And I went 48 takes at Shepperton Studios and I had the cigar and all the dialogue and the military jargon and I began [snapping his fingers] to blow, and blow, and blow. And something said to me: sure I had troubles before, talking about 8 takes, 10 takes, 12 takes uh? But now we're getting up to the twenties, uh (...) And I'm pouring sweat and they're mopping me off... Now a beautiful thing happened, speaking of Stanley Kubrick. I finally got up, I couldn't take it anymore. I walked up to him and I said "Stanley, I apologise to you". And he said this to me, one of the loveliest things a man has ever told me in my life. And he said: Sterling, I know you can't help what's going on and I can't help you, BUT the TERROR in your eyes, on your face, may be just the QUALITY that we want in this jackass general Jack Ripper. He said: If it is not, come back in another couple of months and we'll do it all over again.
Now that was lovely. I'll never forget that. (...)
Pheeew! That's inverse acting! Uh?
Sterling Hayden on impersonating Jack D. Ripper in "Dr. Strangelove"
The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reasons to exist
John Cage, anaRchy
Sometimes even opinion makers have their eyes wide shut.
Stuart Klawans, New York Times
You have not yet learned that you have to be like everyone else. The perfect mediocrity. No better, no worse. Individuality is a monster and it must be strangled in its cradle.
Maurice/Kola Kwariani (in "The Killing")
A few excerpts from this 24-page article:
Born in 1928, graduating at 17 with poor conduct grades - in fact in all subjects except physics. A New Yorker from the Bronx, few words and great intelligence, curious to death.
Born in a Jewish family originally from Central Europe, almost a professional chess player (but he couldn't stand the label of chess hustler even though he had earned money playing it in Washington Square); first photograph sold to Look magazine when he was sixteen. A man who was as proud of being a businessman as he was of being an artist.
Careful with every dollar: for two weeks he hired Malcolm McDowell to record the epic narrative voice in Clockwork Orange, interspersing it all with ping-pong games, which he regularly lost. Then he settled the bill with the actor by paying him only one week because "you spent the other week playing ping-pong".
A guy who, during Barry Lindon, having promised his wife he would never buy him even a pack of cigarettes again, started to constantly scrounge them from the crew. And his collaborators were only hired if they were on the job day and night: a girl who worked for him in France found herself - on the phone - yelling at him answers to "very urgent" questions. She was in the delivery room.
He achieved this and much more thanks to an ultra-magnetic charisma.
Ryan O'Neal remembers how during the shooting of Barry Lindon, after one particularly well interpreted take of one scene, Stanley Kubrick walked next to him to go and talk to the crew and in doing so "he grabbed my hand and shook it it tightly. It was the most enchanting moment and most appreciated gesture in my life. It was the greatest moment of my career".
In 2000, Full Metal Jacket's co-writer Michael Herr - in a particularly interesting little book - recounts having told SK about a dinner he had with a famous director in London: the director had ended up ordering and uncorking - but leaving untouched - a £300 bottle of wine.
To which Stanley comments: “You see, these people don’t know how to live like monks”. Monks? His friend Riccardo Aragno recalls that when SK began to see that the public was responding well to the launch of Clockwork Orange, the maestro’s first comment was: “the problem now is not to think about needing two pairs of shoes”.
Coming from the owner of an estate of about half a million square meters (near London!) it would seem contradictory. But how do you define a very tough businessman who personally changed the litter for his cats and was literally afraid of hurting an ant? His Italian chauffeur and handyman Emilio d’Alessandro says he had to stop using a certain van after telling his boss he had found one birds' nest in the exhaust pipe.
Accused of being a recluse, a maniac and someone that, by comparison, “Howard Hughes would have been considered a party animal”, perhaps he was indeed obsessive-compulsive, certainly a disheveled creative anarchist, with cotton trousers and army jackets with pockets stuffed with all sort of clutter, submerged in an ocean of sketches, clippings and ideas, piled up in huge warehouses or in the rooms of one of the infinite wings of his ‘castle’, possibly doused with cat pee. (The Shining’s labyrinth is very autobiographical; also: look at the resemblance between Jack and SK sitting typing during that shooting.)
(...)
2001/2: DEATH ARIAS
"I became operational at the H.A.L. Plant in Urbana, Illinois on the twelfth of January, 1992.
