Eyes Wide Shut

And action.

Hello and happy new year, dear listeners.

Welcome back to What Went Wrong, your favorite podcast full stop that just so happens to be about movies movies and how hard it is to make them, let alone a good one, let alone a controversial one that you might think is boring, like Chris does.

I am one of your hosts, Lizzie Bassett, here as always with Chris Winterbauer.

And I'm very excited about this new year, new you holiday movie that we have for us today.

Chris, what are we covering?

We're covering that zany, light-hearted romp.

That's right, Stanley Kubrick's 13th and and final film, which I don't think is boring, but I do find difficult to engage with, I guess, I'll say.

Eyes wide shut.

Now, Lizzie, before we get into our thoughts on the film, a brief suggestion to our audience.

We're going to be discussing both Stanley Kubrick and Tom Cruise at length in this episode.

And if you want to learn more about Tom Cruise in particular, you should head over to The Big Flop by Wondry, where Lizzie and I are guest hosting this week to talk about Tom Cruise and his flop era that started shortly after the release of this film, but also covers his upbringing and his rise in Hollywood.

Of course, if you want to learn more about Stanley Kubrick and his biography, you can check out our coverage of The Shining.

You can have a nice little eyes wide shut sandwich that'll be about as long as the movie.

Yeah.

If you want to listen to three podcasts in one day.

Okay, Lizzie, had you ever seen Eyes Wide Shut before?

And what were your thoughts upon finishing it seven years later?

I had seen Eyes Wide Shut before, definitely as an adult.

I didn't see this like as a child, thank God, or even as a young adult.

I saw it probably five-ish years ago, and I remember being pretty bored.

I will say, upon watching it again this time, I really liked it.

I have some bones to pick with it, but it no longer lives in my head as the most boring orgy movie on the planet.

Now I think pretty entertaining orgy movie.

Wish there was a little more orgy.

Wish there were some penises in this, but that's most of my review.

Not a prick in sight, as Frederick Raphael put it, the writer of the film.

This is a VHS cover I remember looking at with intrigue as a young man in the Hollywood video near our house.

I don't know what would take number one now for your list of boring orgy films, Lizzie.

That's a conversation we can have at another date.

I

have very mixed feelings about this movie.

I really do love many of Stanley Kubrick's films: 2001 for its technical Rivera, Doctor Strangelove for its pitchblack humor, The Shining, which we've covered.

I really love kind of the pointlessness of war and Full Metal Jacket, many, many more.

I watched this movie in college, high,

with some friends, and I was not high by the end of it because that's how long it is.

Yeah, it is so long.

And it was, it's really beautiful to look at.

There's a lot of gorgeous cinematography and really interesting things that they do with color.

I had a hard time appreciating it.

Even now as a married man,

I actually do appreciate its themes a lot more, but I still find it's a movie that kind of keeps me at arm's length.

And I think that's for very specific reasons that we'll get to

more on that later.

I love Nicole Kidman.

I love her wigs, even though this is not, this is not wig era Nicole Kidman.

This is regular beautiful hair era Nicole Kidman.

She speaks so slowly in this movie.

The first 45 minutes of this movie are just pushing through Nicole Kidman going like,

I

wonder

about

my dreams.

And it's like, oh my God.

I don't know.

Maybe it's not her fault, but good lord.

It's like it's ultimate baby voice the whole way through.

It's so slow.

She whispers everything.

I love her.

Honestly, she's my least favorite part of this.

And I would have to say, I feel the exact opposite.

Nicole Kideman is my favorite part of this entire movie.

She's like a little baby spider that can't speak above a certain volume.

She is the only person that understands the tone of the film.

She gives it humor and life.

She is a Sphinx.

I think she's great.

Tom Cruise is is a little boy, lost at the big kid table.

He doesn't know what's happening.

I love Nicole Kidman in this movie.

So I'm very excited to talk about why we got the performances we did.

I'm actually thrilled that we're on opposite sides of this because it's a very specific performance.

Yeah, I hate it.

And I love her.

Big fan.

I really, I watched it.

I was like, man, Nicole Kidman, she's a stah.

She's got it.

Okay, let's talk about that more as we get into casting.

This is a fascinating film, Lizzie.

It's surrounded by conspiracy theories, both due to its subject matter, a secret society of men with penises always hidden and nude women, Kubrick himself, and of course, the timing of his death, which occurred prior to the release and completion of the film.

It begs a number of questions.

Is Eyes Wide Shut really a Stanley Kubrick film?

If he didn't finish it, what version were we left with?

How was it fiddled with by the studio after his demise?

Does the movie finally answer the question, Lizzie, of what would happen if an unstoppable force, namely Tom Cruise, were to meet an immovable object, namely Stanley Kubrick?

Does Nicole Kidman have the best butt in Hollywood?

It's pretty good.

She looks incredible.

It's pretty good.

Do doctors carry identification like police officers?

These are a number of questions that we will answer this week, but first, the details.

Eyes Wide Shut is a 1999 erotic mystery thriller or drama directed and produced by Stanley Kubrick.

It was co-written by Kubrick and Frederick Raphael, and more a bit, as we'll learn.

The film is based on the 1926 novella Trom Novelle or Dream Story by Arthur Schnitzler.

It stars Tom Cruise, Nicole Kidman, Sidney Pollock, Marie Richardson, Todd Field, Vanessa Shah, Alan Cumming, and more.

And of course, Lizzie, the film holds the Guinness World Record for the longest continuous film shoot, which is why it shows up on many listicles.

Okay.

As always, the IMDb log line reads, a Manhattan doctor embarks on a bizarre, night-long odyssey after his wife's admission of unfulfilled longing.

Yeah.

Where's the Illuminati in that?

Well,

are they that important to the story at the end of the day?

I'm not sure.

That's the part I'm tuning in for.

Right.

We'll get to them.

All right, as always, guys, the three or four top primary sources used for this episode, Eyes Wide Shut, Stanley Kubrick and the Making of His Final Film, and Kubrick, An Odyssey, those are two different books, both written by Robert P.

Colker and Nathan Abrams.

Eyes Wide Open, written by Frederick Raphael, co-writer of Eyes Wide Shut, detailing his perhaps too subjective experience working with Kubrick on the film, and Amy Nicholson's Tom Cruise Anatomy of an Actor, which is a fantastic hardbound book, including deep dives into many of his most famous roles.

Also, make sure to check out Amy Nicholson's podcast, Unspooled, which is, of course, co-hosted by friend of the pod, Paul Scheer.

Now, as I'm sure most of our audience is well aware, Stanley Kubrick was a famous or infamous shut-in.

He had moved to the United Kingdom, to London, back in the 60s, and never left, and then literally never left at a certain point and barely left his home.

I actually thought he was British for a long time, and then learned he's from the Bronx.

He's very American, and we'll hear a bit of his voice very soon.

So, since we're going to be discussing him ad nauseum this episode, I thought we should get a sense of the man who was as awkward, funny, smart, and peculiar as you could possibly imagine.

In 1997, when he was very deep into shooting Eyes Wide Shut, Stanley Kubrick received the D.W.

Griffith Lifetime Achievement Award from the Directors Guild.

It's an award given out once a year.

Kubrick at the time was considered one of, if not the world's greatest director, but he'd never won Best Director.

So this was a very big honor.

By this point, he would not fly, nor would he go in a car faster than 35 miles per hour.

And I did read he wore a crash helmet when he was in cars.

So he did not attend the award.

He pre-recorded his remarks on videotape.

And it is, I believe, the last recorded video of Kubrick speaking to the camera.

So I'd like to play a snippet for you, Lizzie, in which he describes D.W.

Griffith's career as being akin to Icarus flying too close to the sun.

I've compared Griffith's career to the Icarus myth.

But at the same time, I've never been certain whether the moral of the Icarus story should only be, as is generally accepted, don't try to fly too high,

or whether it might also be thought of as, forget the wax and feathers and do a better job on the wings.

All right.

All right.

The most deadpan possible delivery.

Kibrick hated being on camera.

He hated that video of himself.

He did have a laugh about it with his wife, Christian, later.

He was afraid to fly, Lizzie.

But by the mid-1990s, the 70-year-old filmmaker, near 70-year-old, was prepared to make perhaps his riskiest film, a sex comedy.

Now, Lizzie, as you know, Kubrick had tackled space travel, artificial intelligence, habophilia, nuclear annihilation, anarchy, war, rape, horror, picaresque gold diggers, really the gamut, so to speak, of the human male experience, at least.

a number of films I'm sure you've seen.

Yeah, there's a, I mean, I will say, there's a bit of sex comedy in Doctor Strangelove, so I wouldn't say he hasn't touched on it.

And also, Doctor Strangelove is funny.

Eyes wide shut, not a laugh in sight, but go on.

Well,

there was a specific evolution toward the jokeless eyes wide shut that we got to.

As you mentioned, sex does pop up in humorous ways in his films.

I mean, Lolita is obviously very much about sex.

Doctor Strangelove, the entire third act effectively becomes justifying nuclear annihilation to change the ratio of men to women favorably for the generals in the room.

And the whole thing is precipitated by an Alex Jones-esque belief that the water's making the frogs gay, effectively.

So I love that movie so much.

It's so good.

I'm so excited to cover it eventually.

Now, there had been other projects that had gotten away from him that he'd never gotten to film.

A biopic on Napoleon, he really wanted to make.

There was a Holocaust film that we're going to talk about briefly here.

And of course, AI Artificial Intelligence, which Steven Spielberg eventually directed and was originally named Super Toys.

There was one book, though, Lizzy, that Kubrick could neither crack nor buck through his entire career, and that was Arthur Schnitzler's Trom Novelle, which is a novella about a young doctor in early 20th century Vienna who is positively shook to discover that his wife has had sexy thoughts about somebody else, goes for a walk, discovers a secret sex society, and never actually has has sex with anyone, including his wife.

The book's surprisingly similar to the finished product, and we'll get to the adaptation process, which is frustratingly circular.

Basically, transpose New York for Vienna, Americanize and Anglicize the characters, change the time of year from Carnival to Christmas, and you have Eyes Wide Shut.

Yeah.

But the question remains, why was he so obsessed with this book?

And I read it to try to figure it out.

It's only about 100 pages.

It's very brief.

It's extremely Freudian.

It's almost like an internal monologue of this character.

His name's Friedelin in the book.

He's obviously Austrian, not an American named Bill.

And it's, again, very similar to the movie, and it doesn't really scream cinema when you read it.

The, you know, sex parties are pretty vague the way that they're described.

Not a ton happens.

There's not like a clear structure to the book.

There's actually less structure than the finished film.

But I don't know.

I don't know, Lizzie.

Maybe you think the story sounds more interesting.

I don't at all.

It sounds very sort of Proustian, and which doesn't necessarily seem like a thing that you would adapt to film.

