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.

Kubrick in a Nutshell?

Kubrick was not as complicated a cookie as some have made him out to be. At least, that is what his personal assistant thinks. Leon Vitali was hired by Stanley Kubrick to play Lord Bullingdon in "Barry Lyndon" and continued to work for him until Kubrick's death in 1999. An interviewer in 2007 asked Vitali to describe the real Stanley Kubrick.

You know, it's not as complicated as you might think. The best way I can put it is this: If you make it in more of a personal context and you think about yourself as being someone who can sometimes be angry, sometimes be generous, sometimes be jealous, sometimes be resentful, sometimes be extremely kind -- all those basic human qualities. Everybody's got them. And the thing is, for many people, there's one part of them that drives them more than another. Some people are continually feeling guilty about life. He could feel guilty about some of the things he had to do. Or they could be extremely ambitious. Something drives them more than all the others. They have all those other qualities inside them. But somebody like Stanley, who had all those like you or I, but to about the power of a gazillion, all right? Because from minute to minute it could change. One of those, the ambitious, would suddenly give way to something quite mean. And then equally give way to something almost over-generous. Everything he did was almost overpowering.

It seems that how a person may come across depends upon what emotion is in the driver's seat at the time. Things may not always be what they seem, which makes finding the truth a hit or miss pursuit at best. How does the old Marvin Gaye song go, only believe half of what you see, some or none of what you hear?

Picture of the day. Pakistan asked Google over the weekend to cut off access to You Tube from within the country. That explains why You Tube was inaccessible everywhere last Sunday. But information wants to be free, so the news story spread the that the request was prompted by the posting on You Tube of footage of several Danish editorial cartoons. These were cartoons from 2005 satirizing Mohammed and led to deadly riots world wide. The cartoons were recirculated by the Danes once a secret plot to kill the cartoonist was discovered. For the benefit of you InterWebs gear heads out there, here is why You Tube had to pull the plug everywhere to shut out Pakistan.

Stanley Kubrick's Achilles Heel

A lot of people ask what inspired me to make this documentary. It was a visit to this traveling exhibition from the Stanley Kubrick Archives on display in the Zurich in 2007. The following snip from a New York Times review of the exhibition correctly sums up the essence of the exhibition.

"For those intrigued by his work habits -- he made only eight films after 1962 -- the show answers an enduring question: What took him so long? Kubrick did his homework with a zeal that would make the most conscientious planner look rash. His reputation as a stickler for detail is well known. But the sheer mass of primary materials he used is staggering. At times the prep work seemed an end in itself...[T]he most interesting section concerns a film he never made, 'Napoleon.' In the course of a three-decade quest to film a biography, Kubrick pored through more than 18,000 documents and books about Napoleon's life. He amassed a card file that recorded every significant event in the life of Napoleon, day by day. Kubrick's ambitions were summed up in a letter he sent to a studio in 1971: ''It's impossible to tell you what I'm going to do, except to say I expect to make the best movie ever made.'' No amount of labor was able to save the project, however. MGM pulled the plug because of ever-increasing costs. (Rubbing salt into the wound, a polite letter from Audrey Hepburn turns down his offer of a part.) 'Stanley was devastated,' said Jan Harlan, his executive producer. 'He was very depressed for a while.'"

Apparently Brother Kubrick did not know when to stop. No doubt a cautionary tale can be drawn from this material. Here is a snip from a think piece on the hit play "August: Osage County" currently running on Broadway.

Finally, at least for this go-round, I like what this play represents: a life-long association of a writer with a group of actors and a theater. This is why Shakespeare wrote so much, he had a whole gang of actors waiting to do his work. Go down the list — the writers who wrote a lot of wonderful plays were always associated with a community of actors they could write for: Shepard, Chekhov, Brian Friel, Alan Ackbourne, David Mamet, Lanford Wilson, Caryl Churchill, Richard Foreman, Wendy Wasserstein.

