Eyes Wide Shut

What happens when Tom Cruise’s unstoppable force meets Stanley Kubrick’s immovable object? Tune in as Lizzie & Chris uncover the secrets of the reclusive auteur’s thirteenth and final film, a production so difficult it (likely) ended a marriage, dispatched its director and may have sent not one, but two Kubrick collaborators deeper into the embrace of a truly secretive society. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

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• 0:35Chris Winterbauer?

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• 1:26Lizzie Bassett?

  Hello and Happy New Year, dear listeners. Welcome back to What Went Wrong, your favorite podcast full stop that just so happens to be about movies and how hard it is to make them, let alone a good one, let alone a controversial one that you might think is boring, like Chris does. I am one of your hosts, Lizzie Bassett, here as always with Chris Winterbauer, and I'm very excited about this New Year, New You holiday movie that we have for us today. Chris, what are we covering?

• 1:59Chris Winterbauer?

  We're covering that zany, lighthearted romp. That's right, Stanley Kubrick's 13th and final film, which I don't think is boring, but I do find difficult to engage with, I guess I'll say. Eyes Wide Shut. Now, Lizzie, before we get into our thoughts on the film, a brief suggestion to our audience. We're going to be discussing both Stanley Kubrick and Tom Cruise at length in this episode. And if you want to learn more about Tom Cruise in particular, you should head over to The Big Flop by Wondry, where Lizzie and I are guest hosting this week to talk about Tom Cruise

• 2:42Chris Winterbauer?

  and his flop era that started shortly after the release of this film, but also covers his upbringing and his rise in Hollywood. Of course, if you want to learn more about Stanley Kubrick and his biography, you can check out our coverage of The Shining. And you can have a nice little Eyes Wide Shut sandwich. That'll be about as long as the movie.

• 3:03Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 3:05Chris Winterbauer?

  If you want to listen to three podcasts in one day. Okay, Lizzie, had you ever seen Eyes Wide Shut before? And what were your thoughts upon finishing it seven years later?

• 3:16Lizzie Bassett?

  I had seen Eyes Wide Shut before, definitely as an adult. I didn't see this like as a child, thank God, or even as a young adult. I saw it probably five-ish years ago, and I remember being pretty bored. I will say, upon watching it again this time, I really liked it. I have some bones to pick with it, but it no longer lives in my head as the most boring orgy movie on the planet. Now, I think, pretty entertaining orgy movie. Wish there were, wish there was a little more orgy. Wish there were some penises in this, but that's most of my review.

• 3:52Chris Winterbauer?

  Not a prick in sight, as Frederick Raphael put it, the writer of the film. This is a VHS cover I remember looking at with intrigue as a young man in the Hollywood video near our house. I don't know what would take number one now for your list of boring orgy films, Lizzie. That's a conversation we can have at another date. I have very mixed feelings about this movie. I really do love many of Stanley Kubrick's films. 2001 for its technical bravura, Doctor Strangelove for its pitch black humor, The Shining, which we've covered. I really love kind of the pointlessness of War and Full Metal Jacket, many, many more. I watched this movie in college, high with some friends,

• 4:37Chris Winterbauer?

  and I was not high by the end of it, because that's how long it is.

• 4:40Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, it is so long.

• 4:41Chris Winterbauer?

  And it was, it's really beautiful to look at. There's a lot of gorgeous cinematography and really interesting things that they do with color. I had a hard time appreciating it, even now as a married man. I actually do appreciate its themes a lot more, but I still find it's a movie that kind of keeps me at arm's length. And I think that's for very specific reasons that we'll get to.

• 5:03Chris Winterbauer?

  More on that later.

• 5:04Lizzie Bassett?

  I love Nicole Kidman. I love her wigs, even though this is not, this is not wig era Nicole Kidman. This is regular beautiful hair era Nicole Kidman. She speaks so slowly in this movie. The first 45 minutes of this movie are just pushing through Nicole Kidman going like, "I wonder about my dreams." And it's like, oh, my God. I don't know, maybe it's not her fault, but good Lord. It's like, it's ultimate baby voice the whole way through. It's so slow. She whispers everything. I love her. Honestly, she's my least favorite part of this.

• 5:47Chris Winterbauer?

  And I would have to say I feel the exact opposite. Nicole Kidman is my favorite part of this entire movie.

• 5:52Lizzie Bassett?

  She's like an evil baby spider that can't speak above a certain volume.

• 5:57Chris Winterbauer?

  She is the only person that understands the tone of the film. She gives it humor and life. She is a sphinx. I think she's great. Tom Cruise is a little boy lost at the big kid table. He doesn't know what's happening. I love Nicole Kidman in this movie. So I'm very excited to talk about why we got the performances we did. I'm actually thrilled that we're on opposite sides of this because it's a very specific performance.

• 6:21Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, I hate it and I love her.

• 6:24Chris Winterbauer?

  Big fan. I really, I watched, I was like, man, Nicole Kidman, she's a star. She's got it. Okay, let's talk about that more as we get into casting. This is a fascinating film, Lizzie. It's surrounded by conspiracy theories, both due to its subject matter, a secret society of men with penises, always hidden and nude women, Kubrick himself, and of course, the timing of his death, which occurred prior to the release and completion of the film. It begs a number of questions. Is Eyes Wide Shut really a Stanley Kubrick film if he didn't finish it? What version were we left with? How was it fiddled with by the studio after his demise? Does the movie finally answer the question, Lizzie, of what would happen if an unstoppable force, namely Tom Cruise,

• 7:08Chris Winterbauer?

  were to meet an immovable object, namely Stanley Kubrick? Does Nicole Kidman have the best butt in Hollywood?

• 7:16Lizzie Bassett?

  It's pretty good. She looks incredible.

• 7:18Chris Winterbauer?

  It's pretty good. Do doctors carry identification like police officers? These are a number of questions that we will answer this week. But first, the details. Eyes Wide Shut is a 1999 erotic mystery thriller, or drama, directed and produced by Stanley Kubrick. It was co-written by Kubrick and Frederick Raphael and more, a bit, as we'll learn. The film is based on the 1926 novella Tromnovele, or Dream Story, by Arthur Schnitzler. It stars Tom Cruise, Nicole Kidman, Sidney Pollack, Marie Richardson, Todd Field, Vanessa Shaw, Alan Cumming, and more. And of course, Lizzie, the film holds the Guinness World Record for the longest continuous film shoot, which is why it shows up on many listicles.

• 8:03Lizzie Bassett?

  Okay.

• 8:04Chris Winterbauer?

  As always, the IMDb logline reads, "A Manhattan doctor embarks on a bizarre night-long odyssey after his wife's admission of unfulfilled longing."

• 8:17Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah? Where's the Illuminati in that?

• 8:21Chris Winterbauer?

  Well, are they that important to the story at the end of the day? I'm not sure.

• 8:25Lizzie Bassett?

  That's the part I'm tuning in for.

• 8:28Chris Winterbauer?

  Right. We'll get to them. All right, as always, guys, the three or four top primary sources used for this episode. Eyes Wide Shut, Stanley Kubrick in the making of his final film, and Kubrick: An Odyssey. Those are two different books, both written by Robert P. Kolker and Nathan Abrams. Eyes Wide Open, written by Frederick Raphael, co-writer of Eyes Wide Shut, detailing his, perhaps too subjective, experience working with Kubrick on the film. And Amy Nicholson's Tom Cruise: Anatomy of an Actor, which is a fantastic, hardbound book, including deep dives into many of his most famous roles.

• 9:10Chris Winterbauer?

  Also, make sure to check out Amy Nicholson's podcast, Unspooled, which is of course, co-hosted by friend of the pod, Paul Scheer. Now, as I'm sure most of our audience is well aware, Stanley Kubrick was a famous or infamous shut-in. He had moved to the United Kingdom, to London, back in the 60s, and never left. And then literally never left at a certain point and barely left his home. I actually thought he was British for a long time and then learned he's from the Bronx. He's very American and we'll hear a bit of his voice very soon. So since we're going to be discussing him ad nauseam this episode, I thought we should

• 9:50Chris Winterbauer?

  get a sense of the man who was as awkward, funny, smart and peculiar as you could possibly imagine. In 1997, when he was very deep into shooting Eyes Wide Shut, Stanley Kubrick received the D.W. Griffith Lifetime Achievement Award from the Directors Guild. It's an award given out once a year. Kubrick, at the time, was considered one of, if not the, world's greatest director, but he'd never won Best Director. So this was a very big honor. By this point, he would not fly, nor would he go in a car faster than 35 miles per hour. And I did read he wore a crash helmet when he was in cars. So he did not attend the award.

• 10:33Chris Winterbauer?

  He pre-recorded his remarks on videotape, and it is, I believe, the last recorded video of Kubrick speaking to the camera. So I'd like to play a snippet for you, Lizzie, in which he describes D.W. Griffith's career as being akin to Icarus flying too close to the sun.

• 10:51Speaker 04

  I've compared Griffith's career to the Icarus myth. But at the same time, I've never been certain whether the moral of the Icarus story should only be, as is generally accepted, don't try to fly too high, or whether it might also be thought of as, forget the wax and feathers and do a better job on the wings.

• 11:16Chris Winterbauer?

  All right.

• 11:17Lizzie Bassett?

  All right.

• 11:19Chris Winterbauer?

  The most deadpan possible delivery. Kubrick hated being on camera. He hated that video of himself. He did have a laugh about it with his wife, Chris Chan, later. He was afraid to fly, Lizzie, but by the mid 1990s, the 70-year-old filmmaker, near 70-year-old, was prepared to make perhaps his riskiest film: a sex comedy. Now, Lizzie, as you know, Kubrick had tackled space travel, artificial intelligence, hebophilia, nuclear annihilation, anarchy, war, rape, horror, Picaresque gold diggers, really, the gamut, so to speak, of the human male experience, at least, a number of films I'm sure you've seen.

