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STANLEY KUBRICK: KNOWN AND UNKNOWN Peter Krämer
Since the opening of the Stanley Kubrick Archive at the University of the Arts London in 2007, work on the film-maker has expanded dramatically. With important precursors in previous academic as well as non-academic publications, recent scholarly books, essays and conference papers have, among other things, begun to explore, in considerable detail, the production histories of Kubrick's films and the many projects he worked on but never completed. Based on extensive archival research and a wide range of secondary sources, this essay offers a systematic survey of Kubrick's unrealised projects, with regards to three distinctive phases in his career: the formative years up to 1955, his partnership with producer James B. Harris from 1955 to 1962, and his work as one of Hollywood's leading producer-writer-directors after 1962. Discussing both production processes and thematic patterns, the essay emphasises the close relationship between Kubrick's unrealised projects and the films he made. It also highlights the fact that much still remains unknown, despite the extraordinary level of attention Kubrick has received across the decades.
In a career spanning just over half a century, Stanley Kubrick took numerous pictures for Look magazine, made four documentary shorts and 13 feature films, and published a range of articles and books connected to his film-making. The vast majority of the work Kubrick presented to the public, including all of his photographs, articles and documentaries as well as seven of his features, came out within the first 20 years of his career, between 1945, when Look first published one of his pictures, and 1964, when Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb was released into cinemas.1 By contrast, the last 20 years only saw the release of three features — The Shining (1980), Full Metal Jacket (1987)
Correspondence to: Peter Krämer, School of Art, Media and American Studies, University of East Anglia, Norwich, NR4 7TJ, UK. E-mail: p.kramer@uea.ac.uk
©2017 IAMHIST & Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
2     Peter Krämer
and Eyes Wide Shut (1999) — and the publication of the scripts (co-authored by Kubrick) for his final two productions.2
This brief summary of Kubrick's career serves to foreground one obvious conclusion about its overall shape — a massive reduction in output from the early to the later years — while also, implicitly, raising questions about how the various kinds of output are to be treated in scholarly work (is there, for example, much value in closely examining a promotional documentary Kubrick was commissioned to make for the Seafarers' International Union [SIU] or an article he wrote for a magazine?), and what is to be included in Kubrick's output in the first place. If the pictures he published in Look are included, why not the pictures he took of Virginia Leith, the 'star' of his first feature Fear and Desire (1953), which were used in advertisements for and magazine articles about the film?3 If his SIU documentary The Seafarers (1953) is included, why not his work as a second unit director for the television mini-series Mr. Lincoln (1952—5 3)?4 If the picture book Kubrick produced for A Clockwork Orange is included,5 why not the novelisation of Dr. Strangelove, which was written by Peter George, but closely supervised by Kubrick (the same applies to Arthur C. Clarke's novel 2001: A Space Odyssey):6 More fundamentally, any expansion, along these lines, of the corpus of published works usually studied by Kubrick scholars, together with the observation that Kubrick's output declined so dramatically across the decades, serves as a reminder that many, and in the last two decades even the vast majority, of the professional activities he engaged in did not result in tangible products being presented to the public at all.
To illustrate this last point, it is worth briefly to outline some of the archival traces left by the work Kubrick did in the years after the release of Full Metal Jacket. The Stanley Kubrick Archive at the University of the Arts London contains material from 1991 to 1993 on his planned adaptation (under the title Aryan Papers) of Louis Begley's 1991 Holocaust novel Wartime Lies,7 and also documents as well as drawings from the late 1980s and early to mid-1990s concerning a movie loosely based on Brian Aldiss's 1969 Science Fiction short story 'Supertoys Last All Summer Long' about the experiences of a robot boy which Kubrick had been working on since the early 1980s.8 In addition, the archive contains a script, dated 4 June 1989, by William Kotzwinkle; it carries the title 'NANNI (artificial intelligence)' ('A' and T are highlighted in the original typescript) and deals with a childcare robot who tries to protect an 11 -year-old boy after they crash land on an island used for the staging of combat between robot armies.9 This may well have been an unsolicited submission, but it does relate to Kubrick's 'Supertoys' project (for which he eventually settled on the title A.I. in November 1993), and he is likely to have read it carefully, not least because Kotzwinkle, who had written the novelisation of E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial (1982), evoked many aspects of Spielberg's film in his script, and Kubrick had previously acknowledged E. T. as a major influence on his thinking about the filmic potential of Aldiss's story.11
Then there are copies of many dozens of notes which accompanied cheques sent, between 1988 and 1990, to people who Kubrick's assistant Anthony Frewin paid to write synopses of books, prominent among them Science Fiction novels and volumes about the Holocaust.12 Presumably, on the basis of these synopses Kubrick decided which of the books were worth reading, with a view of possibly finding a story he might want to adapt into a movie. Finally, there is material relating to
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a potential movie about Henri Dericourt, a French double agent during the Second World War, including an option taken out on the film rights for Robert Marshall's 1988 book All the King's Men on 23 August 1989 and an 'Assignment of all Rights' for this volume dated 31 March 1990.13
It is obvious from these (as well as other) sources that Kubrick was always on the lookout for stories, and indeed was constantly working on developing some of the stories he had found into movies, whereby most of these movies never got made (A.l. being a special case, insofar as it was eventually made by Steven Spielberg, who Kubrick had been discussing the project with for several years).14 Across the last two decades, biographies and other books addressed to Kubrick aficionados, rather than specifically to academic readers, have shown considerable interest in the film-maker's unrealised projects, especially the Napoleon biopic he worked on in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and in the production histories of the films he made.15 By contrast, until recently, 'purely' academic publications on Kubrick have largely neglected these dimensions of his work and instead focused on critical analyses of his films and, as far as his adaptations are concerned, on comparisons between a film and its source text.16
However, the opening of the Stanley Kubrick Archive in 2007 has led to a rapidly growing number of scholarly essays and books dealing in considerable detail with the making of Kubrick's films. Furthermore, beginning with Geoffrey Cocks's pioneering chapter 'Almost Directed by Stanley Kubrick, 19S3—2001' in his 2004 study The Wolf at the Door: Stanley Kubrick, History, and the Holocaust,1* a small bod| of academic work exploring the film-maker's unrealised projects has emerged. This work draws, much like the research into the production histories of his films, on the (academic as well as non-academic) literature on Kubrick and a wide range of primary sources, including material in the Stanley Kubrick Archive as well as other archival collections, interviews with his collaborators and newspaper databases.
What we are witnessing, then, with regards to discussions of Kubrick's professional activities, is a certain convergence between the writing academics produce primarily for each other and publications addressed to a more general readership. One of the objectives of this converging research is simply to offer a fuller account than was previously available of Kubrick's working life, and with this also a new perspective on his films. What did he spend his time on, in particular during the increasingly long periods between the releases of his films? How did he organise his work? More specifically, how did his expansive search for stories and the selection of some of them for potential film projects, with several of these often being considered at the same time, relate to the production of a fairly small corpus of films? Why did he, in most cases, use published stories as a starting point for potential film projects rather than writing or commissioning original treatments and scripts, and what kinds of transformation did these stories undergo before some of them were eventually filmed? What distinguished the few stories he turned into films from the vast majority he dropped — but also: what did the two sets of stories have in common? How might his work on unrealised projects have informed the films he made, and can these projects therefore offer us new insights into his films?
4     Peter Krämer
As systematic research on these questions has only recently begun, it is too early for conclusive answers. Instead, in this essay I want to offer a prehminary overview of film projects Kubrick worked on across his career, with a particular emphasis on the sources he selected for (possible) adaptation and on the thematic connections between his films and his unrealised projects. In the first part of this essay, I consider the films Kubrick made, while the second explores his unrealised projects.
