Author Brian Aldiss describes his years of developing film scripts with Stanley Kubrick
Stanley Kubrick’s reputation rests not only on his films but also on his seeming isolation and determined independence. No other director has managed so successfully to stand outside the Hollywood system – and flourish.
I saw an example of this independence when the top brass of Warner Brothers wished to meet him. Pleading a hatred of flying, Kubrick got the top brass, on whose financial support he relied, to come to London. Once there, they invited him to meet them at their hotel. Kubrick said he was too busy. So Warner Brothers made a further trip to St Albans to meet him. The treatment of his servants was stamped by the same self-regard: genial but exacting.
Kubrick’s early films are largely second- rate, thrillers cast in familiar mode, until he produces Paths of Glory in 1957. Then follow Spartacus and Lolita. It is in 1964 that his indisputable misanthropic masterpiece, Dr Strangelove, appears. From then on the course is set, with 2001: A Space Odyssey, followed by a Clockwork Orange, and a film appearing every four or five years -dazzling films of various kinds.
Variety was one of the qualities I valued. I admired many of the films and the legend. However, it was more in a spirit of mischief than a quest for truth that I dubbed him – though only in a footnote in my history of SF, Billion Year Spree – “the great SF writer of the age”.
Kubrick happened to see the footnote. He rang me. We got chatting. We met up in July 1976, over lunch at a restaurant in Borehamwood, to talk movies and SF, and drink. Kubrick appeared in Che Guevara guise: boots, jungle greens, beret crammed over curly hair, beard. The likeness was striking.
Barry Lyndon had come out the previous year. Its perfect cut-glass frigidity had not been to popular taste. Perhaps Kubrick was in a dilemma as to what to film next. I tried to persuade him to do Philip Dick’s Martian Time-Slip.
Margaret and I drove over to Castle Kubrick a couple of times and lunched with Stanley and his artist wife. He liked actors. They were so clever. He thought Peter Sellers was a genius. He built up a casual repertory of actors he liked, such as Sterling Hayden, Philip Stone, Leonard Rossiter and Sellers. “You don’t need this bit of dialogue,” he said on one occasion, throwing it away. “A good actor can convey all that just with a look.”
While filming Stephen King’s novel, The Shining, he was necessarily elusive. He surfaced again in August 1982, referring in a letter to our previous lunch when “we spent most of the time talking about Star Wars and why fairly dumb stories might really be an art form. What has remained with me, however, is the persistent belief that the short story is a fine beginning for a longer story though, sadly, I have had no further ideas about how it could be developed. Anyway, I begin to think the old subconscious doesn’t really begin to work on something which it doesn’t own.”
This was when he made me an offer for Super-Toys. One sees with hindsight that, ironically, owning the story made no difference. Neither he, nor anyone who worked on it, could think how it might be developed. The reason is simple: my story is a vignette, complete in itself.
At that time, I was writing my Helliconia novels. And I had developed PVFS (post- viral fatigue syndrome). Nevertheless, the family urged me on. I signed a complex contract in November 1982 which left all the cards in Stanley’s hands. If the film was made from a screenplay by the two of us, I would get about $2-million. But if someone else, maybe Terry Southern, who had contributed to Strangelove, contributed additional dialogue, then I would get nothing. Or so I understood it – and I understand it no better now, surveying the contract for this article.
Every day, a limo would come to my door on Boars Hill, and Emilio D’Alessandro would drive me to Castle Kubrick, Stanley’s Blenheim-like pad. Stanley had been up half the night, wandering his great desolate rooms choked with apparatus. He would materialise in a rumpled way. “Let’s have some fresh air, Brian.” We would open a door on to his rolling acres. He would light up a cigarette. We would stroll forward, half the distance of a cricket pitch, with Stanley puffing away. “That’s enough,” he would say. Back in we would go for the day. It was a kind of joke. Our relationship was also kind of joking.
Rather ominously, when I first went to work with him, he gave me a beautifully illustrated copy of the story of Pinocchio. I could not or would not see the parallels between my five-year-old boy android and the wooden creature who becomes human. It emerged that Stanley wanted David to become human, and wanted, too, to have the Blue Fairy materialise.
For a while all was well. I wrote a linking episode called Taken Out in February 1983 and faxed it to him. He rang me, full of enthusiasm. “It’s just brilliant. I’m so thrilled. The way to do SF must be to tell it as if it’s just ordinary, with nothing that needs to be explained.”
