes of production were largely coincidental.

The book’s final chapters alternate between the production histories of Elia Kazan’s On the Waterfront and Stanley Kubrick’s Killer’s Kiss, which (incredibly) were among only three films made in New York in the winter of 1953 (the other being Hansel and Gretel). Interestingly, he reveals that Killer’s Kiss (under its original title, Kiss Me, Kill Me) was censored by four minutes by the MPAA, and that a further three minutes were cut by either Kubrick or the film’s distributor, United Artists, before its theatrical release.

“A young man 23 years old by the name of Stanley Kubrick...”

The story behind the premiere of Stanley Kubrick’s Fear and Desire has been published by the organiser of the Venice Film Festival, La Biennale di Venezia. Kubrick’s first feature was shown out of competition in Venice in 1952, after Joseph Burstyn recommended it in a letter to the event’s director, Antonio Petrucci. Burstyn assured him that the film, “made by a young man 23 years old by the name of Stanley Kubrick... could be the great surprise of your Festival.” (He neglected to mention that he was the film’s US distributor: he was lobbying Petrucci, under the guise of a friendly recommendation.)

Petrucci cabled Kubrick, declining to show the film in competition due to its “LENGTH AND CHARACTER”. (Fear and Desire is barely an hour long, and Petrucci may have felt that it didn’t qualify as feature-length.) Instead, he agreed to screen it as part of a sidebar programme, though this prompted a surprisingly indignant reply from Kubrick, who asked for further clarification: “you can well understand the state of confusion I am presently in. Is there anything you can do to shed some light on my problem?”

The correspondence between Burstyn, Petrucci, and Kubrick — posted on La Biennale di Venezia’s website yesterday — was unearthed during research for a new book by Gian Piero Brunetta (author of The History of Italian Cinema), the foremost historian of Italian film. The Venice screening of Fear and Desire, under the working title Shape of Fear, was first reported by James Fenwick in Stanley Kubrick Produces. The version shown at Venice was also nine minutes longer than the general theatrical release of Fear and Desire.

Stanley Kubrick Produces

James Fenwick’s Stanley Kubrick Produces focuses not on Kubrick’s artistic achievements as a director, but on his role as a producer and his place in the studio system. The book makes a revisionist assessment of Kubrick’s work, as Fenwick argues that the last decades of his career represented a debilitating decline in his ability to operate as a producer: “What emerges is almost a tragic narrative, Kubrick’s rise and fall as it were.”

The book covers Kubrick’s producing career chronologically, beginning with the independent films he both produced and directed. Fenwick even tracks down a copy of World Assembly of Youth, a short documentary that Kubrick once claimed to have worked on. (“Despite long-standing speculation about Kubrick’s involvement in the project, there is little evidence to support this.”) Fenwick makes an additional discovery: that Kubrick was involved in the sound editing of a film with the working title Shark Safari in 1953. Supported by extensive archive research, the book also provides detailed accounts of Kubrick’s producing partnership with James B. Harris, his collaborations with Kirk Douglas, and his various studio contracts.

The central thesis is that absolute control is a double-edged sword. Kubrick secured total control over every aspect of his films, though this was ultimately a Pyrrhic victory, as his micromanagement increasingly delayed the development of new projects: “Kubrick had become an impotent producer, overwhelmed by his own centralized management style and the information and research that he sought.” (The Channel 4 documentary The Last Movie made a similar point, comparing late-career Kubrick to a computer overloaded with data.)

The Making of a Masterpiece

Taschen published The Stanley Kubrick Archives as a collector’s edition in 2005, and last year they launched a new series — The Making of a Masterpiece — based on material from that still-definitive work. Each book in the series is essentially a reprint of an individual chapter from The Stanley Kubrick Archives, reformatted to a square 12” format (the same size as an LP sleeve), and bundled with a DVD and poster.

There are three titles in the series so far: A Clockwork Orange, Barry Lyndon, and 2001: A Space Odyssey. The LP-sized format allows for some impressive full-page illustrations, and the authorised poster reproductions are a welcome bonus. The inclusion of the DVDs is more surprising, though, as most readers will either already own them, or prefer to stream the films online. Also, the DVDs are vanilla discs with no bonus features.

While the essays and images are almost entirely the same as the original chapters in The Stanley Kubrick Archives, completists should note that the new books do feature a small amount of new material. In the 2001 book, this includes two letters from Kubrick to Arthur C. Clarke, and a few additional photographs of Kubrick on the set. (On the other hand, Kubrick’s 1968 Playboy interview is missing.)

