Newly found Stanley Kubrick script ideas focus on marital strife

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2019/jul/12/newly-found-stanley-kubrick-script-ideas-focus-marital-strife

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He is revered as a master film-maker and visual stylist, but made only 13 feature films. Now ideas for three previously unknown screenplays worked on by Stanley Kubrick have come to light – with marriage, jealousy and adultery the recurring themes.

They date from between 1954 and 1956, when he was having marital problems with his second wife, Ruth Sobotka, an actor and dancer.

Under the title Married Man are 35 pages of typed script with handwritten annotations, and further pages of handwritten notes, some scrawled untidily in pencil. Another, headed The Perfect Marriage, has handwritten notes and seven pages of scenes. A third, called Jealousy, has 13 pages of typed and handwritten material for a story about resentment between a married couple.

Kubrick’s masterpieces include his first world war classic, Paths of Glory, one of cinema’s most powerful anti-war movies, and his Roman epic, Spartacus, both of which starred Kirk Douglas. He pushed the boundaries of special effects with 2001: A Space Odyssey.

In his opening lines for Married Man, Kubrick wrote: “Marriage is like a long meal with dessert served at the beginning … Can you imagine the horrors of living with a woman who fastens herself on you like a rubber suction cup whose entire life revolves around you morning, noon and night? … It’s like drowning in a sea of feathers. Sinking deeper and deeper into the soft, suffocating depths of habit and familiarity. If she’d only fight back. Get mad or jealous, even just once. Look, last night I went out for a walk. Right after dinner. I came home at two in the morning. Don’t ask me where I was.”

The material was recently transferred to the Kubrick archive at the University of the Arts London.

Nathan Abrams, a professor of film studies at Bangor University and a leading Kubrick expert, expressed excitement over the material. He said: “There’s masses of new material we didn’t know he’d done. It was all previously sitting in his house, now transferred by his estate. These are projects that Kubrick wanted to do but didn’t do. I have not come across references to these in anything I’ve read previously.”

Within them are ideas that would end up in Eyes Wide Shut four decades later – notably in Jealousy, an argument with a wife after a man comes home drunk, and in The Perfect Marriage, in which Kubrick jotted down notes: “Setting Xmas. Wife preparing for party Xmas eve that night. Fussing. Husband depressed by Xmas. Story about marriage, fidelity, cheating.”

Kubrick, an American who lived most of his life in Britain, died in 1999 shortly after completing Eyes Wide Shut, the controversial psychosexual thriller starring Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman.

Abrams expressed frustration that so much material had emerged just after he had finished his forthcoming book, titled Eyes Wide Shut: Stanley Kubrick and the Making of His Final Film, co-written with Robert Kolker and published by Oxford University Press later this month on the film’s 20th anniversary.

He said: “By his own confession, Kubrick wasn’t a writer. There’s a reason he worked with other writers on his films. In terms of literary merit, not high. Kubrick’s a film-maker. So it’s what he would have done with it that counts. Kirk Douglas once said: ‘Stanley … has always functioned better if he got a good writer and worked with him as an editor … I have a copy of the terrible Paths of Glory that he wrote to make it more commercial. If we had shot that script, Stanley might still be living in an apartment in Brooklyn instead of in a castle in England …’.”

He said the fascinating new material shed light on Kubrick’s interests and what motivated him. “The 1950s is probably the least understood period of Kubrick’s career. This shows that he’s working on far more than we previously knew. He’s quite productive. He’s trying his hand at being a writer. But, after Killer’s Kiss, his 1955 film, they were never based on original material. They were always developed with someone from something.”

He added: “Sobotka, who he was married to when he’s developing these screenplays, had a very formative influence on him. But we don’t know so much about it or her. Things weren’t going well with her in Los Angeles. He went off to Germany to make Paths of Glory in 1957, and met one of its actresses, Christiane, who became his third and final wife.”