Kubrick’s unmade films -- Filippo Ulivieri (Thursday 18 July 2019)

Filippo Ulivieri is the author of the book Stanley Kubrick and Me. He has also written Kubrick's unmade films, Two adroit, perceptive, delicately attuned people: the clash between Stanley Kubrick and Marlon Brando, Waiting for a miracle: a survey of Stanley Kubrick’s unrealized projects, Writing and rewriting Kubrick: or, how I learned to stop worrying about the Kubrickian memoirs and love Emilio D’Alessandro, and A Cat Odyssey. 

He coauthored Kubrick e Clarke, storia inedita del film tra genio e ripicche and wrote many more articles on Kubrick in Italian including: 1964-1968: l'Odissea di Kubrick, Ecco la vera storia del "Bruciante segreto" di Stanley Kubrick, From “boy genius” to “barking loon”: an analysis of Stanley Kubrick’s mythology, Kubrick e Clarke, storia inedita del film tra genio e ripicche.

He also runs the Italian website Archivo Kubrick: archiviokubrick.it/ak/crediti/index.html [1,2]

Filippo Ulivieri can be contacted via: twitter @nessuno2001 https://twitter.com/nessuno2001?lang=pt

Filippo Ulivieri during the Workshop dinner at Katwijk. Photo by Karen Ritzenhoff.

Presentation:

I’m going to present the outcome of my research into Kubrick’s unmade or unfinished projects, and then I’ll address a few tentative questions for expanding the topic further. Lots of things have happened in the past two years since I first compiled a list of the projects – most of all an ongoing conversation with Peter, and we’re now collaborating on this topic. I have decided to refer to the new discoveries instead of restart compiling a list from scratch.

Generally speaking, everybody knows the unfinished or unmade films by Stanley Kubrick include Napoleon, A.I. Artificial Intelligence, and Aryan Papers. A few other projects are usually mentioned: for example, One-Eyed Jacks, The German Lieutenant, or Burning Secret. But actually there is evidence for at least 55 distinct unrealized films that Kubrick worked on, plus a number of plot and characters ideas.

A first question would be why bother to study the unmade projects. They are useful to understand the gaps between the films that Kubrick did make, and to give a possible answer to why he made only 13 of them: he spent a lot of time looking for a good story in the first half of his career, and then spent even more time trying to make a story he liked work.

In fact, a display of the unmade films shows that there are two broad periods in Kubrick’s creative odyssey, before and after Dr. Strangelove, which is quite tellingly the first film he produced by himself. The years of the Harris-Kubrick Pictures were hectic but filled with transient interests: Kubrick never renewed his intention of filming the stories that he abandoned in the 1950s and ‘60s. Dr Strangelove was the first film that started, as Kubrick himself said, with an obsessional interest in the subject matter – nuclear warfare, in this case. After Strangelove, Kubrick focused on deeply personal projects, that he worked on endlessly. That doesn’t mean that the first half is less important, though: in fact, the ideas he examined in the ‘50s were possibly instrumental for his later films.

Today’s main topic is Kubrick’s early years, so we may take a closer look at the first half of my list and discuss these projects in greater details later. Just as a first observation, I think it’s interesting to note that two projects were intended as television series (Operation Madball and Three of a Kind), and that virtually all others are genre pictures. This says a lot about both Kubrick’s and Harris’s tastes and strategies, and the prevailing production practices of the time.

It’s easy to see how Kubrick favoured crime thrillers and espionage stories – point in case, what James discovered in the newly arrived material supports this strand –, films dealing with romantic and sexual relationships – again, more discoveries here –, and war films, with an enduring attraction for the Civil War and the Second World War.

A bird’s eye view of all the projects perhaps brings forward more stimulating thoughts. For example, it becomes possible to trace back to the early ‘70s Kubrick’s lifelong fascination with Nazi Germany and chronicle its evolution towards Aryan Papers, including dramatic variations like a serious film based on his wife Christiane’s childhood, or a grotesque, black comedy about the entertainment industry under Goebbels. James revealed yesterday a possible project titled Nazi Paratrooper, so Kubrick’s interest in the topic could have started even earlier.

Or we can also see how, once he had found Arthur Schnitzler’s Traumnovelle, Kubrick didn’t consider any other romance, as if Traumnovelle was for him the quintessential story to explore everything about men and women. What he wasn’t sure of was, again, the tone to give to the story: a drama, a comedy, an art-house film, and so on.