It is.

I mean, you put sex party anywhere in the log line and it's got a little bit of spice to it.

So, I mean, you can't ignore that.

That's true.

Although, as we'll get to, Kubrick did try to ignore the sex party for a long time as he was.

No, Stanley, put in more.

Regardless, whenever Kubrick found the book, and there's there's debate as to when he originally read this book, it seems like a book that he was searching for subconsciously his entire career.

So Lizzie, let's discuss Stanley Kubrick and his sex life very briefly.

It's often pointed out that Kubrick rarely portrays women positively, if at all, in his films.

Yep.

Although I would argue...

I don't think it's because he has a like toxic view of women necessarily, but more so that it seems like they just baffled him.

There are a number of quotes from these books from some of of the women that he'd worked with that basically said, Stanley doesn't understand women.

He doesn't know how to talk to women.

He's not interested.

I think he becomes interested over his life for a specific reason that we'll get to.

So Kubrick was married three times, first to his high school sweetheart, Toba Metz.

He was 19 when they got married.

They got divorced around the production of his first film, Fear and Desire.

And this is when we first start to see him obsessing over loneliness and sex with heavy Freudian themes and male characters incapable of pleasing their wives.

It's very kind of Woody Allen-esque, is how I would describe it.

After his divorce, he had a string of fizzled relationships, and then he started dating his second wife, Ruth Sabatka, who was an Austrian ballet dancer and artist from Vienna in 1952.

He had photographed her, and it seems like maybe she introduced him to Trom Novell.

And what is definitely known is that she kind of ushered him into the higher echelon of creatives in the New York scene.

And so, kind of like Bill, it felt like he was entering a group of people where he wasn't quite sure if he belonged, and yet his wife fit in seamlessly.

So they married in 1955.

I also read 1953.

And there are a bunch more incomplete projects from this time that hint at his state of mind.

Let's talk titles.

A perfect marriage.

Spoiler, it wasn't perfect.

The married man.

Spoiler, not super happy, and many others.

Some even had sequences that felt lifted from eyes wide shut, like him walking around aimlessly until two in the morning.

He and Sabatka divorced in 1957 and then he married his third wife, Christiane Kubrick, who said that, quote, her husband saw extraordinary parallels between his relationship with Ruth and the Trom Nivelle hero's dealings with women.

The irony is of course that Kubrick was not some Lothario.

At the end of the day, he actually just wanted domesticity.

And so his third marriage was his final marriage.

He got married in 1958.

Christiane was a German painter and actress who'd performed in Kubrick's Paths of Glory.

And as James Harris, producer of Kubrick's films through Lolita, said, quote, his pursuit of women was mostly a distraction.

His attitude was, it's easier to be married and get down to work, end quote.

So Kubrick's monogamous at this point.

And I think a lot of the themes of the film can be explained by the fact that Kubrick is fascinated by people who have a capacity to do things that he doesn't, right?

So if you look at a lot of the films that he's done, like the capacity for violence, the capacity for infidelity, the capacity to destroy one's own family from within, these are all things that Kubrick in his personal life never engaged in in any form.

So he certainly read the book by 1968 because that's when he first optioned it.

Now, Lizzie, I think you probably know this.

Kubrick's incredibly secretive.

Yes.

Like

ridiculously secretive.

Actually, Frederick Raphael wrote in his book that Kubrick's biggest secret may be that he actually has no secrets, which I thought was a pretty good way of putting it.

Regardless, he hired American film critic and screenwriter Jay Cox to option the book on his behalf.

And he starts researching Arthur Schnitzler and he's fascinated by him.

And he's like the opposite of Kubrick.

They're both obsessed with sex, but Schnitzler is this prolific philanderer and womanizer.

He's like Alexander the Great with women.

He is obsessed with conquering.

He supposedly kept a diary of every orgasm he'd ever had.

Hello, RFK Jr., binders full of women.

Sorry, Cheryl.

Wait, wasn't that Ritten Romney?

No, no, no, it is.

But RFK Jr.

kept a list of all the women he'd ever slept with.

It was pretty gnarly.

Well, you got to be able to remember somehow.

Yeah, when that brainworm's making its way dune style through the prefrontal cortex.

All right.

Kubrick did have a fascination with women, pornography.

He'd done nude photography, but as cinematographer Gerald Freed put it, he was appalled and fascinated by the length people would go to, perhaps especially men, to achieve some sexual advantage at the risk of truth and honesty, even decency.

He's troubled by the facility with which people can betray one another or betray a marriage for the sake of a little biological aggrandizement.

It was as if Stanley was appalled by the concept of someone looking at you right in the eye without blinking and lying about a sexual affair.

That to him was a horror story.

So that makes a lot of sense because upon re-watching this movie, I don't think I realized how like this is like a PSA to play in schools about why you shouldn't cheat.

It's like the gym teacher, and I think it was Meme Girls, who says, like, if you have sex, you will get chlamydia and die like every time.

That's basically eyes wide shut.

Any interaction he has, because he doesn't have sex, he narrowly avoids avoids literally dying.

Oh, she's dead.

Oh, she has AIDS.

Oh, right.

Yeah.

Yeah, exactly.

Every time.

I have a quick question.

Is it implied at the beginning of the movie that he has been having affairs?

Just that he's had the opportunity is what I would suggest.

Okay.

Yeah, not that he has.

So Kubrick shares the book with his wife and she basically says, no, no, no, honey, don't do this.

And she gives him Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange because she basically says, our marriage is not going to survive you trying to adapt this book because you're going to become a paranoid mess.

Smart,

right?

Very smart.

But he keeps coming back to Trom Nouvelle.

So let's do the quick hits.

In 1971, Warner Brothers announced it called Rhapsody.

This was the working title he had, as his next film.

Kubrick decides, hold on, I'm going to do a movie on Napoleon first.

That never happens.

And so Trom Nivelle fades to the background a little bit as other projects come to the foreground.

But every time he has a break, he keeps coming back to this book.

And even on other movies, he would call for these things called reader reports, which were like analyses of the book.

And he would just read them and read them and try to figure out the right angle to approach this book.

He also would send this book to every damn writer he ever worked with and said, read it, tell me if you think there's a way to crack it.

And we'll go through a couple of the specific examples, but he was obsessed.

So he renews his option through his brother-in-law and collaborator, Jan Harlan.

He and Christian, meanwhile, are becoming more and more domestic.

She had a daughter from her first marriage, and then they have two daughters of their own, Anya and Vivian.

Remember Vivian?

It's during this two decades in development, quote unquote, that Kubrick makes what I kind of think are three key choices about how he's going to adapt this book.

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Choice number one, he ditches the idea of casting someone like him as the lead.

So in the early 1970s, he thought about making the movie as a black and white art house film with Woody Allen as the lead.

Please don't.

So this was before the release of Manhattan and Annie Hall.

I think it was inspired by Allen's Everything You've Always Wanted to Know About Sex, But We're Too Afraid to Ask.

Sure.

He abandoned that idea because he said he needed an attractive pair of leads to sell the themes of the book.

Basically, everyone would understand why Woody Allen is insecure immediately.

So you need somebody who should be secure at the beginning of the movie.

Choice number two, he moves the action from Vienna to New York.

Shortly before the release of The Shining, he met with novelist David Cornwell, aka John Le Carré, about adapting the book.

And Cornwell suggested that they set it in a cloistered city peopled by priests, monks, and nuns where you can practically smell the incense.

So obviously, bits of that make it into the final film with the way that he's done the production design.

But Kubrick said, no, you don't understand.

And he said, it will be set in New York.

And Cornwell was like, okay, so you didn't really want my ideas on this movie.

Choice number three, Lizzie.

This is the important one that you mentioned.

The movie is not going to be an outright comedy.

So in the early 1980s, Kubrick sent the book to novelist Terry Southern.

Terry Southern had been his co-writer on Doctor Strangelove.

Now, Doctor Strangelove is based on Peter George's Red Alert, which is a very somber book.

It's not a comedy, but they couldn't figure out how to crack it.

So they turned it into a dark comedy, which gives you the amazing, you know, Peter Sellers film.

At the time, they'd been joking with each other about making like a mainstream film about porn, which actually kind of sounds similar to Boogie Knights in the end, but they couldn't figure it out.

So Southern turned that into a novel.

Kubrick sends him Trom Novelle, and Southern has has one idea that sticks in the film: make the lead a gynecologist as a joke initially.

Southern then decides: hey, let's turn this into a pitch black comedy, just like Doctor Strangelove, which is something that Kubrick had actually toyed with.

He had turned the movie into a complete joke at one point, basically writing fake pornographic promotional materials for it.

And I'll read you a couple because they're funny.

Rhapsody, she had him, he had her, and together they had her porno pass.

What?

She gave everything to him and to 20 million adult viewers across the nation it seems like maybe in this version she had been a pornographic actress now kubrick did have somebody in mind for the porn version you'll never guess so i'll just say it steve martin

i'm liking this version more and more yeah

i would watch it kubrick loved the jerk i love the jerk i do too Just to show you how all over the place he was, he also watched Albert Brooks' modern romance around this time, which is a rom-com.

He called Brooks personally to tell him, quote, this is the movie I've always wanted to make.

The director of 2001 and a Clockwork Orange regarding a very good but kind of basic rom-com about a neurotic film editor who dumps his girlfriend and then spends the movie trying to win her back.

But Kubrick realized it can't be a comedy, so he ditches Southern's comedic approach.

This version of the movie goes nowhere.

So there's other stops and starts.

Some that are interesting.

Another Kennedy mention, he thought about linking it to Ted Kennedy and and the Chappaquittic incident because you kind of had powerful men and the death of a woman under mysterious circumstances.

Oh.

Could have been interesting.

But in the early 90s, Kubrick had two enormously intriguing and challenging projects in development that it looked like were going to go before this film.

You know one of them, Lizzie.

He didn't end up making it.

Spielberg did.

Oh, AI.

AI, based on the Super Toys, or Super Toys Last All Summer Long by Brian Aldiss, a short story.

And the Aryan Papers, which was a Holocaust adaptation of wartime lies.

Now, of course, in an odd twist of fate, the Aryan Papers was kind of edged out by Spielberg's Schindler's List.

That's not entirely fair.

Kubrick also kind of felt like he couldn't crack the material.

Stupid question.

Is Stanley Kubrick Jewish?

Stanley Kubrick is Jewish, and Stanley Kubrick had a really

strangely hard time including Jewishness in his films, as we'll get to.

He stripped a lot of characters from his adaptations of their Jewishness, which he obviously does in Eyes Wide Shut.

And we'll talk about this more when we talk about Schindler's list, I think.

But when he was adapting the Aryan papers, he also, I think, stripped the characters of their Jewishness in a weird way because it's so integral to the plot as he was writing it.

