Stanley Kubrick's Napoleon

More Heads Talk About Kubrick

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 06 May 2008 17:12:00 +0000

Veteran film composer Gerald Fried talks about scoring all of the early Stanley Kubrick pictures from "Day of the Fight" to "The Killing," and "Paths of Glory." He met Kubrick as a kid over a baseball game in the Bronx. Did the other players resist playing with Kubrick because of Asperger? Fried also scored many episodes of "The Man From UNCLE." Another sideways Napoleon connection.

A Napoleon script's hiding place

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 06 May 2008 10:30:00 +0000

This article from eight years ago, Mar 12, 2000, describes the storage facility where a copy of a draft of Kubrick's Napoleon script was found.

Kansas salt mine warehouse preserves nation's treasures
By ROXANA HEGEMAN | Associated Press Writer

HUTCHINSON -- The original film negative for "The Wizard of Oz." A collection of New York newspapers dating to the assassination of President Lincoln. Secret U.S. government documents. Thousands of medical research biopsies encased in wax. All these -- and so much more -- are buried 645 feet beneath the Kansas prairie in a vast underground salt mine warehouse teeming with treasures and oddities from across the nation. "It's a kind of Noah's Ark -- without the animals," says Lee Spence, president of Underground Vaults & Storage, Inc.

The Hutchinson company has built a thriving business in the mined-out sections of the salt mine, where temperature and humidity stay at near ideal conditions for preserving paper and film brought here from around the world. The caverns, accessible only by a rumbling mine elevator, are safely beyond the reach of tornadoes, floods and earthquakes. These salt deposits -- formed 230 million years ago as the inland sea that once covered Kansas evaporated -- are now being wired with the latest technology to give companies around the world high-speed data access to records stashed within a prehistoric formation underneath Kansas wheat fields.

Wearing a hardhat and carting his requisite canister of oxygen, Spence steps onto the mine elevator -- actually, more of a hoist with an aboveground operator to run it -- for the minute-long ride. He flips off his flashlight for a few seconds, and blackness engulfs the lurching contraption. "See how black it can get," he says. It is clear he enjoys showing off his realm to visitors. The flashlight back on, he aims the beam at a mass of wires running alongside the hoist. These link the world below to civilization above. This is how they run the lines down to link the computers, he explains. The elevator slows to a stop at the bottom, the equivalent of 60 stories below ground. The salt bed -- discovered in 1889 while drilling for oil -- is 100 miles long by 40 miles wide, and 325 feet thick. A miner greets him. "How's the weather up there?" It is common question for those who spend their waking hours deep in the bowels of the earth. The temperature here stays at around 65 degrees Fahrenheit, and the humidity is between 40 and 45 percent year round.

For the next 30 minutes, it is the warehouse's turn to use the elevator, and the mine's conveyor belt and rock crushing equipment are mostly quiet now as he passes them. Spence quickly reaches a doorway below the sign for Underground Vaults and steps inside. The low salt ceiling and antique mining equipment greet visitors for a few feet, before opening up to 10-foot ceilings and a friendly receptionist answering the phones. For a moment, you could almost forget you were sandwiched inside a salt formation. The rough rock walls and ceilings are painted white to keep the salt dust down. The cement floors are level. There is a lunchroom with a refrigerator and microwave for workers. And bathrooms. The storage vaults use only a few of the caverns left behind from salt mining activities. The company has available 800 acres of mined-out space, but so far has used just 12 acres of it. Another 26 acres are under development now, Spence said.

Meanwhile, The Hutchinson Salt Co. continues its mining operations just 1 1/2 miles away in the same formation, with warehouse employees sharing the mine elevator and much of the infrastructure that brings fresh air, electricity and phones deep underground. Among the biggest customers are California movie companies, who find the Kansas salt mines ideal for storing original film negatives along with all the outtakes from their productions. Spence stops at one of the salt bays and points out a few titles: "Journey to the Center of the Earth," "Gone With The Wind," "Ben Hur," and "Star Wars." All the Mash television episodes are stored down here, as are old silent movies.

In the past two months alone, 20th Century Fox has sent 22 truckloads of film here. "It is so cheap to store down here -- a lot cheaper than California," he says. It costs companies $3 a square foot to store their records here. That compares to between $20 and $30 a square foot for storage in places like California, where companies have to build a building, run air conditioning and heating and provide security systems. None of those costs are incurred in the salt mines, where temperatures are naturally constant and access is limited to the one operator-controlled mine elevator, he says.

That makes it a favorite resting place for oil and gas companies to stash their seismic data and leases. Insurance companies keep their original policies here. Government offices store property records and parking tickets, among a slew of other documents. Architects put their blueprints here. A California company stores its old stock certificates in old wooden fruit crates. Hospitals and doctors keep old medical patient files here. Accountants store tax records. Even the federal government has a locked salt bay down here for its secret paperwork. And the salt warehouse also caters on a limited basis to individuals. There are a couple of old wedding dresses down here that have been passed down from generation to generation. Coin collections are stored here, someone even left a collection of newspapers dating to the early 1800s.

It can cost as little as $130 annually for a bit of storage space down here. About 65 warehouse employees work underground -- pulling record requests from companies, computerizing records for others and bringing more boxes down. The company runs two below ground shifts daily. Among those employees is Shirley Byard, who has worked 14 years underground. Her job is to keep the complex presentable and the kitchen done up, as she puts it. "We are like family here," she says. "If we get an oddball (employee) down here, they don't last." It takes some getting used to working below ground. Except for an emergency, the elevator out only runs at specified times each day. And after a day's work you can taste the salt on your skin.

The warehouse firm, which has a 99-year renewable lease with the salt mine, has been stashing things here since 1959. The idea to store archives underground was sparked by one of the company's directors who served in World War II, Spence says. He remembered that Nazi leader Adolf Hitler had stored lots of items in an underground shelter as a way to preserve them. The privately held company has $8 million in gross revenues and 1,500 customers, Spence says. It also has an underground complex in Kansas City, Mo., which is accessible by truck and runs aboveground records centers in Topeka and Wichita.

The warehouse company slogan is "For Security. Forever." It's nice to know that the script is as safe against catastrophe as Dr. Strangelove was in his mineshaft, at least until the lease runs out on the storage facility.

Kubrick's Daughter Documents the Making of The Shining

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 13:55:00 +0000

Vivian Kubrick was seventeen years old when her father was making "The Shining." I have posted below her the documentary she shot behind the scenes during the production of the movie, along with her commentary track.

Watch closely for the moments Stanley Kubrick is directing Shelley Duvall during the world record for the most takes for one movie scene. Is this further evidence that Kubrick suffered from Asperger?

Directors List Favorite Kubrick Films

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 07:49:00 +0000

TimeOut Magazine in London recently asked twelve directors to talk about the Stanley Kubrick film they admired most. Their replies are listed below.

Mike Kaplan (director of ‘Never Apologise: A Personal Visit with Lindsay Anderson’ and Kubrick’s head of marketing from 1968-1973) on ‘Killer’s Kiss’ (1955)(Moody B-thriller set in the back alleys, nightclubs and warehouses of 1950s New York): ‘I love the tactile feel of New York in the movie. It’s been a while since I’ve seen it, but movies that leave an impression on me often do so through their feel and sense of place, and this one certainly did. The scene I remember best is where Irene Kane and Frank Silvera walk through Times Square and eventually come down that long flight of stairs: the look and feel are just perfect. One of the hallmarks of Stanley’s films is that they all have a visceral impact: even back in 1955 it was there. You also have the constant police sirens in the background, which is really the sound of New York. There’s no doubt that after “Fear and Desire”, which Stanley wouldn’t let people see, “Killer’s Kiss” is the film that established his reputation and set his career rolling.

Neil Hunter (‘Lawless Heart’ and ‘Sparkle’) on ‘The Killing’ (1956)(Sterling Hayden leads a gang of petty criminals to rob a racetrack): ‘I think of “The Killing” as the film where Kubrick hit his stride. It has that fascination with constructing a perfect mechanism, in this case a racecourse heist, that he returned to later in “2001” and “Dr Strangelove”. He gives us that principle of order, the perfect crime committed by professionals, then throws in the opposite: chaos, anarchy – which is to say, humanity – embodied by the girlfriend of one of the gang, the racecourse teller. It doesn’t have the grand philosophy he would later lay claim to, though it does have the pessimism. It also doesn’t have the stylistic boldness and formal clarity of his later work: it’s looser. Yet it may be his most purely enjoyable film. It’s a true genre film, and a very powerful one, rather than an attempt to transcend genre or create a new form. His later films would employ a startling range of different sounds, and use music very deliberately and unpredictably. Here, it’s used in a more conventional way – the jazz, for example, telegraphing the unreliability of the teller’s girlfriend (as if her performance wasn’t doing the job!). But above all there’s the excitement of a great filmmaker saying, “Look what can be done. Look how easy it is.” There’s a speed and ruthlessness to the filmmaking which echoes the heist, the killing itself.’

Nick Broomfield (‘Kurt and Courtney’, ‘Battle for Haditha’) on ‘Paths of Glory’ (1957)(Bleak moral drama set during World War I): ‘This harrowingly describes an incident when three innocent men are executed. We are introduced to a bare-chested Kirk Douglas and are reminded of his later appearance in Kubrick’s “Spartacus”. Douglas stars in the film as a colonel seeking justice for his men. The film shows how the army chain of command promotes ruthless ambition and corruption of the worst kind at the expense of everything else, including military efficiency. It is shot in long takes either with the actors moving around the frame or in long tracking shots. This is particularly effective when we see Douglas walking along the trenches past his men. It is a contrast to the fast-cutting action sequences of contemporary cinema. It reminds one that the army – rather like the free market economy and privatised industry of the day – is a system which serves the rich and powerful, and everyone else is just cannon fodder to be sacrificed.’

Andrew Kötting (‘Gallivant’, ‘This Filthy Earth’) on ‘Spartacus’ (1960)(Critical and commercial smash about a slave revolt in Ancient Rome): ‘The last time I saw it was as a kid. The main thing I remember about the film is what a fantastic physique Kirk Douglas had. There’s that wonderful frisson between him and Tony Curtis. The gay subtext of the film is something that, even at an early age, I was aware of and, in a strange way, moved by. I always thought if Kirk had just had a really good session with Tony the whole thing would have been resolved a lot easier, don’t you think? Slavery and all that. It’s kind of sad that my only memories of the film are crass ones. There’s the “I am Spartacus” thing too, it’s become something of a gag now: I used to say it all the time when I was in trouble. If I’d done something wrong I’d always put my hand up and confess to it as Spartacus. And people would often join me.’

Peter Whitehead (‘Charlie is My Darling’, ‘The Fall’) on ‘Lolita’ (1962)(James Mason is nymphet-obsessed Humbert in Kubrick’s adaptation of Nabokov’s novel): ‘I was pretty angry when I first saw this in 1962 – and I’ve seen it since and my opinion hasn’t changed. Kubrick’s version of Nabokov’s 1955 novel is not at all satisfactory. It’s very obviously watered down, tame and was merely exploiting or building on the reputation of the novel. Kubrick set himself an impossible task because the novel is so literary and interior and dark. We were in forbidden territory with the book – and Kubrick’s film is not forbidden on any level. The novel was very psychologically exact about certain aspects of the relationship between old age and teenagehood. The film was trying to be provocative – but it didn’t go far enough. The girl (Sue Lyon) was obviously far too old. It was a rape of the novel. Perhaps Kubrick was just too young and nobody would have let him make it another way anyway. John Huston would have been perfect as a director. The later version of “Lolita” [Adrian Lyne’s 1997 film with Jeremy Irons] was much better. At least the girl was the right age.’

Mike Nichols (‘The Graduate’, ‘Charle Wilson’s War’) on ‘Dr Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb’ (1964) (Kubrick’s third film about war – this time, the Cold War – is a masterpiece of black humour): ‘He was a friend and I loved and revered him. I think that my favourite moment is Peter Bull as the Soviet ambassador and the fight with Peter Sellers as Dr Strangelove. It was that improvised, half-assed, completely brilliant aspect of Stanley that I loved the most. Then, later, he became the opposite: he had to have total control over everything, doing 500 takes just to get it right. It was another kind of genius, but it would never have permitted those moments of improvised mastery that were in “Strangelove”. In the end, I think he began to have trouble, because if you can’t leave home, you lose track of reality, and I think that happened to him. Still, he made great movies and he was a completely gifted director. If you look at “2001: A Space Odyssey”, you suddenly realise: My God, there’s nobody in this movie! There are those two guys who you can’t quite tell apart as they have no real characteristics, and the rest is just… Well, what is it?!’

Shekhar Kapur (‘Elizabeth’) on ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ (1968)(Sci-fi epic loved by stoners and intellectuals alike): ‘Forty years on and we are still trying to comprehend its visual and poetic philosophy – what more can you ask from a film? Just for sheer achievement in the art and technology of cinema, “2001” remains a defining movie for me. It is certainly the film that made me fall in love with cinema and want to become a director. Visually, it was one of the most compelling of its time, setting standards in visual effects that have yet to be bettered. Most people now associate “The Blue Danube” waltz with that amazing cut from the broken bone defying gravity as it sails up in slow motion to the space ship floating in space: a cut that not only leaves the audience to imagine the entire history of human development, but also is one of the best uses of classical music in film that I have ever seen. It still takes my breath away.’

Nicolas Roeg (‘Performance’, ‘Don’t Look Now’) on ‘A Clockwork Orange’ (1971) (Colourful study of psychological conditioning with rape, violence and Beethoven): ‘I never met Kubrick. We came very close at one point, and then drifted away again. It was around the time of “A Clockwork Orange”. Si Litvinoff owned the rights to the book and we had planned to do it together. I’d been working on a treatment and I’d even met with Anthony Burgess. We talked about it and decided to take a completely lateral look at the piece. I received a call from Si who said the producer and studio executive John Calley had phoned him from the US and told him he was coming to England to see Stanley. So I said, “Stanley who?” and he said “Stanley Kubrick”. He knew we owned the rights to the book and d he was interested in getting them for Stanley. ‘Kubrick, obviously, wanted total control, and the studio finally did a deal with him. I must say I did like his attitude towards film and the fact that he was an artist and complete unto himself. He wasn’t under corporate censorship, and he was never trying to make a film that you’d be able to pigeonhole in any particular genre. I think that was the case with all his films. One day, some time later, after they’d done the deal, Si said that he’d offered the book to Stanley when he first picked up the rights. Kubrick later said to him, “Oh yeah, I remember you sent it to me but I didn’t read it. I didn’t like the cover!” ’

Stuart Cooper (‘Overlord’) on ‘Barry Lyndon’ (1975) (Lavish Thackeray adaptation often deemed Kubrick’s most underrated work): ‘My link with Kubrick is that we both shared the same director of photography, the great Johnnie Alcott. “Barry Lyndon” alone is probably enough to hang your hat on. I remember at the time there was some mild criticism saying it was a beautiful film, but perhaps lacking in substance. It was probably his softest picture, though without question one of the most exquisite movies ever made. Alcott brought an enormous amount to the film, which was reflected in his Oscar. Johnnie was the master of natural light. My recollection was that there was a very special zoom lens they used which was given to them by Nasa. It was what they used to get all those landscape shots that look like Renaissance paintings.’

Edgar Wright (‘Shaun of the Dead’, ‘Hot Fuzz’) ‘The Shining’ (1980)(Stephen King adaptation with Jack Nicholson in one of his most extrovert roles): ‘My most profound epiphany in cinema is the moment in “2001: A Space Odyssey” when the planets align with the monolith in some galactic equation. The sense of cosmic order floors me every time. But just as Kubrick inspires awe with his harmonic compositions, he can equally instil terror. The most chilling aspect of “The Shining” is the blunt symmetry of endless corridors and patterned carpets. A shot of an empty hall and a lone, red door disturbs you even before the blood starts to flow. ‘It is these graphic images that keep me coming back. I was underwhelmed when I first saw “The Shining”. Perhaps I wanted the detail and the closure of the novel. But its eccentricity and ambiguity gnawed at me and forced me to re-watch. Its shattering images haunt me to this day.’

Guillermo del Toro (‘Hellboy’, ‘Pan’s Labyrinth’) on ‘Full Metal Jacket’ (1987) (Critique of the Vietnam war, filmed in London): ‘I admire Kubrick greatly. He is often accused of being a prodigious technician and rigid intellectual, which people say makes his films very cold. I don’t agree. I think that "Barry Lyndon" or "A Clockwork Orange" are the most perfect marriages of personality and subject. But in fact, "Full Metal Jacket" is even more so. It looked at rigidity and brutality with an almost clinical eye. It is, for me, a singular film about the military, about war and its consequences. The famous scenes like the induction with R Lee Ermey where he renames the soldiers and reshapes them into sub-human maggots had a particular impact on me. Also the suicide scene with Vincent D’Onofrio in the bathroom. And the sniper set-piece at the end. Those are absolutely virtuoso pieces of filmmaking.’

Barbet Schroeder (‘Reversal of Fortune’, ‘Terror’s Advocate’) on ‘Eyes Wide Shut’ (1999) (Kubrick’s last film was an erotic psychodrama starring Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman): ‘It was a strange phenomenon with his movies: they were never completely understood when they were released. Then, once you let a few years pass, they are suddenly deemed masterpieces and no one really discusses them. It even happened with his last movie, “Eyes Wide Shut”. When it came out, people were floating. In my opinion they didn’t really “get it”. There is so much substance and so much craft, it’s visually quite staggering. The right amount of time hasn’t quite passed for it to be reconsidered. It always takes a few years. It’s very strange. The reason for this, I think, is that each of his films is so different, there’s no precedent for any of them. Every movie stands on its own. And that’s what I like.’

Interesting how envy does not seem to affect most of these directors in their assessment of Kubrick as much as admiration for his technique.

CGI Army for Hire

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 10:01:00 +0000

MASSIVE (Multiple Agent Simulation System in Virtual Environment) is a high-end computer animation and artificial intelligence software package used for generating crowd-related visual effects. Crowd scenes are a specialty for MASSIVE, as these TV commercials show.

MASSIVE was used by Peter Jackson to create the huge army battles for his Lord of the Rings film trilogy. Had this technology been around during the late 1960s Stanley Kubrick would have been all over it for his Napoleon project.