Another strand deals with stories pertaining to the so-called speculative fiction, which we thought originated with a discarded framework device for Dr. Strangelove, but Mick found out that it was earlier when Harris-Kubrick considered a short story by Clarke in the late ‘50s – and then manifested mostly with science-fiction stories, namely Shadow on the Sun and Supertoys Last All Summer Long, but included also fantasy films, such as The Ring of the Nibelung and Eric Brighteyes.

A particular interest for me lies in the long development of Supertoys because it is Kubrick’s second and last attempt at creating an original story, after his work with Arthur C. Clarke on 2001: A Space Odyssey. It is revealing to see that Kubrick employed the same method: in both cases he selected a short story and worked with its author to expand it, incorporating elements from more short stories by the same author. Things with Brian Aldiss didn’t work out as well as with Clarke, so Kubrick sought help elsewhere and I am currently exploring all the different story-lines Kubrick invented with Ian Watson, again Clarke, Steven Spielberg and Sara Maitland. For example, Watson produced an overwhelming array of characters and plot ideas, that Kubrick systematically rejected, even when they were absolutely brilliant and promising, and I think this process could not only help us understand Kubrick’s rationale for a good story, but it may also explain the decline in his output after Full Metal Jacket.

In fact, such analysis of Kubrick’s unmade films compels us to see how Kubrick’s tortuous quest for a good story was almost always unsuccessful. He spent a lot of time and effort in looking for a literary property to adapt into a film – he even set up a company to hire readers to write reports about promising books and scripts – but after the collapse of his pet-project Napoleon in 1969, all the films he managed to make were suggested to him by someone else: A Clockwork Orange and Barry Lyndon by his wife Christiane, The Shining by Warner Bros. executive John Calley, The Short-Timers by writer Michael Herr, who also found Wartime Lies. Only Eyes Wide Shut is a film that stemmed from one of his lifelong interests. Kubrick tried obsessively to make some stories work, but in the end the films he made had a relatively straightforward genesis from book to film, much like those he made in partnership with James B. Harris.

It’s therefore interesting to see how elements from an aborted and much cherished project pollinated the film Kubrick was working on at a given moment: for example, the ending of Napoleon is very much a harbinger for the closing remark in Barry Lyndon, Schnitzler’s stories influenced the male-female relationships both in Napoleon and in The Shining, and the plight of Jews under the Third Reich informed certain scenes in the Supertoys treatments.

Several open questions remain. The most obvious is whether these are all the projects Kubrick worked on. We have already seen they are not. The newly arrived boxes at the Kubrick Archive suggest Kubrick was much more productive in those years than previously thought. There are more archives to examine, too – for example some of these projects have been found among the papers of publisher Alfred Knopf. A project is sometimes mentioned in a letter that Kubrick wrote to a colleague or a friend, and there must be hundreds of letters out there. This is obviously more relevant for the 1950s and early ’60s, as we have seen with the new discoveries.

The time before Kubrick’s association with Harris should be studied with care, too: basically, what did Kubrick do when he was struggling to become a film director? The fact that he accepted the job on The Seafarers and his statement about working for a documentary made by the State Department suggest that he might have taken more jobs to earn money or gain experience.

Another issue is how much we know about each project: only for a few of them there is archival documentation and for even fewer we have a script or at least a treatment. Sometimes we are lucky to be able to read a few pages of scattered notes. Some other projects are just a title that was mentioned in the trade press, or a literary property that Kubrick enquired into. I talked extensively with James B. Harris, Jan Harlan and Tony Frewin, yet, as revealing as these conversations were, I couldn’t detail everything – they simply don’t know or can’t remember. And when they do remember, their memories have been proved wrong by the new material, for example James Fenwick told me Harris-Kubrick was considering Dr. Zhivago, which was something I found mentioned in the press, though denied by Harris when I spoke to him some years ago. We run the risk of equating passing interests with projects that Kubrick really cared for. We may be running out of time, too: people with direct knowledge on these tentative productions may leave us relatively soon.

Finally, my list does not include unsolicited projects at all – that is, scripts or books that Kubrick received for consideration. I had to draw a line somewhere, and I decided that an unsolicited project is of little purpose to understand Kubrick’s artistic concerns. Yet, for example, Peter Krämer noted that there is a script in the Archive about a childcare robot who protects an 11-year-old boy; it is titled NANNI and the letters ‘A’ and ‘I’ are highlighted in the manuscript and resolved as ‘Artificial Intelligence.’ The script is dated 1989 and it could contain plot-lines that may have inspired Kubrick and his co-writers for A.I., and even its title. An examination of the unsolicited scripts held in the Archive would therefore be recommended.