It also, in his personal interactions, from what I read, he was quite paranoid about anti-Semitism.

And I think rightfully so.

He kind of came up in the 1950s in Hollywood during the Red Scare.

Yeah.

And yet he didn't want the audience to see that experience on screen for whatever reason.

He also also had, I think, some issues with Schindler's List because he saw the Holocaust as a failure of humanity since 6 million people died.

And that film presents a portion of the Holocaust as a success because 600 people lived.

Right.

Which I thought was an interesting take.

But Super Toys wasn't going to happen just because the technology was not quite ready.

Also, Steven Spielberg was a little weirded out by Kubrick because Kubrick asked him to put a fax machine in his bedroom so Kubrick could fax him personally at any time.

no

more on kubrick's lack of boundaries to come now a most unexpected film turned kubrick back to his sex movie and lizzy that's what went wrong alum jimmy sees

concrete boots true lies by james cameron

really fun film from the mid 90s the 94 arnold schwarzenegger action comedy about a spy who struggles to balance his professional and personal lives struck a chord with kubrick the tagline for the film is when he said i do he never said what he did.

Pretty good.

Which I really, really like.

Kubrick made a point to reach out to Cameron about the film personally.

He kept a copy of the script in his office.

As Cameron later said, he just totally wanted to know how true lies was made.

I spent the whole time talking about my movie with Stanley Kubrick, which was not where I thought the day was going to go.

Now, sex was in the air in the 1990s.

It was the erotic 90s.

Yes.

We had nine and a half weeks, basic instinct, body heat, body of evidence, color of night.

It was in our politics.

Gary Hart's affair had scuttled a presidential bid.

Clinton's scandal was on the horizon.

And so, in early 1994, William Morris started receiving mysterious phone calls from Warner Brothers inquiring if Oscar-winning screenwriter Frederick Raphael of Far from the Madding Crowd and many more was available for a special project.

No one would tell him, so Raphael assumed it was AI, Super Toys, the movie that everybody had been talking about.

And he really didn't want to do it because he hated science fiction.

Now, before we go any further into the writing of Eyes Wide Shut, I do want to make it clear that much of what I'm about to tell you is pulled from Frederick Raphael's Eyes Wide Open, which is a very entertaining book, but it does feel as if he has a pretty big bone to pick with Stanley Kubrick.

And obviously, Kubrick was unable to defend himself following the publication of this book as he passed away.

So I have tried my best to stick to facts and descriptions of Raphael's state of mind, not his suppositions of Kubrick's state of mind, which he often alludes to in his book.

Anyway, back to the writing.

So Raphael gets a phone call from Stanley Kubrick, and he says, it's not AI, it's this book that I want to adapt, and it's about sex and betrayal and infidelity.

And Freddie says, this is amazing.

It's Stanley Kubrick, one of the greatest living directors.

And even though he just accepted another job, he says, I'll do it.

I'll do it for you, Stanley.

So Kubrick sends him the novella with the author and title redacted.

He's that paranoid about this somehow getting out, even though he sent this book to every writer he's ever met at this point.

Freddie reads it, quickly figures out what it is.

They meet at Kubrick's house to discuss.

And in his book on their working relationship, Freddie describes how much he wanted to impress Kubrick, which is going to be a really common theme in this episode.

Like, Kubrick had such an aura about him by this point in his career.

He also hadn't made a film since 1987's Full Metal Jacket.

The time between his films had only increased.

And so Kubrick has all the power in this relationship.

And all Freddy wants to do at first is prove to Kubrick that he made the right choice in hiring him.

Frederick Raphael is not young.

I think he's within three or four years of Kubrick's age at this point.

He is a very accomplished, long-working screenwriter.

Yeah, but it's Stanley Kubrick.

Exactly.

He agrees to send Kubrick sections of the screenplay in progress, which is highly unusual for an Oscar-winning writer.

But Freddy's clear, he's not going to start writing until the contract is signed.

And deals in Hollywood can take a long time.

And so even though Kubrick likes taking his time, he doesn't like it when other people take their time.

And so he kept bothering Freddie being like, when can you start?

When can you start?

You think you could start soon?

He's literally calling him all the time.

Freddy eventually did start without having a contract.

And then when he got the contract, he didn't love it because there were two clauses in it that were pretty gnarly.

One, an early clause stipulated that during the whole period when I was being paid, I was forbidden to write anything else whatsoever.

Wow.

And as we know, this takes quite a while to actually get written.

That's right.

And that included like a review or a piece for a newspaper or something for a magazine, not just screenwriting.

Just writing anything paid.

Two, in matters of credit, the decision of Stanley Kubrick should be final concerning who had written what line and who had had what idea.

End quote.

Yeah, I don't know if I'm signing that.

Neither did Freddie.

Fortunately, Kubrick did eventually relent, it seems like, on these two points, and they were able to sign the contract and he got to work in the fall of 94.

And fairly quickly, he realizes this is going to be...

a really, really difficult process.

So Kubrick insists on very long phone calls to discuss the material.

They're so long that Kubrick's wife can actually paint him as a still life while he's on the phone, upwards of 10 hours at a time.

A 10-hour phone call?

Yeah.

That's my worst nightmare.

There are decisions Kubrick has made that Freddy doesn't understand.

For example, he, as we mentioned, wants to remove all Jewishness from the text.

What was in it?

Was the main character Jewish?

It's not explicitly stated that the main character is Jewish.

I believe it's heavily implied that he's Jewish, especially just given the cultural context, the fact that he's achieved the highest station possible by being a doctor, which was kind of what a middle European Jew could achieve at that time in Vienna.

That was the extent of his power.

And then

Nochtengale, the Nick Nightingale character in the book, is described as a Jew for hire, basically kind of willing to do anything for money.

And then the unmasking of Friedolin at the ball is very, by these Gentile men, could be read with very much like a Jewish subtext.

Got it.

Okay.

Kubrick wants all of it gone.

The textual references to Judaism and the subtextual references to Judaism.

He says, I don't want any of it.

Ironically, Ziegler, who's kind of the villain, is the only Jewish character in the final film, necessitated by the fact that Sidney Pollack plays him.

Right, but it's never addressed in any kind of direct way.

It's never addressed, but it is unusual.

It kind of inverts the book in a way in the final film.

Kubrick wants the hero to be this Harrison Fordish goy, as Raphael puts it.

Ironically, Ford is actually part-Jewish.

I think his mother's Jewish.

Hence the name Bill Hartford, Harrison Ford, Hartford portmanteau, presumably.

It also could have come from Hertfordshire, which is where Kubrick lived at the time.

And then there's the fact that broadly speaking, Kubrick doesn't seem to have any other positions on the material at all.

And this will be a theme.

He doesn't seem to know what he wants.

Something Kidman would say about working with him on set later.

So basically, Freddy's crawling around in the dark trying to figure out what the greatest director, you know, of all time wants from him, and his journal entries from the time get very bleak.

I'd like to read a few.

Quote, Cinematically, I have no doubt that he is a master.

However, I have little fear that he is intellectually beyond my reach.

I am not even sure how bright he is.

End quote.

Quote, what I dread and cannot help probing is the possibility that the Kubrick myth will perish under close inspection.

I need him to be great, and yet I probe for his flaws, end quote.

And my personal favorite from November of that year, I have the whores constellations.

Whatever I am, he chose me.

He chose me, he chose me.

How many reasons is that to be happy?

End quote.

This book gets a lot of flack online, especially in like the Goodreads community by people who say that it's effectively Raphael pumping himself up and then slandering Kubrick throughout it.

I have to say, I found it wildly entertaining.

Yes, he's a bit of a blowhard, but he's an excellent writer and it's very funny.

So I do recommend checking it out if you're interested.

Freddie takes liberties.

He deviates from the book.

He gives Bill a backstory.

There's a prologue in medical school.

And on December 7th, 1984, he sends 42 pages to Kubrick and Kubrick loves them.

He's like, Freddie, this is great.

He doesn't love that Freddy has stopped working to celebrate Christmas, but he loves the pages.

Yeah, can't do that.

Can't do that.

Freddy is overjoyed.

He regrets all the negative things he's been thinking about, Kubrick.

Surely this man is a genius.

He loves my work.

He's a leader of men.

This movie is going to be magnificent.

But then we get the if you give a mouse a cookie syndrome.

So Kubrick starts asking for smaller chunks.

He's like, Freddie, just send me 20 pages next time.

Just send me 10 pages.

No.

And then the disagreements began.

Broadly speaking, whenever Freddy strays too far from the book, Kubrick pushes him to just follow Arthur's, meaning the author's beats.

Kubrick also didn't like dialogue, something that Frederick Rafael was very good at.

He didn't like funny dialogue.

He preferred voiceover because, as Freddy put it, it avoided all need to use dialogue to articulate how people felt or what motives they had.

So Freddie's writing, writing, writing, early 95, he sends Kubrick a 172-page first draft.

And Kubrick's not thrilled.

He still loves the first 42 pages, but everything else feels a little off.

So he basically says, look, let's just start at page 42 and start reworking it, you know, scene by scene.

Freddie gets back to work, and then in March of 1995, frustrated and wanting to get paid, he makes what I would call like a fatal mistake.

He sends the script to William Morris instead of directly.

to Stanley Kubrick.

Yeah, I can't imagine Stanley's going to be happy about that.

So the reason he did was because he wanted to be paid.

So he sent the script to William Morris so they could record it.

They could then invoice Warner Brothers and then they would be responsible for sending the script to Kubrick.

Freddy goes on a 10-day vacation.

When he comes back, the script in a blue William Morris folio is sitting in his mail with a note from Kubrick.

And it says that Kubrick had been too upset finding the script in a William Morris folder to be able to read it.

And he had put it aside rather than read it in a negative frame of mind.

He then asked Freddie to find out how many copies had been made, retrieve them, and make a list of everyone in London, New York, and Los Angeles who had received them.

Freddie did try to make the point that, quote, there was no risk of anyone in the William Morris office having read the script since I had never had any indication any of them could read, end quote.

But Kubrick felt deeply betrayed.

They were able to patch things up, but there was some logic to his paranoia.

Now, Lizzie, do you you know about the Kubrick impersonator that ran rampant across the UK during the 1990s?

No, I do not.

Alan Conway was a Brit with a checkered past who looked nothing like Stanley Kubrick, sounded nothing like Stanley Kubrick, and didn't even know anything about Kubrick's movies.

But because nobody ever saw Stanley Kubrick when he walked in and said, I'm Stanley Kubrick.

They believed him.

There were hundreds of messages flowing into Warner Brothers from people trying trying to get in touch with the Kubrick that they thought they'd met.

He was so relentless, he borrowed money, he ruined relationships, he even bankrupted a gay bar.