Old School Documentarian Interview

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 07:32:00 +0000

Snip from the 2006 edition of The Documentary Film Makers Handbook. The authors interviewed 111 industry professionals, among them Michael Apted. He echoes a common theme from the book: originality is the most important element to any good documentary. Or story, for that matter.

Q - What does the term "documentary" mean to you?

Michael - That's a very important question these days with the rise of reality TV. One of the hazards these days is that, reality is perceived by some people as documentary. If reality goes down the toilet as it surely will, as all things are cyclical, will documentaries go down the toilet with them? So it's nearly impossible to define what a documentary is. But I suppose I'd call it the observation of real life in a non-interventional way. It's important to see the difference with reality, which is at its heart, contrived. Some of it is very successful and illuminating, but it's contrived to put people into situations and see what they do. A documentary has them in a natural setting.

Q - What advice would you give a documentary filmmaker about choosing their subject matter?

Michael - The great thing about documentaries is that it's totally democratized. At very little cost you can go out and shoot, cut and finish a documentary. Before, it was a whole huge investment deal. That's the good news and the bad news. There are a lot of terrible films made because they don't think it through. "Let's make a film about my grandmother, " and off they go and do it. I think the important thing is not the choice of subject - it's your approach to it. Before you approach your documentary, you should figure out a very elementary structure to see what and where you want to go with the idea. The excitement of a documentary is that it's a real thing happening in front of you - you aren't working with a script in a way one does in fiction. But my advice would be to plot out a story so that it does have some purpose to it. Just don't go out there and shoot a ton of stuff on a subject and then hope you or someone else can come in and make sense of it. While it's much easier to make a documentary, it's much harder to get them seen. So if you want that to happen, you have to be doubly thoughtful about what it is.

Q - What advice would you give to new documentary filmmakers on the topic of interviewing subjects?

Michael - I've found that the best way to interview people is not to be very well prepared. You know what the subject is and you know what is going on, but to run through a list of questions is usually deadly. The only way to interview someone is to have a conversation with them and listen to what they say. This is best if you want something emotional and intimate. If you want the facts and you need it done crisply and cleanly, then of course, go in as crisp as you can. For all interviews, don't say very much. There's nothing worse than an interviewer who has diarrhea of the mouth. Keep the questions short and don't be afraid of silence. Sometimes silence is your best weapon. People will want to fill a silence and when they do, maybe they will come up with something for you. And don't go through the interview with them beforehand, as you only get it fresh and interesting once. If you blow that by driving in a car or having a cup of coffee with them while planning it out, you're dead. You'll wish that you'd been filming that time in the car or at coffee because you will never be able to capture that moment again.

Q - Is it difficult to be objective with subjects that you've been following for a long time?

Michael -You can't be objective. The word objective is bizarre. It means going in and being cold and formal with an interview in a documentary. That's not the way to do it at all. You have to build trust with the person. They have to know they're safe with you. You have to be emotionally involved. You need to be subjective. That's not to say you do whatever they want to do or agree with whatever they say. My point again is that you have to know what you are after. You have to know what your end result is even if it is a circuitous route to getting to it. If objective means distant and cold - forget it. If objective means being even-handed and fair minded, that's another thing and sometimes even that is irrelevant. If you are making a very passionate film about what you think is an injustice then you don't want to be even handed. But you have to be honest at least with the people you deal with. Then the way you approach them depends on what you are doing. If you want anything emotional or revealing then you have to be very much at one with your subject so you will give them the confidence to be open with you.

Q - Are there any differences when you interview children?

Michael - I find the best thing with children is not to patronize them. Treat them like adults. Once you start putting on funny voices or talking down to them, kids resent that.

Q - What advice would you give to new filmmakers on ethics?

Michael - It's a private matter. I don't think you can legislate for it. You have to be honorable. You have to tell people what you're going to do and do it. Don't cross any line to them. Don't lie to them. Don't deceive them. You might think I'm going to have to do something because it's very important that I get some statement out here and t may have to misrepresent it. Maybe you do, but it's a question of your personal ethics. I love arguing with people that documentary is a pure form whereas narrative films are contrived. But every edit you make is a judgment. Making a documentary film is full of judgment calls and therefore full of ethical calls as well. And I don't think doing something like paying people compromises things necessarily. I paid people on the Up films because it's a business and someone is trying to make money out of it and therefore why shouldn't they. If people are only doing it for money or they're being paid a lot to say something then there may be a strong ethical breach. Then you're buying information. But if you're paying people for their time or the exposure they have to deal with, there's a difference between those two things.

Q - To what extent should a filmmaker be thinking about their audience?

Michael -Always. We are in the business of entertainment. And too many documentaries show no thought of some end result. You have to make it for people. You are trying to communicate something. You don't patronize the audience. You don't confuse the audience. Pay attention to their needs. Know who your audience is so you can talk the right language to them. You're never making it for yourself.

Q - What are the common mistakes that you see new documentary filmmakers make?

Michael - The structure issue. The thought that all you have to do is shoot a lot of material and somehow the story will emerge. It's true with experienced documentarians as well. And it's become more endemic with the relative cheapness of stock and digital. Have some sense of the structure and the end product in your mind.

Maybe examining a provocative theory like Stanley Kubrick suffering from autism as a youngster is an original approach for our documentary about his obsession with Napoleon.

Kubrick's Final Days

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 16:41:00 +0000

I don't know if the story posted below adds more fuel to the fire surrounding the claim that Stanley Kubrick was autistic or again just describes a cineaste obsessed with secrecy. Kubrick could easily have asked for the projectionist to wear earplugs so as not to hear the soundtrack from "Eyes Wide Shut" at its first screening for studio executives.

March 10, 1999
All Eyes for a Peek at Kubrick's Final Film
By BERNARD WEINRAUB
Stanley Kubrick's work, like his life, was shrouded in mystery and secrecy.
And his final film, ''Eyes Wide Shut,'' also remains, in many ways, a source of mystery and secrecy. Mr. Kubrick, one of the great postwar filmmakers with classics like ''2001: A Space Odyssey'' and ''A Clockwork Orange,'' told a friend that it was his best film.
Mr. Kubrick's death in his sleep on Sunday, at 70, came only five days after the first screening of the movie for Bob Daly and Terry Semel, the co-chairmen of Warner Brothers, and the film's stars, Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman. At the request of Mr. Kubrick, the screening in New York took place in such secrecy that the projectionist was asked to turn away and not watch the film.
An autopsy had confirmed that Mr. Kubrick died of natural causes. Among those scheduled to attend the private funeral on Friday are Mr. Semel and Mr. Daly, as well as Mr. Cruise and Ms. Kidman.
Mr. Semel said the movie would be released as scheduled on July 16. ''The film is totally finished'' except for ''a couple of color corrections'' and ''some technical things,'' he said. ''What he showed was his final cut.''
Mr. Semel added that Mr. Kubrick had selected 90 seconds of a scene to show on Wednesday in Las Vegas to the Showest convention of theater owners at which studios offer glimpses of their coming movies. ''Eyes Wide Shut,'' a psychosexual drama, is loosely based on Arthur Schnitzler's 1926 novella ''Dream Story.'' Ms. Kidman and Mr. Cruise play psychiatrists. ''It's the story of a married couple and their sexual exploits,'' Mr. Semel said. ''The part that also blew us was it's a terrific suspense thriller. It's a wonderful film. It's a film that's really challenging and is filled with suspense.''
Mr. Semel said he last spoke to Mr. Kubrick on Saturday morning from his hotel room in Syracuse. ''I said, 'Who is this?' and he said, 'Stanley,' and I said, 'Stanley, you're my wake-up call,' and we then spent a fantastic hour on the phone talking about the details of Showest and the release. He was in the highest spirits, the greatest mood. I haven't heard Stanley like that in many years. We were laughing. We were joking.
''He was thrilled with the collective reaction all four of us had to the film. He called an hour later to tell me a joke he had heard. The good news is he definitely went to sleep that night with a smile on his face.''
Another Warner Brothers executive, Julian Senior, the senior vice president for European marketing, said the movie involved two married psychiatrists whose fantasies intersect with their real lives.
Mr. Senior said that Mr. Kubrick called him on Saturday afternoon for an hourlong conversation, and that he told Mr. Kubrick that he was watching a rugby game on television, but the filmmaker began using baseball analogies. Mr. Kubrick, who was born in the Bronx, was a fervent fan of the Yankees.
''He always used baseball terms with me,'' Mr. Senior said. ''He said: 'Forget what you're watching. It's time to go to bat on the movie.' He said that Terry and Bob and Tom and Nicole had seen it and loved it, and he was thrilled. He said, 'Let's do it right.' ''
At one point in the conversation, Mr. Senior recalled, Mr. Kubrick said excitedly, ''It's my best film ever, Julian.''
Mr. Semel said he had read the closely guarded script in a London hotel because Mr. Kubrick did not want copies circulated. The film, made under almost military secrecy, took an unusually long 15 months to shoot.
No director, with the possible exceptions of Steven Spielberg and Clint Eastwood, had as much control as Mr. Kubrick. He did not have to endure the process in which filmmakers show studio executives their director's cut, which is often a starting point for further editing and even filming. There were also no previews to gauge audience reaction.
''When he showed the movie, it was his final version,'' said Mr. Semel, who met Mr. Kubrick while the director was making ''Barry Lyndon'' in 1975. He said Mr. Kubrick had agreed to make ''Eyes Wide Shut'' for an R rating. (No one under 17 may attend without an adult.) The film is believed to have numerous sexual situations, and there had been reports that it would be given a more restrictive NC-17 rating, barring all viewers under 17.
But Mr. Semel said he expected that the film, which cost about $65 million, would receive an R rating. ''It was not only our deal, it was what Stanley wanted,'' Mr. Semel said. ''He wanted the film to be available to the masses.''
The work will be the 13th full-length film of Mr. Kubrick's 40-year career, which began in 1953 with a melodrama, ''Fear and Desire,'' and continued with such classics as ''Paths of Glory'' (1957), ''Spartacus'' (1960), ''Lolita'' (1962), ''Dr. Strangelove'' (1964) and ''Full Metal Jacket'' (1987).
Mr. Kubrick moved to England shortly after completing ''Spartacus,'' a big-budget epic starring Kirk Douglas. By several accounts, he was dismayed by his lack of control in the studio and wanted to make movies free of interference. In the process, he became as publicity-shy as J. D. Salinger and Greta Garbo.
But Mr. Semel and Mr. Senior said that Mr. Kubrick kept in touch by fax, E-mail and phone and read publications on the Internet. He was also highly informed on movie marketing and distribution and could discuss the seating capacities of large theaters in the United States and abroad, Mr. Semel said.
Months ago Mr. Kubrick and Warner Brothers agreed to release the film in the United States in July, partly because it was ''a strong date'' and partly because it would coincide with its release in Europe, Mr. Semel said.
''To say he was reclusive is not true,'' Mr. Senior said. ''He didn't want a photo spread about himself in Hello magazine, but he was aware of everything going on and especially with what was going on with his beloved New York Yankees. He loved life, he loved chess, he loved documentaries. You'd go over to his home and there'd be John le Carre in his kitchen. He was not reclusive at all.''

Kubrick's Napoleon Test Reel?

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 09:23:00 +0000

These YouTube clips from Barry Lydon hint at what Stanley Kubrick might have had in mind for his Napoleon project.

Kubrick's Most Autistic Movie

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 18:37:00 +0000

I could make a case that 2001 is Stanley Kubrick's most autistic movie. That would explain the behavior of the Discovery astronauts Bowman and Poole. Although, you could make the case that Dr. Strangelove has the most autistic character in General Ripper, but paranoia cannot be denied as a strong motivator. Artistic loners tend to be pegged as autistic so you could make the case that Humbert Humbert was a borderline case in Lolita.

You could also make the case that Kubrick's first feature, Fear and Desire, was his most autistic because it was the one he made closer to his teen years. Here it is, complete:

This article from Time magazine published in 1975 upon the release of Barry Lyndon may be making the case for that movie as Kubrick's most autistic.

FIRST PARADOX: Barry Lyndon, a story of an 18th century Irish gentleman-rogue, is the first novel of a great 19th century writer, William Makepeace Thackeray. It shows early signs of a genius that would nourish only after creative struggle and personal adversity. In time, this forgotten book becomes the basis for the tenth feature film by a well-established, well-rewarded 20th century artist—Director Stanley Kubrick. In it, he demonstrates the qualities that eluded Thackeray: singularity of vision, mature mastery of his medium, near-reckless courage in asserting through this work a claim not just to the distinction critics have already granted him but to greatness that time alone can — and probably will — confirm.

SECOND PARADOX: As he did in 2001: A Space Odyssey, Kubrick relies not on words —he is as sparing of them as Thackeray is profligate—but images to tell his story. Yet Barry Lyndon lacks the experimental, hallucinatory visual quality that made 2001 a cultural touchstone of the tripped-out '60s. Kubrick has shot and edited Barry Lyndon with the classic economy and elegance associated with the best works of the silent cinema. The frantic trompe l'oeil manner — all quick cuts and crazy angles — recently favored by ambitious film makers (and audiences) has been rigorously rejected.

This drive for cinematic purity has consumed three years of Kubrick's life and $11 million of Warner Bros.' money. The film is 3 hr., 4 min. and 4 sec. long, and it does not easily yield up its themes. "The essence of dramatic form," says Kubrick, "is to let an idea come over people without its being plainly stated. When you say something directly, it is simply not as potent as it is when you allow people to discover it for themselves."

THIRD PARADOX: Barry Lyndon is obviously a costume drama but in a much more literal sense than any movie easily dismissed by that contemptuous phrase. Many of the clothes are not costumes at all but authentic antiques. The equally real interiors arid landscapes—every foot of the film was shot on location —are intended to function as something more than exotic delights for the eye. Close scrutiny of the settings reveals not only the character of the people who inhabit them but the spirit of the entire age as Kubrick understands it.

Though Barry Lyndon includes the duels, battles and romantic intrigues that we are conditioned to expect in movies about the past, it more often than not cuts away from this easy-to-savor material. This cool distancing suggests that the melodramatic passions normally sustaining our interest in films are petty matters. This vision of the past, like Kubrick's vision of the future in 2001, invites us to experience an alien world not through its characters but with them—sensorially, viscerally. Stanley Kubrick's idea of what constitutes historical spectacle does not coincide with many people's — least of all, those in Warner's sales department. Which brings us to the...

FOURTH PARADOX: Having made what amounts to an art-film spectacle — something few directors since Griffith and Eisenstein have brought off — Kubrick now requires that his backers go out and sell the damned thing. Because of distribution and promotion costs, the film must gross at least $30 million to make a profit. Kubrick has his own ideas about how to proceed: a tasteful ad campaign, a limited-release pattern permitting good word of mouth to build, saturation bookings timed to coincide with the Academy Award nominations that the director and studio believe are inevitable. Warner salesmen wish they had something simpler on then-hands—a great sloshy romance like Dr. Zhivago, for instance, or at least a rollicking rip-off of olden times, like Tom Jones. Now Kubrick will help sell his picture. Among other things, he employs a bookkeeper to chart how films have played in the first-run houses of key cities, so his films can be booked into those with the best records. But the fact remains that his work habits are anything but helpful to publicists.

Multimillion-dollar movies are usually open to the press as they are being made; their heavy tread can be heard clumping toward the theaters for a year prior to release. Kubrick's locations, however, were closed. Not a single publicity still emerged without the director's express approval, which was almost never granted. Thus the only word on Barry Lyndon came from actors and technicians, none of them privy to Kubrick's vision, and some wearied and literally sickened by his obsessive perfectionism.

At age 47, he is the creator of one of cinema's most varied and successful bodies of work; in addition to 2001, it includes Paths of Glory, Lolita, Doctor Strangelove and A Clockwork Orange. He enjoys the rare right to final cut of his film without studio advice or interference. Warner executives were not permitted to see more than a few bits of it until the completed version — take it or leave it — was screened for them just three weeks ago. To put it mildly, it is hard for them to get a proper buildup going for their expensive property on such short notice.

FIFTH PARADOX: Stanley Kubrick himself. Barry Lyndon may be an austere epic, but an epic it surely is. Such works pose complex logistical and technical problems that must be solved along with the aesthetic questions that arise every time a new camera setup is chosen. Kubrick's basic cast and crew of 170 — augmented by hundreds of extras and supporting specialists as needed — crawled from location to location across Ireland and England for 8 months. Normally, the commanders of cinematic operations on this scale are outgoing, not to say colorfully flamboyant characters.

That, however, is precisely what Kubrick is not. He is almost reclusively shy, "a demented perfectionist, according to the publicity mythology around me." This myth began building when he decided to stay on in England after shooting Lolita there in 1961. He found it "helpful not to be constantly exposed to the fear and anxiety that prevail in the film world." He lives and does all pre-and post-production work in a rambling manor house defended by two wooden walls and furnished in early nondescript. He rarely ventures forth even to London, less than an hour away. He prefers that the world—in controllable quantities—be brought to him via telex, telephone, television. All the books and movies this omnivorous reader-viewer requires are delivered to the retreat he shares with his third wife Christiane, his three daughters, three dogs and six cats. He is, says his friend, Film Critic Alexander Walker, "like a medieval artist living above his workshop." According to an actress who once worked for him, he is also "a mole." What has the mole wrought? Is the finished film worth the pains he has taken with it—and given to his associates over the long years of its creation? The answer is a resounding yes.

Kubrick does not know what drew him to this tale of a scoundrel's rise and fall. Beyond noting that he has always enjoyed Thackeray, he does not try to explain his choice: "It's like trying to say why you fell in love with your wife — it's meaningless."

Possibly, but Kubrick's curiosity was probably aroused by the chance to explore a character who is his antithesis. About his work Kubrick is the most self-conscious and rational of men. His eccentricities — secretiveness, a great need for privacy — are caused by his intense awareness of time's relentless passage. He wants to use time to "create a string of masterpieces," as an acquaintance puts it. Social status means nothing to him, money is simply a tool of his trade.