After reading this entry by playwright, librettist and screenwriter Marsha Norman from a New York Times blog, she may have hit on the another reason why Kubrick made so few pictures as a mature artist. He did immerse himself in a subject rather than surround himself with a society of artists eager to perform. Remember, Kubrick started out as a visual storyteller, using his camera to capture images that told a tale, so there is nothing wrong to playing to your strength. Nevertheless, perhaps there is in the cinema more virtue in having your words come alive during the early stages. Perhaps the study of the drama of your story is preferable to piling a mountain of books on your table and creating a visually rich universe around your words.

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."

Production Diary - Day Eight

I have to start getting the word out about this Kubrick Napoloen documentary I am financing. I like problems that tickle my brain but I find publicity and advertising to be tedious to consider. I know that making a movie is literally launching a new business each and every time and entering a crowded marketplace where I will be competing with the Fortune 500 as well as Michael Moore. My primary impulse in backing my pictures lies with story. I will be living intimately with the story for years so if it does not excite me on a gut level I will certainly lose interest in the project. So the trick is to sell others the same way I sell myself; I have to launch a movement of strong supporters for the story. I have tried to convince the director to take the same approach in his community and raise money for a location production kit he can use for this shoot. He is resisting becoming what in his mind would be either a shill or a charity case. Hopefully he will not denigrate charity for much longer. He's still young and has plenty of time to learn. Which gets me to the point of this entry today. I hope to reverse engineer publicity for the Kubrick Napoleon documentary. I will have to brainstorm some ideas on how do it but I already have an idea that will use Google Adwords. I will keep you posted.

Picture of the day. Marilyn and Ella, a musical based on racial unity set during the Jim Crow era of the United States of 1955, opens this weekend in Stratford. It is selling out quickly. Kubrick put brown faces in his first three mid-century features, Fear and Desire, Killer's Kiss, and The Killing. No brown people in the French trenches of Paths of Glory, but he has Laurence Olivier kill Woody Strode in Spartacus, put James Earl Jones on board the cold war bomber in Dr. Strangelove. Then Kubrick travels to the future and to 18th Century Europe where they keep the brown faces out of sight. It isn't until Kubrick has Jack Nicholson kill Scatman Crothers at the Overlook Hotel in the Shining do the brown faces reappear.

Creative Clashes

The creative mind may seem inscrutable to you and me, but conflict seems to be a constant theme. Artists love to fight. Who has seen this clip of his handling of a heckler at a recent movie awards dinner and does not think that the director of "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly" was spoiling for a punch up? And what about Natalie Cole scolding the Grammy voters for raining awards down on Amy Winehouse instead of shunning the party girl for her recent downward spiral into drugs and dissolution? So be prepared to have a screaming match at some point in the production and don't let it slow you down in making the movie. On the Kubrick Napoleon documentary there may be more philosophical differences than creative. This is because the director Thomas Bender has still not finished his first documentary on the Witch School of the Sweet Corn Capital of the World, Hoopeston, Illinois and is trying to manage upwards and sideways on this new La Boca picture. And it will be up to me to contain any instability. It may sound like a losing game but I don't mind a good fight. It helps to cleanse the palate.

Picture of the day. Napoleon at the scene of one of his greatest triumphs, the battle of Austerlitz. Kubrick paid close attention in his script to the constant conflict between Napoleon and Alexander, the Russian emperor. Although Alexander suffered a decisive defeat at Austerlitz, Napoleon was to suffer a humiliating retreat from the Russian capital of St. Petersberg during Napoleon's expansionist period.