And he didn't just fool normal people.

British MPs, theater critic Frank Rich, a famous Dutch actress, he actually convinced everyone that the three times married, somewhat porn and woman-obsessed Kubrick was actually gay.

And Kubrick was very frustrated that he could not maintain his own public image or even the public perception of his sexuality.

We gotta go outside, Stanley.

You gotta go outside to do that.

He had his daughters and his cats and his dogs.

He really loved animals.

He was a bit of a Tony Soprano.

That sounds really nice.

Yeah.

Now, Lizzie, the inability to maintain one's public image or the public perception of one's sexuality, does that remind you of anybody else involved in this film?

Tom Cruise.

Tom Cruise!

Now for a more detailed background on Thomas Cruz Mapithur IV, listen to, as we mentioned, the Big Flops coverage of the Megastar, which Lizzie and I guested on, just dropped today, January 6th.

By the mid-1990s, Tom Cruise had basically willed himself into becoming one of the world's biggest movie stars.

Risky business, top gun, the color of money, rain man, born on the 4th of July, a few good men, the firm, interview with the vampire.

It's a crazy streak.

It's a crazy streak.

And that's not to mention what he'd be doing shortly thereafter: Jerry Maguire.

Yep.

You know, Magnolia with Paul Thomas Anderson.

So he's on this tear and he's determined to work with the best directors in the world.

His mega agent, Michael Ovitz, had promised that he would facilitate this.

Now, as we discuss on the big flop, Cruz was also a complete control freak about his public persona, something that was maintained very carefully by his publicist and close confidant, Pat Kingsley.

More on her on the big flop.

His affiliation with Scientology, which was known at the time, was carefully controlled and downplayed.

And tabloid rumors that Cruz was actually gay, for example, were quickly quashed by Kingsley and threats of legal action.

Now,

despite their individual successes, he and his second wife, Nicole Kidman, who had married in 1990, had yet to strike box office gold together.

Now, Lizzie, have you ever seen Days of Thunder, the race car movie they met on?

I haven't.

I've seen like little clips of it, but I've never watched the whole thing.

It's actually a pretty fun movie, but it's very silly.

And Nicole Kidman's role in it is very silly.

I think she's 20 years old and is playing like the nation's leading neurologist.

It's not.

She can do anything.

She can.

She can.

It was borderline commercially successful, but fizzled critically.

That's actually where they met.

Cruise had seen her in Dead Calm with Sam Neal, and he basically plucked her out of obscurity, in a sense, for that film.

They then failed to connect with audiences in 1992's Far and Away,

Ron Howard's period piece, which was met with tepid box office receipts and even cooler reviews.

And so, who, Lizzie, would play Bill Hartford if not the man who could seemingly have any woman in the world?

It's kind of perfect casting, in a sense, if you really think about it.

It is.

And I want to say, whoever engineered the lifts that Tom Cruise is wearing in this movie deserves every award because, and I'm not even saying this to make fun of the fact that Tom Cruise is shorter and Nicole Kidman is very tall.

I'm saying this because I have stood in front of Nicole Kidman in person, maybe a foot away from her for an interview.

She is so tall, Chris.

Like it says she's 5'11.

I don't, I think she's six feet minimum.

She's basically as tall as the blue alien singing opera in the fifth element.

Literally.

Yeah.

She is so tall.

And I know he's, what, like 5'8 or something?

Yeah, 5'7, 5'8, probably.

What did they put in those shoes?

Because he is almost eye to eye with her, and they are showing their feet walking down the hallway.

It is truly incredible.

You're right.

They do bridge the gap.

She's still taller than him, but they do bridge the gap.

She's only taller by like an inch or two, and she's wearing kitten heels.

I'm telling you, there's something in those shoes.

No, they did a good job.

I mean, it could have been forced perspective or something.

Who knows?

I don't know.

There's a Hobbit-Gandalf situation going on there.

That's fair.

Absolutely.

Now, Kubrick had considered a lot of people before Tom Cruise for this role.

We discussed a couple of them, but there was also Dustin Hoffman, Warren Beatty, Alan Alda, Albert Brooks, Bill Murray, Tom Hanks, Sam Shepard, so many different versions, right, of the movie.

I actually think Warren Beatty would have been really interesting.

Sam Shepard could have been interesting too, although he's a little older.

Well, it may be at the time of when, remember, this was developed over years and years and years.

Oh, that's true.

So in 1983, though, Sidney Pollock actually recommended Tom Cruise to Kubrick, or perhaps Kubrick asked Pollock about Cruz.

It's unclear.

He had just directed him in the firm.

Now, Kubrick was a big fan of Cruz for his turn as Ron Kovich in Born on the Fourth of July, which is a great performance.

Yes.

And kind of proved that Cruz was more than just good looks, you know, and a sense of humor.

I think so much of what he had done to this point proves that he is more than that.

Oh, absolutely.

But there was a physical transformation in that film that even, you know, even though he did it with his personality in Rainman, he hadn't quite done it yet until that film.

Now, Kubrick had been interested in casting a real-life husband-wife duo for the film.

He'd even considered Alec Baldwin and Kim Bassinger.

Interesting.

It would be interesting.

Definitely steamier, I think.

Yes.

Based on what I'd seen of them.

Now, Michael Ovitz was, of course, happy to make the introduction.

And we know that Cruz and Kubrick were in contact by August of 94.

And Cruz, like Freddie, was in awe.

He described Kubrick as a film-making god and he had already decided if Kubrick was ever going to offer him a film, he would do it without even knowing what it was.

Because I think in part, A, he thought he was amazing, but B, he thought, these are my best opportunities to get an Oscar.

And famously, he'd already lost once to Daniel Day Lewis.

in my left foot when Lewis kind of outparalyzed him for one on the 4th of July a few years prior.

Now, they didn't talk about Eyeswatch Chud at first.

They faxed about cameras and airplanes because there was still no script because Freddie Raphael was still clanking away on his keyboard.

And as he described it, solitary confinement without the comfort of being alone.

He and Kubrick were communicating daily by fax and phone.

Kubrick eventually decides the first 42 pages are actually too good, so they need to redo those two so the whole thing fits tonally.

The whole thing's a little worse.

I know.

By May of 95, Kubrick picks a title for the film, Eyes Wide Shut.

Unclear exactly where it came from it's okay great title it could have been a telegram from franco zepharelli a line from a la core novel who knows actually what's funny freddie hated it frederick raphael just did not think the title was very interesting he had recommended a female subject which yeah no no So it seems like Kubrick really struggled even in the writing phase with the orgy scenes.

Like he constantly was asking Freddie, like, have you ever been to an orgy?

Have you ever been with hookers?

Like, tell me what it's like.

And Freddie's like, I've never been to an orgy.

I'm sorry.

There are a couple of fun anecdotes about that.

So in 1995, Freddie sends the last batch of pages at the end of the summer to Kubrick.

Most had been rewritten a half dozen times.

Kubrick thanks him for his work and then turns around and calls another writer, Sarah Maitland, who'd been working with him on AI to see if she'd like a crack at the property.

But she didn't like the book.

And when she told Kubrick that, she never heard from him again.

They paid out her last check on AI and she said, that was it.

Wow.

So Kubrick sat down, took the hundreds of pages that Raphael's written, and he condenses them to a between 80 or 90 page treatment.

So it's not technically really even in script form.

It's kind of prose form.

He shows it to Warner Brothers and they're like, look, it's Stanley, he Rick.

We're going to make this movie, but we really want you to cast a movie star, which he hadn't done since Jack Nicholson and The Shining.

So Kubrick, who'd kind of been warming up to Cruz, really liked him, sends this scriptment to Cruz and Kidman, who were in London while Kidman was filming The Portrait of a Lady.

And I want to play a brief clip of Tom Cruise describing reading Eyes Wide Shut for the first time.

This is from an interview given on the press junket for Eyes Wide Shut.

I was unable to figure out who is interviewing Tom Cruise.

If you recognize your voice, send us an email and we'll make sure to credit you in the show notes.

We were staying at some house that we were renting because Nick was making portrait of a lady.

And

I think the script is about 90 pages long, 92 pages long.

And I remember putting it down and just

sitting back for about 45 minutes.

I was

stunned.

I was really stunned.

And I thought I'd never read anything like it.

And

I couldn't wait to go and talk to him about it.

I remember I was just stunned.

I couldn't wait, you know, because I'd already said, I knew in my mind I was going to make the movie even before he sent the script.

Whatever it was, I was going to do it.

And then when I read it, I thought, no, he's a great character.

It's a great story, very powerful story.

And

I was very, very excited.

Translation.

You don't know what the fuck it's about.

There is no.

He was stunned because he said, what the hell

is this movie?

That is an amazing Tom Cruise performance, but he's trying.

I don't think they

knew what it was about.

And Frederick Raphael can also.

I still don't know what it's about.

Yeah.

And also, as Freddie discusses, like, they stripped all the personality out of the character.

So there was nothing left on the page.

So the character was just a cipher for the audience to fill in.

So there's nothing playable.

He has no backstory.

He has no clear motivations.

Also, you know, it's Cruz, it seems like, really wanted to do it.

And Kubrick described like Cruz and Kidman coming to his house to discuss the film and kind of Cruz kind of being like, Nicole, are you okay with this?

Nick, are you, you know what I mean?

Like, it seems like he was the one who was in, and Kidman needed to kind of be convinced.

Frederick Raphael also read this treatment because Kubrick brought him back in to the fold in December of 1995, basically saying, I'm not a writer.

I know this needs a lot of work.

Do you want to now rewrite the rewrite that I did of your original script?

No, I don't.

He doesn't, but Kubrick says Warner Brothers is going to make it.

And Nicole Kidman and Tom Cruise have agreed to be in the film.

So he has to.

You know what I mean?

Like he, now he's like.

Because she was pretty huge at this point, too, right?

Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

She was blowing up and she would go on, obviously, to do Moulin Rouge shortly after this.

Like two years after this?

Yeah, exactly.

Also, just a little shout out for Jane Campion's campion's portrait of a lady that she was filming in london it's really good yeah and she was actually starting to be known as the more serious actor of the two that makes sense obviously batman forever notwithstanding it was in 1995 that she starred in gus fan sant's amazing to die for incredible dark comedy And based on what I've read at the time, there was a bit of a growing consensus that she might be more of the art house attraction and he might be more of the popcorn movie star.

Yeah.

On December 15th, 1995, Cruz and Kidman are announced as the lead of Stanley Kubrick's newest film for Warner Brothers.

The announcement also states that his next next film will be AI, believed to be one of the most technically challenging and innovative special effects films yet attempted.

Now, even though this is a Christmas movie, Lizzie, Eyes Wide Shut is targeting a summer release to maximize profits for Warner Bros.

Ooh, very diehard.