• 12:02Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, there's, I mean, I will say, there's a bit of sex comedy in Doctor Strangelove, so I wouldn't say he hasn't touched on it. And also, Doctor Strangelove is funny. Eyes Wide Shut, not a laugh in sight, but go on.

• 12:17Chris Winterbauer?

  Well, there was a specific evolution toward the jokeless Eyes Wide Shut that we got to. As you mentioned, sex does pop up in humorous ways in his films. I mean, Lolita's obviously very much about sex. Doctor Strangelove, the entire third act effectively becomes justifying nuclear annihilation to change the ratio of men to women favorably for the generals in the room. And the whole thing is precipitated by an Alex Jones-esque belief that the water's making the frogs gay, effectively. So...

• 12:48Lizzie Bassett?

  I love that movie so much.

• 12:51Chris Winterbauer?

  It's so good. I'm so excited to cover it eventually. Now, there had been other projects that had gotten away from him, that he'd never gotten to film, a biopic on Napoleon he really wanted to make. There was a Holocaust film that we're going to talk about briefly here, and of course, AI, artificial intelligence, which Steven Spielberg eventually directed, and was originally named Super Toys. There was one book, though, Lizzie, that Kubrick could neither crack nor buck through his entire career, and that was Arthur Schnitzler's Trom novel, which is a novella about a young doctor in early 20th century Vienna who is positively shook to discover that his wife has had sexy thoughts about somebody else, goes for a walk, discovers a secret sex society, and never actually

• 13:35Chris Winterbauer?

  has sex with anyone, including his wife. The books?

• 13:40Chris Winterbauer?

  Surprisingly similar to the finished product, and we'll get to the adaptation process, which is frustratingly circular. Basically transpose New York for Vienna, Americanize and anglicize the characters, change the time of year from Carnival to Christmas, and you have Eyes Wide Shut.

• 13:57Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 13:57Chris Winterbauer?

  But the question remains, why was he so obsessed with this book? And I read it to try to figure it out. It's only about 100 pages. It's very brief. It's extremely Freudian. It's almost like an internal monologue of this character. His name's Frieda Lin in the book. He's obviously Austrian, not an American named Bill. And it's, again, very similar to the movie, and it doesn't really scream cinema when you read it. The, you know, sex parties are pretty vague, the way that they're described. Not a ton happens. There's not like a clear structure to the book. There's actually less structure than the finished film. But I don't know. I don't know, Lizzie. Maybe you think the story sounds more interesting.

• 14:40Lizzie Bassett?

  I don't at all. It sounds very sort of Proustian, and which doesn't necessarily seem like a thing that you would adapt to film.

• 14:47Chris Winterbauer?

  It is.

• 14:48Lizzie Bassett?

  I mean, you put sex party anywhere in the logline, and it's got a little bit of spice to it. So, I mean, you can't ignore that.

• 14:54Chris Winterbauer?

  That's true. Although, as we'll get to, Kubrick did try to ignore the sex party for a long time as he was filming.

• 15:00Lizzie Bassett?

  No, Stanley, put in more.

• 15:03Chris Winterbauer?

  Regardless, whenever Kubrick found the book, and there's debate as to when he originally read this book, it seems like a book that he was searching for subconsciously his entire career. So, Lizzie, let's discuss Stanley Kubrick and his sex life very briefly. It's often pointed out that Kubrick rarely portrays women positively, if at all, in his films.

• 15:23Lizzie Bassett?

  Yep.

• 15:24Chris Winterbauer?

  Although, I would argue, I don't think it's because he has a like toxic view of women necessarily, but more so that it seems like they just baffled him. There are a number of quotes from these books from some of the women that he'd worked with that basically said Stanley doesn't understand women. He doesn't know how to talk to women.

• 15:41Lizzie Bassett?

  He's not interested.

• 15:42Chris Winterbauer?

  I think he becomes interested over his life for a specific reason that we'll get to. So. Kubrick was married three times. First to his high school sweetheart, Toba Metz. He was 19 when they got married. They got divorced around the production of his first film, Fear and Desire. And this is when we first start to see him obsessing over loneliness and sex with heavy Freudian themes and male characters incapable of pleasing their wives. It's very kind of Woody Allen-esque is how I would describe it. After his divorce, he had a string of fizzled relationships. And then he started dating his second wife, Ruth Sabatka, who was an Austrian ballet dancer and artist from Vienna in 1952. He had photographed her. And it seems like maybe she introduced him to Tram Novelle.

• 16:27Chris Winterbauer?

  And what is definitely known is that she kind of ushered him into the higher echelon of creatives in the New York scene. And so kind of like Bill, felt like he was entering a group of people where he wasn't quite sure if he belonged. And yet his wife fit in seamlessly.

• 16:43Lizzie Bassett?

  Hmm.

• 16:44Chris Winterbauer?

  So they married in 1955. I also read 1953. And there are a bunch more incomplete projects from this time that hint at his state of mind. Let's talk titles. A Perfect Marriage. Spoiler, it wasn't perfect. The Married Man. Spoiler, not super happy. And many others. Some even had sequences that felt lifted from Eyes Wide Shut, like him walking around aimlessly until 2:00 in the morning. He and Sabatka divorced in 1957. And then he married his third wife, Christiane Kubrick, who said that, quote, "Her husband saw extraordinary parallels between his relationship with Ruth and the Tram Novelle heroes' dealings with women."

• 17:26Chris Winterbauer?

  The irony is, of course, that Kubrick was not some Lothario. At the end of the day, he actually just wanted domesticity. And so his third marriage was his final marriage. He got married in 1958. Christiane was a German painter and actress who'd performed in Kubrick's Paths of Glory. And as James Harris, producer of Kubrick's films through Lolita, said, quote, "His pursuit of women was mostly a distraction." His attitude was, "It's easier to be married and get down to work." End quote. So Kubrick's monogamous at this point. And I think... A lot of the themes of the film can be explained by the fact that Kubrick is fascinated by people who have a capacity to do things that he doesn't, right?

• 18:10Chris Winterbauer?

  So if you look at a lot of the films that he's done, like the capacity for violence, the capacity for infidelity, the capacity to destroy one's own family from within, these are all things that Kubrick in his personal life never engaged in in any form. So he certainly read the book by 1968 because that's when he first optioned it. Now, Lizzie, I think you probably knows this, Kubrick's incredibly secretive.

• 18:33Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 18:34Chris Winterbauer?

  Like ridiculously secretive. Actually, Frederick Raphael wrote in his book that Kubrick's biggest secret may be that he actually has no secrets, which I thought was a pretty good way of putting it. Regardless, he hired American film critic and screenwriter Jay Cox to option the book on his behalf. And he starts researching Arthur Schnitzler and he's fascinated by him. And he's like the opposite of Kubrick. They're both obsessed with sex, but Schnitzler is this prolific philanderer and womanizer. He's like Alexander the Great with women. He is obsessed with conquering. He supposedly kept a diary of every orgasm he'd ever had. Hello, RFK Jr., binders full of women. Sorry, Cheryl.

• 19:18Lizzie Bassett?

  Wait, wasn't that Mitt Romney?

• 19:19Chris Winterbauer?

  No, no, no, it is. But RFK Jr. kept a like list of all the women he'd ever slept with. It was pretty gnarly.

• 19:25Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, you gotta be able to remember somehow.

• 19:27Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, when that brain worms making its way dune style through the prefrontal cortex. All right. Kubrick did have a fascination with women, pornography, he'd done nude photography, but as cinematographer Gerald Freed put it, "He was appalled and fascinated by the length people would go to, perhaps especially men, to achieve some sexual advantage at the risk of truth and honesty, even decency. He was troubled by the facility with which people can betray one another or betray a marriage for the sake of a little biological aggrandizement. It was as if Stanley was appalled by the concept of someone looking at you right in the eye without blinking and lying about a sexual affair. That to him was a horror story."

• 20:10Lizzie Bassett?

  So that makes a lot of sense because upon rewatching this movie, I don't think I realized how like, this is like a PSA to play in schools about why you shouldn't cheat. It's like the gym teacher, and I think it was Mean Girls, who says like, if you have sex, you will get chlamydia and die, like every time. That's basically Eyes Wide Shut. Any interaction he has, because he doesn't have sex, he narrowly avoids literally dying.

• 20:37Chris Winterbauer?

  Oh, she's dead. Oh, she has AIDS. Oh, right?

• 20:40Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 20:40Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, exactly. Every time.

• 20:42Lizzie Bassett?

  I have a quick question. Is it implied at the beginning of the movie that he has been having affairs?

• 20:48Chris Winterbauer?

  Just that he's had the opportunity is what I would suggest.

• 20:52Lizzie Bassett?

  Okay.

• 20:52Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, not that he has. So Kubrick shares the book with his, his wife, and she basically says, no, no, no, honey, don't do this. And she gives him Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange, because she basically says, our marriage is not going to survive you trying to adapt this book, because you're going to become a paranoid mess.

• 21:09Lizzie Bassett?

  Smart.

• 21:10Chris Winterbauer?

  Right, very smart. But he keeps coming back to Trom Navel. So let's do the quick hits. In 1971, Warner Brothers announced it, called Rhapsody, this was the working title he had, as his next film. Kubrick decides, ah, hold on, I'm going to do a movie on Napoleon first. That never happens. And so Trom Navel fades to the background a little bit as other projects come to the foreground. But every time he has a break, he keeps coming back to this book. And even on other movies, he would call for these things called reader reports, which were like analyses of the book. And he would just read them and read them and try to figure out the right angle to approach this book. He also would send this book to every damn writer he ever worked with and said,

• 21:54Chris Winterbauer?

  read it, tell me if you think there's a way to crack it. And we'll go through a couple of the specific examples, but he was obsessed. So he renews his option through his brother-in-law and collaborator, Jan Harlan. He and Chris Jan, meanwhile, are becoming more and more domestic. She had a daughter from her first marriage, and then they have two daughters of their own, Anya and Vivian. Remember Vivian? It's during this "two decades in development," quote unquote, that Kubrick makes what I kind of think are three key choices about how he's going to adapt this book.

