Why stanley kubrick died

Steven Spielberg is one. Clint Eastwood is another. He succeeded in that as few filmmakers ever have. He even handled the marketing of his movies, paying for it out of his production budget, and he dictated the distribution schedule. He had the power to alarm and disturb. He knew the power of the irrational, of the perfect plan gone wrong. He had no love of humanity. He was a misanthrope. When we spoke on the phone, our conversations lasted for hours.

He was constantly in contact with hundreds of people all over the world He would pick up the phone and call a complete stranger to say how much his or her movie impressed him. Shaken friends and colleagues talked fondly of Kubrick Sunday, recalling his intelligence, his love of the good life and his legendary eccentricites and fears.

Warner Bros. He could make you laugh and he could make you cry. He may not have physically traveled but he was always traveling in his mind Walker said some of his fears were well based. But not only fear made him a recluse, according to Walker. Stanley subscribed to Durrants cutting service, and every day he would receive a thick envelope or two full of clips. He tended to throw these envelopes, unopened, into an R-Kive box and then once a month or so give the box to me with the instructions that I should go through them and show him anything noteworthy.

Easier said than done. Just opening the envelopes and unfolding the clippings took a good couple of hours while reading or scanning the clips was interminable. There were articles, but there was clutter, too. In fact, we got a clipping from every newspaper that noted the re-run. Then there were the lengthy magazine pieces, an interview with an actor or a film director, say, and it was only 2, words into the thing that Stanley was mentioned, once, in passing.

They all had to be read. How rewarding, then, to find a piece with Stanley mentioned in the title! That was meat. Once viewed the clippings would be thrown into one of the all-purpose archive boxes Stanley had custom made.

There were dozens and dozens of them on the industrial shelving that lined his offices and store rooms. After Stanley's death the volume of clippings doubled, and tripled, then quadrupled. There were obituaries, memorials, recollections, assessments and so on.

These were too important merely to box, so I decided to file them in date order in Swedex four-prong binders always a favourite with Stanley: "Those Swedes sure know how to make a functional, sexy binder! Even with the help of Rachel, my assistant, we soon had a massive backlog of clippings waiting to be unfolded, read, punched and bound. I would come in at weekends and steadily work my way through them.

It was late on a Saturday in September, six months after Stanley had died and when the clippings were beginning to slow down, that I came across something that startled me. It didn't initially startle me. It startled me when I was reading the next clipping. A delayed startle. I returned to it.

The article was a two-page spread. In the centre was one of the photographs of the bespectacled and bearded Stanley that Christiane, his wife, had taken only a month or two before his death, while display type announced: World exclusive, Kubrick, The Last Interview.

Beneath this, the text stated that Channel 4 would be profiling Stanley on the eve of the release of Eyes Wide Shut, that David Quinlan, the film editor of TV Times, was examining the man and his films and "Adrian Rigelsford and Kim Meffen, who visited Kubrick on set, uncover the truth in what turned out to be the last interview he ever gave".

Eyes Wide Shut is a couple of months into what would eventually become an epic filming schedule Notoriously reluctant to be interviewed, a good-humoured atmosphere prevails on the set and he [Kubrick] agrees to answer a few questions on the condition: 'They don't ask me to conceptualise about my films I read it again. Had Stanley really been interviewed on set? This seemed doubtful, as the sets were always closed and a security guard or two was on sentinel duty at all times.

Even Terry Semel and Bob Daly, the joint heads of Warner Bros who were financing and distributing the film, would have thought twice about visiting the set, and as for two unknown journalists? But, who knows, perhaps Stanley had done this as a special favour? The only time he did give interviews was on the release of a film, and then reluctantly and only to one or two big name journalists or critics from magazines such as Time or Rolling Stone.

Rigelsford and Meffen. Who were they? Were they big names? If so, where? I wasn't aware of them interviewing Stanley, but then I wasn't on set all the time and not everything passed through my office.

Half of it was, for want of a better word, banal. Some of it sounded like Stanley, but if indeed this was Stanley, he was firing on a single cylinder. I put the article to one side and carried on reading and filing the other clippings. When I got a moment I'd return to it. Several weeks went by as more pressing work was dealt with. Every so often I'd glance at the interview. It puzzled and intrigued me.

One morning in October a meeting was cancelled and I had a spare hour. I reread the article. Did this really happen? I'd phone a couple of people. Julian Senior, the head of publicity at Warner Bros in London and a close associate of Stanley's, didn't know anything about it and laughed at the suggestion.

Brian Cook, the film's assistant director and co-producer, who never left Stanley's side throughout the shooting, shook his head, "Not on my watch. Margaret Adams, the production supervisor who had worked for Stanley on and off since , knew nothing about it either. I showed the interview to Christiane Kubrick and she agreed with me. It was unlikely. Very unlikely. Another thing began to puzzle me. Why, if the interview was conducted at the beginning of , did the interviewers wait more than two-and-a-half years to publish it - until six months after Stanley's death?

It wasn't as if they had to have a "peg" in this instance, his death before someone accepted it for publication. My doubts were increasing daily and I decided to speak to the TV Times. I could not prove it was a fraud. I could only suggest it was. There was something about the two interviewers' names.

Adrian Rigelsford. Adrian, for no good reason, I've always felt was a bit of a poser's name. And Rigelsford. What did this suggest? Somebody who wriggles? Kim Meffen. I couldn't get, as they say, a gender-fix on the first name. A girl or a bloke? And as for Meffen, what was this?

It sounded like some long-forgotten agricultural implement or, perhaps, something to do with West Country folk dancing. In fact, as I later found out, it's a variant of the Scottish name, Methuen, from Methven in Perthshire.

I came across a book by Rigelsford in a second-hand bookstore in Rochester - Carry On Laughing: A Celebration, published by Virgin in , a hastily put-together scrapbook of a volume with lots of illustrations. He had also written books on the TV series Blake's 7, Peter Sellers another "celebration" and several on a series he claimed to be a world expert on, Dr Who.

He inhabited that undergrowth of showbiz literature where fandom and cultists hang out. I introduced myself and said that I worked for the Kubrick Estate. There was a long silence and then Genower said,"You realise you're impugning the integrity of a well respected magazine? Which hadn't occurred to me, but he was right. That was it. I was sunk.

I'd convinced myself the piece was invention and here was the proof it wasn't. What folly! I didn't know what to say. I glanced at the opening of the interview:. Q: There are some rather strange legends circulating about you A: You mean the eccentricity? That I'm a recluse? I've heard most of them. A: Probably that I wear a parachute under my coat at all times he laughs.

It must go with the crash helmet that I wear whenever I'm out driving. Q: Why don't you respond to weird stories circulating about you? A: A response to one requires a response to all of them. These enduring mysteries have helped make it into a cult film — though not all of the questions surrounding the film remain unresolved.

Here, we examine five of the most notable myths about Eyes Wide Shut and debunk some longstanding rumours. The actor and the director fell out during filming, and Kubrick ended up removing him from the project altogether.

In a television interview with Andrew Marr, Keitel admitted that Kubrick had fired him, and felt that he had been treated disrespectfully by the director on set. At the time the film was made, Cruise and Kidman were still a couple in real life the pair would go through a highly publicised divorce in It was rumoured that each insisted on being present for any intimate scenes the other was required to film with additional cast members. Truth: The opposite was actually the case. Kubrick did not allow this, and actually discouraged them spending time together on set in general, often directing them separately.