Barry, on the other hand, suffers a monstrous complacency. He betrays not the slightest moral or intellectual self-awareness. Born poor but with a modest claim to gentleman's rank, he never doubts his right to rise to the highest ranks of the nobility. Nor does he ever seem to question the various means by which he pursues his end: army desertion, card sharping, contracting a loveless marriage in order to acquire a fortune. As for time, it means nothing to him. He squanders it, as he does money, in pursuit of pleasure and the title he is desperate for.

In the novel, Thackeray used a torrent of words to demonstrate Barry's lack of self-knowledge. Narrating his own story, Barry so obviously exaggerates his claims to exemplary behavior that the reader perceives he is essentially a braggart and poltroon. Daringly, Kubrick uses silence to make the same point. "People like Barry are successful because they are not obvious—they don't announce themselves," says Kubrick. So it is mainly by the look in Ryan O'Neal's eyes —a sharp glint when he spies the main chance, a gaze of hurt befuddlement when things go awry — that we understand Barry's motives. And since he cannot see his own face, we can be certain he is not aware of these self-betrayals. According to Kubrick, Barry's silence also implies that "he is not very bright," he is an overreacher who "gets in over his head in situations he doesn't fully understand." Though a certain dimness makes him a less obviously comic figure than he is in the book, it also makes him a more believable one. And it permits Kubrick to demonstrate, without shattering the movie's tone, Barry's two nearly saving graces—physical gallantry and desperate love of his only child, whose death is the film's emotional high point and the tragedy that finally undoes Barry.

With the exception of Humbert Humbert in Lolita, this is the first time that Kubrick has moved beyond pop archetypes and taken the measure of a man with a novelist's sense of psychological nuance. Still, it is not as a study in character that Barry Lyndon will be ultimately remembered. The structure of the work is truly novel. In addition, Kubrick has assembled perhaps the most ravishing set of images ever printed on a single strip of celluloid. These virtues are related: the structure would not work without Kubrick's sustaining mastery of the camera, lighting and composition; the images would not be so powerful if the director had not devised a narrative structure spacious enough for them to pile up with overwhelming impressiveness.

As a design, Barry Lyndon is marvelously simple. The first half offers something like a documentary of 18th century manners and morals. To be sure, a lot happens to Barry in this segment — first love, first duel, first wanderings, first military combat — but he remains pretty much a figure in the foreground, rather like those little paper cutouts architects place on their models to give a sense of scale. What matters to the director is the world beyond, the world Barry is so anxious to conquer.

And it is a great world, especially to the modern eye, accustomed as it is to cluttered industrialized landscapes, and architecture and decor that stress the purely functional. The recurring visual motif of the film — especially obvious in the first portion — is a stately pullback. Typically, it starts on some detail, like a closeup of an actor, then moves slowly back to reveal the simple beauty of the countryside that is as indifferent to the player's petty pursuits as he is impervious to its innocent charm. The lighting in all the outdoor sequences appears to be completely natural and patiently—expensively—waited for. Frequently, most of the emotional information for a scene may be found in the light, before anyone says a word. A superb example of this occurs when Barry discovers his first love flirting in a garden with a man who is everything he is not—mature, wealthy, well born, English and an army officer to boot. The late afternoon sun, soft as the lyric of a love ballad, literally dies along with Barry's hopes of romance.

Indoors, there are similar revelations, thanks in part to space-age technology. Kubrick found a way to fit an incredibly fast (F 0.7) 50mm. still-camera lens, developed by Zeiss, onto a motion-picture camera. It permitted him to film night interiors using only the light available to inhabitants of the 18th century. Some scenes are illuminated by just a single candle; in others, hundreds gutter in the candelabra and chandeliers of great halls, bathing the screen in a gentle, wonderfully moody orange glow that almost no one now alive has ever experienced.

In the hands of another director, all this embellishment might seem an idle exercise, perhaps even proof of the old movie adage that when a director dies he becomes a cameraman. The first half of Barry Lyndon deliberately violates every rule of sound dramatic composition. Only a few of the scenes end in powerful emotion or conflict, and there is no strong arc to the overall design of the piece. And yet our attention never wanders: such is Kubrick's gift for lighting and composing a scene, such is the strength of his desire to prove that movies "haven't scratched the surface of how to tell stories in their own terms."

The thought is not new. Everyone who has worked in or thought seriously about the cinema knows that the angle of a shot or the rhythm of a scene's editing can impart information more economically than a long stretch of dialogue. What is novel is that Kubrick has acted so firmly on the basis of that nearly conventional wisdom in the film's first half — the half that must catch and hold the attention of a mass audience (The Towering Inferno crowd) if his picture is to succeed commercially.

It is a big risk, an act of the highest artistic confidence. Reassurance comes in the strong melodrama of the film's second half. From the moment Marisa Berenson, playing Lady Lyndon, appears and Barry's suit for her hand succeeds, the film, without seeming to change its style or gently enfolding pace, gathers tremendous dramatic force of a quite conventional sort. Barry's loveless use of her to further his ambitions has a raw, shocking edge. His conflict with her son by her first marriage, culminating in what is surely the most gripping duel ever filmed, is full of angry uncontrolled passion. Barry's innocent infatuation with his own child, "the hope of his family, the pride of his manhood," has a touching, redeeming warmth to it. His downfall, much more dramatically rendered by Kubrick than by Thackeray, has a tragic starkness and a moral correctness. In short, Kubrick has accomplished what amounts to a minor miracle — an uncompromised artistic vision that also puts all of Warner Bros, money "on the screen," as Kubrick says, borrowing an old trade term. He feels he has done right by himself and "done right by the people who gave me the money," presenting them with the best possible chance to make it back with a profit on their investment.

Kubrick turned to Barry Lyndon after a projected biography of Napoleon proved too complex and expensive even for him. He reread the novel several times, "looking for traps, making sure it was do-able." With typically elaborate caution, he got Warners' backing on the basis of an outline in which names, places and dates were changed so no one could filch from him a story in the public domain. He then settled down to work on script and research. The latter may be, for him, the more important undertaking. "Stanley is voracious for information. He wants glorious choice," says his associate producer, Bernard Williams. Adds Costume Designer Milena Canonero: "He wants to see everything. He wants at his fingertips the knowledge, the feeling of the period."

Kubrick is a self-taught man with an autodidact's passion for facts and the process of gathering them. Son of a Bronx physician, he was an indifferent high school student. He experimented endlessly with cameras and at 17 was hired by Look as a staff photographer. He learned something about people and a lot about photography, traveling the country shooting pictures for 4 years. At 21, he made his first short subject, three years later his first fictional feature — very low budget. He also audited Columbia University courses conducted by the likes of Lionel Trilling and Mark Van Doren, and became a tireless reader with catholic tastes. "I can become interested in anything," he says. "Delving into a subject, discovering facts and details—I find that easy and pleasurable."

It is also essential to his work. For one thing, he finds it impossible to invent an entirely original story, something drawn out of his own experience or fantasy life. Indeed, the creation of fiction awes him. "It is one of the most phenomenal human achievements," he says. "And I have never done it." Instead, he must do "detective work — find out about the things about which I have no direct experience." These, of course, offer metaphors in which to cloak such observations — they are never direct messages — that he cares to share with the world.

Research aids him in another way. Movie sets — even the cool, orderly ones Kubrick is famous for running — seethe with logistical, technical and emotional problems. As Kubrick mildly puts it, "The atmosphere is inimical to making subtle aesthetic decisions." He is unable to determine how to shoot a scene until he sees a set fully dressed and lit. This is a mo ment of maximum risk. Says Ryan O'Neal, who plays Barry: "The toughest part of Stanley's day was finding the right first shot. Once he did that, other shots fell into place. But he agonized over that first one."

It is precisely then that Kubrick's memory bank, well stocked with odd details, comes into play. "Once, when he was really stymied, he began to search through a book of 18th century art reproductions," recalls O'Neal.

"He found a painting — I don't remem ber which one — and posed Marissa and me exactly as if we were in that painting."

Most of his performers seem to worship Kubrick. One reason is that he is always willing to give their suggestions a trial run Or two. He is also Intelligent about not overdirecting them. "Stanley is a great believer in the man," says Murray Melvin, who is superb in the role of a snaky spiritual adviser to Lady Lyndon. "You have to do it." Adds Patrick Magee, who plays a gambler: "The catchwords on the set are 'Do it faster, do it slower, do it again.' Mostly, 'Do it again.'"

Melvin did one scene 50 times. "I knew he had seen something I had done. But because he was a good director, he wouldn't tell me what it was. Because if someone tells you you've done a good bit, then you know it and put it in parentheses and kill it. The better actor you were, the more he drew out of you."

There is no sadism in Kubrick's insistence on huge numbers of retakes. He did not press Berenson or the children in his cast, only the established professionals he knew could stand up under his search for the best they had to offer. "Actors who have worked a lot in movies," Kubrick says mildly, "don't really get a sense of intense excitement into their performances until there is film running through the camera." Moreover, the "beady eye" that several insist was cast on them as they worked is merely a sign of the mesmerizing concentration he brings to his work.

Originally Kubrick, who likes to sleep in his own bed and likes even more to save the money it costs to house and feed a crew on location, had hoped to shoot the entire picture within a 90-minute range of home. He dispatched photographers to all the great houses within that circle, hoping to find the look he wanted. Impossible. He then decided to shoot in Ireland, where the early sections of the book are set anyway. After a couple of months there, however, the I.R.A. — or someone using its name — made telephone threats to the production. Kubrick decamped for rural England, where he used rooms in at least four different stately homes, artfully cut together to give Hackton Castle, Lady Lyndon's digs, spaciousness and richness. At Corsham Court, he was told that if he did not kill his lights within 30 minutes, irreparable harm would be done to the priceless paintings in the room where he was shooting. Similar incidents sent the budget soaring, giving an extra twist to the pressures Kubrick felt. Nerves produced a rash on his hands that did not disappear until the film was wrapped, and though he had quit smoking, he started cadging cigarettes.

Still, things could have been worse. Warner's production chief, John Calley, was always tolerant. "It would make no sense to tell Kubrick, 'O.K., fella, you've got one more week to finish the thing,'" he says. "What you would get then is a mediocre film that cost say, $8 million, instead of a masterpiece that cost $11 million. When somebody is spending a lot of your money, you are wise to give him time to do the job right."

Calley admits he has no idea whether masterpieces are going to sell this season. "The business is, at best, a crap shoot. The fact that Stanley thinks the picture will gross in nine figures is very reassuring. He is never far wrong about anything." If Kubrick is right, he will be rich. By the terms of his deal with Warner, he receives 40% of Barry Lyndon's profits. Only one picture in history — Jaws — has made "nine figures"; it passed the $100 million mark last week.

As for Kubrick, he is still working 18 hours a day, overseeing the final fine tuning of the sound track while keeping one compulsively attentive eye on the orchestration of the publicity buildup. It is something he feels he must do, just as he personally checked the first 17 prints of A Clockwork Orange before they went out to the theaters. "There is such a total sense of demoralization if you say you don't care. From start to finish on a film, the only limitations I observe are those imposed on me by the amount of money I have to spend and the amount of sleep I need. You either care or you don't, and I simply don't know where to draw the line between those two points."

He does not believe a single flop will cost him his ability to ere, act independently, though he may occasionally think of a line in The Killing, his first major studio release in 1956. A thief muses that people romanticize gangsters and artists, but they are also eager to see them brought low.

Much more often, however, Stanley Kubrick is armored in the serene belief that whatever judgment the public passes on his new movie when it opens next week, he has fulfilled the director's basic ideal, which is to shoot "economically and with as much beauty and gracefulness as possible." Beyond that, he adds, "All you can do is either pose questions or make truthful observations about human behavior. The only morality is not to be dishonest." Barry Lyndon fulfills that ideal as well.

Here is an Asperger filmography from an online source:

Molly which is dreadful, Mozart and the Whale is okay, in Anthony Mingella's Breaking and Entering Jude Law's character has a mildly autistic daughter obsessed with gymnastics, in a new UK film, Sparkle, Bob Hoskins plays a man with AS. According to conjecture Stanley Kubrick had Asperger's syndrome so you could watch some movies he directed because they may show from the inside how his AS mind works.

That comments makes you look at Kubrick's film work in a different light, doesn't it?

More on Kubrick and Asperger

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 17:46:00 +0000

Stanley Kubrick was sixteen years old when Asperger was first identified as a form of autism and died before Asperger was officially recognized by the medical community in 1994. Here's a snip from a New Yorker piece written by an artistic aspie last year:

In the fall of 2000, in the course of what had become a protracted effort to identify—and, if possible, alleviate—my lifelong unease, I was told that I had Asperger’s syndrome. I had never heard of the condition, which had been recognized by the American Psychiatric Association only six years earlier. Nevertheless, the diagnosis was one of those rare clinical confirmations which are met mostly with relief. Here, finally, was an objective explanation for some of my strengths and weaknesses, the simultaneous capacity for unbroken work and all-encompassing recall, linked inextricably to a driven, uncomfortable personality. And I learned that there were others like me—people who yearned for steady routines, repeated patterns, and a few cherished subjects, the driftwood that keeps us afloat.

The syndrome was identified, in 1944, by Hans Asperger, a Viennese pediatrician, who wrote, “For success in science or art, a dash ofautism is essential.” Yet Oliver Sacks makes a clear distinction between full-fledged autism and Asperger’s syndrome. In The New Yorker some years ago, Sacks wrote that “people with Asperger’s syndrome can tell us of their experiences, their inner feelings and states, whereas those with classicalautism cannot. With classical autism there is no ‘window,’ and we can only infer. With Asperger’s syndrome there is self-consciousness and at least some power to introspect and report.”

In his 1998 book “Asperger’s Syndrome: A Guide for Parents and Professionals,” Tony Attwood observed, “The person with Asperger’s syndrome has no distinguishing physical features but is primarily viewed by other people as different because of their unusual quality of social behavior and conversation skills. For example, a woman with Asperger’s Syndrome described how as a child she saw people moving into the house up the street, ran up to one of the new kids and, instead of the conventional greeting and request of ‘Hi, you want to play?,’ proclaimed, ‘Nine times nine is equal to 81.’ ”

David Mamet, in his recent book “Bambi vs. Godzilla,” discerned redeeming qualities in the condition. Considering filmmakers past and present, he stated that “it is not impossible that Asperger’s syndrome helped make the movies. The symptoms of this developmental disorder include early precocity, a great ability to maintain masses of information, a lack of ability to mix with groups in age-appropriate ways, ignorance of or indifference to social norms, high intelligence, and difficulty with transitions, married to a preternatural ability to concentrate on the minutia of the task at hand.”

Sounds like a thumbnail sketch of Stanley Kubrick. Asperger can be applied widely, probably due to its being such a recently characterized phenomenon.

The Asperger’s spectrum ranges from people barely more abstracted than a stereotypical “absent-minded professor” to the full-blown, albeit highly functioning, autistic. Symptoms of Asperger’s have been attributed ex post facto to successful figures, but these are the fortunate ones—persons able to invent outlets for their ever-welling monomanias. Many are not so lucky, and some end up institutionalized or homeless. (In the late nineteen-seventies, I saw a ragged, haunted man who spent urgent hours dodging the New York transit police to trace the dates and lineage of the Hapsburg nobility on the walls of subway stations.) For some—record collectors with every catalogue number at hand, theatre buffs with first-night casts memorized, children who draw precise architectural blueprints of nineteenth-century silk mills—a cluster of facts can be both luminous and lyric, something around which to construct a life.

We are informally referred to as “Aspies,” and if we are not very, very good at something we tend to do it very poorly. Little in life comes naturally—except for our random, inexplicable, and often uncontrollable gifts—and, even more than most children, we assemble our personalities unevenly, piece by piece, almost robotically, from models we admire. (I remember the deliberate decision to appropriate one teacher’s mischievous grin and darting eyes, which I found so charming that I thought they might work for me, too.)

So preoccupied are we with our inner imperatives that the outer world may overwhelm and confuse. What anguished pity I used to feel for piñatas at birthday parties, those papier-mâché donkeys with their amiable smiles about to be shattered by little brutes with bats. On at least one occasion, I begged for a stay of execution and eventually had to be taken home, weeping, convinced that I had just witnessed the braining of a new and sympathetic acquaintance.

Caring for inanimate objects came easily. Learning to make genuine connections with people—much as I desperately wanted them—was a bewildering process. I felt like an alien, always about to be exposed. Or, to adapt another hoary but useful analogy, not only did I not see the forest for the trees; I was so intensely distracted that I missed the trees for the species of lichen on their bark.

My first and most powerful obsession was music—the same records played again and again while I watched them spin, astonished at their evocation of aural worlds that I not only instinctively understood even as a toddler but in which I actually felt comfortable. I was both terrified of and tantalized by death (which was absolutely real to me from earliest childhood), and by the way recordings restored Enrico Caruso and Nellie Melba to life for a few minutes, ghostly visitors who had returned to sing for me at 78 r.p.m., through a hiss of shellac and antiquity.

When I was ten, I became fascinated by silent films, the visual complement to my old records. I spent hours at the library of the University of Connecticut, a few minutes’ walk from home, researching the lives of actors and actresses on microfilm, and recall the genuine sense of mourning that came over me when I saw Barbara La Marr’s sad, youthful face on an obituary page from 1926. Not surprisingly, “Sunset Boulevard” was my favorite “talkie” (I actually called them that—in 1965!), and I’d regularly set the alarm and wake in the middle of the night to watch Chester Conklin or Louise Dresser take on minor roles in some B movie that the Worcester, Massachusetts, UHF station put on when nobody else was watching.

Kubrick totally immersed himself in film, as he had with chess and photography, when he was living as a bohemian bachelor in New York in the early 1950s. Kubrick eventually drew in his girlfriend to help him make his first feature and had been married twice by the time he made his first mainstream picture, The Killing, in partnership with James B. Harris. Here's the trailer:

Napoleon Script Resurfaces on Interwebs

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 13:28:00 +0000

The Stanley Kubrick estate asked the web to keep the Napoleon script off the grid while it sought to publish the screenplay in book form. Looks like there has been a breach of the embargo. Or else it could be a guerrilla plan to promote the upcoming book. Either way, get it while it lasts. I will be blogging on excerpts of the script in the coming days. I look forward to commenting on the military aspects of the screenplay and its portrayal of Josephine and Napoleon's sexual appetites.