Kubrick's Films
In the light of the fact that the vast amount of writing about Stanley Kubrick has made very diverse claims about his films, often highlighting what appears to be their great diversity, it is useful to delineate important commonalities between them. From the outset, Kubrick's career placed him at the heart, rather than the
20
margins, of the American entertainment industry. Following his photographic work for the mass market picture magazine Look, almost all of his films, even the early, extremely low-budget and privately funded productions, were made for distribution by the major Hollywood studios (and Mr. Lincoln, the television programme Kubrick did second unit work for, was shown on CBS). The only exceptions are the 19S2 short film about the World Assembly of Youth that Kubrick made for the US State Department (little is known about this production and it does not appear to have been shown widely); The Seafarers, a half hour promotional documentary that was probably mainly screened at events organised by the SIU; and his first feature, the allegorical war movie Fear and Desire (19S3), for which Kubrick turned to art house distributor Joseph Burstyn only after it had been rejected by the majors. By contrast, his first two documentary shorts Day of the Fight (1951) and Flying Padre (1951) were distributed into movie theatres by RKO, and United Artists, Universal, MGM, Columbia and Warner Bros, distributed, and — apart from the privately funded Killer's Kiss (1955) and the Seven Arts production Lolita (1962) — also (co-)financed, the features Kubrick made after Fear and Desire.
In addition to its close association with the major studios, Kubrick's filmic output is characterised by its reliance on previously published stories. While his documentaries deal with actual people and organisations, the very first one was loosely based on a 1949 photo-essay about the boxer Walter Cartier in Look, for which Kubrick had taken the pictures. When it came to features, Kubrick worked with original screenplays (which he co-wrote with Howard Sackler) on Fear and Desire and Killer's Kiss, but he switched to adaptations as soon as he could afford, due to his partnership with James B. Harris, to buy the film rights to novels. From then on, all of his films were based on literary properties.
What follows is a listing of these properties in the order in which Kubrick turned them into films (the brackets contain the country in which the texts were first published and the year of their original publication, together with the title of the film and the year of its release):
• Lionel White, Clean Break (US, 1955; The Killing, 1956),
• Humphrey Cobb, Paths of Glory (US, 1935; Paths of Glory, 1957),
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• Howard Fast, Spaitacus (US, 1951; Spartacus, 1960),
• Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (France, 1955; published in the US in 1958; Lolita, 1962),
• Peter Bryant (pseudonym for Peter George), Two Hours to Doom (UK, 1958; published as Red Alert in the US; Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, 1964),
• Arthur C. Clarke, 'Sentinel of Eternity' (UK, 1951; 2001: A Space Odyssey, 1968),21
• Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange (UK, 1962; published in the US without the UK edition's final chapter in 1963; A Clockwork Orange, 1971),
• William Makepeace Thackeray, Barry Lyndon (UK, two versions published under different titles in 1844 and 1856; Barry Lyndon, 1975),
• Stephen King, The Shining (US, 1977; The Shining, 1980),
• Gustav Hasford, The Short-Timers (US, 1979; Full Metal Jacket, 1987),
• Arthur Schnitzler, Traumnovelle (Austria, 1926; first published in English as Rhapsody: A Dream Novel in 1927; Eyes Wide Shut, 1999).22
The literary sources for Kubrick's films range from nineteenth century to contemporary texts, from continental European to American literature, from modern classics to genre fiction, from short stories to epic novels — and yet they form clearly discernable patterns. The authors of the source texts are all male. This extreme male bias extends to Kubrick's credited collaborators on the scripts for his films, only one of whom is a woman (Diane Johnson is credited, together with Kubrick, for the script of The Shining). With one exception, all the source texts were written in English — by five American and four British authors and also one Russian (Nabokov) who had studied in the UK and then moved to the United States. Eight out of 11 source texts were published between the 1950s and the 1970s, and 7 of these were turned into films within a decade of their original publication. By and large, then, Kubrick preferred to adapt recent publications by Anglo-American men.
Similarly, behind the apparent generic and thematic diversity of his films distinctive patterns can easily be identified. Six of Kubrick's features focus on military organisations and combat: Fear and Desire, Paths of Glory, Spartacus, Dr. Strangelove, Full Metal Jacket and (in its first part) Barry Lyndon. Four films deal with a marriage (or marriage-like relationship) in crisis as their main storyline — Lolita, The Shining, Eyes Wide Shut and (in its second part) Barry Lyndon — while a dysfunctional marriage also forms an important subplot in The Killing, and Spartacus relates the story of a slave rebellion through a central romantic relationship. Three films focus on crime and murderous gang violence — Killer's Kiss, The Killing and A Clockwork Orange —, while lethal actions also figure prominently in all the other movies, not just the ones about military organisations and combat but also Lolita (the framing story), 2001: A Space Odyssey (the pre-historic and 'Jupiter Mission' sequences), The Shining (the final part of the story) and Eyes Wide Shut (the aftermath of the orgy sequence).
The main protagonists of Kubrick's features (as well as his short films) are all male, and with the exception of the teenage Alex in A Clockwork Orange and the young recruits in the first part of Full Metal Jacket, they are all adults; these male
6     Peter Krämer
protagonists get the most screen time, and the story is largely told from their perspective or with regards to their experiences. Spartacus, Lolita, Barry Lyndon, The Shining and Eyes Wide Shut include female characters (and, in the cases of Lolita, Barry Lyndon and The Shining, also young children or teenagers) who for parts of the story receive almost equal attention to the male protagonist, but the majority of Kubrick's films have socio-cultural settings characterised by the extreme marginalisation or absence of women (and children), be it the military, the criminal gang, prison or the world of boxing (the latter is the focus of both Day of the Fight and Killer's Kiss, while The Seafarers deals with an all-male union and Flying Padre with the life of a Catholic priest). The Shining and Eyes Wide Shut feature conspiratorial groups of men (ghosts in the former, the rich and powerful in the latter) who are hostile to women, secretly organising orgies as well as murder.
One might want to go as far as saying that male violence in all its manifestations — carried out by individuals or by groups, with their own hands or with weapons, legitimated or condemned by the state, and caused by military commands, the rules of certain sports, criminal objectives, extreme emotional states or other factors — is the central theme of Kubrick's features (and also of his first short). In them, individual physical acts of violence are linked to more or less complex, all-male social organisations (gangs, conspiratorial groups, sports bodies, the military) which encourage and orchestrate such violence, or to men's heterosexual desire and their dysfunctional relationships with women — in fact, in most films they are linked to both (this applies to Fear and Desire, Killer's Kiss, The Killing, Spartacus, Dr. Strangelove, A Clockwork Orange, The Shining, Full Metal Jacket and Eyes Wide Shut).
In almost all features, male violence, or at least the threat of violence, is directed not only at other men, but also at women, including the female captive who is groped and killed in Fear and Desire, the taxi dancer who is molested and abducted in Killer's Kiss, the treacherous wife who is shot by her husband in The Killing, another female captive who is forced to perform in front of a hostile crowd of enemy soldiers in Paths of Glory, the many female participants in the slave rebellion whose corpses are on display in Spartacus, the women who are raped and murdered in A Clockwork Orange, the woman who is attacked by her husband in The Shining, the female sniper who is killed in Full Metal Jacket and the prostitute who is sacrificed in Eyes Wide Shut. In both Lolita and Barry Lyndon women are manipulated by men, but not subjected to physical violence; however, Humbert Humbert's behaviour directly leads to his wife getting killed in a car accident, and Lady Lyndon tries to commit suicide. At the end of Dr. Strangelove women are destined to die together with men after a doomsday device has been triggered (except for those who, the title figure suggests, can be kept alive in mineshafts for breeding purposes).
In their exploration of male violence, Kubrick's films range widely across space and time: from contemporary America and 1960s Vietnam all the way back to Ancient Rome (with various European countries in the 18th and 20th centuries being covered as well), from the very origins of humanity in Africa millions of years ago to its nuclear self-destruction or its next evolutionary leap, brought about by alien artefacts in space, in the near future. Indeed, in 2001, humans as a species are defined precisely by the capacity of men to use tools as murderous
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weapons (what gives rise to humanity is a male hominid's insight that it is possible to kill animals and other hominids with a phallic bone), whereas the next stage in humanity's development is associated with an unsexed foetus that does not appear to be in need of any technology (destructive or otherwise) at all.