Yeah, it's a sexy, affordable two-hander with two of the world's biggest movie stars taking off their clothes.

And Cruz had taken a pay cut to star in the film.

He was making $20 million a film at this point.

It's unclear what he was paid on the film, but it was a fraction of that.

Neither he nor Kidman were allowed to work on anything else while working on Eyes Wide Shut.

That was a stipulation that stayed.

And of course, the costs of the film would be higher to all involved than anyone could ever imagine.

So let's get into production.

Kubrick sent scouts to New York to meticulously measure and photograph Greenwich Village for recreation in the UK.

Remember, they're going to shoot this in the UK

because he lives in London.

London.

Because he lives in London.

Freddie continues to rework the script.

Kubrick begins casting up and crewing in earnest.

His usual collaborators, including Jan Harlan and Leon Vitale, they're basically his two closest assistants, took on many important roles and responsibilities, especially in casting.

His youngest daughter, Vivian, who had an increasingly strained relationship with Stanley following a move to the United States, did agree to score the film.

Oh.

She had scored Full Metal Jacket under a pseudonym.

More on her later.

Larry Smith, Kubrick's Gaffer on The Shining and Barry Linden was brought in to shoot the film.

Costume designer Merit Allen joined.

She was from Little Shop of Horrors.

And of course, one of my personal favorites, Don't Look Now, amongst many, many others.

Really, really great at using red in film, which I think she does wonderfully in this movie.

And of course, Roy Walker would be the film's production designer of The Shining.

He'd also been art director on Barry Linden.

Now, Kubrick did have a penchant for casting unknowns, but there were a couple of heavy hitters that you don't actually see in the final film film that were originally supposed to be in it.

Do you know about any of these, Lucy?

I don't think so.

Originally, Ziegler was played by Harvey Cattell.

Oh, interesting.

That makes sense.

A more threatening performance, perhaps.

I agree.

Jennifer Jason Lee was to play Marion Nathanson, the grieving daughter of the deceased patient who Bill visits.

That makes sense.

Now, Tubrick actually reached out to one more writer shortly before production, Michael Hare, who had co-written Full Metal Jacket.

And he was like, just do two weeks of polish on the project.

And Hare said, no.

Quote, over the next two and a half years, as I read about the ever-expanding shooting schedule, I picture myself chained to a table in his house, endlessly washing and rinsing for laughs and minimum wage, strenuous, unprotected intercourse, and I had no regrets.

Now, of course, I have a few.

So production began on November 4th, 1996.

The film is scheduled.

according to one source to run for three months and wrap on February 7th, 1997.

But I also read that there was a 24-week schedule, which seems a lot more reasonable.

That would be six months, given Kubrick's history of how long his film shoots would go.

Three or six months, that schedule was written on dirty toilet paper because no, it went out the window immediately.

Yeah.

All right.

So Lizzie.

Over the years, the gaps between Kubrick's projects grew.

So you have four films in the 60s, two in the 70s, two in the 80s, and then one in the 90s.

And this is for like a bunch of reasons.

I think, though, the main one is that he could basically demand to work exactly the way he wanted as he grew older and more powerful.

Obviously we've seen how that affected development in writing the film and we're about to see how it affects production.

Let's talk about his shooting style.

First Kubrick would pre-light the scene.

The cinematographer would light it meticulously.

He would then go in, Kubrick, with a Polaroid-backed medium format camera and stand-ins, and he would shoot at every third stop increment increment of light.

So basically like every possible light level, every possible position of the stand-ins within this scene.

He would then take all of those, stick them on a board, and decide the exact exposures that he was going to shoot the next day on the film.

So that would have to be done right in advance of a shooting day, basically.

Then he did not storyboard, and he would rewrite the script.

while rehearsing and then send rewrites via fax as late as 4 a.m the night before filming.

Oh my God.

He would also rehearse the day's scene repeatedly while searching for the right camera position to begin the day with, because he never wanted to begin the day with the wrong camera position.

And he would shoot these rehearsals on a video camera, according to Sidney Pollock, and then play back that video for the actors to make sure, like, do this head tilt exactly as you did it in the video camera right here.

So, based on records from production, it seems like it was basically very uncommon to get a shot off before lunch.

Yikes.

So that means like they would not actually start rolling until six, seven hours into the day.

As Todd Field, who plays Nightingale in the film and is, of course, an accomplished director in his own right, pointed out, they just shot nights for 18 months on Eyes Wide Shut.

Oh, God.

As a result, by the end of the first day, they were a half day behind.

Oh, no.

So.

They started shooting the ball at Ziegler's Manhattan Townhouse, and it seems like Harvey Cattell quickly realized, or Kubrick realized, it was not going to be a good fit.

Cattell was very anxious.

He was not used to waiting around.

He basically stood there for five days waiting for them to get to his coverage.

They eventually shot out that scene in 12 days.

They moved on to shoot the pool room sequence with Ziegler at the end of the film, but Kubrick got to set, didn't like the build of the set, and said, rebuild it.

So that was going to take two months.

Harvey's like, nope.

Harvey Cattell literally said, when Kubrick stopped the movie, they wanted me to wait for months without getting paid, which I couldn't do.

Yeah.

So he asked out of the movie, more or less.

Publicly, it was cited as a scheduling conflict.

Privately, he was pretty pissed, especially because they didn't even replace him with a, quote, proper actor.

They replaced him with another director, which is true.

Sidney Pollock, he's a director.

He's a director, but he's also...

I mean, he's great.

He has acted, but he's not a professional actor by his own admission.

So Tom Cruise actually, in turn, recommended Pollock, coming full circle on Pollock recommending him.

They then reshot the opening scenes with Pollock.

They also replaced the actor who played his wife.

And at this point, I think they were roughly a month behind schedule.

They then moved to the Lanesboro Hotel in Hyde Park to shoot Bill visiting his deceased patient.

Kubrick looked so shabby, they wouldn't let him in the front of the hotel.

They made him go around the backside.

And at this point, Jennifer Jason Lee is still playing Marion Nathanson.

They then shoot the nightclub scene in which Bill convinces Nightingale to give him the address and password for the Secret Society.

And at the end of the first month, they'd shot three scenes.

Yikes.

So

they then moved to the soundstages at Pinewood Studios in the new year.

And the stress of pleasing Kubrick was starting to get to Tom Cruise.

He developed ulcers, acute gastritis.

He had constant abdominal pains, nausea, and vomiting.

He tried to keep the ulcers from Kubrick.

At one point, Kubrick asked for 95 takes of Tom Cruise walking through a door.

Which door?

It's unclear.

But the inexhaustible actor who was relentlessly positive, who taught himself how to drive a race car and use a wheelchair, was starting to wear down.

The morgue scene in which he leans over the corpse of that woman who'd sacrificed herself for him as if to kiss her required 35 takes.

I mean,

it was brutal.

Even Sidney Pollock was feeling the effects.

This clip is from an interview given to Stuart Maby in 2005 while Sidney Pollock was promoting what would be his last film, The Interpreter, oddly enough, starring Nicole Kidman.

I don't think I've ever gone past the 20s in my life.

And if I go to 20,

it's a tragedy to me.

You know, I mean, if I do five takes or six takes, I start to get nervous already on a picture.

But 70 takes, 80 takes, 100 takes were absolutely regular with with Stanley.

I mean, I finally said,

it's not going to get any better, Stanley.

It's just not.

I'm not a professional actor.

I didn't, to be honest with you, I didn't personally have to do that many takes because he knew he wasn't going to get any more.

But I had to be in the scene when Tom was doing them.

I mean, there were two shots, so it would be over my shoulder or whatever.

So I had to do it that many times.

And with Tom,

we regularly went to take above 70 and 80 takes all the time.

Oh my God.

I just like,

even though it sounds like, okay, well, what are you doing?

You're walking through a door.

Like, how hard is that?

That's exhausting to do it that many times.

And to also be wondering, like, what am I doing wrong?

What am I doing wrong that you need 30 takes of me leaning over this corpse?

Well, I think that's really what you just hinted at, Lizzie, is exactly what was getting to Tom Cruise, which is Cruise's need to please and Kubrick's need to strip performers of all affectation, which he was, you know, that was his approach to film.

I mean, Frederick Raphael has a great quote.

There's nothing that a serious photographer wants less than a model who smiles.

On the contrary, he waits for his subjects to be bled of personality.

He clicks on and on until they reveal their real appearance by no longer having the energy or the will to put a good face on themselves.

So you have the man who is looking to figure out who Tom Cruise really is against the man who has spent every fiber of his being hiding who Tom Cruise really is.

And as Vanessa Shah, whose role was supposed to last two weeks as the young prostitute, but took two months, said of Cruz, quote, he was still into it, but not as energetic, end quote.

So publicly, Tom Cruise did remain positive, as he told the New York Times a year before the film's release.

People say, You've lost 40, 60, 80 million dollars.

You've lost all this time.

To have a chance to work with Stanley Kubrick, that's worth it for me.

But privately, he was struggling.

And it wasn't just Kubrick that he was performing for.

Because, unbeknownst to Kubrick, Cruz's assistant, Michael Dovin, was actually present to keep track of Cruz at the behest of David Miscavige, the head of the Church of Scientology.

Oh no.

So, truly, all eyes were on Cruz, except for Cruz.

His eyes were wide shut because he had long relied on watching dailies to modulate his performances in his films, and Kubrick refused to screen dailies for Cruz.

Plus, Cruz did so many takes, he had no idea which performance Kubrick would use at any given scene.

So he had no way to track his character's arc across the film.

And the uncertainty was killing him.

As he later said, I remember talking to Stanley and I said, look, I don't care how long it takes, but I have to know, are we going to finish in six months?

People were waiting and writers were waiting.

I'd say, Stanley, I don't care.

Tell me it's going to be two years.

But Stanley didn't know and he wouldn't know until he saw it.

It seems like Kidman was able to accept this, but it tormented Cruz.

And I think it's because he was so eager to please.

Yeah, totally.

I also feel like Nicole Kidman, perhaps, obviously I don't know them, but like she may have had a better grasp on reality and may have like had a bit of a better understanding of what she was in for with Stanley Kubrick, especially because it was pretty well known at this time.

there were actors and particularly actresses who had had very not positive experiences with him.

My guess is she knew that.

And this this was probably an easier pill for her to swallow versus Tom Cruise, who, to your point, was like wanting the best, you know, most award-worthy directors.

And he has this very lofty idea of what their collaboration is going to look like.

And then it's just miserable.

I also think that As Raphael pointed out in his book, Kubrick doesn't respond well to people who give him exactly what he asked for.

He actually likes to be challenged a little bit.

And there is one actor who figured that out very quickly.

And I'd like to play a brief clip of Alan Cumming describing the first time he met Stanley Kubrick in an interview with the New York Public Library.