Picture of the day. I have liked blogging on the Stanley Kubrick Napoleon project so much I decided to blog about another upcoming La Boca Production: a Hollywood style bio-pic of the baseball hall of famer Roberto Clemente. Isn't it about time my friends for sports to return to the myth of the self less hero. There is too much made in the media of the darker side of sports which has only reflected the coarsening of the societies supporting professional teams. Be it an orgy with harlots or performance enhancing drugs or even gunplay, many more of the heroes of today are considerably tarnished when you think back to the way players lived during last century's middle period. Particularly in the United States. Roberto Clemente was born dirt poor during the Depression; as an adult he never missed a chance to extend a helping hand or to speak out against oppression. He was an inspiration to his teammates and seemed to defy the effects of age by playing better as he got older. Clemente was on a plane loaded with supplies bound for earthquake survivors in Nicaragua. The plane crashed moments after take off and was never recovered. The mercy flight went down at the very tip of the Bermuda Triangle.

Kubrick for Dummies podcast

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 12:02:00 +0000

Everything you need to know about Stanley Kubrick is her in this ninety minute podchat from three hippie movie geeks. These old school bohos cover Kubrick's entire career. They even go back to when Kubrick was junior camera nut and got his first paying gig as a boy photographer in New York City working for a feisty editor. I will be dissecting the podchat to prune away inaccuracies. For instance, Kubrick was married three times, not twice. Look for video from Malcolm McDowell telling the real story about playing ping-pong with Stanley Kubrick during post-production of ACO.

Picture of the day. Sin comentario.

Documentary Cookbook Manifesto

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 07:45:00 +0000

Below is the final part of the UC Berkeley Documentary Cookbook. This is the heart of the manifesto, dealing with the nuts and bolts of making a movie for less than one hundred thousand dollars. Part of the challenge in making this documentary about Stanley Kubrick's life long obsession with Napoleon will be finding a way to make it economically without sacrificing quality or story.

BASIC APPROACH

"Make films, not proposals:"

If you have lots of money, don't do this.

As expected, most of the lessons learned so far are bone head obvious, and boil down to very disciplined, simple "preventive production." To really be serious about finding projects on which you can lower cost without lowering quality, here's what you need to do, in order of cost efficiency:

Choose the right story. Find stories that naturally lend themselves to low cost, not stories which will be compromised with short funding. Thin Blue Line, Gimme Shelter, , Mark Twain, The Cockettes, and Long Night's Journey Into Day will always cost at least a half million dollars.
Back into it. Reverse the idea/funding process. Find stories and techniques that can be done with the money readily available, not with money which might someday be available.
Exercise Discipline. Be extremely careful and consistent at every stage of planning and production. Make the project all muscle, no fat. Obviously, this favors pre-conceptualized projects and handicaps discovery.
Use small format digital video. Use DV/DVCam as starting point to reduce cost from ground up. Small format digital video is to us as 16mm was to cinema verite or 4-track recorders were to rock and roll.
Exercise consistent technical protocol. Get video and audio close to right in the field, and do not plan to fix anything in the mix or on-line. Small format video demands more technical care than large format.
Pay professionals their going rates. Control personnel costs by adjusting time, not rates. Reconfigure what you do, not how much you pay for it.
Use experienced craftspeople at all levels, especially in audio and assistant editing.
Avoid air travel. Is there no good film to be made within 100 miles of home? .
Make the film quickly. Production and editorial schedules that minimize person-days are big levers for cost reduction. Set rough cut and lock picture deadlines, and meet them no matter what. This favors experienced filmmakers working with strong fallback narrative structures.
Maintain a clear decision flow. The producer/director is in charge. The production unit must be a community, but not a democracy. Fine-tune the filtering of ideas to flow from community to director to editor in orderly fashion. Delays in executive signoff (if there is an executive) can be catastrophic.
"FIDO" "Fuck it and drive on." Choose a story in which a few missing pieces or clunky moments will go unnoticed, so that you can always maintain forward motion. Never bog down, and never miss a deadline, no matter what.
Avoid on-line assembly, out of house, by working on an editing system which directly outputs high-resolution video. Do not color correct the show yourself.
Use high-end facilities for sound finishing and color correction after extremely careful field origination and editorial prep.
Do not use outside archive material, only home movies, personal photos, documents for which you own all rights in perpetuity, and fair use material for which you can make a clearly and obviously defensible case for fair use.
Do not use outside music, only music internally produced, for which you own rights in perpetuity; music rights may be non-exclusive.
Avoid hidden administrative cost, of music, archive footage, and stills. The admin time, paperwork, research, provenance search, and E&O costs can match license fees.
Avoid live performance under trade union jurisdiction, where fees and hidden administrative costs may be excessive.
Avoid fundraising, beyond the bare minimum necessary to get the project done. The fundraising process itself mounts its own enormous costs---sample reels, office expense, producer time, spun budgets, spun proposals.

These suggested methods clearly apply only to a small number of documentaries and a small number of filmmakers. And finally:

Make a high quality film, and then sell it to the highest bidder. "HBO is not going to broadcast a show simply because it cost $100,000. Nobility is not part of the mix," says Pete Nicks.

STORY ATTRIBUTES

"The message is the message"

Story is everything. Conventional wisdom holds that choosing small format digital production is the best way to reduce documentary cost. On the contrary, story choice appears to be the single most determining factor, followed closely by organization of story chosen. (It may come as a surprise to learn that Startup.Com---shot almost entirely on a PD100---cost $750,000.) In setting up this project, we have deliberately avoided calling for content-specific proposals. We have for the moment kept our invitations to filmmakers content-neutral, because it is the method and evolving production template which matter, and these depend first on what stories the producers choose to tackle.

Can this story be told with the funds readily within reach?
Can this story be clearly and naturally told for low cost with little compromise?
Can this story easily withstand moments of inelegant storytelling?
Can this story easily withstand losing an episode or character?
Can this story be done without travel?
Can this story be made into a documentary by a few people in a few days?
Can this story be done without archive materials?
Can the timeline or narrative arc of this story be quickly and efficiently organized.
Does this story require cumbersome administrative access. Getting into Disneyland, Sing Sing, or the San Diego County District Attorney's office will burn up months or even years of work.

Obviously, many stories---most in fact---cannot be done inexpensively under these restrictions. Eyes On The Prize, The Civil War, Africans In American, Crumb, The Farmer's Wife, Endurance, Lalee's Kin, and similar projects will always cost hundreds of thousands of dollars per hour, and must be supported at that level. We are not talking about those.
PRODUCTION

"Preventive Production"

Talk is cheap. This year we invited three producers to make films of various lengths, with the stipulation that, on average, the projects not cost more than $100,000 per hour, and that they be for a television audience. The documentaries are all very different, and the filmmakers bring a good range of style, method, perspective, experience and age.

Peter Nicks is the young producer of The Wolf, a one-hour personal documentary about how cocaine nearly destroyed his life at the peak of America's war against drugs. The Wolf explores America's hesitant romance with illegal drugs by examining Peter's addiction, imprisonment, his unlikely recovery, and the struggles of his family. Before directing the project, Nicks worked at Nightline. And he is currently a producer at PBS's Life 360.

Lourdes Portillo, a widely known and respected mid-career producer (The Devil Never Sleeps, Seniorita Extraviata) is now shooting with Kyle Kibbe on "McQueen." This 20 minute documentary looks back over three decades to the legendary car chase in the 1968 film "Bullit" as a device for exploring sweeping changes in class, demographics, ethnicity, and popular culture in California.

Albert Maysles, whose career spans 45 years (Salesman, Gimme Shelter), and who was an early champion of small format video, will produce and direct the third project. He will begin shooting late this fall on a film about the personal dramas of passengers on long-distance trains.

Jon Else's film Open Outcry, while not made directly under the umbrella of the Center for New Documentary, was produced for ITVS during the center's first year. It was an instructive and not entirely successful attempt to do programming for $100,000 per hour. The project, which experiments with near-real-time shooting, was photographed at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange in 8 days, and edited in 11 days.

(All this discussion of cost reduction unfolds as a departure from the industry standard protocol of one-hour TV documentaries, films which require about $500,000 parsed and budgeted to:

15 to 25 shooting days
4 to 6 travel days
5 to 30% administrative overhead
3 to 5 person field unit, plus executive producer
12 to 18-week full time Avid edit by 2-person edit team
2 to 3 week sound finishing
2 to 3 day on-line & color correction)

Personnel & staffing

"No cheap labor"

Work with experienced people at all levels. To our surprise, the more seasoned the personnel, the cheaper the production, even though individual daily or weekly rates may be higher. The hidden administrative cost of ramping up interns and apprentices on The Wolf was significant, and we have yet to invent a way of using entry level people efficiently. "Cattle calls" for interns are probably a mistake. The fact of the matter is that a journeyman videographer, director, editor, or assistant with solid experience can accomplish an enormous amount in a day. Also, experienced people can quickly spot inefficiencies, wrong turns, and blind alleys long before the problems eat into a budget.

This model depends in large measure on everyone doing a couple of jobs well---director/recordists (like Fred Wiseman), director/editors (like Deborah Hoffmann) or director/shooters (like -Al Maysles). We try to do stories in which it makes sense for the sound recordist to work as AP, or the AP to record sound, or the assistant editor to production manage. The aesthetic advantages are obvious, as are the logistic advantages, and clearly it assumes that anyone brought on to the project is already skilled -- not semi-skilled -- in two job categories. (It does not mean that a good sound recordist should barely squeak by managing the production, or that a good AP should squeak by doing marginal sound. All the savings are eaten up later, when it comes time to repair the damage.) This double-skill multi-tasking can backfire horrifically in situations where the producer/director really needs to devote full attention to directing, unencumbered by technical craftwork.

We work with crews of at least two people, preferably three. In general, the one-man band approach may help access, but it can severely restrict quality. A producer/director/videographer/soundman may be appropriate for getting on the ground fast in Sierra Leone or Uzbekistan, but craft suffers tremendously, especially in severely compromised or unusable audio.

Collegiality and professionalism are critical, and it appears that the production runs more smoothly and efficiently if everyone involved is a moderately experienced producer/director in his or her own right. But at the end of the day it is not a democracy, and everyone involved has to understand that the producer / director's word is law. We discuss, the producer decides, we move on.

Writing

The jury is still out. Clearly a documentary which takes place mostly in the past can be written as a concept paper, treatment, or even sequence outline. The Wolf was done with a treatment, and everyone on the production signed on the deal breaker understanding that if all else failed, the film would follow the treatment. Lourdes Portillo's McQueen was carefully preconceived, and shot nearly in the style of a narrative feature.

Cinema verite voyages of discovery, which are by their very nature unpredictable and un-writeable, may be problematic (as Leacock says, "Great voyage; sorry, no whales.") Unless the producer is ready, without question, to pull the plug when shooting and editing deadlines arrive, trouble is at hand. We'll see, as Al Maysles sets out on his journey. At the very least, it seems reasonable that any low cost production must have some sort of bombproof default plan before anyone shoots a frame. It may be that obsessive planning, so counter to cinema verite, is what allows cinema verite moments to emerge.

Pre-Production

We are working on this. At the very least, if you cannot devise a plan which guarantees completion of at least some reasonable version of the film, then don't start production.

DV and DVCam Origination Camerawork
"Camera stylo"
By the time we began in the summer of 2000, the DV technical explosion had, on its own, lifted documentary to a relatively high plateau of digital production. Behind this lay a deep history of near misses.

A great flurry of hope surrounded the arrival of Sony's Porta-Pak technology in the 1970s, but documentary activists soon learned that the 1/2" tape system was simply too primitive and unreliable for professional use. Hi8 video rode in on a bubble of excitement in the 'eighties, but it too came up wanting. Now, after 30 years of false alarms, superb small cameras with 500+ lines of resolution, and genuinely cheap broadcast-quality digital video editing systems are at last widely available. DV is explosively broadening the playing field, even beyond the degree to which 16mm equipment liberated documentary in the 'sixties. DVCam gear costs a tiny fraction of what a cinema verite crew's Eclair NPR, Nagra & Steenbeck would have cost, even in 1967 dollars. For television DV makes better pictures faster, and ready-to-edit synced up rushes are on the screen for about $40 per hour (including digitizing cost), rather than $200 per hour for 24pHD or $1400 per hour for synced up 16mm dailies.

Starting with the 2001 Sundance Film Festival, exquisite big screen projection of productions originated on DVCam burst onto the scene. These were either blown up to excellent 35mm release prints at costs between $10,000 and $100,000 per hour, or up-converted to HD digital tape at roughly $2000 (and falling) per hour. Though we have no experience yet with big screen projection, other DVCam films (Down From The Mountain, Startup.Com) have been blown to 35mm and look extremely good. Parts of both films could be mistaken for 16mm on the big screen.

(Except for specific scenes requiring painterly high production value--- some landscape and cityscape work---virtually all documentary work for television can now be done on digital video. Faced with the array of image making possible in DV, DVCam, Digibeta and 24p HD, there now appears little compelling reason to produce documentaries on film.)

Our entire camera/audio/editing set up, including all hardware & software, purchased new from the ground up, cost about $15,000, which we expect to amortize over at least four films. We are hearing it said that a full system can be put together for under $5000, but that figure is simply too low, since it rules out the better small cameras, support equipment, good mics, a mixer, cases, and the hefty computer necessary for long form. We've had good luck working with a Sony PD150, though low cost shooting can certainly be done on any of the DV and DVCam cameras available in the $2000 - $5000 price range.

The PD150 makes excellent pictures (500 lines of resolution, compared to 470 for a PD100, 510 for a DSR130, and 540 for a DSR500/570). List is $4000, but you can find one new for $3200. You get a 1/3' CCD, a good mid- range zoom lens with wide angle converter, 2 balanced XLR inputs with 48v phantom power, adjustable zebras and master black, programmable time code, maximum 40 minute recording time, an excellent "steady shot" electronic image stabilizer, Firewire in and out, and a flip-out LCD screen. Like most of the little cameras around, this one is loaded with silly consumer features, has a maddening servo-controlled focus ring, and a brainless placement of the viewfinder at the rear of the camera. We use an after-market lens shade, and, for set-up situations, we use a Sony PVM-8045Q field monitor.

The PD150 and others like it can generate astonishing images (especially the PAL version), and in extremely low light (2 foot candles or less); on television, they can approach if not surpass Super 16mm. Here is Al Maysles' list of why DVCam trumps 16mm.
Date: Mon, 19 Nov 2001 11:50:57 -0500
Subject: no subject
From: Albert Maysles amaysles@mayslesfilms.com
To: Jon Else

For me the greatest technical innovation is the Sony D150, it
1. focuses down to inches.
2. has a magnificent manual zoom.
3. is supersensitive to light.
4. an excellent zoom range especially with the addition of the Century
wide-angle adapter.
5. only 5-10 dollars per tape.
6. extremely useful automatic focus.
7. automatic exposure control.
8. single system picture and sound.
9. as you shoot, you control exposure simultaneously while
observing recorded images.
10. steady device in the lens makes for a steadier picture.
11. unlike the 10minutes 16mm film camera magazine,
each tape runs 40 or 60 minutes, virtually no run outs.
12. camera can be held in many positions with viewer still visible.
13. holding camera below chin, a camera person can see much more
than is in the eyepiece.
14. holding camera below chin, camera person's gaze is available to subjects to assure rapport.
15. camera much lighter (only 3 or 4 pounds vs.20).
16. can vary shutter speed.
17. camera costs only around $3500; a 16mm film camera with lenses and magazines around $100,000.
18. the zoom lens is so good you need no other lenses.
19. easy to film in tight quarters, for example, in cars.
20. totally silent.
21. less intrusive.
22. batteries are tiny (3"x 1 1/2"x 1") weigh little, run for as much as 8 hours.
23. quality satisfactory for TV and can be blown up to 35mm.
24. all you need to shoot goes into a normal camera bag.
25. when necessary can shoot all alone.
26. no waiting a day for rushes. Results are immediately available.
27. is a near perfect one-up on the 16mm.film camera.
(Note also that on DVCams (even on 24p) the depth of field will be greater than what we expect at equivalent focal lengths in 16mm film. This can work for you or against you.)

We used a Century Precision 16X9 optical converter on The Wolf, which is extremely sharp, though it does not work at the telephoto end of the zoom range. Optek has introduced a 16 X 9 converter, but we have not had a chance to test it. The camera's built in, switchable 16 X 9 function simply crops the picture; do not use it. The hidden costs of switching aspect ratios during production will come back to haunt you; do all the origination in either 4X3 or 16X9, not both.

Any of the $1200 - $2000 mini DV tripods will serve well; we use a Sachtler DV2 Batteries, cases, and miscellaneous do-dads add another $1000.

These little cameras can bite; they are not as user friendly as they seem. They bristle with tiny sabotage buttons and menu items, like on-screen date & time. It takes many hours to understand them, and many days to master them. For anyone who grew up on betacam, the $3,200 PD150 is more difficult to operate properly than a $120,000 HDW F900 24p. Low cost production with small format gear requires more, not less, technical expertise than traditional production, because there is little or no financial padding to fix mistakes after the fact. Extreme care in exposure consistency and color balance throughout the project, especially in interviews, can reap significant cost savings in the final color correction session. Likewise, ragged inconsistency suddenly comes home to roost in thousands of dollars of editor and/or suite time at the end. Since the DVCam format is less forgiving after the fact than digibeta or HD, you must know exactly where your zebras are set and pay close attention to them. For those new to the little cameras, it is time well spent to study and ruminate on how the image looks in the b/w viewfinder, then on the flip-out LCD screen, and then on a properly set up field monitor; they are all slightly different.

Though we don't have definitive experience, it appears that postcard cityscapes and landscapes can be problematic in DVCam, as are extremes of contrast. On the other hand, there are no doubt all sorts of new things that can be done with the little cameras, things we haven't thought of. While shooting Lourdes Portillo's film, Kyle Kibbe was surprised at the trivial ease of covering a scene with two or three cameras simultaneously (Spike Lee covered some scenes in "Bamboozled" with as many as 12 PD100s). We haven't yet explored time lapse, arrays of cameras, or new ways of rigging the small cameras.

