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Stanley Kubrick: Projects
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Kubrick agreed to make The Shining for Warners. This left his project with Brian Aldiss up in the air, but he found a characteristically cavalier method to escape from this. Among the more unusual clauses in their contract was one which specified that Aldiss could not leave Britain except with Kubrick’s agreement. Aldiss thought little of it when he signed, and when Kubrick suspended work on ‘Super Toys’ to prepare The Shining, he accepted an invitation to attend a conference in Florida. He sent Kubrick a postcard from there, and on his return was astonished to receive a terse call informing him that, in view of this breach of contract, he was fired.
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The Killing (1956) was Kubrick’s next project and, though more widely acknowledged, it is of lesser interest. Its fractured narrative works well, though dates radically when looked at in hindsight. And while boasting wonderful performances across the board, this is the first example of Kubrick and an actor negating each other. Sterling Hayden has such a strong presence as Johnny Clay, the ringleader of a gang of thieves, that Kubrick’s manipulations of plot, character, and setting – mimicking, perhaps, his own love of chess – feel contrived and the film packs less punch because of it. Thus, The Killing seems more of a calling card to a Hollywood career than anything else. "Look what I can do," says Kubrick and they’ll come-a-knockin’. Indeed, the next few Kubrick movies, until Lolita (1962), mark a degradation of Kubrick’s individuality, until his artistry becomes invisible in Spartacus (1960), and the label of ‘hack’ threatens to apply.
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After The Killing, Kubrick/Harris were signed by Dore Schary, the head of production at MGM, to develop properties. Kubrick and novelist Calder Willingham prepared a script based on a Stefan Zweig story called The Burning Secret. The project was never made.
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According to a biography, Kubrick's wife finally convinced him once to take what she considered a long-overdue vacation. While vacationing, she noticed he was taking copious notes about something. When asked what he was writing, she discovered he was jotting some ideas down about a film project!
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In 1989, Julia Phillips tried to interest Kubrick in filming Anne Rice’s fantasy novel Interview with the Vampire, with funding from record executive David Geffen. Phillips had pitched Rice’s story to Geffen as ‘the 2001 of vampire movies’. She explained, ‘If 2001 was really three separate movies, a little past, a little present, a little future, with the monoliths there as the linkage – the glue – then the vampire epic would be three separate movies – only instead of going forward, go back go; the monoliths are the blood-sucking vampires themselves . . .’ Geffen sent a copy of the novel to Kubrick for his consideration, though he wasn’t convinced it was Kubrick’s kind of project. Nor was Kubrick, but this approach and others like it revived his interest in fantasy, and in 1990 he rang Brian Aldiss again.
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The mythology that surrounds Kubrick is legendary - meticulous and demanding, he planned his projects with encyclopaedic precision. Don't miss this not-to-be-repeated chance to get inside one of the greatest minds in the history of cinema.
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