• 22:29Chris Winterbauer?

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• 24:34Speaker 05

  Some travelers want the charm of an independent hotel. Others want the confidence of a trusted global brand. With Series by Marriott, you get both. Each property is uniquely connected to its destination, delivering local experiences and memorable stays, while being backed by the quality, reliability, and Marriott Bonvoy benefits travelers know and trust. Experience the destination without the compromise. Series by Marriott is part of Marriott Bonvoy. Book direct at Marriott.com or on the Marriott Bonvoy app.

• 25:12Chris Winterbauer?

  Choice number one. He ditches the idea of casting someone like him as the lead. So in the early 1970s, he thought about making the movie as a black and white art house film with Woody Allen as the lead.

• 25:26Lizzie Bassett?

  Please don't.

• 25:26Chris Winterbauer?

  So this was before the release of Manhattan and Annie Hall. I think it was inspired by Allen's "Everything You've Always Wanted to Know About Sex, But Were Too Afraid to Ask."

• 25:34Lizzie Bassett?

  Sure.

• 25:34Chris Winterbauer?

  He abandoned that idea because he said he needed an attractive pair of leads to sell the themes of the book. Basically, everyone would understand why Woody Allen is insecure, and immediately. So you need somebody who should be secure at the beginning of the movie. Choice number two. He moves the action from Vienna to New York. Shortly before the release of The Shining, he met with novelist David Cornwell, aka John le Carré, about adapting the book. And Cornwell suggested that they set it in a cloistered city peopled by priests, monks, and nuns, where you can practically smell the incense. So obviously, bits of that make it into the final film with the way that he's done the production design. But Kubrick said, "No, you don't understand." And he said, "It will be set in New York."

• 26:16Chris Winterbauer?

  And Cornwell was like, "Okay, so you didn't really want my ideas on this movie." Choice number three, Lizzie. This is the important one that you mentioned. The movie is not going to be an outright comedy. So in the early 1980s, Kubrick sent the book to novelist Terry Southern. Terry Southern had been his co-writer on Dr. Strangelove. Now, Dr. Strangelove is based on Peter George's Red Alert, which is a very somber book. It's not a comedy, but they couldn't figure out how to crack it, so they turned it into a dark comedy, which gives you the amazing, you know, Peter Sellers film. At the time, they'd been joking with each other about making like a mainstream film about porn, which actually kind of sounds similar to Boogie Nights in the end, but they couldn't figure it out. So Southern turned that into a novel.

• 27:01Chris Winterbauer?

  Kubrick sends him Chomnivell, and Southern has one idea that sticks in the film. Make the lead a gynecologist, as a joke initially. Southern then decides, hey, let's turn this into a pitch black comedy, just like Dr. Strangelove, which is something that Kubrick had actually toyed with. He had turned the movie into a complete joke at one point, basically writing fake pornographic promotional materials for it. And I'll read you a couple because they're funny. Rhapsody, she had him, he had her, and together they had her porno past.

• 27:32Lizzie Bassett?

  What?

• 27:33Chris Winterbauer?

  She gave everything to him and to 20 million adult viewers across the nation. It seems like maybe in this version, she had been a pornographic actress. Now Kubrick did have somebody in mind for the porn version. You'll never guess, so I'll just say it. Steve Martin.

• 27:50Lizzie Bassett?

  I'm liking this version more and more.

• 27:52Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 27:53Lizzie Bassett?

  I would watch it.

• 27:54Chris Winterbauer?

  Kubrick loved The Jerk.

• 27:56Lizzie Bassett?

  I love The Jerk.

• 27:57Chris Winterbauer?

  I do too. Just to show you how all over the place he was, he also watched Albert Brooks's Modern Romance around this time, which is a rom-com. He called Brooks personally to tell him, quote, "This is the movie I've always wanted to make." The director of 2001 and A Clockwork Orange, regarding a very good, but kind of basic rom-com about a neurotic film editor who dumps his girlfriend and then spends the movie trying to win her back. But Kubrick realized it can't be a comedy, so he ditches Southern's comedic approach. This version of the movie goes nowhere. So there's other stops and starts, some that are interesting. Another Kennedy mention, he thought about linking it to Ted Kennedy and the Chappaquiddick incident because you kind of had powerful men and the death of a woman under mysterious circumstances.

• 28:39Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh.

• 28:40Chris Winterbauer?

  Could have been interesting. But in the early 90s, Kubrick had two enormously intriguing and challenging projects in development that it looked like were going to go before this film. You know one of them, Lizzie. He didn't end up making it. Spielberg did.

• 28:53Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, AI?

• 28:54Chris Winterbauer?

  AI, based on Super Toys, or Super Toys Last All Summer Long by Brian Aldis, a short story, and The Aryan Papers, which was a Holocaust adaptation of wartime lies. Now, of course, in an odd twist of fate, The Aryan Papers was kind of edged out by Spielberg's Schindler's List. That's not entirely fair. Kubrick also kind of felt like he couldn't crack the material.

• 29:17Lizzie Bassett?

  Stupid question. Is Stanley Kubrick Jewish?

• 29:20Chris Winterbauer?

  Stanley Kubrick is Jewish, and Stanley Kubrick had a really strangely hard time including Jewishness in his films, as we'll get to. He stripped a lot of characters from his adaptations of their Jewishness, which he obviously does in Eyes Wide Shut. And we'll talk about this more when we talk about Schindler's List, I think. But when he was adapting The Aryan Papers, he also, I think, stripped the characters of their Jewishness in a weird way, because it's so integral to the plot as he was writing it. It also, in his personal interactions, from what I read, he was quite paranoid about antisemitism, and I think rightfully so. He kind of came up in the 1950s in Hollywood during the Red Scare.

• 29:57Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 29:58Chris Winterbauer?

  And yet, he didn't want the audience to see that experience on screen, for whatever reason. He also had, I think, some issues with Schindler's List, because he saw the Holocaust as a failure of humanity, since 6 million people died, and that film presents a portion of the Holocaust as a success, because 600 people lived.

• 30:15Lizzie Bassett?

  Right.

• 30:16Chris Winterbauer?

  Which I thought was an interesting take. But Super Toys wasn't going to happen, just because the technology was not quite ready. Also, Steven Spielberg was a little weirded out by Kubrick, because Kubrick asked him to put a fax machine in his bedroom, so Kubrick could fax him personally at any time.

• 30:33Lizzie Bassett?

  No.

• 30:35Chris Winterbauer?

  More on Kubrick's lack of boundaries to come. Now, a most unexpected film turned Kubrick back to his sex movie. And Lizzie, that's What Went Wrong alum Jimmy Sees Concrete Boots True Lies by James Cameron. Really fun film from the mid 90s. The 94 Arnold Schwarzenegger action comedy about a spy who struggles to balance his professional and personal lives struck a chord with Kubrick. The tagline for the film is, "When he said I do, he never said what he did." Pretty good. Which I really, really like. Kubrick made a point to reach out to Cameron about the film personally. He kept a copy of the script in his office. As Cameron later said, "He just totally wanted to know how true lies was made.

• 31:17Chris Winterbauer?

  I spent the whole time talking about my movie with Stanley Kubrick, which was not where I thought the day was going to go." Now, sex was in the air in the 1990s. It was the erotic 90s. Yes. We had Nine and a Half Weeks, Basic Instinct, Body of Evidence, Color of Night. It was in our politics. Gary Hart's affair had scuttled a presidential bid. Clinton scandal was on the horizon. And so, in early 1994, William Morris started receiving mysterious phone calls from Warner Brothers inquiring if Oscar-winning screenwriter Frederick Raphael of Far From the Matting Crowd and many more was available for a special project. No one would tell him, so Raphael assumed it was AI.

• 32:01Chris Winterbauer?

  Super Toys, the movie that everybody had been talking about. And he really didn't want to do it because he hated science fiction. Now, before we go any further into the writing of Eyes Wide Shut, I do want to make it clear that much of what I'm about to tell you is pulled from Frederick Raphael's Eyes Wide Open, which is a very entertaining book, but it does feel as if he has a pretty big bone to pick with Stanley Kubrick. And obviously Kubrick was unable to defend himself following the publication of this book as he passed away. So, I have tried my best to stick to facts and descriptions of Raphael's state of mind, not his suppositions of Kubrick's state of mind, which he often alludes to in his book.

• 32:44Chris Winterbauer?

  Anyway, back to the writing. So Raphael gets a phone call from Stanley Kubrick, and he says, "It's not AI. It's this book that I want to adapt, and it's about sex and betrayal and infidelity." And Freddy says, "This is amazing. It's Stanley Kubrick, one of the greatest living directors." And even though he just accepted another job, he says, "I'll do it. I'll do it for you, Stanley." So Kubrick sends him the novella with the author and title redacted. He's that paranoid about this somehow getting out, even though he sent this book to every writer he's ever met at this point. Freddy reads it, quickly figures out what it is. They meet at Kubrick's house to discuss, and in his book on their working relationship, Freddy describes how

• 33:26Chris Winterbauer?

  much he wanted to impress Kubrick, which is going to be a really common theme in this episode. Like Kubrick had such an aura about him by this point in his career. He also hadn't made a film since 1987's Full Metal Jacket. The time between his films had only increased, and so Kubrick has all the power in this relationship. And all Freddy wants to do at first is prove to Kubrick that he made the right choice in hiring him. Frederick Raphael's not young. I think he's within three or four years of Kubrick's age at this point. He is a very accomplished, long-working screenwriter.

• 33:58Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, but it's Stanley Kubrick.

• 34:00Chris Winterbauer?

  Exactly. He agrees to send Kubrick sections of the screenplay in progress, which is highly unusual for an Oscar-winning writer. But Freddy's clear, he's not going to start writing until the contract is signed, and deals in Hollywood can take a long time. And so even though Kubrick likes taking his time, he doesn't like it when other people take their time. And so he kept bothering Freddy, being like, "When can you start? When can you start? You think you could start soon?" He's literally calling him all the time. Freddy eventually did start without having a contract. And then when he got the contract, he didn't love it, because there were two clauses in it that were pretty gnarly. One, an early clause stipulated that during the whole period when I was being paid, I was

• 34:43Chris Winterbauer?

  forbidden to write anything else whatsoever.