Great.

I arrived on the set and I was the new boy and everyone at this point they'd all been working on the film for over a year.

So everyone was just like

robots going like this.

And I was said, it's time to go to the set now, Alan.

And I walked onto the set and there was Stanley Kubrick and Tom Cruise.

I'd met Tom before and he's very nice.

And he went, hey, Alan, blah, blah, blah.

I went, hey, Tom.

And I went, hey, hey, Stanley, I'm Alan.

And he just looked at me and went, you're not American.

Like that, like a real, really aggressive.

And it was like six o'clock in the morning.

And I went, I know, Stanley, I'm Scottish.

And he went, you're American on the tape.

And in my mind, I was like, fuck you, old man.

I bought Deshaun six fucking times for your pissy little part.

It's six o'clock in the morning.

Fuck you.

That was what was in my mind.

And then what came out of my mouth was, after he said, you're an American on the tape, I went, yeah,

that's because I'm an actor, Stanley.

And after that...

Seriously, he looked at me and I just I saw something change in his face and I got on with him like a house house on fire i i loved him we had such a laugh

oh man i love alan cumming so much i love him so much murder traders sorry big traders fan so good um

he is honestly a shining light in this movie when he showed up to your point about like you felt like nicole kidman got this movie i was like alan cumming gets this movie Well, he said that he, there are more interviews of him available.

He said that he and Kubrick had a blast shooting the scene.

Yeah, he's having fun.

Like it was just tons of fun.

And Kubrick loved it.

Yeah.

It was just miserable for Cruz, but Cumming was willing to stand up to him and it totally worked.

Now, to Cruz's credit, he was effectively dealing with psychological warfare and manipulation at this point.

So Kubrick was determined to blur the line between actor and character.

He effectively had Kidman and Cruz move into their bedroom on set.

They literally slept there at times.

What?

They left their clothes and pocket change around.

They brought their own relationship into the world of the film.

Kubrick had them reveal like marital secrets and insecurities to him in confidence, just the three of them.

And then he could use it against them later in eliciting specific performances.

How long after this do they get divorced?

It's not long.

We'll get to that.

So

Kubrick then banned Cruz from the set when he filmed Kidman's love scenes with the sailor.

I also read that Cruz had to be in the United States for a family emergency at that time.

So it's possible that it was just just chance, but he did forbid them from speaking to each other or reassuring one another about each person's respective sex scenes.

So obviously, Kidman.

You don't get to have that, Stanley Kubrick.

They're married.

This is their actual life.

Yep.

And of course, Cruz doesn't actually simulate sex on screen with anyone, but Kidman

does very aggressively with Gary Goba, the Canadian model who played the naval officer.

That was filmed just with Kubrick and the two of them on a closed set.

And everyone has said, actually, that Kubrick was very respectful with the way that he filmed.

And he very rarely had more than 10 people, meaning crew, on set with him when he was filming, especially sex scenes.

Gobo was hired without seeing the script.

The job was described as having sex with Nicole Kidman, and that was it.

Right.

Sign him up.

Yep.

Further.

Kubrick seems to have toyed with Cruz's deep-seated need to please by kind of questioning his ability as an actor, possibly.

Kidman later admitted that, quote, he said that Tom was a roller coaster and I was a a thoroughbred, end quote.

Meaning, like, you know, Cruz's performance was all over the place as opposed to hers was like specific.

Cruise's loyalty to Kubrick was unwavering.

He shut down reports that the set was miserable.

It sounds like it was.

He said that Kubrick is impeccable and extraordinary.

Both Nick and I love him.

But the speculation was rampant.

People were wondering how much nudity would be in the film.

Could their marriage survive it?

Cruise and Kidman even sued Star Magazine for publishing a report that they'd hired a sex therapist to coach them.

As Todd Field later said, you've never seen two actors more completely subservient and prostrate themselves at the feet of a director.

But there were some that were not willing to bow unquestionably to Kubrick.

Choreographer Yolanda Snaith, I apologize if I'm mispronouncing your last name, had been hired to choreograph the two secret society scenes, the ceremony and then the subsequent orgy, basically.

So these scenes were cast in August of 97 by Leon Vitale.

There were roughly 100 extras, models from all over the world, very explicit instructions, no Botox, breast enhancements, anything like that.

Those are all natural boobs?

Apparently, I know.

Wow.

There's some in there that are, those are impressive.

Yep.

It was also very cold.

The mansion was no more than 50 degrees, and the actresses were nude in heels, and they were destroying their knees on the marble floor.

Now, the first ceremony scene was more or less what Yolanda had signed up for, but the second orgy scene was originally described as supposed to be like a suggestive, erotic dance

and quickly became

something much more graphic as she describes it.

There's a very good oral history on the orgy by Vulture.

I'd encourage you to check out.

I'll just hit the high-level beats.

Kubrick started sending them more and more pornographic reference material.

He also kept delaying the orgy in the shoot.

So he just kept pushing the orgy.

He just like didn't want to shoot the orgy.

The first AD actually recommended like, we should just get a director in here who knows how to shoot sex scenes to shoot the orgy because Stanley, it seems like you don't want to do this.

The material sent got so graphic that Yolanda realized she was being asked to choreograph an actual orgy, at which point she left the production.

And she basically said, I don't want to have anything to do with this.

In Kubrick's defense, most involved seemed to say that he was very respectful and he was gentleman about the process.

And there are some funny progress reports that just kind of show what a slog this was.

I'll read a couple quotes of why he couldn't use certain takes.

Kate's legs looking too spread.

Good, but possibly see Adam Pudney's pouch.

Kate has legs in odd position.

Adam gave up fucking before shot cut, but good.

Jockstrap visible.

Three women at end to be more sensual.

It just sounds like so clinical and not sexy in any way.

I mean, I don't think sex scenes are really ever particularly sexy to film, but

also with this, it's such long shots through these like very heavily choreographed.

You can tell that people are carefully placed so that you're not really seeing anything.

I mean, you see a lot of naked women's bodies.

You don't really see naked men at all.

No.

But it's also just like, it's choreographed in such a way that you can't really see the thrusting.

I actually think it's extremely well done because even though there are naked people, they're having sex everywhere, it does leave a certain amount to the imagination.

Now, there are some things that you would have been able to see in the original version of the film but we'll get to that shortly oh okay on february 3rd 1998 kubrick announced that the orgy was done it is done

meaning eyes wide shut was done yay uh no he wasn't happy with the scene of bill visiting the home of his dead patient so he rebuilt that set using bill and alice's apartment jennifer jason lee of course had moved on she probably uh was 10 years older had a different movie that she was on called existence with david cronenberg It's actually really fun if you haven't seen it.

And she was replaced by Marie Richardson.

Cruise was then called back to set after rapping, and Kubrick actually shot some of these scenes himself because cinematographer Larry Smith had also moved on to another project.

And

Stanley Kubrick was looking rough because the truth is, Lizzie, the only person that Kubrick worked harder than Tom Cruise was Stanley Kubrick.

And it's easy to forget, but the man was 70 years old and I I don't think ever particularly healthy.

Even though, like Arthur Schnitzler, he was the son of a doctor, he was famously averse to visiting doctors.

He self-medicated relentlessly.

As we learned, he hardly slept at all.

I believe he was sleeping two, three, maybe four hours a night on this film.

By the end of the shoot, he had an oxygen tank in his bedroom.

He would often lean against the wall to support himself.

Leon Vitaly sometimes needed to help him up and down the stairs or pick him up off the floor.

That's not an exaggeration.

It had been rumored that he'd had a heart attack in the early 90s.

Jan Harlan, his longtime assistant and brother-in-law, denied that report, but later said that he felt that Kubrick had carried this movie for so long inside of him that when he wrapped it, it seemed to have triggered a physical change in him, and he aged five years as a result.

I mean, I believe that that can absolutely happen, that you sort of hold on to the last little bit of energy and then it's just gone.

Yeah.

So on June 17th, 1998, Eyes Wide Shut finally wrapped.

294 shooting days across 579 calendar days.

My God.

The longest film production in history and they had to edit the damn thing.

So in total, Kubrick had captured over a million feet of film.

And if my math is correct, that's roughly 11,000 minutes of footage.

Oh my God.

Now, Lizzie, have we discussed, I believe, shooting ratio on this podcast before?

Maybe briefly, but good to revisit it.

Sure.

So shooting ratio, broadly speaking, is how many minutes of film did you shoot to yield one minute of on-screen finished footage for the movie?

Kubrick had shot a ratio of roughly 60 to 1 on this movie.

If the movie had been two hours, it would have been 90 to 1.

For reference, according to some sources, during the golden age of Hollywood, a 10 to 1 shooting ratio was standard.

Hitchcock famously shot three or four to one to limit how much the studio could interfere with his edit.

Of course, Coppola had shot 90 to 1 on Apocalypse Now.

But Kubrick was also editing digitally for the first time on an Avid machine.

So Kubrick was very technologically advanced despite his age.

And now that he was on Avid, the possibilities were endless.

He didn't have to destroy, you know, film and actually cut and slice to test everything's out.

So Nigel Galt, the editor, began work on December 30th, 1996.

That's obviously during production.

He's working 12-hour days.

There's so much footage.

He asked for an assistant, Melanie Viner-Cuneo, was hired.

They then needed another assistant, Klaus Wellis, came on.

And this team edited non-stop for over two years to deliver the film on time, often working 15 or 16 hour days.

But Kubrick would have to finish the film without one of the people he seemed to truly trust and love.

As we've discussed, Kubrick was, I think, obsessed more with betrayal on this film than sex.

And the betrayal that he seemed to fear did come, but not from his wife, like Bill.

In fact, his wife's paintings are the paintings that you see in Bill and Alice's apartment in the film.

Oh, wow.

It didn't come from a mentor like Ziegler.

or a studio head, all of whom at Warner Brothers seemed to have remained supportive throughout this runaway productions process.

And it didn't come from a pupil like Tom Cruise who stood steadfast by his exacting director Take After Take, but instead it came from his daughter, Vivian.

She'd agreed to score the film, but at the last minute pulled out.

By November of 1996, she had moved from New York to California, and soon after, she officially cut ties with Stanley Kubrick and, in turn, her entire family.

He was distraught.

His wife described him as a perfect combination of a Jewish father and mother, constantly fretting over his daughters, trying to understand them.

As she later said, what does not come through in any of his films, but what made Stanley extraordinary was his ability to love truly and to identify with the girls and with what was happening to them.

And so when Vivian cut him off, he really, it seems, could not figure out what was going on.

He wrote her a 40-page letter trying to win her back.

but he couldn't.

Now it wasn't revealed until years later, but it now seems clear that Vivian was engaged in the process of disconnection, a practice that many cults press members to perform, in which they cut ties with anyone critical of the group the new member is joining.