There is thus a considerable degree of thematic overlap between Kubrick's films, which is in turn connected to the fact that — with the exception of Sparta-cus23 — he initiated the projects that resulted in his features and managed to assert a high level of control over story development, pre-production, principal photography and post-production. With regards to story development, it is important to note that Kubrick received writing credits for most of his features, while usually working closely with other writers. He was not credited for his work on the script for Fear and Desire (although he co-wrote it with Howard Sackler) and for Lolita (the film's credits name only Nabokov, although his script had little to do with the film, which was mostly based on work Kubrick had done with Calder Willingham and Martin Russ),24 and he was the only credited writer on Killer's Kiss (although it had been co-written by Sackler), A Clockwork Orange and Barry Lyndon.
Kubrick's script collaborators tended to be poets, journalists and novelists, including, on four occasions, the writers of the texts he was adapting: Nabokov, George, Clarke and Hasford.23 These collaborators had comparatively little or no prior experience of script writing, rather than being established screenwriters (the exception being Frederic Raphael on Eyes Wide Shut). Kubrick often left the actual writing of treatments and scripts to them. The framework for these treatments and scripts was established in long conversations and through Kubrick's notes, and writers also received extensive feedback on their drafts, again both verbally and in writing.26
The precise relationship between the source text and the end product of the adaptation process varies from film to film. In the borderline case of 2001, while the basic theme of the discovery of an artefact of an extra-terrestrial civilisation is shared by source text and film, the actual incidents of the short story are only referenced in the film's dialogue, rather than being enacted in its plot. In other cases, the (geographical and temporal) setting has been changed (most obviously from early twentieth century Vienna to late twentieth century New York in Eyes Wide Shut), or the overall tone altered (most notably, with the injection of comedy into the suspense narrative of Two Hours to Doom in Dr. Strangelove). There are also, of course, many changes in the source texts' storylines and characters, above and beyond the removal of minor plot developments and supporting characters which is necessitated by the limited length of a mainstream movie. But it is perhaps fair to say that Kubrick's films stick reasonably, and in some cases perhaps even surprisingly, closely to the basic storylines of the adapted texts.
However, even in those cases where Kubrick appears to have directly converted the source text's main storyline into a script (as in the case of A Clockwork Orange), he dropped, added or significantly changed scenes during the scriptwriting process, whereby many of these changes did not make it into the film.27 In other words, Kubrick used the writing process to explore various possibilities for developing the story away from the source text, and was perfectly willing to reject these alterations in the end, returning to material contained in the source text instead.28
8     Peter Krämer
This approach is perhaps most strikingly in evidence during the production of Dr. Strangelove.29 After several months of exploring variations on the basic storyline of Two Hours to Doom, from March to June 1962 Kubrick and Peter George worked on a brand new story — no longer directly related to the novel at all — which was meant to be used as the basis for both a novel and a film script. The new story, which, quite unlike George's novel, took a humorous approach and included many sexual references, dealt with the rise in the American political establishment of a nuclear strategist who eventually acquired the name Dr. Otto Strangelove. The title The Rise of Dr. Strangelove was considered for the project by June 1962. In July, however, Kubrick decided to go back to his original intention and wrote his own, quite faithful adaptation of George's novel under the title Red Alert, before changing his mind again and importing the humorous tone and sexual references as well as the figure of the nuclear strategist from the Dr. Strangelove story into the thriller narrative of Red Alert. By the end of August 1962, the project had acquired the title Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, although at this point the title character was only briefly mentioned in the film's dialogue.
Script revisions, involving George and the American writer Terry Southern, and among other things being concerned with expanding the role of Dr. Strangelove and turning him into a Nazi, continued for the next few months, well into principal photography which took place from January to May 1963, and key decisions about the overall shape of the story were made only a few weeks before the film's release in January 1964. In the end, very little story material from the initial exploration of variants of George's novel in autumn 1961 and winter 1962, and from the subsequent work on a brand new story about a nuclear strategist in spring 1962, made it into the film, the basic storyline of which is remarkably close to George's novel (although there are, of course, significant differences as well).
The example of Dr. Strangelove demonstrates that much of Kubrick's work on story development for his literary adaptations remains hidden from view if we focus only on a comparison between finished film and source text. It also reveals that Kubrick might approach a particular theme (in this case the threat of nuclear war) through several stories — on the one hand variants of Two Hours to Doom, on the other hand The Rise of Dr. Strangelove. In fact, we could regard the latter as a separate film project which was never realised but did exert a strong influence on Kubrick's adaptation of George's novel. Other unrealised projects can also be understood as preparing the ground for, and helping to shape, the films Kubrick made.
Kubrick's Unrealised Projects
Any survey of the numerous projects Stanley Kubrick worked on but never completed quickly reveals that, by and large, these projects mirrored his filmic output, insofar as most of them were adaptations (intended for distribution by major Hollywood studios) of recent English-language publications by male authors, whereby Kubrick collaborated with male writing partners who were not established scriptwriters30 It would seem that Kubrick's only female writing partner, apart
Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Tebvision 9
from Diane Johnson on The Shining, was the novelist Sara Maitland on 'Super-toys'/A.L, and the closest he came to adapting a source text written by a woman was when, in the early 1960s, he considered a remake of the 1949 movie The Reckless Moment, which is based on Elisabeth Sanxay Holding's novel The Blank Wall (1947), and later expressed an interest in Diane Johnson's The Shadow Knows (1974). When, for his unrealised adaptation projects, Kubrick considered non-English-language sources, they mostly were, like Traumnovelle, originally published in German.31 At various points, Kubrick was interested in another story by Arthur Schnitzler, the author of Traumnovelle, as well as German-language works by Stefan Zweig, Richard Wagner and Hans Helmut Kirst.
Like his films, the stories of most of Kubrick's unrealised projects focus on male protagonists, especially their potential for violence, and are concerned with crime, war and/or dysfunctional heterosexual relationships. Yet, unlike his films, several of these projects put women and/or children at the centre. These included attempts to adapt Zweig's 1911 novella Brennendes Geheimnis (published in English as The Burning Secret) about a young boy who during a holiday is befriended by a man using him to get close to, and then start an affair with, his mother; Calder Willingham's novel Natural Child (195 2) about the friendships and romantic adventures of a 19-year-old Southern girl in New York; and The Passion-Flower Hotel (1962) by Rosalind Erskine (a pseudonym for Roger Erskine Longrigg), a comic novel about teenage girls setting up a brothel in their British boarding school, so as to cater to a neighbouring boys' school. In addition, young boys were the main protagonists of Aldiss's short story 'Supertoys Last All Summer Long' (which focuses on the relationship between an artificial child and the woman he thinks is his mother) and Begley's Wartime Lies (a semi-autobiographical novel about a Jewish boy, who, together with his aunt, manages to survive with faked papers in wartime Poland).
As Kubrick worked on The Burning Secret and Natural Child in 1956, these two unrealised projects would appear to have prepared the ground for his interest in, and work on, Lolita. This novel initially revolves around a triangular relationship in many ways mirroring that of The Burning Secret: a child, the child's mother and a man who is not the child's father, with the all-important twist, however, that in Lolita the man's sexual interest is aimed at the child rather than the mother. In Kubrick's film the novel's pre-teen girl is transformed into a sexually active teenager, thus, to some extent, echoing Willingham's heroine. Importantly, in Kubrick's film the novel's exclusive focus on Lolita's adult lover's perspective is broken up to pay more attention to her experiences, in particular her interaction with, and feelings for, her mother, and also her pregnancy at the end of the story and the future she wants to build for her child. This shift is broadly in line with The Burning Secret's focus on a child's perspective, in particular on the boy's relationship with his mother.
More generally, it seems that Kubrick's work on The Burning Secret, Natural Child and The Passion-Flower Hotel (a project he considered in the early 1960s), together with Lolita and Laughter in the Dark, another Nabokov adaptation Kubrick worked on in in 1959—60 (about a middle-aged German man being ruined by his teenage lover and her boyfriend), facilitated a general reorientation of his output.32 Several of the films Kubrick made after Lolita have important parts for children
10     Peter Krämer
or teenagers, whereas none of his films before Lolita have such a part (with the possible exceptions of the young soldier who loses his mind in Fear and Desire and the young female captive in Paths of Glory, both of whom could conceivably be in their late teens). After Lolita, there are, in addition to several minor characters, Alex and other juvenile delinquents in A Clockwork Orange, the stepson and son of Barry Lyndon's title character, Jack Torrance's son in The Shining and the young marines in Full Metal Jacket (still teenagers when in training on Parris Island).