Brian: “In other words, you treat the reader as if he is also part of the future world you’re describing.” Stanley: “I guess so, you just don’t go into all the gory scientific details.” B: “The more you explain, the less convincing it gets.” S: “You seem to have two modes of writing – brilliant and not so damned good.” That’s taken from a note made at the time. I have three volumes of notes.
We had our stand-offs. I never again pleased him as well as with Taken Out. Though we often rocked with laughter while working together, we made no progress. Plot line after plot line came to a dead end.
Stanley would never discuss what else he was working on. He was a severe anal- retentive. Occasionally, we would take a break and wander through the vast place to a pleasant bare room where his wife was sitting painting. He would then be relaxed. We would go into the huge kitchen where the dogs slept. There Stanley would cook us steak and string beans, and we would discuss the world situation, which always filled him with gloom. “Whatever happened to England, Brian?” he would ask.
The Shining appeared in 1980. It is certainly horrific. The most perceptive book on Kubrick’s work so far is Thomas Allen Nelson’s Kubrick: Inside a Film Artist’s Maze (1982). Nelson makes largely convincing claims for what others may see as mere inconsistencies, explaining them as givens in any horror fantasy. Still, the film could have been greatly improved if some shading had been given to the character of Wendy Torrance (played by Shelley Duvall). She gibbers too much.
It was surprising to discover that Stanley was uncertain where to go next. He asked me once what sort of movie he could make that would gross as much as Star Wars, while enabling him to retain his reputation for having a social conscience. When I arrived at his pad on one occasion, he talked only about Stephen Spielberg’s ET. Perhaps he admired the way much of ET is filmed from hip height, in emulation of a child’s vision. As some of The Shining is shot by Steadicam from young Danny Torrance’s viewpoint.
Stanley would have none of my reliance on narrative. He pointed out that a movie can contain at most 60 scenes, whereas a novel can contain any number, one fading into another. A film needed only about eight “non-submersible units”, as he called them. One can see this episodic method in 2001 and, at its best, in The Shining. Here, blackboards announcing starkly A Month Later, or, simply, Monday, warn the audience pleasurably that something awful is going to happen, and that Jack Nicholson is going to be a little more over the top.
The years dragged on. I would take notes during the day. Getting home, I would turn them into screenplay material, fax them to Stanley, and then write up my diary notes. Meanwhile, I also strove to remain a husband and father. I had given up my three decades of proud independence for this long dusty trail.
In 1987, the grumpy, coarse-veined Full Metal Jacket was released. This late take on Vietnam became a hit in Japan, while proving less successful elsewhere. Bizarrely, with the aid of 36 palm trees imported from Spain, Kubrick created Vietnam within the ruins of a site in London’s east end. (“It’s almost impossible to build plausible ruins. And winter sunsets in England resemble sunsets in Vietnam,” he claimed.)
By 1990, we were in difficulties. Agents and lawyers were exchanging letters. Stanley and I had flooded New York, only to have the Blue Fairy emerge from the depths. I tried to tell Stanley that he should create a great modern myth to rival Strangelove and 2001, and to avoid fairy tale. It was absurd of me. I was wheedled out of the picture.
He never said goodbye or uttered a word of unmeaning thanks. Instead, another cigarette was lit, the back was turned. And Super-Toys was rechristened Al – destined never to be made.
Stanley was a kind of genius, not least in the way he kept the world from his creative door. Geniuses do not have to bother with ordinary courtesies. They have other things on their mind. You do well not to resent their meaner habits. And even Arthur C Clarke, Stanley’s partner on 2001, could not expand my vignette into a major movie. There’s a lesson there for all of us, if only I could think what it was.
It was a relief to go my own sweet way again. For a few years, I had been one of Kubrick’s tentacles. He had many tentacles. On one occasion, when we were struggling with the concept of having a real android boy, Stanley claimed that it was the Japanese who really liked robots; so they would have the electronic wizards most likely to construct the first genuine androids. He summoned his right-hand man.
“Get me Mitsubishi on the line.” (Let’s just say it was Mitsubishi.) “Who do you want to speak to at Mitsubishi, Stanley?” Get Mr Mitsubishi on the line.”
A short while later, the phone rang. Stanley picked it up. A voice at the other end said, “Oh, Mister Stanley Kubrick? Is Mr Mitsubishi speaking. How can I help you?”
Everyone on the planet knew the name of Stanley Kubrick. One must expect such a man to be unlike the rest of us.