Do you have any guesses as to which group Vivian may have joined in the mid-90s?

Oh, no.

Is it like Children of God or something?

No, it was actually the religion of Stanley Kubrick's new star.

Scientology.

Ooh, was he a suppressive person?

He must have been because in lieu of scoring Eyes Wide Shut, she instead scored fellow member of Scientology Christy Alley's The Mao game, a film which I don't think anyone remembers.

Now, I want to be clear.

At the time, it doesn't seem like anyone on the production was aware of this.

I don't get the sense Tom Cruise was aware of this.

It doesn't seem like there was any attempt, you know what I mean, to woo her in.

Maybe Tom Cruise's creepy handler was aware of it.

It's possible.

It seems like something that she had kind of fallen into on her own is my point.

And the Cruise connection was ultimately incidental.

Kubrick pushed on in post-production.

March of 1999, he's ready to screen his cut of the film for executives.

Normally, he'd do this in London, but to accommodate Cruz and Kidman, who are going to be in New York, he sends the one print of the film to New York.

It's screened at the Warner Brothers Fifth Avenue headquarters on Tuesday, March 2nd, for Tom Cruise, Nicole Kidman, and two execs from Warner Brothers.

And the projectionist was instructed to literally cover his eyes during the film.

Just like Nick Nightingale playing the piano.

It's so right.

It's so good.

It's amazing.

Yeah.

On March 5th, a second screening was held with additional executives.

It seems like everybody was happy and excited about the film.

And on March 7th, 1999, Stanley Kubrick, five days after screening the film, died in his sleep.

Wow.

I did read that it looked as if he had been trying to reach for an oxygen bottle that he had in his bedroom.

He had suffered a massive heart attack.

He was buried in private at his home on March 12th.

Cruz, Kidman, and Steven Spielberg all spoke.

I also read that Vivian did attend the funeral with a sponsor from Scientology present to watch over her.

Oh, man.

Warner Brothers, along with Kubrick's closest collaborators, Jan Harlan, Leon Vitale, the entire post-production team, and Christian, his wife, now needed to finish a film made by the most notoriously specific director of the modern era without him.

And it seems like it mostly fell on Leon Vitali.

As Warner Brothers exec Brian Jamieson later said, Leon was probably the most important person from what I'd called the Kubrick stable.

Leon was determined in the face of the chairman of the board of the company that he was going to do whatever he could to finish Eyes Wide Shut as Stanley would have wanted it.

Now, I didn't go into a ton of detail on Leon in this film because I want to encourage everyone to watch the documentary Film Worker about Leon and his relationship with Kubrick.

It's great.

They had their work cut out for them.

Not only did they need to finish the film in a Kubrickian manner, they had to do it with people who had taken shit from Kubrick for years and only put up with it because he was Kubrick, which was a very difficult proposition.

Right.

They had to finish the score and the soundtrack, sound design and mixing.

There were a few final shot selections that needed to be made.

They had to screen for the MPAA, do color correction, and more.

Plus, there were some characters that needed to be re-voiced in ADR.

Now, Lizzie, there is one voice in this film that is pretty recognizable, I would say.

Did you pick it up?

Well, it's only because you mentioned this person and I didn't know why.

I did not look it up.

But then as I was watching the movie movie and they're in the mansion, the woman with the headdress is Kate Blanchett's voice.

It is.

So played by Abigail Goode on the day, she was not able to do a convincing American accent.

So they dubbed her, ironically, with an Australian.

With an Australian actress.

It was actually Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman who recommended Kate for the part in Post.

Now, the reason I mentioned Lizzie that the movie's length did not change is that they were terrified of changing the actual edit itself.

Okay.

So much so that jump cuts Kubrick had put in the film, meaning cuts within the same camera angle, were actually corrected with digital morphs as opposed to putting in different footage to make the cut make sense.

The silver blue monochrome was laid over the naval officer fantasies per Kubrick's initial original intentions.

And they needed to figure out voiceover.

And I think this was the thing that may have been the biggest could have gone either way in post-production about the film.

So with the exceptions of 2001 and The Shining, and The Shining kind of has a little kind of voiceover in it, every Kubrick film has voiceover of some kind, more or less.

And the Stanley Kubrick Archive, and you can buy it, it's published, contains a bunch of notes for voiceover that Kubrick was considering for the film.

I don't want to bore you guys by reading them right now, but I do think they offer a lot of interiority that the movie's missing, as well as like a little bit of humor as well.

It's basically like the interior thoughts of Tom Cruise as Bill.

But what insanity.

After all, nothing happened.

What was he thinking about?

But then wasn't it really just as bad if she'd actually fucked him?

Like it's just him being neurotic, basically.

And I actually think it might have added a little bit to the final film, just me personally.

Now.

I'm not going to talk a ton about music.

There's some very famous classical pieces used, but there is a really wonderful piece of music with some reversed chanting that plays during part of the ceremony scene.

That is a piece of music called Backwards Priest by British composer Jocelyn Pook.

And it was an instance of Templove.

Basically, the choreographer Yolanda was using it to choreograph the scenes.

Kubrick heard it, loved it, gets in contact with Jocelyn, says, this is great.

Can you make more, quote, sexy music for me?

And she's like, I don't know what sexy music is.

And he goes, figure it out.

And then she says, can I read the script?

And he says, nope.

And then she says, Can I see the movie?

And he says, Nope.

And then she just started working on the music.

And eventually he did relent and show her some of the movie so she could write the music actually to the movie.

So you wouldn't even let his composer.

In case anyone listening doesn't know, temp love refers to when temp music is placed in the edit and then everybody becomes so attached to the temp music that they've seen there that it's extremely hard to replace it with any kind of original score that you would be coming in to drop in.

Yeah.

And so they didn't.

They just used it.

Yeah.

Lizzie, you mentioned how tasteful the orgy scenes look, and that's in part because when they first sent the film to the MPAA, they gave it an NC17 rating.

But the studio and Kubrick's family don't want to alter the edit.

So they don't want to just remove frames like they did in Die Hard with the murder of Takagi, for example.

So the solution was to add in digital human figures to obscure the most explicit sex acts.

What?

Exactly.

So in all, 22 shots were digitally altered by putting additional hooded figures in specific places to, for example, cover two women performing oral sex on one another on the table, creating 8,000 frames of digital material.

That's pretty well done.

It's very well done.

And actually, there are some who believe that Kubrick may have been anticipating this because he did early digital scanning on this film and was testing out digital scanning of environments for AI, it's believed, the next film he was going to do.

And

basically like the notes of the lighting setups of those orgy scenes were more detailed than other scenes, which would allow a VFX team to be able to recreate the lighting more convincingly.

So it's possible he saw this coming.

It's also like a relatively...

Fortunately, it's a smart solve because those figures don't need to move.

It makes sense that they would be there.

It's sort of menacing menacing and creepy that they're there.

You don't lose anything by not seeing what they're covering.

In fact, I think you actually gain something by it being a little bit shadowy.

Well, some people who didn't agree, Lizzie, were the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, who issued a statement saying that by censoring Eyes Wide Shut, Warner Brothers and the NPAA have acted as if Stanley Kubrick made a pornographic movie.

He did not.

So there were a lot of people that were up in arms about taking the sex out of Eyes Wide Shut.

Well, it's you can tell what's happening.

Well, unfortunately, it seems like the problem is they needed more sex at the end of the day because Kubrick's need for secrecy and the studios' need to hype the film led to speculation that Eyes Wide Shut was going to be not only the sexiest movie of the summer, but maybe of the year and maybe of all time.

No.

The trailer for the film, Lizzie, is erotic.

I'd like to play it for you right now.

Great.

So, listeners, what we just watched was a montage of every moment in the movie that could potentially be hot out of context, set to Chris Isaac's Baby Did a Bad, Bad Thing, which, listen, if you're putting Chris Isaac on something, it's gonna sound sexy.

That's right.

But that is so funny because they're like, they're trying to not totally hide the very sinister and creepy Illuminati sex party and make it look sorta of hot.

And it like kind of works sandwiched in there, but you're still like, nah.

Now, Lizzie, fun fact, Stanley Kubrick cut that trailer.

Well, he's a troll because that is not this movie.

Well, it sounds like he didn't want to necessarily.

One Warner Brothers exec said, quote, we all persuaded Stanley that the way to sell the movie was that first trailer.

It promised a different kind of film.

That trailer promised something the movie didn't deliver.

End quote.

Yeah.

Now, Kubrick is famously hands-on all the way through marketing, all the way through the release of the film.

He continued to edit The Shining after it had been released.

When Frederick Raphael first went to his house, he was reviewing the ad placements for screenings of Full Metal Jacket in Jakarta.

to make sure that they were measuring the correct amount of lines for the ad that he had placed

years after the film's release.

So without Kubrick there, it was kind of a hodgepodge of of Warner Brothers plus Pat Kingsley and Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman selling the film.

And everybody felt, you know, the best thing that we have to sell this is the sexiness of these two stars.

So Eyes Wide Shut opens wide on July 16th, 1999, and

it just doesn't meet expectations.

The reviews were mixed at best, I would say.

Many felt the film was boring, that the sex and sets felt very artificial and stilted.

A lot of people pointed out that like the New York City streets felt very strange.

If you pay attention, they're actually reusing the same two blocks, just redressing them five or six times.

Also, is he like walking on a treadmill in front of a screen?

Yes, he is at a couple points.

Yeah, it doesn't quite look right.

I liked that.

I like that they do it in the car, too.

It's a dream-like effect, which I think is cool, but it is very hype-less as a result.

The movie, of course, had its champions.

Janet Maslin of the New York Times was a big supporter of the movie.

And the movie started pretty well because it had all this hype, right?

It opened to just under 22 million its first weekend.

It's 60 plus million dollar film though.

So it's going to need a lot of legs to continue.

But it flagged quickly.

It grossed about 55 million in the United States.

It did fare better overseas, in particular in Latin America and Japan, where it was much better received than in kind of the Anglo world.

In the end, it grossed $162 million worldwide, which I have to believe it went over budget at its 60 million and had a very expensive marketing campaign.

So it probably didn't lose money.

Yeah, maybe broke even, did fine on ancillary markets eventually.

It was, though, Stanley Kubrick's highest-grossing film, not adjusted for inflation, which is odd.

Now, conspiracy theories popped up immediately, most around the secret society portrayed in the film.

Was Kubrick sending a message to the Illuminati Lizzy?

Had he been murdered for trying to reveal them?

Of course, these conspiracy theories have been given fresh fuel in recent years with revelations surrounding the likes of Jeffrey Epstein and many others.

I don't think there's anything to any of these.

In fact, there's a funny part in Frederick Raphael's book where he gave a backstory to the secret society and he sent it to Kubrick and said, I learned this from an FBI friend of mine about this like secret sex society.

