Production Diary - Day Twenty

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

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


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

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

Production Diary - Day Twelve

Legal limbo. The Kubrick Napoleon documentary is paused as the director negotiates his contract. Thomas Bender made his first documentary on his own so he had no need to negotiate terms with himself, unless he is hiding some deep psychological problem. The contours of La Boca Productions original offer to the director to work on the project have shifted. Originally, we offered him a deal where La Boca would supply the entire budget, a location camera kit and the use of our business operations to produce the Kubrick Napoleon documentary. The thinking behind that deal was that it would free up the director to focus on the creating the picture and remove the distractions of insurance brokers, lawyers and accountants from the process. But moving from calling all the shots on his first documentary to having to deal with an established production company has proved to be a challenge for Thomas. So La Boca presented the director with another alternative. For a reduced budget figure, the director would produce the Kubrick Napoleon documentary on his own, without the camera kit or support from La Boca Productions. This alternative would provide the director with maximum flexibility but he would in essence become his own indie producer and take on the business burdens directly. La Boca would benefit by not going into the equipment business by purchasing the camera kit and by saving money on the budget at the outset. But while the director was considering the two alternatives, internally at La Boca, fear started to creep in. Thomas Bender had only made one other documentary in a small town in rural Illinois and La Boca was contemplating spanning the globe for the Kubrick Napoleon documentary. The feeling inside La Boca was that this project may prove to be too complex for a newbie film maker and it was still not too late to consider partnering with a more experienced documentarian to make the film. In a compromise, La Boca offered the director a third alternative: a scaled back production of the Kubrick Napoleon documentary reduced to 6 weeks and two locations, Paris and New York, and a budget closer to the budget of the director's "Hoopeston" project. La Boca believes in supporting emerging talent, but it does have to protect itself from the risk and expense of the director abandoning the project part way during production. So now we wait as the director considers his options.

Picture of the day. After joining the staff of Look magazine as a photographer, Kubrick eventually graduated from Taft High School in the boogie down Bronx. He watched movies at the Museum of Modern Art and took some classes at Columbia University while working the New York City chess circuit to make spending money. (Imagine if the Matt Damon movie "Rounders" was set in the late 1940s in the seedy world of chess clubs and outdoor park chess boards.) It took him several years working at Look magazine until he decided to make his first film. He was inspired by the subject of one of his photo assignments for Look, the journeyman boxer Walter Cartier, and his twin brother Vincent. He shot the sixteen minute film, Day of the Fight, and had it picked up by RKO for distribution. The short subject is posted in two parts on You Tube. Here are both parts.

Production Diary - Day Ten

The scope of the production may be to big for the director. Thomas Bender has only made one feature about a small Midwestern American town, Hoopeston, Illinois. He self financed the documentary. Made it on a shoestring. He still hasn't finished it. A distributor wants to release the movie and is eager to release the Kubrick Napoleon documentary as well. He resisted comments from me and the distributor to make "Hoopeston" longer (not shorter) and tweaks to make the story stronger for a long time. But to his credit he has agreed to give the picture another pass through the edit machine. He has a day job making digital shorts but now is facing the daunting task of making a documentary on an unrealized passion project of one of the most revered visionary filmmaker. And facing a budget exponentially bigger than his first film. I think his brain may begin to fry given the locations contemplated for the story: Paris, London, Los Angeles, Kansas City, New York. The logistical complexity of this shoot may be overwhelming him. Yet it shouldn't. I keep telling him that La Boca Productions will handle all the mundane business details like booking travel and ensuring the production, but he wants to be involved in those details as well. The tipping point came when he insisted that he could not sign a contract to make the Kubrick Napoleon documentary until he completed a production breakdown. Now typically, the production breakdown is completed once the script is finished. He is in the middle of research and wants to start a production board before he has finished writing the script. I don't want him to burn out but I don't want to derail him or dampen his enthusiasm for the picture. I am thinking about scaling back the production to make it less ambitious in terms of locations and shooting days. Or else I might adopt a "scared straight" approach and throw him into the deep end of this production without the life jacket of La Boca Productions to cling to. Stay tuned.

Picture of the day. Yesterday was St. Valentine's Day and another Illinois city was cleaning up a bloody massacre. It was a shooting rampage that rivaled the gangland shooting in Chicago on that very day early in the century just past. When the mysteries of the human heart call out for explanation folks turn to art. Here is a snip from the website of Canada's Virtual Museum: "The first years of love between Josephine Beauharnais and France's most powerful general can scarcely be eclipsed in their passion, yet the political reality of Napoleon's position assured a love equally tumultuous. His desire for an heir led to their divorce, yet at the ceremony each read to the other a statement of lasting devotion, as a testament to their enduring love."