by hanshan » Tue Dec 06, 2005 12:46 pm
<br><br><!--EZCODE ITALIC START--><em>Just because you like my work doesn’t mean that I owe you anything.</em><!--EZCODE ITALIC END--> <br><br><br>-Bob Dylan <br><br><br>some random excerpts from an article <br>by Michael Herr on Kubrick:<br><br>From: Vanity Fair <br><br><br>Title: <!--EZCODE LINK START--><a href="http://www.visual-memory.co.uk/sk/memories/mh.htm" target="top">The Real Stanley Kubrick by Michael Herr</a><!--EZCODE LINK END--><br><br><br>Everybody brings his adolescence forward through life with him,<br><br><br>“Always thinking, huh, Stanley?” I said after one of those exhausting (for me) rooftop-to-rooftop riffs of his. I felt that these calls were starting to take up most of my time, yet I knew they didn’t take up most of his, that he was doing other things, “many many of them.” I acquired a sense of awe at the energy that had coincided so forcefully with my own. You really needed your chops for this; you’d feel like some poor traveler caught in a ground blizzard, 3 to 30 times a week and usually after 10 at night, when he usually started wailing. Sometimes I’d duck his calls. <br><br>He disliked the usual references to his having been a “chess hustler” in his Greenwich Village days, as though this impugned the gravity and beauty of the exercise, the suggestion that his game wasn’t pour le sport or, more correctly, pour l'art. To win the game was important, to win the money was irresistible, but it was nothing compared with his game, with the searching, endless action of working on his game. But of course he was hustling, he was always hustling; as he grew older and moved beyond still photography, chess became movies, and movies became chess by other means. I doubt that he ever thought of chess as just a game, or even as a game at all. I do imagine that a lot of people sitting across the board from him got melted, fried, and fragmented when Stanley let that cool ray come streaming down out of his eyes - talk about penetrating looks and piercing intelligence; here they’d sat down to a nice game of chess, and all of a sudden he was doing the thinking for both of them. <br><br><!--EZCODE CENTER START--><div style="text-align:center">-****-</div><!--EZCODE CENTER END--><br><br>A powerful vision can be very fragile while it’s still only in the mind, and people have gone to extraordinary lengths to protect it.<br><br><br>(This photograph could also suggest why, when he came to make his “youth movie,” actual youth was completely absent from it. A Clockwork Orange was released in 1971 to unprecedented controversy, odium even, revealing presumptions in the critical "community" about the high order of our so-called civilization that Stanley was affronting here, a condemnation of the ambiguity that has always been the sign of the first-rate. I think he scared himself with that one, which speaks well for any artist, art and life riding so close together and out of control here that there was no time for one to imitate the other, it was pouring from the same fount. The copycat beatings and killings started as soon as it was shown in England, and he permanently withdrew it from release there. Right-minded people couldn’t believe that he was aware of what a repellent film he’d made, because if he’d been aware he could never have made it. But certainly he was aware, and perfectly sincere; he didn’t care that it was repellent - it was meant to be repellent -as long as it was beautiful.) <br><br><br><!--EZCODE CENTER START--><div style="text-align:center">-****-</div><!--EZCODE CENTER END--><br><br><br><!--EZCODE ITALIC START--><em>There are some wonderful women in Stanley’s movies, and some of them he had enough respect for that he made them as dangerous as any of the men.</em><!--EZCODE ITALIC END--><br><br><br><br><!--EZCODE CENTER START--><div style="text-align:center">-****-</div><!--EZCODE CENTER END--><br><br><br>When we first met I told him secondhand stories about the filming of Apocalypse Now, and what a tough shoot it had been. “They’re all tough, Michael,” he said, and they were, at least the way he did it. Yet something drew people to it, and kept them at it, even into the part of the process where you felt like you were a slave, to it and to him, like he and his movie were inseparable, insatiable, you were trapped in it, even though the door was always open and you were technically, if not always contractually, free to walk through it at any time. People stayed, holding on to whatever piece of the prevailing obsession was going around at the moment, dragging massive blocks nights and weekends and holidays to build another one of Stanley’s pyramids, and whether cheerful or resentful didn’t matter that much to him, although he preferred cheerful. <br><br><br><br><!--EZCODE CENTER START--><div style="text-align:center">-****-</div><!