And Kubrick called him and he was like,

are you sure we can use this?

Like, are we going to get like whacked by these guys?

And he's like, I made it up.

I made it all up.

None of it's real.

Kubrick was very paranoid too.

Now, of course, Lizzie, the biggest question was, is this a Kubrick film?

Are we seeing his vision at the end of the day?

Or is this just an incomplete edit manipulated by the studio?

In 2006, actor Arlie Ermi, who, of course, plays the drill sergeant in Full Metal Jacket, said that Kubrick had called him two weeks prior to his death and said the film was terrible and that he was, quote, disgusted with it, end quote.

which does not seem likely.

Todd Field has directly called this bullshit, basically saying that Kubrick had even told Field not to cast Ermi in one of his films and that they really weren't very close and he doubted Kubrick even called him.

But Todd Field did not go so far as to say that Eyes Wide Shut was a final cut.

Basically, He says, if Stanley's post-production on past films is taken into even modest consideration, it's clear that the film would be different.

However, it would be foolish to try and speculate about what might have changed had Stanley lived to make it.

Yeah.

Leon Vitali, for his part, said that he had completed his final cut.

He said that basically all that was left to do was re-record missing dialogue and fine-tune the color.

There's much to do in post-production, but Stanley had left instructions for much of it, including the film's marketing campaign.

And there are a lot of people that agree with this, basically saying he never would have screened it for Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman if he didn't think it was ready.

Yeah, I believe that.

I tend to as well.

Now, Kubrick, according to some, had said that he was very excited about the movie and he'd actually called it his best work and his greatest contribution to cinema.

But the recognition that some had hoped for did not come.

So briefly, Lizzie, the aftermath for Mr.

Tom Cruise.

He was nominated for an Oscar in 1999, I guess in 2000 for a role in 1999, but it was not for Eyes Wide Shut.

Do you know what movie it was for?

Magnolia.

Magnolia.

Kind of the opposite role of his character.

Yep.

His performance in Eyewise Shut was at best ignored.

I do personally, and I love Tom Cruise, think he feels flat and out of his depth, especially compared to Kidman, in my opinion, who I think gives a Sphinx-like performance.

I don't agree.

I think Tom Cruise is really good in this.

I don't, but whether he's good or bad, he is exactly as Kubrick wanted him.

is the point.

So you can't say he's bad necessarily.

You can say you don't like it, right?

But it's whatever Kubrick wanted.

Now, perhaps Cruz should have looked at Kubrick's own history to know that he could never be the star of a Kubrick film.

Kubrick was always the star of a Kubrick film.

I think only Peter Ustinov and Spartacus had won an Oscar, and Peter Sellers got nominated for his turn in Doctor Strangelove.

And of course, Sellers didn't do 50 takes.

He only did two or three for Kubrick, and that was it.

And so he didn't even do the Kubrick method.

Also, which performance?

He plays like four or five people in that.

Exactly.

Everybody.

And as Amy Nicholson said, Cruz couldn't even turn to his director for support.

And after a year or so after the film had come out, Cruz came as close as he ever would to criticizing Kubrick when he said, I didn't like playing Dr.

Bill.

I didn't like him.

It was unpleasant, but I would have absolutely kicked myself if I hadn't done this.

To your earlier question, Lizzie, he filed for divorce from Nicole Kidman in 2001.

And he would eliminate another close member of his circle when he fired Pat Kingsley in 2004.

And if you want to continue that story, listen to our guest performance on The Big Flop with Wondry.

I will say it is interesting that it feels like potentially Scientology was sinking its claws deeper and deeper into him.

This is all conjecture, but this is a time when it seems like he was very insecure going through this, going through a really rough shoot.

It took forever.

You know, he's trying to please a director that's impossible to please.

There's a handler with him on set the entire time.

The timing of his divorce from Nicole Kidman after this does feel a little creepy, especially because that, I believe, was pretty heavily influenced by the church in terms of labeling her a suppressive person, an SP, which we referenced earlier with Stanley Kubrick's daughter as well.

It's weird.

It is a little weird.

This is a movie about, you know,

a very controlling secret society, seemingly with a lot of money, and that both Kubrick lost his daughter and Tom Cruise's marriage ends up falling apart as well.

And then, to Chris's point about the big flop,

there's a lot more discussion there that he does lose his publicist, who had been kind of successfully keeping the sort of Scientology monster at bay

for a long time.

And then, once it was gone, it really gets weird.

I wonder.

I wonder how much they took advantage of his

psyche during this time.

I agree.

And

this is a quote from one of these books, and I'm going to mistribute it.

So, generally speaking, what the person said was basically they weren't surprised that Vivian had turned to Scientology because for so long Stanley had loomed so large in her life.

And when she disconnected from him, she needed something else to fill that void.

And it could be said that Cruz experienced a not dissimilar thing with a disillusionment with somebody that he had worshipped prior to working on this film?

Also, I guess we should probably legally say that Scientology, I think, is still classified as a religion.

Sure.

Now, I struggled to find an appropriate ending for this episode because this movie, like Kubrick's life, was cut short and had kind of an unexpected end.

And so, what I tried to parse is: was Stanley Kubrick a genius?

Which is a question that came up again and again, and people seem to have very strong opinions on.

I don't know.

I think he was always interesting, and he was relentless.

And there's a great quote that Frederick Raphael has in his book attributed to Thomas Carlyle, a Scottish essayist and historian.

Genius is an infinite capacity for taking pains.

And so it seems like Kubrick did meet that definition of genius, which brings me back to that acceptance speech for the D.W.

Griffith Award.

because I think he was less interested in the heights that his wings could achieve than the construction of the wings themselves.

So, in honor of the man who insisted on removing all jokes from this movie, I would like to end with a joke, Lizzie.

A rabbi brings some fine material to a tailor and asks him to make a pair of pants.

When he comes back a week later, the pants are not ready.

Two weeks later, still not ready.

Finally, after six weeks, the pants are ready.

The rabbi tries them on.

They fit perfectly.

Nonetheless, as he pays, he can't help but take a dig at the tailor.

You know, the rabbi says, it took God only six days to make the world, and it took you six weeks just to make one pair of pants.

Ah, says the tailor, but look at this pair of pants, and then look at the world.

And we'll end it there with Stanley Kubrick and his pair of pants.

And that concludes our coverage of Eyes Wide Shut.

Chris, what went right?

You know what?

Fuck you, Lizzie.

Nicole Kidman.

All right, fine.

No, no, no.

I'm not.

I actually think Larry Smith cinematography.

Yeah, it looks great.

They did some interesting things we didn't discuss.

They shot the film.

I believe they underexposed it and pushed it a stop in post.

And, you know, this is kind of right before the transition to digital.

And I just think the movie looks so saturated and vibrant and punchy.

And so many of the movies, you know, we watch today, especially on streaming, feel very gray and muted.

And I love the colors of this film.

So, really, to the entire production design and costume team, I would have to say just an incredible use of color.

And obviously, Kubrick was hyper-specific with what he wanted.

But let's just say, Larry Smith, cinematographer, you went right.

Great.

I think that what went right in this movie is also what bothers me the most about it, which is that both times I've seen it, I do not know what exactly I'm supposed to take away from it.

And

like immediately after viewing, including when David and I watched it just last night, I had the same feeling where I was like, I enjoyed it, but I don't get it.

And, you know, David was like, I don't think you're supposed to necessarily be able to get it.

Like, you're not quite supposed to be able to put your finger on it.

And I actually think that that is what went right about this.

And I think that has to be down to Stanley Kubrick.

There is just something,

there is something really creepy about this film that I think works really, really well.

And whatever happened in terms of the edit after his death, their ability to maintain that sort of ambiguity across this and to not fall into the trap of trying to explain exactly what happened or even to verify whether or not what Tom Cruise thinks happened is what really happened, I think is very successful.

So, Stanley, hats off to you.

I don't know what this movie is about, but I do enjoy it.

And it does leave me feeling very unsettled.

I think he would love that answer because he famously never wanted to explain any of his films.

And when people said, what is it about?

He said, I said what it's about in the movie.

And that's all you're going to get.

So I think he'd be very happy with that.

Great.

You're welcome,

All right.

Now, guys, we really appreciate you listening to this podcast.

And if you want to go one step forward and support this podcast actively, there are three easy ways to do it.

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You can say Fidelio and then hand them your phone and play them what went wrong.

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And of course, you can join our Patreon.

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So make sure you sign up if you want to shout out.

And of course, we have to give our shout outs now.

So,

Nicole, could you

just do one more take with that incredible performance you've been giving?

Tom, you can leave now.

Tom,

you can go back to America.

But Nicole, could you stay?

Because you're just a thoroughbred.

Could I stay?

Sorry, I will do it momentarily, but that's my other bone to pick with this movie: all they do is repeat each other's lines.

All right, here's Nicole.

Kate Erlington,

M

Zodia,

Benton

Brown,

C.

Grace B

Jen Mastramarino,

Christopher

Helener,

Mark Dimitrik Blaze Ambrose

Just remember the password is Fidelio Jerome

Wilkinson

Lance

Stater

Nate and Knife

Lenna

Andrea,

Ramon, Vinueva Jr.

Half Grey Hound.

There's something very important that we have to do as soon as we get home.

Lauren Dunn, Brittany Morris,

Darren and Dale Conkling,

Jake Killen, Andrew McFagel, Bagel,

McFagel,

Bagel,

Matthew Jacobson,

Grace Potter,

Ellen Singleton,

JJ Rapido,

Jewishree Samot,

Scott

Gerwin,

Sadie,

Just

Sadie,

Brian Donahue,

Adrian Peng, Korea,

Chris Leal,

Kathleen,

Olson,

Leah Bowman,

Steve Winterbauer,

Don

Scheibel,

George,

Rosemary Southward,

Tom,

Kristen,

Soman Chainani,

Michael,

McGrath.

Thank you all.

All right.

Thank you guys so much.

Lizzie, what are we coming back with in two weeks?

We have got a heavy, heavy hitter coming to you in two weeks.

It is

one of the most bonkers movies, movie productions we have covered on this show, and that is The Godfather part one.

But it will be a two-part episode, a two-part episode on The Godfather Part one.

So come back for part one of our two-part coverage of The Godfather.

No, it's the Godfather part one, part one.

And then we're going to have The Godfather Part One, part two.

The following week.

And then eventually we'll have The Godfather Part two Part One.

Yeah, exactly.

So yes, come back next week for part one of our coverage of The Godfather.

Bye.

Bye.

Go to patreon.com slash what went wrong podcast to support what went wrong and check out our website at whatwentwrongpod.com.

What went wrong is a sad boom podcast presented by Lizzie Bassett and Chris Winterbauer.

Editing and music by David Bowman.