As with The Burning Secret and Lolita, Kubrick's later films also frequently place a strong emphasis on the mother—child bond. Barry Lyndon ends with Barry in the care of his mother, and his wife in the care of her son, The Shining ends with the death of the murderous father and the escape of his wife and child, and although the IS-year-old protagonist of Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange is made a few years older in Kubrick's film, the latter focuses much more than the source novel on his longing for 'home' and thus for his father and mother. More abstractly, but also arguably most powerfully, 2001 ends with a newly born (unsexed) 'Star-Child' returning to Mother Earth. And in the final scene of Eyes Wide Shut, Bill Harford's conversation with his wife is framed by her interaction with their daughter.33 Thus, a cluster of unrealised projects from the late 1950s and early 1960s appears to have prepared the ground for the increasing focus on children and teenagers in the films Kubrick actually made thereafter.
In order to survey the totality of Kubrick's unrealised projects and their relationship with his films, it is useful to divide his career into three main stages (with the greatest concentration of unrealised projects being found in the middle one): the formative period up to 1955, during which Kubrick made the transition from photojournalism to film-making, from shorts to features and from films being released by independent distributors to those released by the majors; his critical and commercial breakthrough, and the consolidation of his position in Hollywood, during his partnership with producer James B. Harris from 1955 to 1962; and his subsequent work as one of Hollywood's leading producer-writer-directors. Each career stage provided a particular framework for the selection and development of projects that Kubrick never completed.
Not altogether surprisingly, the very beginnings of Kubrick's interest in filmmaking concern projects that were never realised. Together with his high school friend Alexander Singer, Kubrick embarked on his career as a film-maker in the late 1940s, while being employed as a staff photographer at Look magazine. From the outset, the two friends, despite their complete lack of film-making experience and their young age (Kubrick turned twenty-one on 26 July 1949), set their sights on Hollywood. The film ideas they were working on included an adaptation of Homer's Iliad (a Singer project) and a love story (which was meant to be a joint project).
While nothing came of these two ideas (and very little is known about them), between 1950, the year Kubrick left Look magazine, and 1955, he completed four short and two feature films, all of which were made with extremely low budgets and a small cast and crew, including many friends and newcomers, with Kubrick himself usually taking on (not least to keep costs down), and often being credited for, multiple production roles — ranging from producing and writing to directing, cinematography and editing. The two features did not generate much critical
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acclaim and made very little money at the box office, although Kubrick received a considerable amount of press attention for being a precocious film-maker.
He then formed Harris-Kubrick Pictures with a young producer who was a friend of Alexander Singer's. Among other things, Harris's role was to secure bigger budgets for Kubrick's films and to find stories to be turned into films (whereas Kubrick, as previously noted, had co-written original scripts for his first two features); this he did mainly by optioning — and in several cases purchasing — the film rights for a range of literary properties. During his partnership with Harris, Kubrick, now working mostly with experienced Hollywood personnel and (apart from two writing credits) only being credited as director, completed four films. The low-budget The Killing (co-financed by United Artists and by Harris and Harris's father) as well as the medium-budget Paths of Glory (financed and released by United Artists) and Lolita (financed by Seven Arts and released by MGM) were produced by Harris, while the hugely expensive Spartacus had been developed and was being produced (for Universal) by Kirk Douglas's company Bryna Productions rather than Harris-Kubrick Pictures.
In addition to these four productions, Harris and Kubrick considered, and in some cases did substantial work on, more than 20 other film and television projects.36 There are several reasons for this flurry of activity. To begin with, while Harris brought substantial financial resources to his partnership with Kubrick (as evidenced by his ability to invest a considerable amount of his own money into the production of The Killing), funding any Harris-Kubrick project was always going to be a challenge; as they wanted to go beyond the micro-budgets that Kubrick had raised privately for his first two features, this challenge could only be met if a major studio or a well established independent production company got involved.37 It was difficult to predict what kind of film the majors and leading independents would be interested in, and on what terms they might be willing to support a particular project, which made it imperative for Harris and Kubrick to have a range of projects on offer (on the assumption that most of them would be rejected) and also to be flexible when it came to negotiating the terms on which they might work with other companies.
Thus, in addition to initiating their own projects and then trying to keep creative control while partnering with bigger players in the film industry, Harris and Kubrick made a short-lived development deal with MGM in 1956 which required them to select an unproduced script from the studio's archive (they chose The Burning Secret). When this deal ended without any film going into production and The Killing turned out to be a box office flop, they signed an unfavourable five-picture deal with Kirk Douglas's Bryna Productions so as to get the star on board for Paths of Glory, and, following the commercial failure of this production (making it two flops in a row, four if Kubrick's pre-Harris films are counted), also decided that Kubrick would work as a director-for-hire for Marlon Brando's production company Pennebaker and as a replacement for the original director Anthony Mann on Bryna Productions' blockbuster Spartacus (in return for which Douglas let them out of their five-picture deal). Harris and Kubrick even planned branching out into telefilm production, with two TV series in development in the late 1950s. It is important to note, then, that the projects they worked on were driven by practical considerations — to do ultimately with keeping their company afloat by getting
12     Peter Krämer
project funding and generating income — as well as (perhaps, in some cases, even instead of) their personal interests.
So what were the unrealised projects they got involved with, and why these and not others? With regards to the projects Harris and Kubrick initiated, three initial strategies suggested themselves: to do more of what they already had a track record for; to select pre-sold properties, that is stories that had already been published (ideally, but not necessarily, with some commercial success); and to keep costs down (by selecting stories set in the here and now that could be filmed fairly cheaply, and by acquiring the film rights to literary properties at a reasonable price). All of these help to explain their work on The Killing, Kubrick's second crime film after Killer's Kiss and an adaptation of a recently published novel set in contemporary America. It was followed in the next few years (especially in 1955— 6) by numerous crime-related projects, most of which were adaptations of recent (fiction as well as non-fiction) books.38 Interestingly, at least one of these projects, a planned adaptation of Lionel White's 1955 novel The Snatchers, was rejected outright by the Production Code Administration, the film industry's self-censorship body, for dealing with the unacceptable subject matter of kidnapping (whereas Killer's Kiss and The Killing had been approved by the PCA after script changes and some re-editing).39
Highly problematic subject matter also characterised several other Harris-Kubrick projects that were not dealing centrally with crime, but first and foremost with sexual desire and relations (thus building on the exploration of dysfunctional sexual relationships in Fear and Desire, Killer's Kiss and The Killing). As already noted, in addition to their adaptation of Nabokov's scandalous bestseller Lolita (which Harris and Kubrick started working on soon after its publication in the United States in 1958), these projects ranged from their work on The Burning Secret in 1956 to an adaptation, which Harris and Kubrick were discussing towards the very end of their partnership, of The Passion-Flower Hotel.40 Once again, many of these projects ran into serious difficulties with the Production Code Administration.41 Yet, Harris and Kubrick must have thought that they had a good chance to appeal to the major studios which at that time were interested in extending the boundaries of sexual representations on screen (not least by very gradually liberalising the Production Code) so as to exploit the resulting controversies. Furthermore, several of these Harris-Kubrick projects dealt with teenagers and their interaction with the older generation, a key topic in Hollywood cinema of the 1950s and early 1960s.