--EZCODE CENTER END--><br><br><br>The more highly paid you were, or the closer to the actual shooting, the more enslaved you were likely to be. If you were right there on the set with film running, the pressure could be amazing, or so I was convincingly told by many of the cast and crew of Full Metal Jacket. I wasn’t the cameraman or the art director or even a grip, or, thank God, an actor. I was only even on the location two or three times, so maybe I wasn’t properly enslaved at all. I may have rewritten a few scenes 20 or 30 times - I would have done that anyway - but I never had to go through the number of takes Stanley would require. It was everything anyone ever said it was and more, and worse, whatever it took to "get it right,” as he always called it. What he meant by that I couldn’t say, nor could hundreds of people who have worked for him, but none of us doubted that he knew what he meant. <br><br><br><!--EZCODE ITALIC START--><em>every one of his films making its powerful assertion that pace is story as surely as character is destiny.</em><!--EZCODE ITALIC END--><br><br><br><!--EZCODE CENTER START--><div style="text-align:center">-****-</div><!--EZCODE CENTER END--><br><br><br> I sometimes thought that he was ruled by his aversions, chief among them - worse than waste, haste, carelessness to details, hugging, and even germs - was bullshit in all its proliferating manifestations, subtle and gross, from the flabby political face telling lies on TV to the most private, much more devastating lies we tell ourselves. Culture lies were especially revolting. Hypocrisy was not some petty human foible, it was the corrupted essence of our predicament, which for Stanley was purely an existential predicament. In terms of narrative, since movies are stories, the most contemptible lie was sentimentality, and the most disgusting lie was sanctimoniousness.<br><br><br><!--EZCODE CENTER START--><div style="text-align:center">-****-</div><!--EZCODE CENTER END--><br><br><br>Stanley could hardly fail to notice that very few directors had anything close to autonomy on their pictures. He said the way the studios were run in the 50s made him think of Clemenceau’s remark about the Allies winning World War I because our generals were marginally less stupid than their generals. He was determined to find some way to succeed there, because he didn’t know where else he could make movies. His ambition was spectacular; he had talent and confidence, a steely brain and huge brass balls. He saw clearly that on every picture someone had to be in charge, and figured that it might as well be him. <br><br><br>He told me that he owed it all to Kirk Douglas. Douglas once called Stanley “a talented shit,” and this may be one of the nicer things he said about him. He’d starred in Paths of Glory, and even though he’d done himself a lot of good by it, I imagine that he felt Stanley owed him, and would be grateful and pliant when he hired him to replace Anthony Mann after three weeks of shooting on Spartacus. The script had been written by Dalton Trumbo, who was still blacklisted in 1958, and when the producers agonized over whether they dared give him the writing credit or not, Stanley suggested that they solve the problem by giving the credit to him. (Douglas says that Stanley never wrote one word of that script, but I doubt this. Laurence Olivier’s Crassus is the most complex character ever to appear in an epic-genre film, almost Shakespearean, and I’m sure Stanley wrote and otherwise informed a lot of those scenes. I don’t think he wrote lines like “Get up, Spartacus, you Thracian dog.”) Kirk Douglas (and this is rich) was offended by Stanley’s chutzpah. <br><br><br>But specifically, conclusively, it was Kirk on horseback and Stanley on foot, just about to shoot a scene and having yet another of their violent disagreements. Kirk rode his white freedom-fighter stallion into Stanley to make his point, which was that he was the star and the producer, turning his horse’s flank against Stanley, pushing him back farther and farther to drive it home again, then riding away, leaving Stanley standing in the dust, furious and humiliated, as one of the wise guys on the crew walks by and says, “Remember, Stanley:The play’s the thing.” <br><br><!--EZCODE CENTER START--><div style="text-align:center">-****-</div><!--EZCODE CENTER END--><br><br><br> I don't want to give the impression that I didn’t get extremely irritated, that I never thought he was a cheap prick, or that his lack of trust wasn’t sometimes obstructive and less than wholesome, that his demands and requirements weren’t just too much. Nothing got between the dog and his meat, somewhere it was that basic - I only just hesitate to say primitive. It was definitely unobstructed; you’d have to be Herman Melville to transmit the full strength of Stanley’s will - My Way or the Highway - yet he rarely raised his voice. It was hard to know whether he was just supernaturally focused or utterly fixated. “What is it they say, Michael - if something can go wrong, it will?” Vigilance wasn’t enough, pre-emption was the only way to go. Don’t think just because you’ve known a few control freaks in your time that you can imagine what Stanley Kubrick was like.