• 34:47Lizzie Bassett?

  Wow. And as we know, this takes quite a while to actually get written.

• 34:51Chris Winterbauer?

  That's right. And that included like a review, or a piece for a newspaper, or something for a magazine, not just screenwriting, just writing anything, paid. Two, in matters of credit, the decision of Stanley Kubrick should be final concerning who had written what line and who had had what idea, end quote.

• 35:11Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, I don't know if I'm signing that.

• 35:14Chris Winterbauer?

  Neither did Freddie. Fortunately, Kubrick did eventually relent, it seems like, on these two points, and they were able to sign the contract, and he got to work in the fall of 94. And fairly quickly, he realizes this is going to be a really, really difficult process. So Kubrick insists on very long phone calls to discuss the material. They're so long that Kubrick's wife can actually paint him as a still life while he's on the phone, upwards of 10 hours at a time.

• 35:44Lizzie Bassett?

  A 10-hour phone call?

• 35:46Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 35:46Lizzie Bassett?

  That's my worst nightmare.

• 35:48Chris Winterbauer?

  There are decisions Kubrick has made that Freddie doesn't understand. For example, he, as we mentioned, wants to remove all Jewishness from the text.

• 35:56Lizzie Bassett?

  What was in it? Was the main character Jewish?

• 35:59Chris Winterbauer?

  It's not explicitly stated that the main character is Jewish. I believe it's heavily implied that he's Jewish, especially just given the cultural context, the fact that he's achieved the highest station possible by being a doctor, which was kind of what a middle European Jew could achieve at that time in Vienna. That was the extent of his power. And then Nochtangale, the Nick Nightingale character in the book, is described as a Jew for hire, basically kind of willing to do anything for money. And then the unmasking of Frieda Lynn at the ball is very, by these Gentile men, could be read with very much like a Jewish subtext.

• 36:37Lizzie Bassett?

  Got it. Okay.

• 36:38Chris Winterbauer?

  Kubrick wants all of it gone, the textual references to Judaism and the subtextual references to Judaism. He says, I don't want any of it. Ironically, Ziegler, who's kind of the villain, is the only Jewish character in the final film, necessitated by the fact that Sidney Pollack plays him, and-

• 36:55Lizzie Bassett?

  Right, but it's never addressed in any kind of direct way.

• 36:57Chris Winterbauer?

  It's never addressed, but it is unusual. It kind of inverts the book, in a way, in the final film. Kubrick wants the hero to be this Harrison Ford-ish goy, as Raphael puts it. Ironically, Ford is actually part Jewish, I think his mother's Jewish.

• 37:10Lizzie Bassett?

  Sure.

• 37:11Chris Winterbauer?

  Hence the name Bill Hartford, Harrison Ford Hartford Portmanteau, presumably. It also could have come from Hertfordshire, which is where Kubrick lived at the time. And then there's the fact that broadly speaking, Kubrick doesn't seem to have any other positions on the material at all. And this will be a theme: He doesn't seem to know what he wants, something Kidman would say about working with him on set later. So basically, Freddy's crawling around in the dark, trying to figure out what the greatest director of all time wants from him, and his journal entries from the time get very bleak. I'd like to read a few. Quote, "Cinematically, I have no doubt that he is a master. However, I have little fear that he is intellectually beyond my reach.

• 37:55Chris Winterbauer?

  I am not even sure how bright he is." End quote. Quote, "What I dread and cannot help probing is the possibility that the Kubrick myth will perish under close inspection. I need him to be great, and yet I probe for his flaws." End quote. And my personal favorite from November of that year, "I have the whore's constellations. Whatever I am, he chose me. He chose me, he chose me. How many reasons is that to be happy?" End quote. This book gets a lot of flack online, especially in the Goodreads community, by people who say that it's effectively Raphael pumping himself up and then slandering Kubrick throughout it. I have to say, I found it wildly entertaining. Yes, he's a bit of a blowhard, but he's an excellent writer,

• 38:39Chris Winterbauer?

  and it's very funny. So I do recommend checking it out if you're interested. Freddy takes liberties. He deviates from the book. He gives Bill a backstory. There's a prologue in medical school. And on December 7, 1984, he sends 42 pages to Kubrick, and Kubrick loves them. He's like, "Freddy, this is great." He doesn't love that Freddy has stopped working to celebrate Christmas, but he loves the pages.

• 39:04Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, can't do that.

• 39:05Chris Winterbauer?

  Can't do that. Freddy is overjoyed. He regrets all the negative things he's been thinking about Kubrick. Surely, this man is a genius. He loves my work. He's a leader of men. This movie's going to be magnificent. But then we get the "if you give a mouse a cookie" syndrome. So Kubrick starts asking for smaller chunks. He's like, "Freddy, just send me 20 pages next time. Just send me 10 pages."

• 39:26Lizzie Bassett?

  No.

• 39:27Chris Winterbauer?

  And then the disagreements began. Broadly speaking, whenever Freddy strays too far from the book, Kubrick pushes him to just follow Arthur's, meaning the author's, beats. Kubrick also didn't like dialogue, something that Fredo Raphael was very good at. He didn't like funny dialogue. He preferred voiceover, because, as Freddy put it, "it avoided all need-to-use dialogue to articulate how people felt or what motives they had." So Freddy's writing, writing, writing, early 95, he sends Kubrick a 172-page first draft. And Kubrick's not thrilled. He still loves the first 42 pages, but everything else feels a little off. So he basically says, "Look, let's just start at page 42 and start reworking it,

• 40:11Chris Winterbauer?

  you know, scene by scene." Freddy gets back to work, and then in March of 1995, frustrated and wanting to get paid, he makes what I would call like a fatal mistake. He sends the script to William Morris instead of directly to Stanley Kubrick.

• 40:30Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, I can't imagine Stanley's gonna be happy about that.

• 40:34Chris Winterbauer?

  So the reason he did was because he wanted to be paid. So he sent the script to William Morris so they could record it. They could then invoice Warner Brothers, and then they would be responsible for sending the script to Kubrick. Freddy goes on a 10-day vacation. When he comes back, the script in a blue William Morris folio is sitting in his mail with a note from Kubrick, and it says that Kubrick had been too upset finding the script in a William Morris folder to be able to read it, and he had put it aside rather than read it in a negative frame of mind. He then asked Freddy to find out how many copies had been made, retrieve them, and make a list of everyone in London, New York, and Los Angeles who had received them. Freddy did try to make the point that, quote, "There was no risk of anyone in the William

• 41:17Chris Winterbauer?

  Morris office having read the script, since I had never had any indication any of them could read," end quote, but Kubrick felt deeply betrayed. They were able to patch things up, but there was some logic to his paranoia. Now, Lizzie, do you know about the Kubrick impersonator that ran rampant across the UK during the 1990s?

• 41:40Lizzie Bassett?

  No, I do not.

• 41:42Chris Winterbauer?

  Alan Conway was a Brit with a checkered past who looked nothing like Stanley Kubrick, sounded nothing like Stanley Kubrick, and didn't even know anything about Kubrick's movies, but because nobody ever saw Stanley Kubrick when he walked in and said, "I'm Stanley Kubrick," they believed him. There were hundreds of messages flowing into Warner Brothers from people trying to get in touch with the Kubrick that they thought they'd met. He was so relentless, he borrowed money, he ruined relationships, he even bankrupted a gay bar. And he didn't just fool normal people. British MPs, theater critic Frank Rich, a famous Dutch actress. He actually convinced everyone that the three times married, somewhat porn and woman obsessed Kubrick was actually gay.

• 42:25Chris Winterbauer?

  And Kubrick was very frustrated that he could not maintain his own public image, or even the public perception of his sexuality.

• 42:32Lizzie Bassett?

  We gotta go outside, Stanley. You gotta go outside to do that.

• 42:36Chris Winterbauer?

  He had his daughters and his cats and his dogs. He really loved animals. He was a bit of a Tony Soprano.

• 42:41Lizzie Bassett?

  That sounds really nice.

• 42:42Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah. Now, Lizzie, the inability to maintain one's public image, or the public perception of one's sexuality, does that remind you of anybody else involved in this film?

• 42:51Lizzie Bassett?

  Tom Cruise.

• 42:52Chris Winterbauer?

  Tom Cruise! Now, for a more detailed background on Thomas Cruise: Mepethor IV, listen to, as we mentioned, the Big Flops coverage of the megastar, which Lizzie and I guested on, just dropped today, January 6th. By the mid 1990s, Tom Cruise had basically willed himself into becoming one of the world's biggest movie stars. Risky Business, Top Gun, The Color of Money, Rain Man, Born on the Fourth of July, A Few Good Men, The Firm, Interview with the Vampire.

• 43:22Lizzie Bassett?

  It's a crazy streak.

• 43:24Chris Winterbauer?

  It's a crazy streak! And that's not to mention what he'd be doing shortly thereafter. Jerry Maguire.

• 43:29Lizzie Bassett?

  Yep.

• 43:30Chris Winterbauer?

  You know, Magnolia with Paul Thomas Anderson. So, he's on this tear, and he's determined to work with the best directors in the world. His mega-agent, Michael Ovitz, had promised that he would facilitate this. Now, as we discussed on The Big Flop, Cruise was also a complete control freak about his public persona, something that was maintained very carefully by his publicist and close confidant, Pat Kingsley.

• 43:55Lizzie Bassett?

  Right.

• 43:55Chris Winterbauer?

  More on her on The Big Flop. His affiliation with Scientology, which was known at the time, was carefully controlled and downplayed, and tabloid rumors that Cruise was actually gay, for example, were quickly quashed by Kingsley and threats of legal action. Now, despite their individual successes, he and his second wife, Nicole Kidman, who had married in 1990, had yet to strike box office gold together. Now, Lizzie, have you ever seen Days of Thunder, the race car movie they met on?