Origination Audio

Here lies the trap door of low cost production. Small format digital video is notorious for lousy audio, almost always because audio is not taken seriously. Always work with a sound recordist. Do not plan to fix it in the mix; you may not have a mix. As with camera work, controlling audio costs requires in fact more care than in traditional production. Exercise the standard due diligence---microphone choice and placement, proper modulation, levels, track management, ambience management, consistency in field recording and good digitizing management.

Our sound package (which pretty much came off the shelf at the graduate school) is a Shure FP33 mixer, Sennheiser K6/ME66 Combo mic, K-Tek boom, Countryman lav, a snake and a few XLR cables. Al Maysles and many other camera people work with a radio velcroed to the camera and a good small shotgun mic on the camera. Spencer Nakasako uses radios on roving crew members as "stealth lavs". We prefer to use a boom, through a mixer with a snake to the camera. In addition to the standard due diligence, you need to,

Avoid the on-camera mic supplied by the manufacturer. If you must use a mic on the camera, have the sound person rig a good one---Schoeps or Sennheiser.
Boom the scene whenever possible.
Use a good radio on the main subject. We rent radios when needed. (Caution: a radio mic on a particular person can unreasonably drive the process of deciding who or what is important as a scene unfolds.)
Establish consistent protocol for field recording. If multiple sound recordists work on the show, there must be an audio standard --- mics, internal mixer settings, sampling rate, levels, noise, track management --- set by the lead sound recordist from the git-go.
Go easy on room tone.
Go easy on double system recording; stories which require separate DAT recording (except as a backup for camera recording) may be problematic, simply because of the postproduction cost.
Establish consistant protocol for digitizing audio---levels, track assignment, etc.
Do pick-up audio interviews by telephone, the way radio producers have done them for years. Rather than fly people around the country for pick-up voice over, we have had very good experience doing it over the phone, with the interviewee in a studio in his/her home city, recorded on DAT (according to the show's audio protocol). These can also be done over an ISDN life if it's available, though it generally costs more.

Lighting

"Darkness is cheap." Dickens

Good DVCam and DV cameras can usually record astonishingly elegant images in any setting where human beings routinely live or work. A few foot-candles of nearly any color will let you squeak by. Flourescents look great. Those of us who came of age fighting to control both the quantity and quality of light now only need worry about quality. We are shooting virtually all observational scenes in available light, often wide open, often at night, often with medium gain. We haven't seen how these might look in big screen theatrical projection, but they look fine on TV, which is where we have chosen to work. For interviews, we have broken no new ground; so far we stick to the standard Chimera/showcard setup. Lowell donated a basic omni/tota/rifa kit, and it has been more than sufficient for everything on "Wolf."

If a little fill light is needed, more and more videographers are using small flashlights. AA Mag Lights or AA Duracell rectangular lights taped to the camera or to walls work well, and for a real punch, use Scorpion or Streamlight 6v lithium flashlights. We sandpaper the lenses for diffusion, and of course you can attach any gel you would put on a 10K. But in general, digital video seems well suited to finding good light rather that making good light.

Production management

Technical advances have begun to plateau, in apparent violation of Moore's Law. It appears we can no longer rely on exponential reduction in hardware and software expense to reduce overall cost, and we're more interested in using the technical advances as a springboard for other sorts of cost reduction. The need to rely more on non-technical "evergreen" ways of keeping cost down seems more in line with where we are, now that the cost of the entire broadcast quality hardware/software set has fallen below the threshold of an adult's credit card limit.

The job is to develop a template that is financially practical and attractive to journeyman filmmakers. We budget all personnel, equipment, facilities and administration at documentary rates prevailing in California (slightly higher in New York, lower in the Midwest). To keep some real world discipline about the enterprise, we have avoided folding in the myriad in-kind scroungings often available at this and other universities.

We are still sorting things out, but it appears that sharing core management on several projects, absolute avoidance of OT, absolute deadlines, and the "slinky" edit schedule described below make the biggest cost difference. And run it like a business; this is not for the chicken-hearted.

Edit Prep

You must have everything in the system before you begin editing. This is a deal breaker. Before the editor(s) begin, it is critical to have enough footage in house and digitized to finish the film, if necessary without pickups. This allows the editor and director to approach the structure with a full deck, to "throw and axe at it" on the first cut in full knowledge of what would be available in a worst case scenario. Naturally, we set aside a small portion of the production budget for pickups, but do not let the structure depend on pickups.

Time can be saved by screening all the rushes and digitizing at the same time, in the same pass.

A single, dedicated assistant editor, thoroughly conversant with the editing system, is indispensable.

If you anticipate using home movies, graphics, stills, headlines, or audio recordings, have them all in house and digitized before editing begins. Delaying their arrival costs money in re-dos and false starts; no way around it.

Before starting, have an "editorial standards" meeting with everyone who will lay a hand on the material---standardize video and audio digitizing, track assignment, and track management. The hidden costs of later redigitizing video or audio or shuffling audio from one track to another can be enormous.

We have not found a way around transcripts, which appear to be indispensable if the film includes interviews. As always, make simultaneous audiocassette recordings on location. We had hoped to experiment with speech recognition software, but so far have not been able to. Use a highly experienced transcription service, and if necessary be selective in what gets transcribed.

Editing

Many PC and Mac desktop and laptop systems are now available, and they all appear to work well. However, we discovered when beginning Wolf that very few producers had actually completed hour-long documentaries on them. This territory is actually quite mysterious. We use Final Cut Pro on a desktop G4 with a 450 MHz dual processor, 256 RAM, 30 Gig internal hard drive, and 45 Gig external drive, two 19"View Sonic monitors, and a Sony DSR-20 DVCam deck, external speakers, and miscellaneous cables. We had the vendor set it up for us, so that it would be his problem, not ours. The whole thing cost $10,000 We have not tried the Avid Xpress DV. (See DV Magazine for consistently excellent and up to date information on all DV hardware and software.)

We broke no new ground in the order of editorial steps. Wolf, like 10,000 documentaries before it, went through assembly (1st cut), rough cut, fine cut, locked picture, and sound finishing. Since the Final Cut Pro system can handle an enormous volume of material digitized at full resolution, we did not need an out-of-house on-line. FCP handles the DVCam format end-to-end with the same compression ratio, 4:2:2, as a DVCam camera. As with field audio recording, we did all the standard due diligence common to documentary editorial practice, but kept costs down in other ways.

"Slinky" editing. This may be the single best way to save money on any given project. We budgeted 30 days of editing, appropriate for the story, which had been pre-organized to within an inch of its life. But rather than set an editor for work full time for 30 days over 6 weeks, we brought the editor(s) on 2 or 3 days a week over 11 weeks. Obviously, this works only with editors splitting time between two jobs. The great efficiency comes from each week allowing the producer/director and assistant editor to consolidate ideas and material, to catch up and get ahead of the editor. Non linear editing has now become so fast that writers, APs, and directors often find themselves unable to keep up with the editor. We usually find no time to ruminate, to digest ideas, screen cuts, write, or brainstorm, because the big editorial taxi meter is humming.
Agree on an organizational principle after screening the rushes. On Wolf the editors asked producer Peter Nicks to provide a monologue of his story, which then became the practical vehicle for the ideas and events described in the treatment. Clearly and unfortunately, this works against pretzelplots and against projects in which you must unearth a structure while editing is underway. If you are serious about making an inexpensive film, do not go down the rabbit hole of "finding the film" late in the editorial process.
Maintain orderly forward motion at all costs. Orderly scheduled progress toward lock picture is essential. Do not inflate the film late in the game---on Wolf we made the mistake of adding six minutes to the documentary two days before locking picture, and had a terrible time getting those six minutes out. Fine tune the filtering of everyone's ideas to make them flow to director, and then to editor in an orderly way. Clearly, this can stifle the exchange of ideas, but it is expensive for the editor to receive conflicting suggestions and instructions from more than one voice.
Hire an assistant editor with solid experience on the system you are using. Ideally, this should be a dedicated assistant, not burdened by other jobs.
Never change software versions during editing. Don't even think about it. We experienced a near disastrous loss of lists and media while upgrading from FCP system 1.5 to 2.0.
Do not conform mixed formats on FCP Do not attempt to render a long 16 X 9 film on Final Cut Pro, since the chances of freezing or crashing are high. Do it in a high-end suite when you do your final color correction; there it is trivial.
Get a color-coded keyboard
While it probably is not a way to keep costs down, we used two editors on Wolf, Jeffery Friedman (Common Threads, Paragraph 175) and Kim Roberts (Long Night's Journey Into Day, Danang Daughter). Peter Nicks also edited some sequences (never without close coordination with Kim and Jeffery). If you choose to do this, be sure that two editors overlap their shifts for at least a couple hours each week, so that they can screen the entire film each week and agree on a plan for dividing labor. Rather than re-work each other's sections, Kim and Jeffery agreed with Peter to divide editing responsibilities between the two halves of the film.
In-progress screenings
Screenings will uncover surprises and add clarity. But do not talk the film to death when you should be making the film; get feedback and input and move forward.
Two or three well-placed screenings are invaluable for maintaining forward motion. Schedule one rough cut and one fine cut screening with a small group of outsiders. Use questionnaires, discuss the show, and move on. Schedule more frequent editor/director screenings.
Always watch the whole show.

Archive material

There appear few ways to inexpensively produce documentaries which rely on archive material other than home movies, photos and audio recordings which the producer owns. The obvious first problem is the obscene license fees charged by commercial archive houses, particularly music archives. But just as important may be the astonishing hidden administrative costs of research, provenance search, dubbing, releases, and the added headaches when it comes time to purchase E & O insurance. Use of any archive material is, at best, more cumbersome than using origination footage.

Rights-free footage can, of course, be had from the National Archives and other government sources. Rick Prelinger and others are experimenting with libraries of public access archive material on the internet, but even these come with the same administrative problems as commercial footage. More work needs to be done on optimizing use of archive footage from both commercial houses and government archives.

Music

Low cost production weighs heavily against commissioning a composer, but there may be cases in which the score is inseparably bound to the film's concept. If you must score, back into it just as you back into the film as a whole. The simple but very effective original score for The Wolf began with a discussion in which we asked Mary Watkins (Ethnic Notions, Complaints of a Dutiful Daughter), "what can you reasonably do for this amount of money?"

If music is critical, decide first, before production begins, what you can afford, then work with a composer to sort out what can be done. Like archive music, original music comes with hidden administrative costs. Does you composer have pre-existing work that can be acquired or adapted? Consider non-exclusive use of an original score, since neither you nor the composer has much to gain by taking the music completely out of circulation. If you do hire a composer, be sure to contract a package deal, under which the composer hires and pays the players and studio.

On-line & video finishing

We have found that maximizing forward motion for a very limited time at an expensive commercial post house may be more cost-effective than doing longer sessions at an inexpensive house. Facilities geared toward television commercials have very fast and efficient hardware/software, are accustomed to working intensely against the clock, and are often very eager to apply their expertise (hard-earned on hundreds of McDonalds commercials) to social documentaries for a good price.

Set up protocols with finishing facilities before beginning production
Do your own on-line assembly edit (but not your color correction, sizing, or aspect ratio correction) in house. On Final Cut Pro, this is a non-issue, since the system easily stores and outputs DVCam video at full resolution. In practical terms, you skip traditional on-line, and your locked picture is you on-line.
Do your titles, text and credits in-house FCP, coming from design- savvy Apple, has a good array of fonts. PhotoShop and After Affects help.
Do color correction at a high end facility, making very clear before starting that you have an absolutely fixed amount of suite time, and that you are willing---eager---to triage the show in order to get the maximum value added in the minimum time. Arrive with a triage list of problem scenes. On Wolf we worked with Loren Sorenson at Varitel in San Francisco, doing four hours of color correction and four hours of re-sizing and extra titling. The show was enormously improved. At a good facility, you should be able in a few hours to do 80% of what you can do in a full day, since the curve of value added drops off fairly quickly. Set the interviews first, if there are any, then work through the show.
Expect trouble in file transfer We have yet to see any long form documentary successfully move all its video and audio files to an outside system on the first try. OMS file transfer, file compatibility, software compatibility, and version differences are the bane of getting stuff out of FCP into Avid or Pro Tools, or even from Avid into Pro Tools. Some of this may have been solved by the incorporation of Pro Tools into FCP 2.0. We'll see.
Resize and correct aspect ratio at the post house, where they have fast, efficient engines for this, not on the FCP, where it is cumbersome, unpredictable and extremely slow on a long documentary. Also, in the high-end suite you can customize the exact aspect ratio (on Wolf we did a half way vertical expansion on 4X3 home movies to put them in the show's 16 X 9 letterboxed format, thereby losing 6% top and bottom.) Note also that in a good on-line suite you can quickly generate mattes to clean up headlines, stills, and other flat art.

Sound finishing

It all begins with very consistent sound standards and protocols in the field and in editing, as noted above. On "The Wolf" we ran into unexpected cost in sound finishing because we had allowed tracks to multiply unreasonably during editing. Make it a game to imagine not having a mix. Some of it is simple stuff like using exactly the same microphone & location for audio pick-ups as you used for first origination. Some of it, like controlling background noise, is not so simple.

Meet with your outside audio facility early, at the start of editing, to sort out what they can/should do, and to establish clear track assignment and separation standards from the start. Re-sorting tracks to suit the mix facility at the lock picture stage costs money.
Do a pre-mix in FCP (after locking picture---before that much of it will be time wasted.)
During editing, the editor should listen carefully and decide which track to use for a given shot if there are two choices (boom & lav, for instance). Do not defer this decision for later.
Use a high-end audio house.
Expect and plan a defense against file transfer problems

Broadcast, festivals, & distribution

Many, documentary makers have grown up thinking of PBS as the first, if not the only serious television venue. This come partly from years of expensive production which was made possible only with seed and lead money from CPB, or from foundations and endowments which contractually required offering the finished show to public television. As soon as a non-profit funder gets its paws on a documentary, even for a few thousand dollars, the producer is almost always locked into a track toward PBS. Forget that; assume that the entire spectrum is fair game --- HBO, Cinemax, MTV, Bravo, A&E, History, Tech TV, PBS, LifeTime. All of these work with independents, as do myriad foreign broadcasters and even some venues, such as Nightline within the major commercial networks. Our goal is to make some shows so inexpensive that they do not require seed funding from anyone, shows which when they are finished can be shopped around to all broadcasters.

Because of its low cost, The Wolf did not require outside funding from any broadcast entity. Hence, the film remained independent throughout production, and we were able to present it around to a number of broadcasters, including MTV, HBO, ABC, and various venues within PBS. We have not yet heard from PBS, but reaction was quick and positive from the others. ABC Nightline acquired the show, and placed it in the schedule pipeline for early October, but the events of September 11 intervened, and broadcast is postponed Spring.

As for festival screenings, film projection is history. The last 16mm print has packed its bags, its scratches, and its wretched optical sound track, and gone to the old prints home. Sundance has established the solid performance of good video projection from digibeta and HD. The cost differential is a no-brainer -- $10,000/hr for the cheapest, marginal quality 35mm print v. $1000/hr for an HD up-conversion.

We have not experimented with DVD self-distribution, but a DVD disk burner can now be had for about $900.
Case study, "The Wolf"

Much of what we've learned on The Wolf is described above. A few more points deserve mention.

Both the producer and associate producer found their time and attention stretched to the limit. Especially during editing and post production, the AP was simply handling too many jobs at once. At times the producer/director became so preoccupied with other duties that he couldn't pay adequate attention to style and elegant story telling, and couldn't optimize his time with the editors. As production neared completion, a series of rolling delays turned into a cascade of extra costs, almost all in additional staff time. Choice of a story which was centered in Washington D.C. took its toll in travel costs, time and attention. We are still sorting it all out, with the suspicion that at least some of the trouble came with job of making the first film in a new way at a new production center, with a relatively green core production crew.

Nonetheless, this story of and by a young unknown African American producer is finished and will be seen by several million viewers. We feel that the film represents a success in meeting the goals we had set for ourselves; it is a documentary which:

was produced in nine months for $100,000
remained truly independent from start to finish
is journalistically sound
was managed so that all professional personnel were paid their customary rates.
was ambitious in its reach but carefully contained in particulars
would have taken years to fund and produce with the traditional methods
was appropriate for low cost production because it tells an extremely robust story, it could be produced with a small multi-tasking crew, involved no commercial archive footage (but several fair use clips), it was not burdened by cumbersome executive sign-off, and it lent itself well to a flexible editing schedule.
has been acquired for nationwide broadcast, where it will reach an audience of about 2,000,000 on it's first showing, and at least as many additional viewers during its useful life, which we expect to be at least 10 years.

"The Wolf" Personnel
Peter Nicks, Producer/director
Craig Delaval Associate Producer / Videographer
Jeffery Friedman, Editor
Kim Roberts, Editor
Victoria Mauleon, Production Associate
Kelly Whelan, Marci Aroy, assistant editors
Mary Watkins, original music
Dave Nelson, Outpost Sound, sound design & mix
Loren Sorensen, Varitel Video, color correction
Jon Else, Executive producer
"The Wolf" Budget Summary

Production staff salaries and 10.5% fringes (producer, assoc prod, prod asst) $53,300

Talent Fees 0

Contract personnel (advisors, transcription) 1,948

Acquisition and rights (original music, flat fee for non-exclusive rights) 4,000

Pre- Production 0

Production (videographer, recordist, video/audio/lighting equip, permits, DVCam & DAT tape, expendables) 9,542

Post-production (editors' & asst editor's salaries, 10.5% fringes, all FCP hardware and software, color correction, sound finishing, dubbing & master tapes) 24,055

Travel (air fare SFO - Wash DC, auto rental, hotel) 5,082

Website and cookbook 0

Promotion (still photographer) 750

Professional Services (insurance and legal services) 1,222

Office facilities and materials 0

Total $101,983

Pictures of the day. Steven Spielberg collaborated posthumously with Stanley Kubrick and that begat AI. Hopefully Spielberg's collaboration with Peter Jackson on a series of movies based on the Belgian comic book character Tintin will be less sleep enducing. From a news story posted today on the InterWebs announcing the casting of Tintin:

Spielberg has been working with The Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson on how to bring Tintin, instantly recognisable by his blonde quiff and faithful side-kick Snowy the dog, to life. But it is not yet known which of the 23 Tintin stories will be filmed. And while Spielberg will direct one and Jackson one, it is still not known who will direct the third. They will be filmed back to back in the US and New Zealand, using the latest 3D technology. Spielberg said: “We want Tintin’s adventures to have the reality of a live action film and yet Peter and I felt that shooting them in a traditional live action format would simply not honour the distinctive look of the characters and world that Hergé created. The idea is that the films will look neither like cartoons nor like computer-generated animation. We’re making them look photo-realistic, the fibres of their clothing, the pores of their skin and each individual hair. They look exactly like real people - but real Hergé people.”