Fundraising for Documentaries

I just spent a week in Asia meeting with folks I hope to make private investors in the Stanley Kubrick Napoleon documentary. The pitch often reaches a tense moment after I mention the Kubrick name. "Oh, you mean Stanley Quebrick." Now I have to bite my tongue and not try to correct the speaker and watch them sail away with the money. Because at this stage in the game, politics is more important than accuracy. Biting my tongue has become some thing of a knee jerk response to the notion of asking people for money. But the name of the game is getting people to bankroll my passion in this documentary. And passion and correction do not create a tasty mix. At Princeton they hold seminars for alumni about the "art of the ask." Princeton is in the midst of a major fundraising campaign and that is where I just learned about asking for money in a dispassionately passionate way. The pitch is tailored to fit the position of the potential donee. If that person has not made a major contribution before, or is disaffected or even hostile to the university matters in how you present the message. Even their generation is significant as a baby boomer is inclined differently to the university than is a Gen Y'er. If ever I thought that annual giving was to become such an important part of my life I would have paid more attention as an undergraduate on starting a movement. Because, ultimately, isn't this whole fundraising thing about building a movement and community behind a common vision? And what's wrong with taking that notion and giving it a capitalistic twist? There is a trend now among documentary filmmakers in allying with non-profit and not for profit foundations as a way to turn financial support for a film into an immediate charitable deduction for the giver. It also benefits the foundation by promoting its mission to benefit the arts and sciences. And if the documentary delivers a return to the private investors then everybody wins. The blog at Docs Interactive comments on this technique as well as listing more fundraising sources for documentary filmmakers. On the Kubrick Napoleon project I will test some of these techniques and report on their effectiveness. Any additional funds raised would go to post production and animation. I will keep everyone posted on my progress with fundraising with foundations to get this documentary produced.

Photo of the day. Barry Lyndon, infantryman. Gives you the idea of the kind of thinking Kubrick might have contemplated for the Napoleon project and translated to his 1975 film, Barry Lyndon. Enjoy the trailer from this Kubrick movie's initial release posted here by TCM.

Here is another version of the trailer from You Tube:

Lagnappe. In honor of his Bafta award for Best Actor, here's a little ditty riffing on Daniel Day-Lewis as John Huston, sorry, the oil baron Daniel Fairview from "There Will Be Blood."

Here's the actual "milkshake" clip from the Paul Thomas Anderson movie.

Production Diary - Day Two

Boarded a flight to Singapore to visit with potential investors in the film. Twelve hour flight and no Kubrick movies on board. Fortunately YouTube has uploads of a number of Kubrick's earlier black and white movies in segments. I will view his first feature, "Fear and Desire" when I get to Singapore. The first segment is embedded below.
Check out this short video bio on Brother Kubrick courtesy of another YouTubian in the meantime.

Kubrick Bio - Part the First

It may not be entirely correct to call Kubrick a child prodigy. Nonetheless one can picture the confidence and strength of the young artist when, at 16 years old, he managed to sell an unsolicited picture to the highly influential publication, Look. He’d been experimenting in the family darkroom for several years at the suggestion of his parents, and early home movies (1) reveal the seeds of their encouragement. In these movies the young Kubrick is obviously take-charge, as aware of his high stature in family and in life as his placement within the camera frame. Conscious of it or not, Kubrick is directing the action and, judging by his smile, he’s having a grand old time doing it.
...Kubrick’s first sold photograph led to a career at Look magazine. His numerous photo spreads ranged from profiles of actors like Montgomery Clift to documentations of the New York jazz scene. Comparing the former category with the latter one reveals the opposite extremes of Kubrick’s artistry. The actor profiles show Kubrick’s liking for what I’ll call the ‘pose.’ That’s basically a blanket euphemism for the control Kubrick places on the image. In these photos, setting and subject bend to the artist’s will and the sense of manipulation is readily apparent. This is especially of interest in the Clift profile: the actor was a manipulator in his own right, and there’s a strong sense of a meeting of two very distinct and individual minds that adds a tension to the image. As much as Clift exudes his own sort of confidence, it’s also evident that Kubrick has an equal control. It foreshadows Kubrick’s later, conflicted dealings with high profile actors such as Kirk Douglas and Sterling Hayden, and may partly explain why he cast blander and more easily controlled leading men in many of his later films.
...A photo of a trumpet player feels three-dimensional, as if the instrument and its master reach beyond the lens and into the very lives of the viewer. You can hear the music and feel the movement in this still frame, and the sense of life being lived (as opposed to the sense of life having been lived in the ‘pose’ photographs) is extraordinary. This image, and the many others like it, presuppose the musical interludes in Kubrick’s films that recreate these feelings of presence. It is in these moments of musicality, of the physical and psychological dance of characters and setting, where Kubrick’s movies come most alive.

From this My Space fan page on Stanley Kubrick.