My instructor was Mr. Langley, and he taught me to sing a song. If you would like to hear it, I can sing it for you. It’s called Daisy”.
“Recitativo” by HAL (2001 A Space Odissey)
Despite the sense of lightness, harmony, and grace that emanate from the Karajan-ised Strauss waltzes of "2001", it is inevitable that some critics have hunted for the other ternary tempos included in the movie, seeking duplicates or conceptual negatives of the Blue Danube.
The results, are more surprising than obvious. They certainly project a dark shadow casting off the apparently playful technical appropriation of Strauss. Kubrick gives us indeed these two other waltzes - cleverly camouflaged in the plot with the task of making explicit what David Patterson has cleverly called "a sinister Totentanz".
The first is the one created by the triplet pulses emitted by the machines of the hibernated scientists while HAL is killing them. In a certain sense it is HAL himself who emits this waltz: Beep beep beep ... Beep beep beep ... It is not the first murder in 2001, but it is unique in its kind. [Those sounds will be somehow remembered in the scene in which Bowman re-enters the Discovery through an emergency maneuver, with siren blares in a deadly ascending glissando. An ironic take on “for whom the siren tolls”!]
The second waltz is Daisy Bell (A Bicycle Built For Two), HAL’s “death aria”, when the roles are reversed and - after a dialogue between machine and man that acts as a recitative for the aria - the man ‘kills’ HAL. Some have compared it to the death of a child, others have considered it the most dramatic moment of the entire film. Yes, perhaps it is so. But then: why that piece?
Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer do/ I’m half crazy all for the love of you
It won’t be a stylish marriage/I can’t afford a carriage
But you’ll look sweet upon the seat/Of a bicycle built for two
Daisy (A Bicycle Built For Two)
Daisy Bell was a Harry Dacre song that a certain Max Mathews (a graduate of Cal-Tech and MIT, and a manager at Bell Telephone Laboratories between 1962 and 1985) had recorded in 1961 with the voice generated by an IBM7094 computer (NB: I have read other names and different versions of the story - you can listen to the original on vintagecomputermusic.com).
Mathews then continued in the musical field by publishing some pieces in a Decca electronic music collection, Music for Mathematics, and collaborating with Varèse, Cage, as well as helping Boulez set up IRCAM in Paris. Informed choices, in short, with a piece and a character very well known in the American A.I. scene.
In other words, these technological waltzes of death force us to consider the possibility that Stanley Kubrick allowed himself the pleasure of giving voice to those who - precisely in those years - were questioning the delirium of accepting the fatalities deriving from technology, or accepting technology as destiny.
I think of the philosopher Jacques Ellul who precisely rejected this fatalistic predisposition by urging humanity to rebel, rediscovering the traits of Greek tragedies in this mythical battle for supremacy between technology and intellect. Let's call it a coincidence, but in the acceptance speech for the most important award he received in life (the DW Griffith Award - 1997) SK resurrected a Greek myth, speaking against popular wisdom. He spoke of Icarus and how, in his opinion, that myth did not criticize "flying too high" so much as it suggested "doing a better job" with wings. What exactly this means - as always with mr. K - is a matter of personal opinion.
'Technique' was certainly one of Kubrick's obsessions. He enjoyed it, always looking for the latest lens or the first pre-PC (in '62). But, as the shapes of the 2001 artifacts tend to tell, the much-vaunted technique of 2001 resembles that of the bone of millions of years before, if the one who uses it is always a quarrelsome and violent ape.
It is little wonder that this technical dance of spaceships and satellites, in perfect synchronicity with Strauss's pauses designed to allow the dancing couples to change partners, ends as DS began: with a classic, phallic "up and down" - the defloration of the orbiting platform, "the penetration of the market" by a Pan Am space-plane.
Ad abudantiam the following spaceship, used to ge to the Moon, will hit the deep dark mouth of the lunar landing station which (not by chance) opens like a flower, concluding the visual commentary of metaphorical alignments, of what we see and what we hear (the end of the waltz) and of the historical context of those sounds (the waltz as sexual innuendo in Imperial Austria), with a twist of detached irony as the ideal accompaniment for the dish.
(...)
As Napoleon himself said, “Everything is in the execution” SK