• 44:24Lizzie Bassett?

  I haven't. I've seen like little clips of it, but I've never watched the whole thing.

• 44:28Chris Winterbauer?

  It's actually a pretty fun movie, but it's very silly and Nicole Kidman's role in it is very silly. I think she's 20 years old and is playing like the nation's leading neurologist.

• 44:37Lizzie Bassett?

  She can do anything.

• 44:39Chris Winterbauer?

  She can, she can. It was borderline commercially successful, but fizzled critically. That's actually where they met. Cruise had seen her in Dead Calm with Sam Neill and he basically plucked her out of obscurity in a sense for that film. They then failed to connect with audiences in 1992's Far and Away, Ron Howard's period piece, which was met with tepid box office receipts and even cooler reviews. And so who, Lizzie, would play Bill Hartford if not the man who could seemingly have any woman in the world? It's kind of perfect casting in a sense, if you really think about it.

• 45:15Lizzie Bassett?

  It is. And I want to say whoever engineered the lifts that Tom Cruise is wearing in this movie deserves every award because, and I'm not even saying this to make fun of the fact that Tom Cruise is shorter and Nicole Kidman is very tall. I'm saying this because I have stood in front of Nicole Kidman in person, maybe a foot away from her for an interview. She is so tall, Chris. Like it says she's 5'11". I don't, I think she's six feet minimum.

• 45:43Chris Winterbauer?

  She's basically as tall as the Blue Alien singing opera in The Fifth Element.

• 45:48Lizzie Bassett?

  Literally. She is so tall and I know he's what, like 5'8" or something?

• 45:55Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, 5'7", 5'8", probably.

• 45:57Lizzie Bassett?

  What did they put in those shoes? Because he is almost eye to eye with her and they are showing their feet, walking down the hallway. It is truly incredible.

• 46:08Chris Winterbauer?

  You're right. They do bridge the gap. She's still taller than him, but they do bridge the gap.

• 46:12Lizzie Bassett?

  She's only taller by like an inch or two and she's wearing kitten heels. I'm telling you, there's something in those shoes.

• 46:18Chris Winterbauer?

  No, they did a good job. I mean, it could have been forced perspective or something. Who knows?

• 46:22Lizzie Bassett?

  I don't know. There's a Hobbit Gandalf situation going on there.

• 46:25Chris Winterbauer?

  That's fair. Absolutely.

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• 48:43Chris Winterbauer?

  Now, Kubrick had considered a lot of people before Tom Cruise for this role. We discussed a couple of them, but there was also Dustin Hoffman, Warren Beatty, Alan Alda, Albert Brooks, Bill Murray, Tom Hanks, Sam Shepard. So many different versions, right, of the movie. I actually think Warren Beatty would have been really interesting.

• 48:59Lizzie Bassett?

  Sam Shepard could have been interesting, too, although he's a little older.

• 49:02Chris Winterbauer?

  Well, maybe at the time of when, remember, this was developed over years and years and years.

• 49:06Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, that's true.

• 49:07Chris Winterbauer?

  So in 1983, though, Sidney Pollack actually recommended Tom Cruise to Kubrick, or perhaps Kubrick asked Pollack about Cruise, it's unclear. He had just directed him in The Firm. Now, Kubrick was a big fan of Cruise for his turn as Ron Kovac in Born on the Fourth of July, which is a great performance.

• 49:26Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 49:26Chris Winterbauer?

  And kind of proved that Cruise was more than just good looks, you know, and a sense of humor.

• 49:31Lizzie Bassett?

  I think so much of what he had done to this point proves that he is more than that.

• 49:34Chris Winterbauer?

  Oh, absolutely. But there was a physical transformation in that film that even, you know, even though he did it with his personality in Rain Man, he hadn't quite done it yet until that film. Now, Kubrick had been interested in casting a real-life husband-wife duo for the film. He'd even considered Alec Baldwin and Kim Bassinger.

• 49:51Lizzie Bassett?

  Interesting.

• 49:52Chris Winterbauer?

  It would be interesting. Definitely steamier, I think.

• 49:55Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 49:55Chris Winterbauer?

  Based on what I'd seen of them. Now, Michael Ovitz was, of course, happy to make the introduction, and we know that Cruise and Kubrick were in contact by August of 94, and Cruise, like Freddy, was in awe. He described Kubrick as a filmmaking god, and he had already decided if Kubrick was ever going to offer him a film, he would do it without even knowing what it was. Because I think in part, A, he thought he was amazing, but B, he thought, these are my best opportunities to get an Oscar. And famously, he'd already lost once to Daniel Day Lewis in My Left Foot, when Lewis kind of out-paralyzed him for Born on the Fourth of July a few years prior. Now, they didn't talk about Eyes Wide Shut at first, they faxed about cameras and airplanes

• 50:40Chris Winterbauer?

  because there was still no script, because Freddy Raphael was still clanking away on his keyboard, and as he described it, solitary confinement with Without the comfort of being alone. He and Kubrick were communicating daily by fax and phone. Kubrick eventually decides the first 42 pages are actually too good, so they need to redo those two, so the whole thing fits tonally.

• 51:02Lizzie Bassett?

  So the whole thing's a little worse.

• 51:03Chris Winterbauer?

  I know. By May of 95, Kubrick picks a title for the film Eyes Wide Shut, unclear exactly where it came from.

• 51:10Lizzie Bassett?

  It's okay. Great title.

• 51:11Chris Winterbauer?

  It could have been a telegram from Franco Zeffirelli, a line from a Lacarre novel. Who knows? Actually, what's funny, Freddy hated it. Federico Raphael just did not think the title was very interesting. He had recommended a female subject, which, eh.

• 51:24Lizzie Bassett?

  Nope.

• 51:24Chris Winterbauer?

  No. So it seems like Kubrick really struggled, even in the writing phase, with the orgy scenes. Like, he constantly was asking Freddy, like, "Have you ever been to an orgy? Have you ever been with hookers? Tell me what it's like." And Freddy's like, "I've never been to an orgy. I'm sorry." There are a couple of fun anecdotes about that. So in 1995, Freddy sends the last batch of pages, at the end of the summer, to Kubrick. Most had been rewritten a half dozen times. Kubrick thanks him for his work and then turns around and calls another writer, Sarah Maitland, who'd been working with him on AI, to see if she'd like a crack at the property. But she didn't like the book. And when she told Kubrick that, she never heard from him again. They paid out her last check on AI, and she said, "That was it."

• 52:08Lizzie Bassett?

  Wow.

• 52:08Chris Winterbauer?

  So Kubrick sat down, took the hundreds of pages that Raphael's written, and he condenses them to a between 80 or 90-page treatment. So it's not technically really even in script form. It's kind of prose form. He shows it to Warner Brothers, and they're like, "Look, it's Stanley Kubrick. We're gonna make this movie, but we really want you to cast a movie star," which he hadn't done since Jack Nicholson in The Shining. So Kubrick, who'd kind of been warming up to Cruise, really liked him, sends this scriptment to Cruise and Kidman, who were in London while Kidman was filming The Portrait of a Lady. And I want to play a brief clip of Tom Cruise describing reading Eyes Wide Shut for the first time.

• 52:52Chris Winterbauer?

  This is from an interview given on the press junket for Eyes Wide Shut. I was unable to figure out who is interviewing Tom Cruise. If you recognize your voice, send us an email, and we'll make sure to credit you in the show notes. We were staying at some house that we were renting, because Nick

• 53:08Speaker 07

  Was making A Portrait of a Lady.

• 53:12Speaker 07

  And I think the script is about 90 pages long, 92 pages long. And I remember putting it down and just

• 53:23Speaker 07

  sitting back for about 45 minutes. I was stunned. I was really stunned. And I thought, I'd never read anything like it. And

• 53:37Speaker 07

  I couldn't wait to go and talk to him about it. But I remember I was just stunned. I couldn't, I couldn't wait, you know, because I'd already said, I knew in my mind I was going to make the movie even before he sent the script, whatever it was, I was going to do it. And then when I read it, I thought, no, he's a great character. It's a great story, very powerful story. And I was very, very excited.

• 53:58Lizzie Bassett?

  Translation, you don't know what the fuck it's about.

• 54:02Chris Winterbauer?

  There is no, he was stunned because he said, what the hell is this movie? That is an amazing Tom Cruise performance, but

• 54:12Lizzie Bassett?

  He's trying.

• 54:13Chris Winterbauer?

  I don't think they knew what it was about. And Fredo Graffael can also

• 54:20Lizzie Bassett?

  I still don't know what it's about.

• 54:21Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah. And also, as Freddie discusses, like, they stripped all the personality out of the character. So there was nothing left on the page. So the character was just a cipher for the audience to fill in. So there's nothing playable. He has no backstory. He has no clear motivations. Also, you know, it's Cruise, it seems like, really wanted to do it. And Kubrick described Cruise and Kidman coming to his house to discuss the film and kind of Cruise kind of being like, Nicole, are you okay with this? Nick, are you, you know what I mean? Like, it seems like he was the one who was in and Kidman needed to kind of be convinced. Fredo Graffael also read this treatment because Kubrick brought him back in to the fold in December of 1995,

• 55:04Chris Winterbauer?

  basically saying, I'm not a writer. I know this needs a lot of work. Do you want to now rewrite the rewrite that I did of your original script?

• 55:14Lizzie Bassett?

  No, I don't.

• 55:15Chris Winterbauer?

  He doesn't, but Kubrick says Warner Brothers is gonna make it and Nicole Kidman and Tom Cruise have agreed to be in the film. So he has to. You know what I mean? Like he now he's like-

• 55:26Lizzie Bassett?

  Cause she was pretty huge at this point, too, right?

• 55:29Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, yeah, absolutely. She was blowing up and she would go on, obviously, to do Moulin Rouge shortly after this.