The A Clockwork Orange and Barry Lyndon books include slightly more new material, each adding a handful of on-set photos and a few script pages. Barry Lyndon also has an additional letter from Kubrick, to a studio executive in Japan. In the letter, Kubrick attempts to assuage the Japanese censor’s concerns that pubic hair is visible in the film’s bathtub scene. (Any depiction of pubic hair is forbidden in Japan.) Kubrick reassures the executive that the actress in question was wearing a bikini to preserve her modesty.

Stanley Kubrick:American Filmmaker

More than twenty years after Stanley Kubrick’s death, academic interest in his films is still increasing. The latest book on the director, Stanley Kubrick: American Filmmaker by David Mikics, could best be described as a beginner’s guide to Kubrick’s work. At a brisk 200 pages, this is certainly not an in-depth study, though it does include a potted production history of each Kubrick film.

Mikics, a professor of literature, makes insightful comparisons between the films and their source novels. He also identifies subtle physical nuances in actors’ performances. Part of the Jewish Lives series, the book’s sources include letters from the Kubrick Archive.

His analysis is relatively interesting, though Mikics (again, a literary scholar rather than a film critic) makes some technical errors. A studio executive’s comment about “1.66 lenses” goes uncorrected; they should be 1.66 mattes. He also conflates two different quotes from Dr. Strangelove: “I don’t avoid women, Mandrake, I just deny them my precious bodily fluids.”

Mikics makes a series of tenuous links between Kubrick’s life and his film plots. He claims, for example, that Lolita echoed the director’s relationship with his daughter (“The Lolita story oddly foreshadows the relation between Kubrick and Vivian”), and that Barry Lyndon represented Kubrick’s feelings towards his father (“Tension and disappointment animate father-son relations in Barry Lyndon as they did in the teenage Kubrick’s life”).

In the book’s final paragraphs, Mikics writes that “Kubrick’s appeal has outlasted his death, even extending to pop music of the 2010s.” It’s true, of course, that Kubrick remains influential, though simply citing two recent songs is hardly a sufficient discussion of his legacy. Then, Mikics considers Kubrick’s cinematic influence, though again he gives only a limited selection of recent examples: The Tree of Life, Arrival, and Zama.

Kubrick by Kubrick

Grégory Monro’s documentary Kubrick by Kubrick (Kubrick par Kubrick) premiered on the French Arte channel on 12th April. The film is largely comprised of audio clips from Kubrick interviews recorded by Michel Ciment in 1975, 1980, and 1987, and begins with Kubrick’s admission that “I’ve never found it meaningful, or even possible, to talk about film aesthetics in terms of my own films. I also don’t particularly enjoy the interviews.” Most of his thirteen films are covered, with three exceptions (Killer’s Kiss, The Killing, and Lolita).

Much more extensive extracts from Ciment’s recordings were broadcast on French radio in 2011, though the material in the documentary has improved sound quality (thanks to noise reduction). Some extracts also appeared in Making Barry Lyndon. Extended interviews with Alfred Hitchcock (Hitchcock/Truffaut) and Orson Welles (The Lost Tapes of Orson Welles; This Is Orson Welles) have also been released in audio format.

If your main source material is an audio tape, how can you make a visually appealing documentary film? Monro follows the pattern previously adopted by other documentaries built around audio recordings: as in Marlene and Listen to Me Marlon, a tape recorder plays while the camera prowls around a set. In this case, the set is a recreation of the bedroom from 2001: A Space Odyssey, and the audio is supplemented with vintage talking-head clips, shown on an old CRT television (just like the TV playing Summer of ’42 in The Shining).

Other Kubrick interview recordings have also been released in recent years. The collector’s edition of The Stanley Kubrick Archives included a CD featuring a 1966 Kubrick interview by Jeremy Bernstein for The New Yorker. A 1987 Kubrick interview by Tim Cahill for Rolling Stone was issued as an episode of The Kubrick Series podcast. Japanese TV producer Jun’ichi Yaoi interviewed Kubrick by telephone in 1980, and VHS video footage of the interview was released online in 2018.

The Criterion CollectionDr. Strangelove

Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove was first released by the Criterion Collection on laserdisc, in 1992. That transfer was supervised by Kubrick himself, and he even designed the front cover, though the disc was swiftly withdrawn from sale after Kubrick complained about the unauthorised inclusion of a screenplay draft among the supplementary features. (The draft script opened with a segment titled The Dead Worlds of Antiquity, told from the perspective of an alien civilisation.)