In addition to crime films and sex dramas and comedies, which could be made with small or medium budgets and therefore did not require the presence of major stars, Harris and Kubrick also initiated a series of projects that were meant to be star vehicles and might allow them to break into the big-budget sector. The first major star they worked with was Kirk Douglas on Paths of Glory, the script of which was rewritten specifically to turn the project from an ensemble piece into a star vehicle; this had become necessary because the project had initially been rejected by both MGM and United Artists, the latter studio signalling however that it would be willing to reconsider if a major star came on board. In 1958 and 1959, Harris and Kubrick talked about remaking the French foreign legion movie Beau Geste (with two previous versions of this literary adaptation having been
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released in 1924 and 1939) as a Jerry Lewis comedy, and about doing an American Civil War epic (based on a much written-about actual historical incident) with Gregory Peck, a Second World War combat movie based on an original script entitled The German Lieutenant, co-written by Kubrick and the Korean war veteran Richard Adams, with Alan Ladd, and a Korean war movie, based on Martin Russ's 1957 autobiographical book The Last Parallel: A Marine's War Journal, with Marlon Brando.42
While Harris and Kubrick failed to get these projects off the ground (only The German Lieutenant came reasonably close to principal photography), their first two productions from 1956 and 1957 had attracted enough attention for major stars to approach Kubrick with job offers, which is how in 1958 he came to be hired by Brando to work on the script for, and to direct, an adaptation of Charles Neider's 1956 Western novel The Authentic Death of Hendry Jones; however, Brando then decided to direct this big-budget production himself (it was eventually released under the title One-Eyed Jacks in 1961). This was followed in 1959/60 by Kubrick's employment on Spartacus. Although, as with the Brando production, Kubrick had less creative control than he was accustomed to, his involvement in this mega-budget production further raised his profile in Hollywood, and the film's enormous financial and critical success after its release in October 1960 was, among other things, attributed to his direction.
As a consequence, Harris and Kubrick were able to negotiate a favourable two-picture deal with the Canadian telefilm distributor Seven Arts which was entering movie production at that time. The first of their two Seven Arts films was Lolita, starring James Mason and Peter Sellers; its commercial and critical success confirmed Kubrick's status as a major Hollywood film-maker. The second was meant to have been Dr. Strangelove, but Harris and Kubrick amicably dissolved their partnership in 1962, and Kubrick produced the film himself (for release by Columbia).
From this point onwards, Kubrick's filmic output was much reduced.43 From Dr. Strangelove to The Shining, it took him on average four years to release a new movie; after The Shining there was a 7-year and then a 12-year gap. Although he was working with major (and expensive) stars on Dr. Strangelove, Barry Lyndon, The Shining and Eyes Wide Shut, Kubrick's productions stayed in the medium-budget range, with the exception of the — by the standards of the time — very expensive 2001 and Barry Lyndon, and they were successful at the box office (in the case of 2007 spectacularly so).44 Kubrick's good commercial track record enabled him to proceed so slowly with his film productions, as did the special relationship he had developed with Warner Bros, during the making and controversial release of A Clockwork Orange; all of his later films were also made for this studio.
Kubrick appears to have encountered serious funding problems only once after the early 1960s (with regards to his Napoleon biopic); he could normally count on getting studio support for whatever film he wanted to make. His choice of projects and his deals with major studios no longer involved the kind of second-guessing and compromises so prevalent during the Harris-Kubrick years (although it has to be emphasised that Kubrick had always been interested in reaching the largest possible audience which aligned him perfectly with Hollywood's commercial objectives). Furthermore, after the Production Code had in effect been suspended in
14     Peter Krämer
1966, so as to be finally replaced with a ratings system in 1968, Kubrick's work was freed from the restrictions of Hollywood's self-censorship.
Unlike the comparatively short development and production schedules for his films of the 1950s and early 1960s, Kubrick was able to spend several years on research, story development, pre-production, principal photography and post-production for each of the seven films he completed between 1964 and 1999 (indeed, initial work on his final movie, Eyes Wide Shut, started already in the late 1960s). He did the same (except for the final two production stages) for several other projects, including the Napoleon biopic of the late 1960s and the 1970s, the 'Supertoys'/j4J. project of the 1980s and 1990s (with initial conversations about the possibility of another Science Fiction movie going back to the mid-1970s), and Wartime Lies/Aryan Papers, which was the focus of Kubrick's work from 1991 to 1993 and was based on his long-standing interest in, and research on, the Holocaust.
Apart from these three major unrealised projects, which Kubrick worked on intensively for years, coming quite close to actually making the movies, there were numerous other film ideas he pursued with varying degrees of commitment and effort after the early 1960s. Among these we can identify several clusters which once again overlap thematically with the films he made during the same period, while also drawing on the work he had done up to the early 1960s. The first cluster is made up of projects dealing with pre-twentieth century history in an epic fashion. Harking back to Spartacus as well as the Western and American Civil War projects of the 1950s (and even to Alexander Singer's idea to adapt Homer's Iliad), Kubrick did not only develop a Napoleon biopic (the research for which in turn informed his work on Barry Lyndon), but also considered a film about Caesar and adaptations of two mythical epics about the Middle Ages, namely Richard Wagner's opera cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen (The Ring of the Nibelung, 1876) and H. Rider Haggard's The Saga of Eric Brighteyes (1890), while toying once more with the idea of making a Civil War movie. More so than in his films (with the exceptions of Spartacus and Dr. Strangelove), in these unrealised historical projects Kubrick showed a particularly strong interest in the actions, and the failings, of (political) rulers, including fictional Germanic kings and gods as well as real statesmen such as Caesar and Napoleon.
A second cluster of unrealised projects concerns the future of humanity, rather than its past. Kubrick first got interested in Science Fiction in the late 1950s when, in preparation for what was to become Dr. Strangelove, he started reading up on nuclear weapons and nuclear strategy, topics widely covered in technical and scholarly publications as well as in futuristic fiction. Indeed, for several months during its production, Dr. Strangelove was meant to have had a Science Fiction framing story featuring extra-terrestrial beings who discover a completely devastated Earth in the distant future and reconstruct the story of how it came to be that way. From this point onwards, Kubrick maintained a strong interest in exploring the future of the relationship between humanity and its tools (such tools ranging from bones being used as weapons in the pre-historic opening sequence of 2001 to the futuristic robots at the centre of 'Supertoys'/A/.), and the possible outcomes of humanity's encounters with extra-terrestrials.
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With regards to the latter, Kubrick considered an adaptation of the 1961 multi-part BBC radio drama Shadow on the Sun about an alien attack on Earth as a follow-up to Dr. Stiangelove, before settling instead on what was to become 2001: A Space Odyssey, a film intended to give a hopeful account of the future, with alien artefacts encountered at the beginning of the twenty-first century serving to protect humanity from self-destruction and to lead it on to the next stage of evolution (as Clarke's novel tried to make clear). While Shadow on the Sun and 2001 also examined human interaction with technology, this was the main subject of Dr. Stiangelove, which ends with the explosion of an automated, computerised nuclear device releasing enough radioactivity to poison the globe; of A Clockwork Orange, in which medical technology is employed to manipulate subjective experience and restrict possible behaviour; and the 'Supertoys'/<4./. project, which comprised very diverse treatments exploring the relationship between humans and robots — in some the latter eventually decide to punish humanity, while in others they form a Utopian civilisation and mourn humanity's passing.
Importantly, the 'Supertoys'/yl./. project revolved centrally around the inhumane treatment of robots who, for all intents and purposes, think and feel like human beings (an issue also raised in relation to HAL in 2001), with various story outlines explicitly comparing their systematic destruction to the Nazi genocide of European Jewry. What is more, the story of Peter George's novel Two Hours to Doom proceeds from the assumption (shared by most of its main characters and also, arguably, by its narrator) that the people of the Soviet Union have dangerous racial traits, recognition of which justifies a genocidal attack on their country. Kubrick's film removes the novel's genocidal racism, replacing it with a scene in which the American political and military leadership is won over by Dr. Strange-love's vision — based on Nazi ideology — of a post-apocalyptic society in which male elites reproduce themselves with the help of carefully selected, subservient and fertile young women. One could also describe the actions of the extraterrestrials in Shadow on the Sun as genocidal warfare, and understand the Ludovico treatment in A Clockwork Orange as a method for denying a person's humanity. In this way, Kubrick's Science Fiction projects reveal strong thematic continuities with the slavery epic Spartacus and with the third cluster of unrealised projects from the 1960s to the 1990s, namely those dealing with Nazi Germany, the Second World War and the Holocaust, topics which none of his films address head on (although the allegorical Fear and Desire clearly evokes the Second World War and there are, as already noted, many references to the Nazi past in Dr. Strangelove and also, for example, echoes of images taken during the liberation of concentration camps in Spartacus).*5
As a grandchild of Jewish immigrants from eastern Europe growing up during the 1930s and 1940s, Kubrick was bound to be particularly interested in the Second World War and Nazi Germany, and also in Jewish culture and history. As already noted, from the very beginnings of his film career in the 1950s, he developed projects dealing with the Second World War (among them Fear and Desire and The German Lieutenant); projects based on the writings of Jewish authors such as the Austrians Stefan Zweig and Arthur Schnitzler; and projects dealing with various aspects of German and Austrian life, both Jewish and non-Jewish, in the
16     Peter Krämer
first third of the twentieth century (before the Nazi era) such as Laughter in the Dark and The Burning Secret. From the late 1950s onwards, he did a lot of reading on the Holocaust and started referencing it in notes for his films (especially Dr. Strangelove).