• 55:34Lizzie Bassett?

  Like two years after this?

• 55:36Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 55:37Lizzie Bassett?

  Also, just a little shout out for Jane Campion's Portrait of a Lady that she was filming in London. It's really good.

• 55:42Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, and she was actually starting to be known as the more serious actor of the two.

• 55:47Lizzie Bassett?

  That makes sense.

• 55:48Chris Winterbauer?

  Obviously, Batman Forever notwithstanding, it was in 1995 that she starred in Gus Van Sant's Amazing, To Die For, incredible dark comedy. And based on what I've read, at the time, there was a bit of a growing consensus that she might be more of the arthouse attraction and he might be more of the popcorn movie star.

• 56:07Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 56:08Chris Winterbauer?

  On December 15th, 1995, Cruise and Kidman are announced as the lead of Stanley Kubrick's newest film for Warner Brothers. The announcement also states that his next, next film will be AI, believed to be one of the most technically challenging and innovative special effects films yet attempted. Now, even though this is a Christmas movie, Lizzie, Eyes Wide Shut is targeting a summer release to maximize profits for Warner Brothers.

• 56:31Lizzie Bassett?

  Ooh, very diehard.

• 56:33Chris Winterbauer?

  Yep, it's a sexy, affordable two-hander with two of the world's biggest movie stars taking off their clothes. And Cruise had taken a pay cut to star in the film. He was making $20 million a film at this point. It's unclear what he was paid on the film, but it was a fraction of that. Neither he or Kidman were allowed to work on anything else while working on Eyes Wide Shut. That was a stipulation that stayed. And of course, the costs of the film would be higher to all involved than anyone could ever imagine. So let's get into production. Kubrick sent scouts to New York to meticulously measure and photograph Greenwich Village for recreation in the UK. Remember, they're gonna shoot this in the UK and New York-

• 57:09Lizzie Bassett?

  Right, cause he lives in London.

• 57:11Chris Winterbauer?

  Cause he lives in London. Freddy continues to rework the script. Kubrick begins casting up and crewing in earnest. His usual collaborators, including Jan Harlin and Leon Vitale, they're basically his two closest assistants, took on many important roles and responsibilities, especially in casting. His youngest daughter Vivian, who had an increasingly strained relationship with Stanley following a move to the United States, did agree to score the film.

• 57:35Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh.

• 57:35Chris Winterbauer?

  She had scored Full Metal Jacket under a pseudonym. More on her later. Larry Smith, Kubrick's gaffer on The Shining and Barry Lyndon, was brought in to shoot the film. Costume designer Merritt Allen joined. She was from Little Shop of Horrors. And of course, one of my personal favorites, Don't Look Now, amongst many, many others. Really, really great at using red in film, which I think she does wonderfully in this movie. And of course, Roy Walker would be the film's production designer of The Shining. He'd also been art director on Barry Lyndon. Now, Kubrick did have a penchant for casting unknowns, but there were a couple of heavy hitters that you don't actually see in the final film that were originally supposed to be in it. Do you know about any of these, Lucy?

• 58:13Lizzie Bassett?

  I don't think so.

• 58:14Chris Winterbauer?

  Originally, Ziegler was played by Harvey Catell.

• 58:17Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, interesting. That makes sense. A more threatening performance, perhaps.

• 58:21Chris Winterbauer?

  I agree. Jennifer Jason Leigh was to play Marion Nathanson, the grieving daughter of the deceased patient who Bill visits.

• 58:28Lizzie Bassett?

  That makes sense.

• 58:29Chris Winterbauer?

  Now, Kubrick actually reached out to one more writer shortly before production, Michael Hare, who had co-written Full Metal Jacket. And he was like, just do two weeks of polish on the project. And Hare said, no. Quote, "Over the next two and a half years, as I read about the ever-expanding shooting schedule, I picture myself chained to a table in his house, endlessly washing and rinsing for laughs and minimum wage, strenuous unprotected intercourse, and I had no regrets. Now, of course, I have a few." So, production began on November 4th, 1996. The film is scheduled, according to one source, to run for three months and wrap on February 7th, 1997. But I also read that there was a 24-week schedule, which seems a lot more reasonable. That would be six months, given Kubrick's history

• 59:13Chris Winterbauer?

  of how long his film shoots would go. Three or six months, that schedule was written on dirty toilet paper. Because no, it went out the window immediately.

• 59:21Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 59:22Chris Winterbauer?

  All right, so Lizzie, over the years, the gaps between Kubrick's projects grew. So you have four films in the 60s, two in the 70s, two in the 80s, and then one in the 90s. And this is for like a bunch of reasons. I think though, the main one is that he could basically demand to work exactly the way he wanted as he grew older and more powerful. Obviously, we've seen how that affected development in writing the film, and we're about to see how it affects production. Let's talk about his shooting style. First, Kubrick would pre-light the scene. The cinematographer would light it meticulously. He would then go in, Kubrick, with a Polaroid back medium format camera and stand-ins,

• 1:00:06Chris Winterbauer?

  and he would shoot at every third stop increment of light. So basically, like every possible light level, every possible position of the stand-ins within this scene. He would then take all of those, stick them on a board, and decide the exact exposures that he was going to shoot the next day on the film. So that would have to be done, right, in advance of a shooting day, basically. Then, he did not storyboard, and he would rewrite the script while rehearsing, and then send rewrites via fax as late as 4:00 a.m. the night before filming.

• 1:00:40Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh my god.

• 1:00:41Chris Winterbauer?

  He would also rehearse the day scene repeatedly while searching for the right camera position to begin the day with, because he never wanted to begin the day with the wrong camera position. And he would shoot these rehearsals on a video camera, according to Sidney Pollack, and then play back that video for the actors to make sure, like, do this head tilt exactly as you did it in the video camera right here. So, based on records from production, it seems like it was basically very uncommon to get a shot off before lunch.

• 1:01:08Lizzie Bassett?

  Yikes.

• 1:01:09Chris Winterbauer?

  So that means, like, they would not actually start rolling until six, seven hours into the day. As Todd Field, who plays Nightingale in the film and is, of course, an accomplished director in his own right, pointed out, they just shot nights for 18 months on Eyes Wide Shut.

• 1:01:25Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh god.

• 1:01:26Chris Winterbauer?

  As a result, by the end of the first day, they were a half day behind.

• 1:01:31Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh no.

• 1:01:32Chris Winterbauer?

  So. They started shooting The Ball at Ziegler's Manhattan Townhouse, and it seems like Harvey Catell quickly realized, or Kubrick realized, it was not going to be a good fit. Catell was very anxious. He was not used to waiting around. He basically stood there for five days, waiting for them to get to his coverage. They eventually shot out that scene in 12 days. They moved on to shoot the pool room sequence with Ziegler at the end of the film, but Kubrick got to set, didn't like the build of the set, and said, rebuild it. So that was going to take two months.

• 1:02:04Lizzie Bassett?

  Harvey's like, nope.

• 1:02:06Chris Winterbauer?

  Harvey Catell literally said, "When Kubrick stopped the movie, they wanted me to wait for months without getting paid, which I couldn't do."

• 1:02:12Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:13Chris Winterbauer?

  So he asked out of the movie, more or less. Publicly, it was cited as a scheduling conflict. Privately, he was pretty pissed, especially because they didn't even replace him with a, quote, "proper actor." They replaced him with another director, which is true. Sidney Pollak, he's a director.

• 1:02:29Lizzie Bassett?

  He's a director, but he's also, I mean, he's great.

• 1:02:33Chris Winterbauer?

  He has acted, but he's not a professional actor by his own admission. So Tom Cruise actually, in turn, recommended Pollak, coming full circle on Pollak recommending him. They then reshoot the opening scenes with Pollak. They also replaced the actor who played his wife. And at this point, I think they were roughly a month behind schedule. They then moved to the Lanesboro Hotel in Hyde Park to shoot Bill visiting his deceased patient. Kubrick looked so shabby, they wouldn't let him in the front of the hotel. They made him go around the backside. And at this point, Jennifer Jason Leigh is still playing Marion Nathanson. They then shoot the nightclub scene in which Bill convinces Nightingale to give him the address and password for the secret society. And at the end of the first month, they'd shot three scenes.

• 1:03:14Lizzie Bassett?

  Yikes.

• 1:03:15Chris Winterbauer?

  So they then moved to the sound stages at Pinewood Studios in the new year. And the stress of pleasing Kubrick was starting to get to Tom Cruise. He developed ulcers, acute gastritis. He had constant abdominal pains, nausea and vomiting. He tried to keep the ulcers from Kubrick. At one point Kubrick asked for 95 takes of Tom Cruise walking through a door.

• 1:03:41Lizzie Bassett?

  Which door?

• 1:03:43Chris Winterbauer?

  It's unclear, but the inexhaustible actor, who was relentlessly positive, who taught himself how to drive a race car and use a wheelchair, was starting to wear down. The more scene in which he leans over the corpse of that woman who sacrificed herself for him as if to kiss her, required 35 takes. I mean, it was brutal. Even Sidney Pollack was feeling the effects. This clip is from an interview given to Stuart Mayby in 2005, while Sidney Pollack was promoting what would be his last film, The Interpreter, oddly enough, starring Nicole Kidman.

• 1:04:20Speaker 04

  I don't think I've ever gone past the 20s in my life. And if I go to 20, it's a tragedy to me. You know, I mean, if I do five takes or six takes, I start to get nervous already on a picture. But 70 takes, 80 takes, 100 takes were absolutely regular with Stanley. I mean, I finally said, "It's not going to get any better, Stanley. It's just not. I'm not a professional actor. It's not... I didn't, to be honest with you, I didn't personally have to do that many takes because he knew he wasn't going to get any more. But I had to be in the scene when Tom was doing them.

• 1:05:02Speaker 04

  I mean, there were two shots, so it would be over my shoulder or whatever. So I had to do it that many times. And with Tom, we regularly went to take above 70 and 80 takes all the time.