Herge people? Sounds spooky, huh? Herge was the pen name of Tintin's creator Georges Prosper Remi. Here's a clip promoting a Tintin stage play, with actual, not virtual, actors running in London's West End.

Newly Released Kubrick Documentaries on DVD

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 19:23:00 +0000

Here's a snip from a review of the reissue earlier this month of a box set of special editions of five Stanley Kubrick movies on DVD:

It’s been a long, typically Kubrickian wait, but finally a worthy DVD boxset gathers five of his greatest films in scrubbed-up Special Editions (also available separately). And boy, has it been worth it. Each movie comes with its own commentary and (bar Full Metal Jacket) a second disc of gripping, intimate docs and featurettes.

The biggest of the bunch is 2001: A Space Odyssey, the film in which Kubrick went to infinity and beyond – a year before man set foot on the moon. Hours of Making Of material and legacy assessment begin with lengthy new doc The Making Of A Myth, presented by James Cameron, no less. There’s vintage footage of Kubrick on set and past and present interviews with Arthur C Clarke. There’s also fresh chinwags with Kubrick’s producer, tech crew and, well, seemingly everyone else, from William Friedkin and Spider-Man FX guru John Dykstra to Alien screenwriter Dan O’Bannon and doughy US critic Roger Ebert. Effects maestro Douglas Trumbull and Kubrick’s wife Christiane recall the cosmic scale of the director’s demands (“Stanley would walk around saying, ‘Please draw me an image that doesn’t remind me of anything in a colour that doesn’t exist’”). Trumbull spills yet more info on the commentary, although cardboard star Keir Dullea fills the dead air with empty babble.

No danger of that from Malcolm McDowell. The bulging-eyed Brit is a tremendous presence on A Clockwork Orange’s chat-track (he’s joined by doc-maker Nick Redman) and on the terrific 86-minute doc O Lucky Malcolm!, where he rattles off fantastic stories from his entire career and gets saluted by a who’s who of the Brit film industry. Two more smashing docs complete the disc: Still Tickin’ wades through the shit-storm surrounding the film’s release, withdrawal and return, while Great Bolshy Yarblockos! sees another galaxy of filmmakers (hello, Mr Spielberg!), collaborators and critics unload a massively informed, anecdote-rich Making Of.

Nine years after Kubrick’s mesmerising horrorshow of stylised swagger and surgical intellect became the most controversial film in Brit cinema history, the director returned with The Shining. Kubrick’s stay at the Overlook gets the same quality treatment across a superb commentary by steadicam inventor Garrett Brown and biographer John Baxter, plus two utterly comprehensive Making Of docs.

Each runs to less than 30 minutes, but not a second is wasted: the weight of first-hand accounts, insight and pure affection on show here is phenomenal. Vivian Kubrick’s precious mini-doc, shot hand-held during filming, survives from the previous DVD release and there’s a further bonus in an interview with Kubrick’s longtime composer Wendy Carlos.

It was another seven years before Full Metal Jacket’s double-barrelled assault on ‘Nam and a further 12 before Eyes Wide Shut proved that even the world’s biggest movie stars would bow to Kubrick’s might. Gangs Of New York screenwriter Jay Cocks and stars Vincent D’Onofrio, R Lee Ermey and Adam Baldwin lay on Jacket’s cut’n’paste commentary, sharply edited for minimum waffle.

The disc’s Making Of doc doesn’t disappoint either, with much marvel directed at Ermey’s “endless resource for obscenities”, the fact that East London doubled for Vietnam and how Kubrick coaxes a performance (says D’Onofrio: “‘Do it again, do it better.’ He’ll say it right to you”). Just a single-discer mind, but in a boxset packed with great stories, Ermey gets to tell what might be the best…

“We’re driving in Stanley’s wife’s brand new SUV,” explains Full Metal Jacket’s iconic drill sergeant. “We’re looking for a place to do a scene. Stanley’s driving and pointing and talking. And I’m sitting there watching us driving towards a 6ft deep ditch. Stanley, as he talked, drove off into this ditch and the car went over on its side. Stanley reached up, pushed the door open, climbed up... and he’s still talking. ‘We’ll put up the tent over here...’ Then he climbs down from the car and starts walking back to the camp. Can you believe this shit?”

Kubrick’s fin de siècle sign-off Eyes Wide Shut – another masterwerk, not about sex, but about capitalism – gets the smart discussion it deserves in the commentary by Sydney Pollack and historian Peter Loewenberg, while the second disc devotes itself to the method and madness of the legendary shoot (listed as The Guinness Book of World Records’ ‘Longest Constant Movie Shoot’). There’s also a look at Kubrick’s numerous unrealised dream projects in two more stellar docs.

I guess this is material you won't be seeing in our upcoming documentary look at Stanley Kubrick's Napoleon.

Kubrick and Asperger

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 17:20:00 +0000

Are you familiar with the theory that Stanley Kubrick suffered from a highly functional form of autism called Asperger Syndrome? Here's a snip from an autism website:

People with Asperger's Syndrome usually have normal or above normal IQs. Asperger's can be described as an inability to understand how to interact socially.

Frederic Raphael would likely dispute that Stanley Kubrick had an IQ bigger than his IQ, but Kubrick does hold the Guinness Book World Record for the most number of retakes for a movie at 127. Try to judge for yourself if Stanley Kubrick was a highly functional autistic while watching this documentary. Vivian Kubrick offers the commentary track. She was seventeen when she made this behind the scenes look at the making of The Shining, during which her dad broke the record while directing Shelley Duvall.

Here's more from the InterWebs on AS

Asperger syndrome is one of five Pervasive Developmental Disorders (PDD) and it is increasingly being referred to as an Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). Asperger syndrome is characterized by deficiencies in social and communication skills. It is considered to be part of the autistic spectrum and is differentiated from other Autism Spectrum Disorders in that early development is normal and there is no language delay. It is possible for people with Aspergers syndrome to have learning disabilities concurrently with Asperger syndrome. Asperger's syndrome is often not identified in early childhood, and many individuals do not receive diagnosis until after puberty or when they are adults. In most cases, they are aware of their differences and recognize when they need support to maintain an independent life. There are instances where adults do not realize that they have Asperger syndrome personalities until they are having difficulties with relationships and/or attending relationship counseling. Recognition of the very literal and logical thought processes that are symptomatic of Asperger syndrome can be a tremendous help to both partners in a close/family relationship.

Aspergers syndrome is sometimes viewed as a syndrome with both advantages and disadvantages, and notable adults with Asperger's syndrome or autism have achieved success in their fields. Prominent Aspergers syndrome-diagnosed individuals include Nobel Prize-winning economist Vernon Smith, electropop rocker Gary Numan, Vines frontman Craig Nicholls, and Satoshi Tajiri, the creator of Pokémon. Some Aspergers syndrome researchers speculate that well-known figures, including Albert Einstein, Isaac Newton, Glenn Gould, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Stanley Kubrick, had Asperger syndrome because they showed some Aspergers syndrome-related tendencies or behaviors, such as intense interest in one subject, or social problems. Einstein's brain was investigated after his death. Einstein did not start talking until he was three and he frequently repeated sentences obsessively up to the age of seven. As an adult his lectures were notoriously confusing.

Abnormalities in the Sylvian fissure of Einstein's brain could possibly be associated with autism. I also read a biography of Walt Disney and the descriptions of his mercurial character at work, where he fired animators for minor slights, and his poor ability to judge people contrasted with his vast imagination and brilliant insight and creativity suggest Asperger as well. There is a lively debate going on in the InterWebs around these post-mortem diagnosis of famous people who may have suffered from autism. Names like Emily Dickinson, H. P. Lovecraft, Syd Barret, Andy Warhol, Greta Garbo and Paul Cezzane are mentioned as possible "aspies."

Kubrick Bio - Part the Second

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 11:33:00 +0000

Here is a snip from the Stanley Kubrick entry on the All Movie Guide web site:

In 1940 Stanley Kubrick's father Jack, a physician, sent the twelve year old Stanley to Pasadena, California to stay with his uncle Martin Perveler. Stanley was considered intelligent despite poor grades at school and Jack hoped that a change of scenery would produce better academic performance. Returning to the Bronx in 1941 for his last year of grammar school, there seemed to be little change in his attitude or his results. Hoping to find something to interest his son, Jack introduced Stanley to chess, with the desired result. Kubrick took to the game passionately, and quickly became a skilled player. Chess would become an important device for Kubrick in later years, often as tool for for dealing with recalcitrant actors, but also as an artistic motif in his films.

Jack Kubrick's decision to give his son a camera for his thirteenth birthday would be an even wiser move: Kubrick became an avid photographer, and would often make trips around New York taking photographs which he would develop in a friend's darkroom. After selling an unsolicited photograph to Look Magazine, Kubrick began to associate with their staff photographers, and at the age of seventeen was offered a job as an apprentice photographer.

In the next few years, Kubrick had regular assignments for "Look", and would become a voracious movie-goer. Together with friend Alexander Singer, Kubrick planned a move into film, and in 1950 sank his savings into making the documentary Day of the Fight (1951). This was followed by several short commissioned documentaries (Flying Padre (1951), and The Seafarers (1952)), but by attracting investors and hustling chess games in Central Park, Kubrick was able to make Fear and Desire (1953) in California.

Filming this movie was not a happy experience; Kubrick's marriage to high school sweetheart Toba Metz did not survive the shooting. Despite mixed reviews for the film itself, Kubrick received good notices for his obvious directorial talents.

More Kubrick documentary shorts from his early days: Flying Padre for RKO

The Seafarers produced for the SIU seafarers union, in three parts:

Meet Napoleon Podcast

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 15 Mar 2008 10:44:00 +0000

For the benefit of the Napoleon curious I have posted this sixty-eight minute podcast of a conversation between two history buffs. The podcast introduces us to the genius of Napoleon, whose story captured the imagination of another genius, Stanley Kubrick, immediately after Kubrick had created the most imaginative film of the Sixties, 2001: A Space Odyssey. You can jump to the four minute mark to get to the meat of the discussion. Depending upon web traffic the file may take a while to completely upload before it is ready to play.

The Four Million Year Jump Cut

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 16:59:00 +0000

TimeOut magazine in London recently asked several big name movie directors to pick a favorite Stanley Kubrick picture. Here is a snip from the article.

Shekhar Kapur (‘Elizabeth’) on ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ (1968)(Sci-fi epic loved by stoners and intellectuals alike): ‘Forty years on and we are still trying to comprehend its visual and poetic philosophy – what more can you ask from a film? Just for sheer achievement in the art and technology of cinema, “2001” remains a defining movie for me. It is certainly the film that made me fall in love with cinema and want to become a director. Visually, it was one of the most compelling of its time, setting standards in visual effects that have yet to be bettered. Most people now associate “The Blue Danube” waltz with that amazing cut from the broken bone defying gravity as it sails up in slow motion to the space ship floating in space: a cut that not only leaves the audience to imagine the entire history of human development, but also is one of the best uses of classical music in film that I have ever seen. It still takes my breath away.’

Wonder what Kubrick would make of the YouTubian mashup I posted below? I loved it. I think I found a clip for the Kubrick Napoleon project. While we're on the subject of 2001, check out the new widget in the sidebar. It gives you the "Cliff Notes" to what has been a seemingly imponderable movie to many. I will admit that it takes repeated showings for the story of 2001 to sink in, but it is worth the challenge. It certainly did what Kubrick set out to do, which was to lift the science fiction movie out of a critical genre ghetto. The picture was a masterpiece of film making technique and Kubrick deservedly won his first Oscar for the work of his special effects team.

Kubrick's Archive in the Raw

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 09:39:00 +0000

Here is a snip from an article written by the archivist who prepared material for the current touring exhibition of Stanley Kubrick's archive:

During my time spent on the Stanley Kubrick Estate, I went through more than 1000 boxes, searched former offices and other rooms, cellars, attics, two Portakabins, and the dusty storeroom of a workshop in order to collect memorabilia, photographs, objects, scripts, books and paperwork for the exhibition. I opened boxes that had not been opened for 20 or more years, read letters, scripts, books, magazines, brochures and publicity material, watched all kind of video cassettes and listened to countless audio reels.

Picture of the day. The idea of boxes and boxes stacked all over the place is not how I had imagined Kubrick would have organized his records. I guess he never found a system he was happy with. Apparently, once Kubrick shelved a project he just packed up all the files and put them away and moved on to the next one without looking back. I wonder if he ever did put away the Napoleon project? What treasures are left to be uncovered in the archives?

Documentary Cookbook Preface

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 14:20:00 +0000

In researching the Kubrick Napoleon project I came across this manifesto for a new movement in documentary film making. I believe in it strongly enough to try and stick to its precepts in making the Kubrick Napoleon documentary. The manifesto is in two parts. I have posted the prefatory material below.

Documentary Cookbook

*** DRAFT 02/20/02
The Center for New Documentary
Graduate School Of Journalism
University Of California, Berkeley
Introduction

The Center For New Documentary was established in the fall of 2000 to explore, test, and promote new ways of producing good quality long form television documentaries at very low cost. We opened our doors (one door, actually) in response to a rising chorus of frustration over the skyrocketing cost of mainstream documentary production, and an ever deepening exasperation with fundraising. We sensed that enormous talent and energy were being wasted in stalled production and grant writing. As a way to help break the logjam, we invited several filmmakers to experiment with very inexpensive production, and to tell us what they found.

We are not trying to make all documentaries cheaply. We do see the new little cameras as "ball point pens of television" but we have no interest in abandoning 50 years of hard won documentary craft. We are looking for those few stories and production methods that naturally lend themselves to the very low cost production with high-quality. Without compromising journalistic integrity or style, can some films be done for a fifth, a tenth, or even a hundredth of the prevailing cost? Can some of public television possibly approach the cost of public radio? Can we make a living at it? Will there be any pleasure in it? In an increasingly stagnant, market-constrained TV landscape, can low-cost production boast its own craft and virtuosity? Can it co-exist in tandem with high cost traditional (archive/witness/observational/narrated/series-driven) documentary? What strong, journalistically sound, adventuresome films for prime time television can be made by a grown up with a DVCam and Final Cut Pro? Is the whole idea self-destructive?

In practical terms, we invited three filmmakers, Peter Nicks, Lourdes Portillo, and Albert Maysles, to see what films could be well made for $100,000 per hour---about one-fifth the going rate for prime time documentaries. The obvious question is "Where do you get $100,000?" More on that later, but finding 100K is certainly easier than finding half a million, and we see the 100K target as only a first step in really drastic reductions for some films.

Our main concern is not with beginning filmmakers, students, or neighborhood filmmakers, but with journeyman documentary makers who already know the ropes, and are trying reach a large television audience. (The Center's work is not part of the regular graduate studies curriculum at the School of Journalism. Likewise, we are not skilled at shepherding photojournalists into television magazine work or breaking news; that is being well handled by Dick Halstead and others at the "Platypus" workshops, www.digitaljournalist.com. Likewise, international digital journalism is being well considered by the Pew International Journalism Program www.pewfellowships.org).

By now, virtually everyone working in documentary in this country has brushed up against DV production, and many producers have embraced it exclusively. But despite the emergence of a robust folk culture surrounding digital non-fiction, we still see little evidence of filmmakers aggressively searching out stories, styles, and techniques which naturally fit the new tools. Most of the work seems aimed and squeezing blood from the turnip, by digitally making the same sorts of traditional films with the same methods for less money.

Many cost saving devices are already in play. Most of it is not rocket science, but rather a cagey sort of "preventive production," as described below. It turns out that the technical advantages of DV are not as much of a cost lever as personnel time or rights costs. Story choice seems to make the greatest difference, followed by extreme schedule efficiency, and extreme technical discipline. Then comes a nearly dogmatic avoidance of archive footage, archive music, and travel. Everyone gets paid professional rates, and cost savings are achieved by adjusting methods and schedules, not day rates. We look for generally non-technical "evergreen" devices that will long outlast changes in hardware and software.

The Ford Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, and Gerbode Foundation stepped forward to fund our first round of work. The Rockefeller Foundation supports the development and distribution of a "Documentary Cookbook." Our first project, "The Wolf" by Peter Nicks, was completed for $100,000, and has been acquired by ABC Nightline for broadcast over two nights this spring, where it will probably be seen by 2,000,000 people. It's a good start.

Following is some of what we've learned. Please send your experiences, suggestions, lessons, tips, lists of what to do, etc, to dvtv@berkeley.edu. Please do not send proposals; that will come later.

The Problem

It had become clear by the early 1990s that most available documentary money, especially in pubic television, was going to a shrinking and increasingly risk-free pool of veteran producers making increasingly risk-free documentaries. These were more often than not earnest, predictable, and sometimes brilliant programs about dead people. For reasons involving public policy, the commercialization of public television, corporate consolidation in commercial television, partisan congressional politics, and the rising costs of production, new voices and new forms could emerge only with great difficulty. Even well established documentary makers could seldom explore new ground.

The average cost of a prime time documentary television hour had risen to around $500,000, of which a large portion generally had to come from the advertising budgets of ratings-hungry corporate underwriters. As the funding and underwriting stakes rose, idiosyncratic "one-off" programs and unpredictable forms like cinema verite all but vanished from public television, except for work within ITVS and POV. Long form was dead at the networks. HBO soldiered on, and together with MTV has become generally more accepting of idiosyncratic fare.

The cost of traditional production rose, due largely to 16mm film costs (before the wholesale transition to video), skyrocketing archive footage and music costs, travel costs, and long production and post-production schedules often made even longer by delay in executive sign off.