<br><br>Stanley would have said it was cash, hut I think the most perishable element in the making of a movie is reverence. On most pictures it rarely survives the first day of shooting, but in Stanley’s case it had a life of its own. You can follow its career over the course of a series of interviews, usually but not always with actors, normally spanning a couple of years: They’re so honored to be working with Stanley, they’d do anything in the world to work with Stanley, such a privilege they’d work with Stanley for free. And then they work with Stanley and go through hells that nothing in their careers could have prepared them for; they think they must have been mad to get involved, they think that they’d die before they would ever work with him again, that fixated maniac, and when it’s all behind them and the profound fatigue of so much intensity has worn off, they’d do anything in the world to work for him again. For the rest of their professional lives they long to work with someone who cares the way Stanley did, someone they can learn from. They look for someone to respect the way they came to respect him, but they can’t find anybody. Their received, fictionalized, show-business reverence has been chastened and reborn as real reverence. I’ve heard this story so many times. <br>He didn’t exactly utter the word “actors” under his breath like a curse, but he definitely thought of them as wild cards, something to be overcome with difficulty. They were so lazy about learning their lines, were often otherwise “unprepared,” so capricious, so childlike, and the younger ones were completely spoiled. There was even something mysterious, and to him a little freakish, about anybody who could and would stand up in front of other people to assume and express emotions at will, sometimes to the point of tears. <br><br><br><!--EZCODE CENTER START--><div style="text-align:center">-****-</div><!--EZCODE CENTER END--><br><br><br>"He’s probably the most heartfelt person I ever met. It’s hard for him, being from the Bronx with that neighborhood mentality, and he tries to cover it up. Right underneath that veneer is a very loving, conscientious man, who doesn’t like pain, who doesn’t like to see humans suffering or animals suffering. I was really surprised by the man.” <br><br><br>This from a guy who really suffered for most of the year that he was in London shooting Full Metal Jacket, as part of an ensemble of young actors, some of them hardly actors at all, who had only the most rudimentary sense of what Stanley actually meant by “knowing your lines”; by which he meant that you had to know them so completely that there were no other possible lines anywhere in your head, and certainly no lines of your own, unless you were Peter Sellers or Lee Ermey. They were a jolly enthusiastic crew, some very talented, some not, all thrilled to be in a Stanley Kubrick movie - I think they all saw blue skies and high times ahead - but there was a plateau of discipline that they couldn’t have known existed before. Stanley showed them, and it hurt. <br>I have no idea what really went on for Stanley with actors. I do know that it was his belief, or his prevailing hunch, that actors were really working only when film was running. If he had any preconceptions about what he wanted them to be doing, he kept them to himself. Maybe actors were essentially visuals for Stanley, like Alfred Hitchcock and his blondes. Stanley said he didn’t like Hitchcock much - ”all that phony rear projection” - but they had a lot in common. I was always impressed by what Hitchcock did with, or to, James Stewart in Vertigo, ruthlessly (but far more subtly than Carl Dreyer making Falconetti kneel on cobblestones all night to experience the suffering of Joan of Arc) drawing a performance out of him that was so sweaty, tortured, and unwholesome that, if Stewart had known he had any of that in him, he would have done anything in the world to conceal it. I think that Stanley did something like this with just about every actor he ever worked with. <br><br><br>Nor could I explain that strange irresistible requirement he had for pushing his actors as far beyond a “naturalistic” style as he could get them to go, and often selecting their most extreme, awkward, emotionally confusing work for his final cut. The peculiarity of it: George C. Scott in Dr. Strangelove, Patrick Magee in A Clockwork Orange, and Jack Nicholson in The Shining, just to pick the most blinding examples; Scott complained publicly that Stanley not only directed him way over the top but also chose the most overwrought takes for the final cut, while Nicholson’s performance turned The Shining into a movie that largely failed as a genre piece but worked unforgettably on levels where it didn’t matter that there was a huge movie star and great actor on the premises or not. (Nicholson did some of