The Stanley Kubrick Archive contains an untitled, undated and incomplete manuscript telling the story, set during the Second World War, of a young German girl travelling from her boarding school in Germany to her parents in Amsterdam; once there she gradually becomes aware of the persecution of Jews. This story is closely based on the childhood experiences of Kubrick's third wife Christiane Harlan who he met during the shooting of Paths of Glory when he cast her as the female captive forced to sing a song at the end of the movie (she is credited as Susanne Christian). The manuscript is not yet catalogued, and it is contained in an envelope that has 'German Lieutenant' written on it, which leads me to believe that it may be from the late 1950s or early 1960s. Given the fact that Kubrick regularly asked writers to develop a story first in the form of a novelistic treatment, which could then form the basis of both a script and a book publication, I am inclined to think that this manuscript is Kubrick's first attempt to prepare a film about the Holocaust.
Throughout the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, Kubrick continued to consider projects about the Second World War and Nazi Germany, including combat and spy movies as well as films about everyday life in the Third Reich, about leading Nazis and about the film industry in Nazi Germany. For this last project Kubrick was particularly interested in the career of his wife's uncle Veit Harlan, a leading German film-maker of the 1930s and 1940s, whose filmography included the notorious anti-Semitic drama Jud Süß (Jew Süss, 1940). While most of Kubrick's projects about the Second World War and Nazi Germany focused on non-Jewish characters, from the mid 1970s onwards he became increasingly invested in making a film about Jews during the Holocaust, his efforts culminating in the extensive work he did on Wartime Lies/Aryan Papers in the early 1990s.
Had Kubrick lived longer, he may well have returned to this project at some point, but as it is, we are left with Eyes Wide Shut as his final statement not only on marriage (a surprisingly positive statement when compared to his earlier films, as here marriage actually survives a serious crisis) and on Jews in his films. An adaptation of the work of a Jewish-Austrian author writing mainly about Jewish-Austrian characters, Kubrick's film is set in White Anglo-Saxon Protestant New York; this follows on from many earlier instances all the way back to the 1950s in which Kubrick changed Jewish characters in source texts or in treatments and scripts into non-Jewish characters. And yet Eyes Wide Shut prominently features a character (Victor Ziegler) who is not derived from the source text but is in fact recognisably Jewish, judging by his name (German last names often signalling Jewish descent in the United States), his distinctly non-WASPish looks and the fact that he was played by Sydney Pollack, like Kubrick the grandchild of Jewish immigrants from eastern Europe and also, like Kubrick, best known as a film director. It is almost as if Kubrick was declaring that, even if none of the characters in his films were identified as Jewish, there was always a Jew in his movies, namely the director himself.
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Conclusion
More has been written about Stanley Kubrick than about just any other American film-maker (with the possible exceptions of D. W. Griffith, Alfred Hitchcock and Orson Welles), so that one might assume that most of the things worth knowing about him are already known. Nothing could be further from the truth as new research into Kubrick's life and career has revealed in recent years, especially the work by Nathan Abrams on his Jewishness, by Filippo Ulivieri on his unrealised projects and by Catriona McAvoy on his exploratory approach to film-making.46 In addition to providing new insights into Kubrick's work, these and other scholars have pinpointed areas requiring further research, to do, for example, with Kubrick's socio-cultural background and his life experiences as a husband and father, his early career as a photographer and documentary film-maker (as well as his activities as a writer, editor and designer of print publications), the economic dimensions of his film-making, his (often long-term) collaborative working relationships and film industrial affiliations, the dozens of projects he considered at one point or another but never realised, and the complex ways in which he approached the selection and development of stories and the actual production of movies. Our growing awareness that so much is unknown about the man and his work should be an inspiration for a whole new phase in Kubrick Studies.
Acknowledgements
This essay is based on a keynote address I presented at 'Stanley Kubrick: A Retrospective', an international conference at De Montfort University, Leicester, 11—13 May 2016. I would like to thank the organisers of, and the audience at, that conference. I also want to thank Filippo Ulivieri for sharing his research with me.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author. Notes
1. For a Kubrick filmography, see, for example, Tatjana Ljujic, Peter Krämer and Richard Daniels, eds., Stanley Kubrick: New Perspectives (London: Black Dog, 2015), 6—11. A list of Kubrick related publications, including articles written by him, can be found in Wallace Coyle, Stanley Kubrick: A Guide to References and Resources (Boston: G.K. Hall, 1980). For discussions of his work as a photographer, see, for example, Rainer Crone, ed., Stanley Kubrick, Drama and Shadows: Photographs, 1945-1950 (New York: Phaidon, 2005); and Philippe D. Mather, Stanley Kubrick at Look Magazine: Authorship and Genre in Photojournalism and Film (Exeter: Intellect, 2013).
2. Stanley Kubrick, Michael Herr and Gustav Hasford, Full Metal Jacket: The Screenplay (New York: Knopf, 1987); Stanley Kubrick and Frederic Raphael, Eyes Wide
18     Peter Krämer
Shut: A Screenplay by Stanley Kubrick and Frederic Raphael (New York: Warner Books, 1999).
3. See various materials in the Stanley Kubrick Archive at the University of the Arts London (hereafter SKA): folders SK/5/3 and SK/5/4.
4. Cp. Paul Hughes, 'The Lincoln Story Breaks into TV, Courier Journal Magazine, October 26, 1952, 24—9; Gene D. Phillips and Rodney Hill, eds., The Encyclopedia of Stanley Kubrick (New York: Checkmark Books, 2002), 257-8.
5. Kubrick certainly thought that this was an important, innovative publication, writing in his introduction: 'I have always wondered if there might be a more meaningful way to present a book about a film. To make, as it were, a complete, graphic representation of the film, cut by cut, with the dialogue printed in the proper place in relation to the cuts, so that within the limits of still-photographs and words, an accurate (and I hope interesting) record of a film might be available to anyone who had a bit more curiosity than just knowing what happened in the last reel.' Stanley Kubrick, Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange. Based on the Novel by Anthony Burgess (New York: Ballantine, 1972), no pagination.
6. Peter George, Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. A Novel (London: Transworld, 1963); Arthur C. Clarke, 2001: A Space Odyssey. A Novel. Based on the Screenplay of the MGM Film by Stanley Kubrick ScArthur C. Clarke (New York: Arrow Books, 1968).
7. SKA: SK/18/2; cp. Ronny Loewy, '"That was About Success, wasn't it?" Zum Projekt Aryan Papers' (On the Aryan Papers project), Kinematograph 19 (2004): 224—31; Jan Harlan, 'From Wartime Lies to "Aryan Papers'", in The Stanley Kubrick Archives, ed. Alison Castle (London: Taschen, 2005), 509.
8. SKA: SK/18/3; cp. Alison Castle, 'Stanley Kubrick's "A.I."', in The Stanley Kubrick Archives, ed. Alison Castle (London: Taschen, 2005), 504—8; Jan Harlan and Jane M. Struthers, eds., A.I. Artificial Intelligence From Stanley Kubrick to Steven Spielberg: The Vision Behind the Film (London: Thames and Hudson, 2009); Peter Krämer, 'Adaptation as Exploration: Stanley Kubrick, Literature and A.I. Artificial Intelligence', Adaptation: The Journal of Literature on Screen Studies 18, no. 3 (2015): 372—82; Peter Krämer, 'Spielberg and Kubrick', in A Companion to Steven Spielberg, ed. Nigel Morris (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2017), 195-6, 205-8.