Fig 1.

Fig 2.

Photos of Filippo's Uliviri's presentation as he organized Kubrick's work thematically. War Films in Figure 1 and Crime Films in Figure 2. Photos by Karen Ritzenhoff.

Panel: 

The conversation this afternoon started off with Filippo saying that the list he presented this morning was a byproduct of the more general research he had done. He did so by going through the treatments in the archive, looking at Variety magazine, and other trade press sources, even down to the local ones. By finding mentions of projects and then listing the sources that support a particular project the list was assembled. A majority of these projects was already described in books, and verified by interviewing Kubrick’s coworkers namely James B. Harris, Tony Frewin, and Jan Harlan, particularly for Kubrick’s interest in Nazi Germany.  There are more in the boxes in the Archive now, so the list we saw is incomplete.

It was then discussed Schnitzler’s Traumnovelle and how Stanley was interested in adapting it all the way back in the 1950s. James B. Harris remembers working on Schnitzler’s Death of a Bachelor. It is unknown exactly when Kubrick read Traumnovelle but we do know he was interested in Schnitzler’s work in 1956.  Peter Schnitzler (Arthur Schnitzler’s descendant) visited Stanley Kubrick during the filming of Spartacus and was on good terms with Kubrick.

This brought up the question of just how did Stanley Kubrick choose his projects? It is the continued pursuit of a specific theme that crystalizes this theme into a film, in this case from 1956 all the way to 1999. This led to ideas being stretched far beyond recognition, e.g. Dr Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.

Jan Harlan on Stanley Kubrick’s research into Nazi Germany said: “the topic is so massive you cannot tackle it in one direction so you just explore it.” It was a general interest in a topic that got Kubrick going. When he found a story in which he felt he could properly explore said topic, he knew he could use the story to make a film. Even because many of his unmade projects have overlapping thematic ideas, as an example, Napoleon has marital drama and mother son dynamics, besides the obvious themes of power and war.

Elements to these themes are added, and transformed, but he does repeat himself upon a closer reading. He even is quoted by Filippo saying, when asked how is it going, “I’m trying not to repeat myself.” So, it was a problem he wrestled with. Therefore, Kubrick is a filmmaker that defines his voice through a list of themes that he then crystalizes into movies. As Lawrence Ratna said on the first day Kubrick doesn’t conceive what he wants but rather recognizes from the ideas presented to him what he wants to put in his films. So, it is only natural that he recognizes the same themes.

The second major factor in a Kubrick production being completed is exterior factors. James Harris said: either the screenplay was not good enough or other things interfered.

And the soundtracks are an example of this phenomenon: Alex North’s soundtrack was recorded but not used. Wendy Carlos’ soundtrack for The Shining was not used. Nina Rota was just contacted to participate in Barry Lyndon as an arranger. Ennio Morricone and Pink Floyd were considered for A Clockwork Orange. So, if things did in fact interfere and ideas not used, they would get reused in other productions. Napoleon and Barry Lyndon are a clear example of this phenomenon.

As another example Kubrick thought highly of the novel Kaputt, pondering how to turn it into a film. Because of his fascination with the Holocaust. Although this was never made, we do have genocidal representations in Spartacus. In Dr. Strangelove Dr. Strangelove has eerily similar ideas to Hitler for the post apocalyptical world.

So, it was asked, what are these themes? And here are some we came up with:

War male on male violence, sexual relations and male on female violence, supernatural, technology and its role in humanity, child parent relationship and power politics.

What we realized in our discussion is that Kubrick (who is seen as a filmmaker who always made very different movies) did in fact have recurring themes. So, it is best to organize Kubrick’s unmade films by thematic ideas rather than genres which are arbitrary. [3]

Filippo Ulivieri presenting his findings on Kubrick's unmade films. Photo by Karen Ritzenhoff.

Bibliography: 

1. “Filippo Ulivieri.” Academia.edu, https://independent.academia.edu/FilippoUlivieri.

2. Archivio Kubrick: Informazioni Sul Sito, http://www.archiviokubrick.it/ak/crediti/index.html.

3. Ulivieri, Filippo. “Kubrick’s Unmade Films .” Stanley Kubrick, Life and Legacy . 18 July 2019, Leiden.

Presentation by: Fillipo Ulivieri

Blog post by: Miguel Mira