• 1:05:16Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, my God. I just like... Even though it sounds like, okay, well, what are you doing? You're walking through a door, like, how hard is that? That's exhausting to do it that many times. And to also be wondering, like, what am I doing wrong? What am I doing wrong that you need 30 takes of me leaning over this corpse?

• 1:05:34Chris Winterbauer?

  Well, I think that's really what you just hinted at, Lizzie, is exactly what was getting to Tom Cruise, which is Cruise's need to please and Kubrick's need to strip performers of all affectation, which he was, you know, that was his approach to film. I mean, Fredo Raphael has a great quote. There's nothing that a serious photographer wants less than a model who smiles. On the contrary, he waits for his subjects to be bled of personality. He clicks on and on until they reveal their real appearance by no longer having the energy or the will to put a good face on themselves. So you have the man who is looking to figure out who Tom Cruise really is

• 1:06:15Chris Winterbauer?

  against the man who has spent every fiber of his being hiding who Tom Cruise really is. And as Vanessa Shaw, whose role was supposed to last two weeks as the young prostitute, but took two months, said of Cruise, quote, "He was still into it, but not as energetic," end quote. So publicly, Tom Cruise did remain positive. As he told The New York Times a year before the film's release, "People say you've lost 40, 60, 80 million dollars. You've lost all this time. To have a chance to work with Stanley Kubrick, that's worth it for me." But privately, he was struggling. And it wasn't just Kubrick that he was performing for. Because unbeknownst to Kubrick, Cruise's assistant,

• 1:06:57Chris Winterbauer?

  Michael Dovin, was actually present to keep track of Cruise at the behest of David Miscavige, the head of the Church of Scientology.

• 1:07:06Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, no.

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• 1:08:53Chris Winterbauer?

  So truly, all eyes were on Cruise. Except for Cruise, his eyes were wide shut because he had long relied on watching dailies to modulate his performances in his films, and Kubrick refused to screen dailies for Cruise. Plus, Cruise did so many takes, he had no idea which performance Kubrick would use at any given scene. So he had no way to track his character's arc across the film. And the uncertainty was Killing him as he later said, I remember talking to Stanley and I said, look, I don't care how long it takes, but I have to know, are we going to finish in six months? People were waiting and writers were waiting. I'd say, Stanley, I don't care. Tell me it's going to be two years, but Stanley didn't know, and he wouldn't know until he saw

• 1:09:38Chris Winterbauer?

  it. It seems like Kidman was able to accept this, but it tormented Cruz. And I think it's because he was so eager to please.

• 1:09:47Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, totally. I also feel like Nicole Kidman, perhaps, obviously, I don't know them, but like she may have had a better grasp on reality and may have like had a bit of a better understanding of what she was in for with Stanley Kubrick, especially because it was pretty well known at this time, there were actors and particularly actresses who had had very not positive experiences with him. My guess is she knew that. And this was probably an easier pill for her to swallow versus Tom Cruise, who to your point was like wanting the best, you know, most award worthy directors. And he has this very lofty idea of what their collaboration is going to look like. And then it's just miserable.

• 1:10:31Chris Winterbauer?

  I also think that, as Raphael pointed out in his book, Kubrick doesn't respond well to people who give him exactly what he asks for. He actually likes to be challenged a little bit. And there is one actor who figured that out very quickly. And I'd like to play a brief clip of Alan Cumming describing the first time he met Stanley Kubrick in an interview with the New York Public Library.

• 1:10:54Lizzie Bassett?

  Great.

• 1:10:55Speaker 05

  I arrived on the set and I was the new boy and everyone at this point, they'd all been working on the film for over a year. So everyone was just like, robots going like this. And I was said, it's time to go to the set now, Alan. And I walked onto the set and there was Stanley Kubrick and Tom Cruise. I'd met Tom before and he's very nice. And he went, hey, Alan, blah, blah. And I went, hey, Tom. And I went, I went, hey, hey, Stanley, I'm Alan. And he, and he just looked at me and went, you're not American. Like that, like a real, really aggressive. And it was like six o'clock in the morning. And I went, I know, Stanley, I'm Scottish. And he went, you're American on the tape.

• 1:11:40Speaker 05

  And in my mind, I was like, fuck you, old man. I bought this and six fucking times for your pissy little part. It's six o'clock in the morning. Fuck you. That was what it was in my mind. And then what came out of my mouth was, after he said, you're an American on the tape. I went, yeah, that's because I'm an actor, Stan Lee.

• 1:12:06Speaker 05

  And after that, seriously, after he looked at me and I just, I saw something change in his face. And I got on with him like a house on fire. I loved him. He had such a laugh.

• 1:12:19Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, man, I love Alan Cumming so much.

• 1:12:21Chris Winterbauer?

  I love him so much.

• 1:12:22Lizzie Bassett?

  Murder, traitors. Sorry, big traitors fan.

• 1:12:26Chris Winterbauer?

  So good.

• 1:12:28Lizzie Bassett?

  He is honestly a shining light in this movie. When he showed up, to your point about like, you felt like Nicole Kidman got this movie. I was like, Alan Cumming gets this movie.

• 1:12:37Chris Winterbauer?

  Well, he said that he, there are more interviews of him available. He said that he and Kubrick had a blast shooting the scene.

• 1:12:42Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, he's having fun.

• 1:12:43Chris Winterbauer?

  Like, it was just tons of fun and Kubrick loved it.

• 1:12:46Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:46Chris Winterbauer?

  It was just miserable for Cruise, but Cumming was willing to stand up to him and it totally worked. Now, to Cruise's credit, he was effectively dealing with psychological warfare and manipulation at this point. So Kubrick was determined to blur the line between actor and character. He effectively had Kidman and Cruise move into their bedroom on set. They literally slept there at times.

• 1:13:08Lizzie Bassett?

  What?

• 1:13:09Chris Winterbauer?

  They left their clothes and pocket change around. They brought their own relationship into the world of the film. Kubrick had them reveal like marital secrets and insecurities to him in confidence, just the three of them. And then he could use it against them later in eliciting specific performances.

• 1:13:26Lizzie Bassett?

  How long after this did they get divorced? It's not long, right?

• 1:13:29Chris Winterbauer?

  We'll get to that.

• 1:13:30Lizzie Bassett?

  Okay.

• 1:13:32Chris Winterbauer?

  Kubrick then banned Cruise from the set when he filmed Kidman's love scenes with the sailor. I also read that Cruise had to be in the United States for a family emergency at that time, so it's possible that it was just chance. But he did forbid them from speaking to each other or reassuring one another about each person's respective sex scenes. So obviously, Cruise doesn't have any.

• 1:13:55Lizzie Bassett?

  You don't get to do that, Stanley Kubrick. They're married. This is their actual life.

• 1:14:00Chris Winterbauer?

  Yep. And of course, Cruise doesn't actually simulate sex on screen with anyone, but Kidman does, very aggressively with Gary Goba, the Canadian model who played the naval officer. That was filmed just with Kubrick and the two of them on a closed set. And everyone has said, actually, that Kubrick was very respectful with the way that he filmed. And he very rarely had more than 10 people, meaning crew, on set with him when he was filming, especially sex scenes. Goba was hired without seeing the script. The job was described as having sex with Nicole Kidman, and that was it.

• 1:14:30Lizzie Bassett?

  Right. Sign him up.

• 1:14:31Chris Winterbauer?

  Yep. Further, Kubrick seems to have toyed with Cruise's deep-seated need to please by kind of questioning his ability as an actor, possibly. Kidman later admitted that, quote, "He said that Tom was a roller coaster and I was a thoroughbred," end quote. Meaning, like, you know, Cruise's performance was all over the place, as opposed to hers was, like, specific. Cruise's loyalty to Kubrick was unwavering. He shut down reports that the set was miserable. It sounds like it was. He said that Kubrick is impeccable and extraordinary. Both Nick and I love him. But the speculation was rampant. People were wondering how much nudity would be in the film. Could their marriage survive it? Cruise and Kidman even sued Star Magazine for publishing a report that they'd hired a sex therapist

• 1:15:13Chris Winterbauer?

  to coach them. As Todd Field later said, "You've never seen two actors more completely subservient and prostrate themselves at the feet of a director." But there were some that were not willing to bow unquestionably to Kubrick. Choreographer Yolanda Snath, I apologize if I'm mispronouncing your last name, had been hired to choreograph the two secret society scenes. The ceremony and then the subsequent orgy, basically. So these scenes were cast in August of 97 by Leon Vitale. There were roughly 100 extras, models from all over the world, very explicit instructions, no botox, breast enhancements, anything like that.

• 1:15:55Lizzie Bassett?

  Those are all natural boobs?

• 1:15:58Chris Winterbauer?

  Apparently, I know.

• 1:15:59Lizzie Bassett?

  Wow, there's some in there that are, those are impressive.

• 1:16:02Chris Winterbauer?

  Yep, it was also very cold. The mansion was no more than 50 degrees and the actresses were nude in heels and they were destroying their knees on the marble floor. Now, the first ceremony scene was more or less what Yolanda had signed up for, but the second orgy scene was originally described as supposed to be like a suggestive erotic dance and quickly became something much more graphic, as she describes it. There's a very good oral history on the orgy by Vulture. I'd encourage you to check out, I'll just hit the high level beats. Kubrick started sending them more and more pornographic reference material. He also kept delaying the orgy in the shoot. So he just kept pushing the orgy. He just like, didn't want to shoot the orgy.

• 1:16:46Chris Winterbauer?

  The first AD actually recommended like, we should just get a director in here who knows how to shoot sex scenes to shoot the orgy. Because Stanley, it seems like you don't want to do this. The material sent got so graphic that Yolanda realized she was being asked to choreograph an actual orgy, at which point she left the production. And she basically said, I don't want to have anything to do with this. In Kubrick's defense, most involved seemed to say that he was very respectful and he was gentleman about the process. And there are some funny progress reports that just kind of show what a slog this was. I'll read a couple of quotes of why he couldn't use certain takes. Kate's legs looking two spread. Good, but possibly see Adam Pudney's pouch. Kate has legs in odd position. Adam gave up fucking before shot cut, but good.