9. SKA: SK/1/2/12/1/1/8.
10. Krämer, 'Adaptation as Exploration', 379.
11. Krämer, 'Spielberg and Kubrick', 203—4.
12. SKA: SK/1/2/3/2/35.
13. These documents are included in as yet uncatalogued materials on Kubrick's unrealised projects in the SKA.
14. Steven Spielberg, 'Foreword', in A.I. Artificial Intelligence From Stanley Kubrick to Steven Spielberg: The Vision Behind the Film, ed. Jan Harlan and Jane M. Struthers (London: Thames and Hudson, 2009), 7.
15. See, for example, Vincent LoBrutto, Stanley Kubrick (London: Faber, 1998); John Baxter, Stanley Kubrick: A Biography (London: HarperCollins, 1998); Piers Bizony, 2001: Filming the Future (London: Aurum, 2000); Phillips and Hill, The Encyclopedia of Stanley Kubrick; the catalogue for the Kubrick exhibition at Deutsches Filmmuseum, Frankfurt am Main, Germany, in 2004, which was published as a special issue of Kinematograph (no. 19, 2004); Alison Castle, ed.,
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The Stanley Kubrick Archives (London: Taschen, 2005); Alison Castle, ed., Stanley Kubrick's 'Napoleon': The Greatest Movie Never Made (London: Taschen, 2009); Harlan and Struthers, A.I. Artificial Intelligence; Piers Bizony, The Making of Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (London: Taschen, 2015); Christopher Frayling, The 2001 File: Harry Lange and the Design of the Landmark Science Fiction Film (London: Reel Art Press, 2015); and Danel Olson, ed., The Shining: Studies in the Horror Film (Lakewood: Centipede, 2015).
16. The academic literature on Kubrick is vast. For an extensive, but no longer up-to-date bibliography, see Geoffrey Cocks, The Wolf at the Door: Stanley Kubrick, History, and the Holocaust (New York: Peter Lang, 2004), 319-28. Recent examples of work specifically on Kubrick's adaptations include Charles Bane, 'Viewing Novels, Reading Films: Stanley Kubrick and the Art of Adaptation as Interpretation' (unpublished PhD diss., Louisiana State University, 2006). http://etd.lsu.edu/docs/available/etd-07122006-171959/unrestricted/ Bane_dis.pdf; Elisa Pezzotta, Stanley Kubrick: Adapting the Sublime (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2013); and the special Kubrick issue of Adaptation: The Journal of Literature on Screen Studies (18, no. 3, December 2015).
17. See, for example, Peter Krämer, 2001: A Space Odyssey (London: BFI, 2010); Peter Krämer, A Clockwork Orange (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2011); Peter Krämer, Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (London: BFI, 2014); Ljujic, Krämer and Daniels, Stanley Kubrick: New Perspectives; Maria Pramaggiore, Making Time in Stanley Kubrick's Barry Lyndon: Art, History, and Empire (New York: Bloomsbury, 2015); Mick Broderick, Reconstructing Strange-love: Inside Stanley Kubrick's 'Nightmare Comedy' (London: Wallflower, 2017).
18. Cocks, The Wolf at the Door, 148-60.
19. Krämer, 'Adaptation as Exploration'; Krämer, 'Spielberg and Kubrick'; Peter Krämer, 'Stanley Kubrick and the Internationalisation of Post-War Hollywood', New Review of Film and Television Studies 15, no. 2 (2017): 250—69; Filippo Ulivieri, '"The problem is to find an obsession": An Analysis of Stanley Kubrick's Numerous Unmade and Unfinished Projects', and Simone Odino, '"God, it'll be hard topping the H-bomb": Fragments of Kubrickiana on the Path from Strange-love to 2001', two papers presented at 'Stanley Kubrick: A Retrospective', De Montfort University, Leicester (UK), May 11-13, 2016.
20. Cp. Mather, Stanley Kubrick at Look Magazine; Peter Krämer, "The Limits of Autonomy: Stanley Kubrick, Hollywood and Independent Film-making, 1950— 53', in American Independent Cinema: Indie, Indiewood and Beyond, ed. Geoff King, Claire Molloy and Yannis Tzioumakis (London: Routledge, 2013), 153—64; Peter Krämer, '"Complete Total Final Annihilating Artistic Control": Stanley Kubrick and Postwar Hollywood', in Stanley Kubrick: New Perspectives, ed. Tatjana Ljujic, Peter Krämer and Richard Daniels (London: Black Dog, 2015), 48—61; and Robert Sklar, 'Stanley Kubrick and the American Film Industry', Current Research in Film 4 (1988): 114-24.
21. As far as adaptations are concerned, 2001: A Space Odyssey is a borderline case, because, while it was developed from Clarke's 'Sentinel of Eternity', this story did not receive an on-screen credit. For a discussion of the relationship between Kubrick's film, 'Sentinel of Eternity' and Clarke's novel 2001: A Space Odyssey, which was written parallel to the film's production and can therefore be considered a novelisation, see I. Q. Hunter, 'From Adaptation to Cinephilia: An Intertextual
20    Peter Kramer
Odyssey', Science Fiction Across Media: Adaptation/Novelization, ed. Thomas Van Parys and I. Q. Hunter (Canterbury: Gylphi, 2013), 43—63. Kubrick's unusual approach was initially to collaborate with Clarke on a novelistic treatment which could then be used as the basis for both a script and a novel. There are several other cases in which Kubrick (or his business partner James Harris) asked authors to write a new story, which might then be developed into both a script and a book publication. Examples include Jim Thompson's (unpublished) 19SS novella Lunatic at Large and the work Sara Maitiand did on A.I.; cp. Krämer, 'Adaptation as Exploration', and Ulivieri, "The Problem is to Find an Obsession'.
22. Oddly enough, the credits for Eyes Wide Shut state that the film was '[ijnspired by' Schnitzler's Traumnovelle, while, apart from 2001: A Space Odyssey, the other films have a 'based on' credit.
23. Cp. Fiona Radford, 'Having His Cake and Eating It Too: Stanley Kubrick and Spartacus', in Stanley Kubrick: New Perspectives, ed. Tatjana Ljujic, Peter Krämer and Richard Daniels (London: Black Dog, 2015), 98-115.
24. Karyn Stuckey 'Re-Writing Nabokov's Lolita: Kubrick, the Creative Adaptor', in Stanley Kubrick: New Perspectives, ed. Tatjana Ljujic, Peter Krämer and Richard Daniels (London: Black Dog, 2015), 116-35.
25. It is perhaps worth noting that Kubrick had access to a script for A Clockwork Orange written by Anthony Burgess (as well as another one written by Terry Southern and Michael Cooper). Burgess's script departed significantly from the novel but Kubrick ignored its innovations, working instead directly from the novel.
26. On Kubrick's working methods, see, for example, publications by, and interviews with, some of his co-writers: Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita: A Screenplay (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1974), vii—xiii; Terry Southern, 'Strangelove Outtake: Notes from the War Room', Grand Street 13, no. 1 (1994): 65-80; Arthur C. Clarke, The Lost Worlds of 2001 (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1972); Donald Williams, 'An Interview with Diane Johnson, Screenwriter for Stanley Kubrick's Film The Shining, 1992, www.cgjung.page.org/films/shining.html; Catriona McAvoy, 'Diane Johnson', in The Shining: Studies in the Horror Film, ed. Danel Olson (Lakewood: Centipede, 2015), 533—65; Michael Herr, Kubrick (New York: Grove, 2000); and Frederic Raphael, Eyes Wide Open: A Memoir of Stanley Kubrick (New York: Ballantine, 1999).
27. Peter Krämer, '"What's it going to be, eh?" Stanley Kubrick's Adaptation of Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange', in Stanley Kubrick: New Perspectives, ed. Tatjana Ljujic, Peter Kramer and Richard Daniels (London: Black Dog, 2015), 226-34.