As independent producers, we knew even by the early �90s that a good one-hour prime time idea pretty well condemned us to raising half a million dollars, and that it would take five years of fundraising---work for which we had no talent, no training, and less than no interest. Small, experienced independent production houses and producers of on-offs were particularly hard hit, and the pipeline became increasingly clogged with unfunded and partially funded $500K projects. Henry Hampton took ten years to fully fund Eyes on the Prize. Cadillac Desert required 307 separate funding applications, and for Sing Faster: The Stagehands Ring Cycle, Jon Else prepared and submitted 137 separate grant applications over nine years. Who does not have a seed-funded, embryonic, or half-grown single program or mini-series festering on the shelf?

In a trend that has accelerated ever since the ratings success of The Civil War, public television especially embraced huge, market-friendly series projects while generally consigning single programs to the dustbin. We came to live in a world of exemplary but chillingly expensive series and mini-series like Africans in America, Frontline, The American Experience, and New York. But not every idea was a series idea, and not every one-off fit into an established strand.

We complained that Ken Burns got all the money (not noticing that his passions for serial American history correlate almost exactly with funders' desires). We became a culture of complaint, with journeyman filmmakers frustrated at moving beyond traditional forms, and young professionals frustrated at trying to launch new projects. The important role of television documentary in vigorous civil dialogue, in collective memory, education, entertainment, and public policy formation was not well served. Over the years, a great pool of young documentary talent became increasingly unhinged from prime time television.

The aggregate level of support for long form documentaries at the networks, PBS, cable, foundations, and endowments, has not increased significantly, nor is it likely to. As producers scramble to get anything made---anything---these funding imperatives erode the traditional fire wall between non-fiction television and the marketplace, and journalistic standards begin to erode. Despite rare exceptions like The Farmer's Wife and the heroic efforts at ITVS, POV, HBO, and a few foundations, idiosyncratic one-offs are off the table.

The new Juggernauts

Some production institutions have chosen to attack the problem of escalating cost with brute force, by designing ever-larger documentary projects as "product lines" intended for a market-driven television system. These typically include the films themselves, web sites, interactive enhancement, outreach programs, and curriculum materials, as well as companion books, videos, CD-ROMs, DVDs, and CDs sold via on-air advertising. Many public television venues are, in fact, now demanding that proposals come through the door not as films, but as "projects" with web sites, outreach, and educational materials. Even the cheapest documentary can now easily balloon into an expensive multi-layered project. Cable channels appear more flexible, and somewhat less demanding.

Many producers now find themselves in a surreal vortex where the longer a project takes to fund, the more it costs, and the more it costs, the longer it takes to fund, and the longer it takes, the more it costs� ad infinitum. The more films cost, the less risk the funders can stand; at $1,000,000 per hour, who can dare risk a ratings misfire? Some half-funded Juggernauts have been inching their way through the system for years.

Hamster Wheel

Then, there were those of us who scampered to make as many corporate videos, TV commercials, airline tech reports, depositions and wedding videos as we could, trying desperately to save a few hundred thousand dollars for MY BIG FILM. We should live so long.

A few good, cheap, fast films

We are interested in the exact opposite approach: drastically limiting cost in order to get more documentaries made more quickly. We want to break the queue by lowering the entry fee, not raising it. It is the television equivalent of watercolor instead of oil paint, mimeograph instead of linotype, garage bands instead of stadium rock, guerrillas instead of armies. The aim is to find methods and stories that are so naturally inexpensive that they can slip below the radar of financing. It worked in the �60s.

We were first inspired by public radio, seeing the refreshing power of programs like the early "This American Life," "Lost & Found Sound" and "Soundprint." There were glimmers of real possibility in late 90s with The Cruise, Salt Men Of Tibet, digital work by Ricky Leacock, experiments at Frontline, Nightline, and the National Film Board Of Canada, and the narrative productions of Jon Jost and the Dogma '95 group. And on the un-cool sidelines, a shadow world of very fast very cheap and sometimes very good corporate production had also taken hold.

An old truism in Hollywood is, "Cheap, fast, good� Pick any two." Clearly with the right methods, some small percentage of documentaries can be cheap, fast, and good. In the bargain, as we found with "The Wolf," there is the prospect of retaining true independence by avoiding early funding from any specific broadcaster, and thus being able to offer the finished documentary to all possible broadcasters.

Part 1 will follow in a future post.

Picture of the day. I could make a rude joke about the real reason Napoleon stuck his hand in his clothes but if the current governor of New York had been a French politician instead of a Dick Tracy square-jawed type he could have survived the discovery of his sessions with prostitutes from the Emperor's Club with mere public scorn and cries of hipocracy and not calls for his resignation and impeachment. Or maybe he should have been a US senator from Louisiana. Lagnappe. Click the link below to hear about the Napoleon who fascinated me as a tot in the 1960s.

March 7, 1799

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 12:37:00 +0000

A snip from Chapter 18 of the Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete by Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne which documents the siege of Jaffa during Napoleon's expedition to Egypt. Napoleon's army secured the city of Jaffa on 7 March, 1799 and after a two day deliberation over the fate of his Muslim prisoners he decided to slaughter over twenty five hundred troops who had previously sworn an oath never to take arms against the French after they were released by Napoleon after the battle of El Arish.

Arrival at Jaffa--The siege--Beauharnais and Croisier--Four thousand prisoners--Scarcity of provisions--Councils of war--Dreadful necessity--The massacre...

On arriving before Jaffa, where there were already some troops, the first person. I met was Adjutant-General Gresieux, with whom I was well acquainted. I wished him good-day, and offered him my hand. "Good God! What are you about?" said he, repulsing me with a very abrupt gesture; "you may have the plague. People do not touch each other here!" I mentioned the circumstance to Bonaparte, who said, "If he be afraid of the plague, he will die of it." Shortly after, at St. Jean d'Acre, he was attacked by that malady, and soon sank under it. On the 4th of March we commenced the siege of Jaffa. That paltry place, which, to round a sentence, was pompously styled the ancient Joppa, held out only to the 6th of March, when it was taken by storm, and given up to pillage. The massacre was horrible. General Bonaparte sent his aides de camp Beauharnais and Croisier to appease the fury of the soldiers as much as possible, and to report to him what was passing. They learned that a considerable part of the garrison had retired into some vast buildings, a sort of caravanserai, which formed a large enclosed court. Beauharnais and Croisier, who were distinguished by wearing the 'aide de camp' scarf on their arms, proceeded to that place. The Arnauts and Albanians, of whom these refugees were almost entirely composed, cried from the windows that they were willing to surrender upon an assurance that they would be exempted from the massacre to which the town was doomed; if not, they threatened to fire on the 'aides de camp', and to defend themselves to the last extremity. The two officers thought that they ought to accede to the proposition, notwithstanding the decree of death which had been pronounced against the whole garrison, in consequence of the town being token by storm. They brought them to our camp in two divisions, one consisting of about 2500 men, the other of about 1600.

I was walking with General Bonaparte, in front of his tent, when he beheld this mass of men approaching, and before he even saw his 'aides de camp' he said to me, in a tone of profound sorrow, "What do they wish me to do with these men? Have I food for them?--ships to convey them to Egypt or France? Why, in the devil's name, have they served me thus?" After their arrival, and the explanations which the General-in-Chief demanded and listened to with anger, Eugene and Croisier received the most severe reprimand for their conduct. But the deed was done. Four thousand men were there. It was necessary to decide upon their fate. The two aides de camp observed that they had found themselves alone in the midst of numerous enemies, and that he had directed them to restrain the carnage. "Yes, doubtless," replied the General-in-Chief, with great warmth, "as to women, children, and old men--all the peaceable inhabitants; but not with respect to armed soldiers. It was your duty to die rather than bring these unfortunate creatures to me. What do you want me to do with them?" These words were pronounced in the most angry tone. The prisoners were then ordered to sit down, and were placed, without any order, in front of the tents, their hands tied behind their backs. A sombre determination was depicted on their countenances. We gave them a little biscuit and bread, squeezed out of the already scanty supply for the army.

On the first day of their arrival a council of war was held in the tent of the General-in-Chief, to determine what course should be pursued with respect to them the council deliberated a long time without coming to any decision. On the evening of the following day the daily reports of the generals of division came in. They spoke of nothing but the insufficiency of the rations, the complaints of the soldiers--of their murmurs and discontent at seeing their bread given to enemies who had been withdrawn from their vengeance, inasmuch as a decree of death; in conformity with the laws of war, had been passed on Jaffa. All these reports were alarming, and especially that of General Bon, in which no reserve was made. He spoke of nothing less than the fear of a revolt, which would be justified by the serious nature of the case. The council assembled again. All the generals of division were summoned to attend, and for several hours together they discussed, under separate questions, what measures might be adopted, with the most sincere desire to discover and execute one which would save the lives of these unfortunate prisoners. (1.) Should they be sent into Egypt? Could it be done? To do so; it would be necessary to send with them a numerous escort, which would too much weaken our little army in the enemy's country. How, besides, could they and the escort be supported till they reached Cairo, having no provisions to give them on setting out, and their route being through a hostile territory, which we had exhausted, which presented no fresh resources, and through which we, perhaps, might have to return. (2.) Should they be embarked? Where were the ships?--Where could they be found? All our telescopes, directed over the sea could not descry a single friendly sail Bonaparte, I affirm, would have regarded such an event as a real favour of fortune. It was, and--I am glad to have to say it, this sole idea, this sole hope, which made him brave, for three days, the murmurs of his army. But in vain was help looked for seaward. It did not come. (3.) Should the prisoners be set at liberty? They world then instantly proceed to St. Jean d'Acre to reinforce the pasha, or else, throwing themselves into the mountains of Nablous, would greatly annoy our rear and right-flank, and deal out death to us, as a recompense for the life we had given them. There could be no doubt of this. What is a Christian dog to a Turk? It would even have been a religious and meritorious act in the eye of the Prophet. (4.) Could they be incorporated, disarmed, with our soldiers in the ranks? Here again the question of food presented itself in all its force. Next came to be considered the danger of having such comrades while marching through an enemy's country. What might happen in the event of a battle before St. Jean d'Acre? Could we even tell what might occur during the march? And, finally, what must be done with them when under the ramparts of that town, if we should be able to take them there? The same embarrassments with respect to the questions of provisions and security would then recur with increased force. The third day arrived without its being possible, anxiously as it was desired, to come to any conclusion favourable to the preservation of these unfortunate men. The murmurs in the camp grew louder the evil went on increasing--remedy appeared impossible--the danger was real and imminent. The order for shooting the prisoners was given and executed on the 10th of March. We did not, as has been stated, separate the Egyptians from the other prisoners. There were no Egyptians. Many of the unfortunate creatures composing the smaller division, which was fired on close to the seacoast, at some distance from the other column, succeeded in swimming to some reefs of rocks out of the reach of musket-shot. The soldiers rested their muskets on the end, and, to induce the prisoners to return, employed the Egyptian signs of reconciliation in use in the country. They, came back; but as they advanced they were killed, and disappeared among the waves.

I confine myself to these details of this act of dreadful necessity, of which I was an eye-witness. Others, who, like myself, saw it, have fortunately spared me the recital of the sanguinary result. This atrocious scene, when I think of it, still makes me shudder, as it did on the day I beheld it; and I would wish it were possible for me to forget it, rather than be compelled to describe it. All the horrors imagination can conceive, relative to that day of blood, would fall short of the reality. I have related the truth, the whole truth. I was present at all the discussions, all the conferences, all the deliberations. I had not, as may be supposed, a deliberative voice; but I am bound to declare that the situation of the army, the scarcity of food, our small numerical strength, in the midst of a country where every individual was an enemy, would have induced me to vote in the affirmative of the proposition which was carried into effect, if I had a vote to give. It was necessary to be on the spot in order to understand the horrible necessity which existed.

War, unfortunately, presents too many occasions on which a law, immutable in all ages, and common to all nations, requires that private interests should be sacrificed to a great general interest, and that even humanity should be forgotten. It is for posterity to judge whether this terrible situation was that in which Bonaparte was placed. For my own part, I have a perfect conviction that he could not do otherwise than yield to the dire necessity of the case. It was the advice of the council, whose opinion was unanimous in favour of the execution, that governed him, Indeed I ought in truth to say, that he yielded only in the last extremity, and was one of those, perhaps, who beheld the massacre with the deepest pain. After the siege of Jaffe the plague began to exhibit itself with a little more virulence. We lost between seven and eight hundred, men by the contagion during the campaign of Syria'

A muslim account of the massacre describes Napoleon's men using their bayonets to kill the prisoners when they ran out of ammunition and looting and pillaging the city until the point of exhaustion two days later.

Picture of the day. Napoleon lost more men to disease than to the enemy during his siege of Jaffa. The shame and disgrace the Bush fils White House let the wounded veterans of his war suffer at the Walter Read medical center will be remembered long after his swan song this weekend to the Washington establishment, which in their clubby way was acknowledged with a standing ovation from the partisan crowd. Stephen Colbert gave Bush his proper send-off in 2006.

March 7, 1999

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 03:07:00 +0000

Here is the text of the obituary published in the Washington Post the day after Stanley Kubrick died. Play along with us and spot the inaccuracies. Post below at will.

Stanley Kubrick, Cinema's Unsurpassed Cynic, Dies

Stanley Kubrick, the adventurous moviemaker who took audiences from Spartacus's slave revolt in ancient Rome through Dr. Strangelove's Cold War fantasies and on to distant worlds in the year 2001, died yesterday as he was finishing the final cut of a long-awaited new film.
Police were called Sunday afternoon to the 70-year-old director's rural home in Hertfordshire in London's northern suburbs. Kubrick's family said nothing about the cause of death; Hertfordshire police issued a brief statement saying, "There are no suspicious circumstances." Kubrick's death was utterly unexpected; a friend who spoke with him Saturday night said there was no indication anything was wrong.
His movies were often as controversial as they were unique, and just as often came later to be regarded as cinematic monuments that resonated through American popular culture.
The notoriously reclusive American-born director, who rarely left London, his adopted home, created "2001: A Space Odyssey," "A Clockwork Orange," "Dr. Strangelove," "Lolita" and "Full Metal Jacket," treating themes as diverse as war, pedophilia, the tyranny of technology, the nature of madness and the nuclear age.
For more than three decades, the opening of a Stanley Kubrick film has been an event, and the planned July 16 release of his final effort – "Eyes Wide Shut," starring Hollywood's first couple, Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman – may be the biggest ever. Kubrick had completed enough of the film about sexual obsession to allow an editor to bring a copy last Tuesday to New York, where Warner Bros. chiefs Bob Daly and Terry Semel along with stars Cruise and Kidman were allowed a first glimpse. The film was then immediately returned to London.
"He was on Cloud 98. He was very, very excited. Obviously I'm really happy that he got to see how we all reacted to the movie he made," Semel said. He talked to Kubrick by phone for an hour on Saturday night. "But if you'd have said to me he was either sick or God knows what, that the next morning I would find out he died – I would never have dreamt that."
In the film, Cruise and Kidman play psychologists who are married but cheat on each other with their own patients. Cruise reportedly wears a dress in one scene.
To work with Kubrick, Cruise and Kidman moved to London and enrolled their children in school there. Filming took 15 months – one of the longest shooting schedules in recent movie history – and the meticulous Kubrick then spent months editing and re-editing.
Semel said Kubrick's passing would not delay the film. "Short of one or two minor things, the movie was finished. It would not, nor does it need to be, cut in any way," he said.
Cruise and Kidman issued a statement saying they were "devastated" and "in shock." "He was a genius, a dear friend and we will greatly miss him," they said.
Kubrick's family – he lived with his third wife, Christiane, with whom he had three daughters – said there would be no further comment.
Malcolm McDowell, who starred in "A Clockwork Orange," issued a statement through his publicist saying Kubrick "was the last great director of that era. He was the big daddy."
His work has also been an inspiration to many independent filmmakers. Tony Kaye, director of "American History X," said "Eyes Wide Shut" was the only film he was looking forward to seeing this year, since he knew it would be Kubrick's vision alone. "It was the only thing the meddlers couldn't get their hands on," he said.
In an industry known for its formulaic scripts and heavily marketed concepts, Kubrick was one of the few true renegades. He worked in total secrecy on his projects, often serving as his own producer, screenwriter and cinematographer, and maintained absolute artistic control over his films from start to finish. He refused to travel for his films since the 1960s, and instead re-created elaborate sets in England – notably a war-ravaged Vietnamese city in an abandoned gasworks for "Full Metal Jacket" – rather than shoot on location.
Kubrick "has shown more imagination with dialogue and camera than Hollywood has seen since the obstreperous Orson Welles went riding out of town," wrote Time magazine in 1955. Few critics have differed with this view in the years that followed.
His films have produced a litany of indelible cultural images, whether it was "HAL," the humanlike computer in "Space Odyssey," the mad gesticulations of Peter Sellers in "Dr. Strangelove," or the manic face of Jack Nicholson hissing, "Heeere's Johnny" in "The Shining."
If there were an Oscar for Most Influential Space Film, Kubrick's "Space Odyssey" would probably have won it in a walk. The powerful movie, with minimal dialogue and a plot that trailed off mysteriously into dark corners of space and time, set the mold for space movies ever since – and incidentally restored a forgotten Richard Strauss tone poem, "Also Sprach Zarathustra," to a prominent place in the repertoire of symphony orchestras around the world.
The film brought Kubrick his lone Oscar, which was not for directing but for the film's special effects.
His work often fell into categories between drama and black comedy, so that critic Pauline Kael called "Lolita," Kubrick's adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov's disturbing novel about a pedophile, "black slapstick, and at times it's so far out that you gasp as you laugh."
Born in the Bronx, Kubrick was a largely self-educated man with an insatiable thirst for knowledge. He performed poorly in high school, but by age 17 had landed a job as a photographer with Look magazine. He also took literature courses at Columbia University taught by Lionel Trilling and Mark Van Doren and played chess for money.
In 1951 he made his first film, a 16-minute short for RKO called "Day of the Fight," and quit his job at Look. In 1953 he made a 30-minute union documentary called "The Seafarers," then raised $13,000 to finance his first feature movie, "Fear and Desire."
In 1956 Kubrick went to Hollywood, where he teamed with James B. Harris and made his first real studio film, "The Killing." The next year he made his first critically acclaimed movie, "Paths of Glory," which starred Kirk Douglas. In 1959, Douglas recruited Kubrick to direct "Spartacus," the classic story of a slave revolt in ancient Rome. He vowed it would be the last film he made without full artistic control – and it was.
In 1962, Kubrick made "Lolita," which, because of its controversial story, could not be filmed in this country. Kubrick made it in England, where he settled and made the rest of his movies.
The hilarious and macabre "Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb" followed in 1964. Featuring George C. Scott, Slim Pickens and Peter Sellers in a variety of roles, it became both a cult and commercial hit. For that film, Kubrick received Oscar nominations as co-author, producer and director.
He was also nominated for screenwriting, direction and Best Picture in 1971 for "A Clockwork Orange," based on the Anthony Burgess novel; the film was panned by many critics because of its violence and sexual content.
On all of his films, Kubrick became renowned for his attention to detail. The Guinness Book of World Records notes that Kubrick has the dubious honor of demanding the most retakes of any scene: 127 takes for Shelley Duvall in "The Shining." The director's demanding style meant that many actors clamored to work with him a first time, but few did so again.
In a rare interview with The Washington Post in 1987, Kubrick disdainfully noted that he expected actors to know their lines cold before acting in a scene. "You cannot think about your lines and act," he said. "Some actors – and those are usually the ones who go back to L.A. and do interviews about what a perfectionist I am – don't go home after shooting, study their lines and go to bed. They go out, stay out late and come in the next morning unprepared."
In the same interview, Kubrick said his love of movies came from seeing early films at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, movies by Erich von Stroheim, D.W. Griffith and Sergei Eisenstein.
"I was star-struck by these fantastic movies," he said. "I was never star-struck in the sense of saying, 'Gee, I'm going to go to Hollywood and make $5,000 a week and live in a great place and have a sports car.' I was really in love with movies. I used to see everything at the RKO in Loew's circuit, but I remember thinking at the time that I didn't know anything about movies. But I'd seen so many movies that were bad, I thought, 'Even though I don't know anything, I can't believe I can't make a movie at least as good as this.' And that's why I started, why I tried."