• 1:17:30Chris Winterbauer?

  Jockstrap visible. Three women at end to be more sensual. It just sounds like so clinical and not sexy in any way.

• 1:17:40Lizzie Bassett?

  No, I mean, I don't think sex scenes are really ever particularly sexy to film. But also with this, it's such long shots through these like very heavily choreographed.

• 1:17:50Chris Winterbauer?

  Yes, I know.

• 1:17:51Lizzie Bassett?

  You can tell that people are carefully placed so that you're not really seeing anything. I mean, you see a lot of naked women's bodies. You don't really see naked men at all.

• 1:18:02Chris Winterbauer?

  No.

• 1:18:02Lizzie Bassett?

  But it's also just like, it's choreographed in such a way that you can't really see the thrusting. I actually think it's extremely well done because even though there are naked people, they're having sex everywhere. It does leave a certain amount to the imagination.

• 1:18:14Chris Winterbauer?

  Now, there are some things that you would have been able to see in the original version of the film, but we'll get to that shortly.

• 1:18:19Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, okay.

• 1:18:20Chris Winterbauer?

  On February 3rd, 1998, Kubrick announced that the orgy was done. That is done. Meaning Eyes Wide Shut was done. Yay. Uh, no, he wasn't happy with the scene of Bill visiting the home of his dead patient. So he rebuilt that set using Bill and Alice's apartment. Jennifer Jason Leigh, of course, had moved on. She probably was 10 years older, had a different movie that she was on called Existence with David Cronenberg. It's actually really fun if you haven't seen it. And she was replaced by Marie Richardson. Cruise was then called back to set after wrapping. And Kubrick actually shot some of these scenes himself because cinematographer Larry Smith had also moved on to another project. And Stanley Kubrick was looking rough because the truth is, Lizzie,

• 1:19:05Chris Winterbauer?

  the only person that Kubrick worked harder than Tom Cruise was Stanley Kubrick. And it's easy to forget, but the man was 70 years old and I don't think ever particularly healthy. Even though, like Arthur Schnitzler, he was the son of a doctor, he was famously averse to visiting doctors. He self-medicated relentlessly. As we learned, he hardly slept at all. I believe he was sleeping two, three, maybe four hours a night on this film. By the end of the shoot, he had an oxygen tank in his bedroom. He would often lean against the wall to support himself. Leon Vitale sometimes needed to help him up and down the stairs or pick him up off the floor. That's not an exaggeration. It had been rumored that he'd had a heart attack in the early 90s.

• 1:19:50Chris Winterbauer?

  Jan Harlan, his longtime assistant and brother-in-law, denied that report, but later said that he felt that Kubrick had carried this movie for so long inside of him that when he wrapped it, it seemed to have triggered a physical change in him. And he aged five years as a result.

• 1:20:07Lizzie Bassett?

  I mean, I believe that that can absolutely happen, that you sort of hold on to the last little bit of energy and then it's just gone.

• 1:20:13Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah. So on June 17th, 1998, Eyes Wide Shut finally wrapped. 294 shooting days across 579 calendar days.

• 1:20:27Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh my god.

• 1:20:28Chris Winterbauer?

  The longest film production in history, and they had to edit the damn thing. So in total, Kubrick had captured over a million feet of film. And if my math is correct, that's roughly 11,000 minutes of footage.

• 1:20:41Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh my god.

• 1:20:43Chris Winterbauer?

  Now, Lizzie, have we discussed, I believe, shooting ratio on this podcast before?

• 1:20:48Lizzie Bassett?

  Maybe briefly, but good to revisit.

• 1:20:50Chris Winterbauer?

  Sure. So shooting ratio, broadly speaking, is how many minutes of film did you shoot to yield one minute of on-screen finished footage for the movie? Kubrick had shot a ratio of roughly 60 to 1 on this movie. If the movie had been two hours, it would have been 90 to 1. For reference, according to some sources, during the golden age of Hollywood, a 10 to 1 shooting ratio was standard. Hitchcock famously shot three or four to 1 to limit how much the studio could interfere with his edit. Of course, Coppola had shot 90 to 1 on Apocalypse Now. But Kubrick was also editing digital. For the first time on an Avid machine. So Kubrick was very technologically advanced despite his age.

• 1:21:34Chris Winterbauer?

  And now that he was on Avid, the possibilities were endless. He didn't have to destroy, you know, film and actually cut and slice to test different things out. So Nigel Galt, the editor, began work on December 30th, 1996. That's obviously during production. He's working 12-hour days. There's so much footage, he asked for an assistant. Melanie Viner Cunio was hired. They then needed another assistant. Klaus Wellish came on. And this team edited nonstop for over two years to deliver the film on time, often working 15 or 16-hour days. But Kubrick would have to finish the film without one of the people he seemed to truly trust and love.

• 1:22:16Chris Winterbauer?

  As we've discussed, Kubrick was, I think, obsessed more with betrayal on this film than sex. And the betrayal that he seemed to fear did come, but not from his wife, like Bill. In fact, his wife's paintings are the paintings that you see in Bill and Alice's apartment in the film.

• 1:22:34Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:22:35Chris Winterbauer?

  It didn't come from a mentor like Ziegler or a studio head, all of whom at Warner Brothers seemed to have remained supportive throughout this runaway productions process. And it didn't come from a pupil like Tom Cruise, who stood steadfast by his exacting director, take after take. But instead, it came from his daughter, Vivian. She'd agreed to score the film, but at the last minute, pulled out. By November of 1996, she had moved from New York to California. And soon after, she officially cut ties with Stanley Kubrick and, in turn, her entire family. He was distraught. His wife described him as a perfect combination of a Jewish father and mother, constantly fretting over his daughters, trying to understand them.

• 1:23:19Chris Winterbauer?

  As she later said, "What does not come through in any of his films, but what made Stanley extraordinary was his ability to love truly and to identify with the girls and with what was happening to them." And so when Vivian cut him off, he really, it seems, could not figure out what was going on. He wrote her a 40-page letter, trying to win her back, but he couldn't. Now, it wasn't revealed until years later, but it now seems clear that Vivian was engaged in the process of disconnection, a practice that many cults press members to perform, in which they cut ties with anyone critical of the group the new member is joining. Do you have any guesses as to which group Vivian may have joined in the mid 90s?

• 1:24:00Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, no. Is it like Children of God or something?

• 1:24:02Chris Winterbauer?

  No, it was actually the religion of Stanley Kubrick's new star Scientology.

• 1:24:08Lizzie Bassett?

  Scientology, ooh, was he a suppressive person?

• 1:24:11Chris Winterbauer?

  He must have been, because in lieu of scoring Eyes Wide Shut, she instead scored fellow member of Scientology Christie Alley's The Mao Game, a film which I don't think anyone remembers. Now, I want to be clear. At the time, it doesn't seem like anyone on the production was aware of this. I don't get the sense Tom Cruise was aware of this. It doesn't seem like there was any attempt, you know what I mean, to woo her in.

• 1:24:36Lizzie Bassett?

  Maybe Tom Cruise's creepy handler was aware of it.

• 1:24:39Chris Winterbauer?

  It's possible. It seems like something that she had kind of fallen into on her own, is my point. And the Cruise connection was ultimately incidental. Kubrick pushed on in post-production. March of 1999, he's ready to screen his cut of the film for executives. Normally, he'd do this in London. But to accommodate Cruise and Kidman, who are going to be in New York, he sends the one print of the film to New York. It's screened at the Warner Brothers Fifth Avenue headquarters on Tuesday, March 2nd. For Tom Cruise, Nicole Kidman, and two execs from Warner Brothers, and the projectionist was instructed to literally cover his eyes during the film.

• 1:25:16Lizzie Bassett?

  Just like Nick Nightingale playing the piano.

• 1:25:19Chris Winterbauer?

  It's so right. It's so good. It's amazing.

• 1:25:21Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:22Chris Winterbauer?

  On March 5th, a second screening was held with additional executives. It seems like everybody was happy and excited about the film. And on March 7th, 1999, Stanley Kubrick, five days after screening the film, died in his sleep.

• 1:25:37Lizzie Bassett?

  Wow.

• 1:25:38Chris Winterbauer?

  I did read that it looked as if he had been trying to reach for an oxygen bottle that he had in his bedroom. He had suffered a massive heart attack. He was buried in private at his home on March 12th. Cruise, Kidman, and Steven Spielberg all spoke. I also read that Vivian did attend the funeral with a sponsor from Scientology present to watch over her.

• 1:26:00Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, man.

• 1:26:12Chris Winterbauer?

  Warner Brothers, along with Kubrick's closest collaborators, Jan Harlan, Leon Vitale, the entire post-production team, and Christiane, his wife, now needed to finish a film made by the most notoriously specific director of the modern era without him. And it seems like it mostly fell on Leon Vitale. As Warner Brothers exec Brian Jamison later said, "Leon was probably the most important person from what I'd call the Kubrick stable." Leon was determined in the face of the chairman of the board of the company that he was going to do whatever he could to finish Eyes Wide Shut as Stanley would have wanted it. Now, I didn't go into a ton of detail on Leon in this film because I want to encourage everyone to watch the documentary Film Worker

• 1:26:55Chris Winterbauer?

  about Leon and his relationship with Kubrick. It's great. They had their work cut out for them. Not only did they need to finish the film in a Kubrickian manner, they had to do it with people who had taken shit from Kubrick from years and only put up with it because he was Kubrick, which was a very difficult proposition.

• 1:27:15Lizzie Bassett?

  Right.

• 1:27:16Chris Winterbauer?

  They had to finish the score and the soundtrack, sound design and mixing. There were a few final shot selections that needed to be made. They had to screen for the MPAA, do color correction and more. Plus, there were some characters that needed to be re-voiced in ADR. Now, Lizzie, there is one voice in this film that is pretty recognizable, I would say. