Posted by Isis at 132.236.35.61 on February 06, 2002 at 16:05:37:
In Reply to: Destroyed footage posted by Vincent on February 06, 2002 at 14:38:32:
Even if he hadn't specifically destroyed it, didn't he shoot like hours and hours of footage for that movie? I doubt the studio archived it all, and even if they did, their film preservation techniques were pretty poor at the time. Kubrick was always changing his stuff; didn't he even pull back and re-edit Dr. Strangelove after it had already been released? (I personally feel like Eyes Wide Shut wasn't finished when he died...and certainly we can all agree that his vision for A.I. either wasn't communicated perfectly to Spielberg, or was altered by Spielberg).
I agree it's probably a great loss, but I'm sure that Kubrick had his reasons for destroying the footage. I'm sure there's probably stuff YOU'VE shot that you wouldn't prefer get out after your death. Particularly in Kubrick's case, I think it would take the man himself to sort through everything he shot and determine what was of value and what were just mistakes, or things he would have changed his mind about later (since he was so prone to changing it). Yeah, it's valuable to see the sort of "works in progress" that great artists never were able to complete, but there's a downside too -- we'll never know what they would have changed, or why they didn't pursue the incomplete projects to the finish, so on, so on. It's all too easy to fall into a trap of worshipping wholeheartedly everything that a genius does. They should be allowed to make mistakes that others won't be able to scrutinize as exemplary of their work.
Enough rambling. I like Kubrick.
: : As it is, Kubrick destroyed the footage. (I believe he did the same for cut things from "The Shining", but I'm not 100% clear on that being destroyed.)
: I'm not sure about the footage from DR. STRANGELOVE having been destroyed. I read a report not too long ago about that footage actually having been SCREENED recently in London. Certainly, when Kubrick made STRANGELOVE he didn't have the control that he had when he started making films with Warner Bros., so I'm not sure that he could have destroyed that footage if he wanted to.
: And yes, according to an interview Leon Vitali gave around the time of the release of the "new" Kubrick collection, Kubrick had all of the outtakes from his films that were in his possession (I'd imagine this consisted of all the Warner Bros. films outtakes, and possibly 2001) taken to a dump and burned two years before he died. I think this is a travesty myself- years from now, that material could have been an incredible insight into how the man worked (much as work in progress manuscripts of great literary works are studied by scholars today).
: Vincent
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