Kubrick's Early Aethetic

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 15:50:00 +0000

Stanley Kubrick was a feature photographer for the weekly news journal Look magazine in his sophomore year at Taft High School in the Bronx, New York. His mediocre grades keep him out of college but it did not sidetrack his career at Look. By the time Kubrick was nineteen his work had become such a fixture at the magazine that in 1948 he was profiled in The Camera, a photographic trade magazine. He stated his bias in composition for guerrilla photography over portraiture; he was more interested in spontaneous action rather than in a posed tableau. He even had advice for amateurs trying to break into the business. His self confidence even took the writer aback. Ah, the folly of youth professing to know all the answers. I remember those days.

"I think esthetically recording spontaneous action, rather than carefully posing a picture, is the most valid and expressive use of photography," Stanley Kubrick said. Maybe the statement wasn't earth-shaking, but it startled me. The boy who said that had turned nineteen a week ago, and has been a staff photographer for LOOK magazines since age seventeen.

Mr. Kubrick didn't come by this photographic philosophy overnight. He has been making and selling picture stories for three years. Just three years ago, Stan got his first camera as a present - a Kodak Monitor 620. That was his "how do you do" to the instrument that has served him like the genie served Aladdin.

Kubrick was sixteen years old, and the posessor of a new camera, when he passed a newsstand on April 12, 1945. An old man was sitting at the stand, surrounded by papers with black headlines that read, "ROOSEVELT DEAD." Stanley took the picture, and when it was developed he realized it was salable. From reading camera magazines he knew how to go about selling it, so he took it to LOOK. At that time Mrs. Helen O'Brian was picture editor. She showed the picture to the late managing editor Guenther and they decided to use it.

Mrs. O'Brian shared Kubrick's belief that picture stories were his natural bent and she encouraged him to do more - after school, "He sold LOOK four picture stories," Mrs. O'Brian said, "Stanley had the highest percentage of acceptances of any free-lance photographer I've ever dealt with." About half of Kubrick's off-guard stories were his own ideas. They were before he became LOOK's youngest photographer and they still are. One Kubrick candid began with an ordinary visit to the dentist. Like most of us Stanley hates to go to the dentist. While he was waiting he noticed that the other patients waiting looked as nervous as he felt. The result was a series of off-guard shots, made with natural lighting that show the photographer's appreciation of the humor in our fear of the dentist and something else - the humor is sympathetic. This combination is seldom found, and then usually among extremely mature persons.

Stanley Kubrick showed his capacity for sympathetic humor when he was only sixteen. He had an English teacher at Taft high school who read "Hamlet" aloud to the class. The teacher played every part, using facial expressions and gestures appropriate for the character he was playing. Kubrick brought his camera to class, took off-guard pictures, and LOOK bought them. Because the pictures were funny without being cruel the teacher enjoyed the story as much as any other LOOK reader. There is this same quality in a story called "How people look to the monkeys." Kubrick was assigned to do a picture on how people looked to the caged animals. To find out he made the necessary arrangements with the authorities at the zoo at Prospect park in Brooklyn. In the monkey house there are both indoor and outdoor cages. The monkeys were in the outdoor cage, so Kubrick stationed himself in the indoor cage with his lens poked through the food slit. At first the monkeys were curious but after they were allowed to look in the camera they returned to hamming for their usual audience. The picture ran in LOOK with a full-page picture of a monkey scratching its head, titled, "This is how monkeys look to people." The other page showed Kubrick's picture of the monkey's audience and was captioned "...and this is how people look to the monkeys."

Until he joined LOOK's staff, Stanley used a standard Rolleiflex. Now he uses an automatic Rolleiflex, a 4 by 5 Speed Graphic and a Contax.

Indoors he prefers natural light, but switches to flash when the dim light would restrict the natural movement of the subject. In a subway series he used natural light, with the exception of a picture showing a flight of stairs. "I wanted to retain the mood of the subway, so I used natural light," he said. People who ride the subway late at night are less inhibited than those who ride by day. Couples make love openly, drunks sleep on the floor and other unusual activities take place late at night. To make pictures in the off-guard manner he wanted to, Kubrick rode the subway for two weeks. Half of his riding was done between midnight and six a.m. Regardless of what he saw he couldn't shoot until the car stopped in a station because of the motion and vibration of the moving train. Often, just as he was ready to shoot, someone walked in front of the camera, or his subject left the train.

Kubrick finally did get his pictures, and no one but a subway guard seemed to mind. The guard demanded to know what was going on. Kubrick told him.
"Have you got permission?" the guard asked.
"I'm from LOOK," Kubrick answered.
"Yeah, sonny," was the guard's reply, "and I'm the society editor of the Daily Worker."

For this series Kubrick used a Contax and took the pictures at 1/8 second. The lack of light tripled the time necessary for development.

When Kubrick has a story idea five copies are typed out and one is to be submitted to Dan Mich (executive editor), Henry Ehrlich (managing editor), Merle Armitage (art director), Arthur Rothstein (technical director) and Woodrow Wirsig (assistant managing editor). At a board meeting they decide to give the idea a red, or green light. A green light means a specific assignment. Rarely does Kubrick have a free rein.

Kubrick is maintaining the same high batting average as a staff photographer that he enjoyed as a free lance. He explains it by saying, "The magazine's policy is so well determined that you seldom go out on a wild goose chase. When LOOK sends you out on a story the story is usually published." I asked Stanley for some advice to ambitious amateurs who want to become magazine photographers. "Think up ideas for stories, go out and shoot them, and then send them in to the magazines. I was lucky; I figured that out when I was young," he said. I couldn't help smiling at the word "young" and he continued, "Don't try to shoot big events or people; wou will probably have the most success by shooting things the magazine would never know of."

Stan is also very serious about cinematography, and is about to start filming a sound production written and financed by himself and several friends.

Picture of the day. The above photo of Kubrick commanding his army of extras on the set of Barry Lyndon was not taken in the style of his Look days; too static.

A Kubrick Documentarian Speaks

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 07:28:00 +0000

Here is a snip from an website offering critical analysis of Stanley Kubrick' body of film work. It is taken from an interview with Paul Joyce, the man behind the British Channel 4 documentary "Stanley Kubrick: The Invisible Man." Joyce had to tread lightly around the subject because Kubrick was still alive and of course many of his associates did not want to speak ill of him, but if you watch the video you will hear some unvarnished opinions nevertheless. Joyce also has a cogent analysis of the fair use of clips from other films without clearances from the copyright owner in a documentary. I wonder if Joyce would be interested in revisiting the cult of Kubrick a generation later? The Kubrick video links in the sidebar of this blog are to the You Tube version of that documentary.

What attracted you on doing a documentary on Kubrick?
Well he's probably one of the greatest living directors, is the first answer to that. I grew up with his work and he shifted shifted from genre to genre with such ease and his films are in a sense (even though can call them genre pieces), really unquantifiable in a certain level. Obviously, The Shining as a horror movie, but its very other things beyond that and I think its that and the extraordinary ability to take on genre pieces, as indeed in the case of 2001, and make something which isn't a science fiction movie. So I think that's a long answer but its a complicated decision in a sense to see who your going to do. There's a limited number of great directors, in the case of Kubrick. Channel 4 at that point were putting together a season of his films, so one was able to match the documentary to the season, so that was a additional reason to do him.
Is there any particular Kubrick film that you like?
I like them all actually, in their own way. The Killing is one of my favorites, given the strictures of budget and time. But its clear that he was a young man who was really pushing the boundary of his own ability in a really exciting way, which went on to the next film, Paths Of Glory, which similarly is a young man's film. When you think about the great war, the subject he was dealing with, there were mainly young men involved in that, and that's a young man's film about young men in war, and I think if he moves on, the work becomes more mature and more considered, as he gets older. But theirs something highly energized all those movies which appeals to me.
So how did you contact Mr. Kubrick for agreeing to do the documentary?
He didn't agree.
He didn't?
I mean he didn't agree and he didn't disagree. He did co-operate. I communicated with him by fax and via his personal assistant.
Leon Vitali?
Yes, and who was a contact. I never received a reply from my faxes or letters to Kubrick, but I know that he saw them, so I kept him informed about the people I was intending or hoping to interview, and he never raised any objection. There was more a fear on the part of the participants, for example, I subsequently did a film on Robert Altman, to which Shelly Duvall contributed. Well she did a big interview at the time on Kubrick, which I never included in my film on Kubrick, because it was too explosive, the material. And she asked me to be very careful about using it. But at some point there is an additional sequence put in, which is Shelly Duvall talking about Stanley.
I remember seeing clips from Vivian Kubrick's documentary which showed Shelly and Kubrick not getting along very well together.
I think they got on quite well personally. I think they respected each other at a certain point. I think in that sequence which we extracted in our documentary (which Kubrick allowed us to do, which was very nice of him) I think he was playing up for the camera at that point frankly. He wanted to make a point and in fact, the worse exchange at the doorway, during the false snowstorm, he switches very cleverly from one point he's making to another, to really wrong foot her. Which is, if you look at it two or three times very clever, but its below the belt. I don't think she deserved that treatment.
Were you anyway hoping to take a fly on the wall approach of Kubrick working on a film in the initial planning stages of the documentary?
He wasn't a making a film then, though he has done one now. Basically, he won't allow anything recorded which doesn't have his full authority. He hasn't been filmed for thirty years. Have you seen the programme I've done on him?
I've seen it around five or six times.
Well, I mean Ken Adam talks about driving him to a press conference on Strangelove and he had to stop by the side of the road so that Kubrick could vomit, out of fear, and that was the last time he's done it. He's terribly, terribly, nervous at public encounters. He won't do it. He's like an actor with stage fright, he's a great actor but he can't go on stage....
I'm sure that would have upset Kubrick that I included [Fear and Desire] because he wanted to suppress the movie. But under the copyright laws of this country, you are able to extract for the purposes of criticism and review, extracts without the copyrights holders permission, and that's the route I took, and the channel have quite a history of that. Off course they fought one action against Warner Brothers on just that.
That was the documentary on ACO?
Indeed, and it went to a judicial review. And it was a majority decision in favour of the channel and Warner Brothers decided not to press it too the high court. Which was very wise, because they would have lost that.
I know Barraclough Carey got into trouble as well when they inserted scenes from ACO in their programme on censorship. Did you get away the same reason there?
Yes. That wasn't shown in the season for Channel 4, because it wasn't acquired for Television and he doesn't want it shown here. You can get it on laserdisc in the states and its shown in France regularly, so its a bit of a nonsense really. So as it not being a season film, we were covered. The Channel 4 lawyers, thought we were covered. It's how you use the clips. You cannot use them for illustration. You can't say "Kubrick's a great director" and you use a clip of something demonstrating how great he is. You can't do that. If somebody says, the sequence in Spartacus where Kirk Douglas is painted in different colours, to show the most vulnerable spots on the human body to aim for in mortal combat, and makes a point about that, you know that was a particular clever way to express Kirk Douglas' fear or whatever, if you then show that clip having described it in some detail, than that is some permissible use. But it has to be a very, very specific commentary on a specific sequence.
But of course, as one gets older and longer in the tooth on doing these things, it becomes easier to make sure you adhere to the context.
Are there any interviews that had to be cut out from the final film?
Well Shelly Duvall wasn't included for reasons that I've said, although it was really rather that Kubrick was finished by the time I got to Duvall. I would have had to have recut Kubrick, by which time it had been transmitted already. But for the sake of history, it might be worth doing that, if one could get the money. The only person who expressed some concern really, was Malcolm McDowell, who thought that this must have Kubrick's blessing and therefore his editorial control, this programme of mine.
Now, when I convinced him that Kubrick had nothing to do with it, and what I want to include in my film was entirely what I wanted to include --I didn't need to get Kubrick's permission --Malcolm was happy to do it. He'd never done that before, talked about ACO in that detail. So he was rather fearful that Kubrick would censor it or may censor it.
Did you try and obtain interviews with members of Kubrick's families or friends, i.e. Vivian Kubrick or Alex Singer?
I got to James B. Harris, which I thought was pretty close for that. Vivian was in America and untraceable at that point. She seems to have left the Kubrick household now and is traveling somewhere and doesn't seem to have made another film. It would have been interesting to talk to her but I couldn't trace her. We put out some calls, but nothing came back.
Alex Singer is a director I admire, but we felt that we were pretty well covered on that early stuff. Even though it became, or it can be construed that Kubrick feels that its more personal, than professional some of the comments in there. There's certain points where you go into to examine a mans creative genius and if they want talk about what a shit he is, I can't do much about it.
So you haven't heard anything about Kubrick's reaction to the documentary.
The only reaction I've had is from Warner Brothers, who I've talked too about other projects, and they say its still a sensitive matter with Stanley. So I would assume that he was not well pleased.

Picture of the day. Kubrick trained his camera on many misfits in his career and did not shy away from controversial subject matter. He took this picture for Look magazine of German dadaist George Grosz. Grosz rebelled against the anarchy of expressionism, the leading artistic force of the 1950's. How does that impulse square with Kubrick's desire to control and manipulate his public image as he grew as a film artist? Kubrick was content to remain an abstraction as a public figure, but then he seemed to encourage the perception that he was an obsessive eccentric. Food for thought. Here is a short documentary on the early Kubrick films.

Production Diary - Day Twenty

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 07:38:00 +0000

Remember when I wrote that snafus are inevitable when you start making a movie? The party is over for the director. Thomas Bender has left the building. I now have to push back the start of production until I find a new director for the Kubrick Napoleon documentary.

Over the weekend Thomas sent me email saying he did not like how he was portrayed in this blog. He wanted references to him removed from these posts. I asked him to correct the record where he believed I had been untruthful, unfair or had taken a cheap shot at him. I asked him to post in these comments if he felt maligned by anything I had written. I even asked him to prepare a response that I would have posted unedited and without comment. He declined. He had decided instead that he would like to focus on smaller film making projects rather than take on the Kubrick Napoleon documentary. Fortunately, he will use his impending hiatus from Howcast to focusmore attention on completing the new cut of his Hoopeston documentary. Here is a trailer for the film.

I should have an announcement in several days on who will be making the Kubrick Napoleon documentary. I am looking a several strong contenders to direct the project, all of them seasoned professionals who have made feature length documentaries in the USA and the UK. Again, this is no guarantee that the project will be snafu-free in the future. I was just surprised at how quickly the hurdles started popping up given how quickly we got out of the box.

Picture of the day. Stanley Kubrick had to replace an actor in the middle of making his last feature, "Eyes Wide Shut." Sydney Pollack came in at the last minute to replace Harvey Keitel as Tom Cruise's semi-mentor in the demi-monde of posh, after-hours sex clubs at the close of the last millennium. Just like "Barry Lyndon," "Eyes Wide Shut" may prove to be ahead of its time and undergo a critical reappraisal. Kubrick was fascinated with cinema eroticism and in the early 1960's had planned to make an erotic epic written with Terry Southern. Southern worked with Kubrick on the "Dr. Strangelove" script. The novel "Blue Movie" has a character Southern purportedly modeled after Kubrick. Frederick Raphael, who worked with Kubrick on "Eyes Wide Shut," wrote a memoir of his time on the picture; "Eyes Wide Open" does not paint a flattering picture of Kubrick. Michael Ciment's "Kubrick" is still the best book on the subject, and I refer to the first edition from the mid 1980's.

Production staff salaries and 10.5% fringes (producer, assoc prod, prod asst)	$53,300
Talent Fees	0
Contract personnel (advisors, transcription)	1,948
Acquisition and rights (original music, flat fee for non-exclusive rights)	4,000
Pre- Production	0
Production (videographer, recordist, video/audio/lighting equip, permits, DVCam & DAT tape, expendables)	9,542
Post-production (editors' & asst editor's salaries, 10.5% fringes, all FCP hardware and software, color correction, sound finishing, dubbing & master tapes)	24,055
Travel (air fare SFO - Wash DC, auto rental, hotel)	5,082
Website and cookbook	0
Promotion (still photographer)	750
Professional Services (insurance and legal services)	1,222
Office facilities and materials	0
Total	$101,983