28. Cp. Catriona McAvoy's important work on Kubrick's exploratory approach to film-making, for example Catriona McAvoy, 'Creating The Shining: Looking Beyond the Myths', in Stanley Kubrick: New Perspectives, ed. Tatjana Ljujic, Peter Krämer and Richard Daniels (London: Black Dog, 2015), 280—307.
29. Cp. Peter Krämer, Dr. Strangelove; also see Broderick, Reconstructing Strangelove.
30. The most comprehensive such survey can be found in Ulivieri, 'The Problem is to Find an Obsession'. Ulivieri's discussion of Kubrick's unrealised projects in various published and unpublished manuscripts has centrally informed my own analysis. Detailed information on the individual projects discussed in this section, including references to a wealth of primary sources (archival documents, press
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reports and interviews with Kubrick's collaborators) can be found in Ulivieri's manuscripts.
31. The only non-English and non-German sources Kubrick seems to have considered are the 1960 French novel La jete by Roger Vailland and Joseph Kessel's Le lion (1958). Vladimir Nabokov's Laughter in the Dark (1938) is a special case. This novel was originally published in Russian under the title Kamera Obskura in France in 1932, and then translated into English by the author himself.
32. In this context, it is worth noting that Spartacus ends by combining the depiction of the protagonist's dying moments with a conversation about the future of his wife and child, which is the first time that a Kubrick film puts the mother—child dyad centre stage. This conclusion echoes the reaffirmation of the mother—child bond at the end of The Burning Secret and in turn prefigures the ending of Kubrick's Lolita.
33. With regards to the presence of teenage characters in Kubrick's later films, we can also note that Full Metal Jacket ends with the revelation that the deadly enemy sniper is in fact a young female who might well be in her teens. Additionally, Kubrick's unrealised projects after the early 1960s did not only include 'Supertoys'/yl./. and Wartime Lies/Aryan Papers, but also the Napoleon biopic which was meant to have dealt extensively with the title character's childhood and youth.
34. For detailed accounts of Kubrick's early career up to the early 1960s, which is the subject of this and the next few paragraphs, see LoBrutto, Stanley Kubrick, Chs. 1—12; Cocks, The Wolf at the Door, Chs. 2—5, 7; Mather, Stanley Kubrick at Look Magazine; Krämer, "The Limits of Autonomy'; Krämer, 'A New Boy Wonder: Killer's Kiss, The Killing and Stanley Kubrick's Early Career', DVD/Blu-ray booklet for Arrow Film's edition of The Killing, 2015, 6—20; Ljujic, Krämer and Daniels, Stanley Kubrick: New Perspectives, 20—173; Krämer, 'Stanley Kubrick and the Internationalisation of Post-War Hollywood'; and Ulivieri, "The Problem is to Find an Obsession'.
35. Here it is worth noting that Kubrick's co-writer Howard Sackler also was a friend of his and a newcomer.
36. For details, see Ulivieri, 'The Problem is to Find an Obsession'.
37. For an in-depth analysis of the financial challenges of Kubrick's early film career, see Krämer, 'The Limits of Autonomy', and Krämer, 'Complete Total Final Annihilating Artistic Control'.
38. For details, see Krämer, 'Stanley Kubrick and the Internationalisation of Postwar Hollywood', and Ulivieri, 'The Problem is to Find an Obsession'.
39. Krämer, 'A New Boy Wonder', 10—12, 18—9; also see the files on the following film titles in the Production Code Administration collection at the Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Beverly Hills (hereafter PCA): Along Came a Spider (the original tide of Killer's Kiss), Killer's Kiss, The Snatchers and The Killing.
40. Cp. Ulivieri, 'The Problem is to Find an Obsession'. Ulivieri lists a number of additional projects from 1956 to 1960 dealing with transgressive sexuality, among them an adaptation of Shelby Foote's 1951 novel Love in a Dry Season.
41. For discussions of the (self-)censorship of Lolita, see, for example, Stuckey 'Re-Writing Nabokov's Lolita', esp. 131—4, and Daniel Biltereyst, '"A Constructive Form of Censorship": Disdplining Kubrick's Lolita', in Stanley Kubrick:
22    Peter Kramer
New Perspectives, ed. Tatjana Ljujic, Peter Krämer and Richard Daniels (London: Black Dog, 2015), 136-^-9, esp. 142-8. Also see the PCA files on Lolita, The Passion-Flower Hotel, The Burning Secret and Natural Child. The latter, for example, was deemed 'basically unacceptable' due to the fact that it dealt with abortion and generally took 'an extremely light and casual approach to the subject of illicit sex', according to a letter from Geoffrey Shurlock to James Harris, dated 15 October 1956. Another adaptation project ran into problems with the PCA for political reasons. Shurlock considered the story of Felix Jackson's 1955 novel So Help Me God, which was critical of anti-communist witch hunts, in particular of the House Un-American Activities Committee, to be in violation of 'the Code requirement that prominent institutions be not misrepresented' and also to go against the general 'industry policy' not to stir political controversy; Shurlock memo dated 6 January 1956, file for So Help Me God, PCA.
42. For details, see Ulivieri, 'The Problem is to Find an Obsession', and Krämer, 'Stanley Kubrick and the Intel-nationalisation of Post-War Hollywood'. With their interest in war movies and historical epics Harris and Kubrick were tracking dominant box office trends in the United States. They also participated in the ongoing internationalisation of post-war Hollywood cinema in terms of subject matter, sources, personnel, locations and production facilities. Their projects (both unrealised and completed) often dealt with stories set outside the United States, including several based on foreign publications; on some projects they (would have) worked with foreign actors and crew members, using foreign locations and production facilities. For example, Paths of Glory was shot in Germany, and The German Lieutenant was also meant to be made there (with a partially German cast), while parts of Spartacus were filmed in Spain and Lolita was made in the UK, as were all of Kubrick's later films. He permanently moved to the UK in the mid 1960s.
43. For detailed accounts of Kubrick's career after the early 1960s, which is the subject of this and the next few paragraphs, see, for example, Sklar, 'Stanley Kubrick and the American Film Industry'; LoBrutto, Stanley Kubrick, Chs. 12—19; Krämer, 2001: A Space Odyssey; Krämer, A Clockwork Orange; Krämer, Dr. Strangelove; Ljujic, Krämer and Daniels, Stanley Kubrick: New Perspectives, 174— 356; Krämer, 'Adaptation as Exploration'; Krämer, 'Spielberg and Kubrick'; Ulivieri, 'The Problem is to Find an Obsession'; and Simone Odino, 'God, it'll be Hard Topping the H-bomb'.
44. Even Barry Lyndon and Eyes Wide Shut did quite well at the box office. The latter was the 26th highest grossing film around the world in 1999 (http://www.box officemojo.com/yearly/chart/?view2=worldwide&yr=1999&p=.htm), and the former ranked among the twenty top grossing films of 1975 in the United States; David A. Cook, Lost Illusions: American Cinema in the Shadow of Watergate and Vietnam, 1970-1979 (New York: Scribner's, 2000), 500.
45. The complex relationship between Kubrick's strong concern for the Holocaust and the movies he made is examined in Cocks, The Wolf at the Door. Cocks also explores the importance of Kubrick's Jewish background, as does, more recently, Nathan Abrams; see, for example, Nathan Abrams, 'An Alternative New York Jewish Intellectual: Stanley Kubrick's Cultural Critique', in Stanley Kubrick: New Perspectives, ed. Tatjana Ljujic, Peter Krämer and Richard Daniels (London: Black Dog, 2015), 62-79.
Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Tebvision
46. See, for example, Abrams, 'An Alternative New York Jewish Intellectual'; Ulivieri, 'The Problem is to Find an Obsession'; and McAvoy, 'Creating The Shining'.
Notes on contributor
Peter Krämer is a Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of East Anglia. He is the author and editor of eight academic books, including, most recently, Stanley Kubrick: New Perspectives (2015), co-edited with Tatjana Ljujic and Richard Daniels, and the BFI Film Classics volume on The General (2016).