The Criterion laserdisc presented Dr. Strangelove “in its original split-format aspect ratio for the first time.” The film alternated between 1.66:1 and 1.33:1, as it had on its original theatrical release. (Criterion’s Lolita laserdisc also featured these alternating ratios.) When Dr. Strangelove was released on DVD for the first time, in 1999, the split-format was retained, though all subsequent releases have been matted to 1.66:1. Sadly, the Criterion blu-ray, released in 2016, is also framed at 1.66:1, though it does have an uncompressed mono soundtrack.

The blu-ray’s supplementary features include an extraordinary new discovery: an exhibitor’s trailer of highlights from the film, narrated by Kubrick himself (“Please remember, as you watch this, that the material is uncut”). The disc also includes an interview with Mick Broderick, author of the excellent Reconstructing Strangelove. The packaging is equally impressive, with reproductions of the “miniature combination Russian phrasebook and Bible” and the “Plan R” dossier.

World Class Cinema

After The Wizard of Oz and Annie Hall, the Thai Film Archive has announced the next batch of films in this year’s World Class Cinema (ทึ่ง! หนังโลก) programme. Highlights over the next few months include Stanley Kubrick’s horror film The Shining (showing on 15th March), the ‘New Hollywood’ classic The Graduate (19th April), Steven Spielberg’s masterpiece Jaws (17th May), and the South Korean ‘golden age’ melodrama The Housemaid (하녀; 16th August).

The Shining was originally scheduled for last year’s World Class Cinema season, though Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange was shown instead. All screenings will take place at the Scala cinema in Bangkok.

2001 between Kubrick and Clarke:The Genesis, Making and Authorship of a Masterpiece

2001 Between Kubrick and Clarke: The Genesis, Making and Authorship of a Masterpiece, by Filippo Ulivieri and Simone Odino, sits alongside eleven other books about 2001 on the Dateline Bangkok bookshelves. (The others are Filming The Future, The Making of Kubrick’s 2001, The Making of 2001, 2001 Memories, Moonwatcher’s Memoir, Are We Alone?, 2001, The Lost Science, The 2001 File, The Making of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001, and Space Odyssey.)

Despite being the latest of at least a dozen books on the subject, 2001 between Kubrick and Clarke offers a original analysis of the making of Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece and his collaboration with Arthur C. Clarke. It provides “for the first time a complete account of the creative odyssey undertaken by Kubrick and Clarke,” including previously-unseen material from both the Kubrick Archive and, especially, Clarke’s papers at the Smithsonian.

Most accounts of the production of 2001 are largely anecdotal, relying on decades-old recollections, though 2001 between Kubrick and Clarke takes a reassuringly systematic approach, verifying every fact via contemporaneous press reports and production documents. The book’s most substantial section offers a unique chronology of 2001’s production, meticulously researched and thoroughly detailed. There is also an in-depth examination of the often-overlooked period following Dr. Strangelove, when Kubrick was formulating his plans for 2001.

2001 between Kubrick and Clarke was first published in Italian, as 2001 tra Kubrick e Clarke: Genesi, realizzazione e paternità di un capolavoro. Ulivieri also wrote the excellent Stanley Kubrick and Me (Stanley Kubrick e me), the memoir of Kubrick’s personal assistant Emilio D’Alessandro.

Siri House

To celebrate Halloween, Siri House in Bangkok will be showing Kubrick’s The Shining tomorrow. The screening is free of charge.

Eyes Wide Shut:Stanley Kubrick and the Making of His Final Film

Eyes Wide Shut: Stanley Kubrick and the Making of His Final Film examines the production and legacy of Eyes Wide Shut, twenty years after its theatrical release. Authors Robert P. Kolker and Nathan Abrams make effective use of files from the Stanley Kubrick Archive, comparing script drafts and using production reports to create a detailed account of the extended filming process. (Frederic Raphael’s self-serving memoir Eyes Wide Open is also a major source.)

The book’s second half, dealing with Eyes Wide Shut’s post-production and release, is less impressive than the first. There are only two paragraphs devoted to the editing process, and Kubrick’s editing notes are dismissed as “gobbledygook.” The film was censored to comply with MPAA regulations, though the authors were unable to confirm how this was decided: “whether Kubrick intended to do this remains the subject of some controversy.” (The soundtrack was also changed, for the film’s European theatrical release and all video versions, though the book makes no mention of this.)

Kubrick died during post-production, and the book reproduces detailed notes from the Kubrick archive concerning changes required before the theatrical release. However, the film’s state of incompletion at the time of Kubrick’s death is dealt with under the subheading “The Irrelevant Question”. Such matters are dismissed as mere trivialities: “Whether it might have been different in some small way is ultimately irrelevant and certainly counterproductive to our understanding of the film and the pleasure we take from it.” This is a pretty extraordinary statement, given Kubrick’s meticulous attention to detail.