his greatest work, and his very worst, in The Shining, and the same could be said of the director.) “That was much more real,” Stanley told him after a take, “but it isn’t interesting.” Even the biggest stars knew what it was like to be a pawn in Stanley’s game:“That was really great. Let’s go again.” <br>They’d come to him for direction, and he’d send them back to work to find out for themselves. On A Clockwork Orange, when Malcolm McDowell asked, he told him, “Malcolm, I’m not RADA. I hired you to do the acting.” He was preparing a scene for Spartacus in which Laurence Olivier and Nina Foch are sitting in their seats above the arena waiting for the gladiators to enter and fight to the death, and Nina Foch asked him for motivation. “What am I doing, Stanley?” she asked, and Stanley said, “You’re sitting here with Larry waiting for the gladiators to come out.” <br><br><br><br><!--EZCODE CENTER START--><div style="text-align:center">-****-</div><!--EZCODE CENTER END--><br><br><br>The usual M.O. was for him to become incredibly close to actors during shooting, and then to never see them again. A lot of actors were terribly hurt by this. There’s no question that the affection he felt for them and the inspiration he extended to them were genuine, and this made the break even more painful. For Stanley’s part, I never heard him speak of an actor, even ones who had given him a hard time or been “disloyal” once the film came out, with anything but affection, like a family member who’d gone off, dispelled into some new career phase, even if it was oblivion. <br><br><br>As I write this, the release of his last film two months away. Only a few people have seen it, and already the entertainment media is holding itself ready to be shocked and offended, or pretending to. “What’s new?” Stanley would have said, as if it hardly warranted the question mark. He’d begun planning the publicity campaign before he completed the final cut of the film, but I’m sure that he’d thought about it for years. Some people seem to think that he’s controlling it from the grave. It’s inconceivable to anyone who knew him that an energy like that could stop just because death has occurred, that it isn’t going on in some form, circulating. This very piece is evidence of that, since it was his idea that I write about him, and specifically for this magazine. <br>All the things that people believe they know about Stanley they get from the press, and the entertainment press at that. Almost none of these reporters ever met him, because he thought you had to be crazy to do interviews unless you had a picture coming out, and even then it had to be very carefully managed. It wasn’t personal with him, but I think it became personal for a lot of them. They work hard, much too hard, the belt is moving faster and faster, carrying increasingly empty forms, silly and brutal and thankfully evanescent entertainments. You can’t go to the movies anymore without slipping in all the Pavlovian drool running down the aisles, big show business Manifest. This is the world that Stanley chose to become a master of, and one of the ways he did it was by keeping himself to himself. So I can see, in a time when so many celebrities are so eager to hurl themselves into our headlights, where anyone who doesn’t want to talk with the entertainment press might seem eccentric, reclusive, and misanthropic; crazy, autocratic, and humorless: cold and phobic and arrogant. <br><br><br>But I must say that a lot of people took it hard; people he’d known, some of them for 40 years, or people he hadn’t seen in a decade; certainly his family, since he’d been a loving husband and father - amazing, the number of people who loved him, and the way they loved him, and the size of the hole he made in our lives by dying. He was so alive to us that it was hard to believe, and then there was that other thing (“We’ve seen it in Homer, Michael”), people regarding their dead heroes and thinking, If it can do this to him, imagine what it can do to us. <br><br><br>He’d never talk about his movies while he was making them, and he didn’t like talking about them afterward very much, even to friends, except maybe to mention the grosses. Most of all, he didn’t want to talk about their “meaning,” because he believed so passionately in their meaning that to try to talk about it could only spoil it for him. He might tell you how he did it, but never why. I think that he, an arch-materialist (maybe) and an artist of the material world, made the single most inspired spiritual image in all of film, the Star Child watching with equanimity the timeless empty galaxies of existence-after-existence, waiting patiently once again to be born. Somebody asked him how he ever thought of the ending of 2001. “I don’t know,” he said. “How does anybody ever think of anything?” <br> <br> <br><br><!--EZCODE FONT START--><span style="color:blue;font-family:comic sans ms;font-size:xx-small;">....</span><!--EZCODE FONT END--> <p></p><i></i>
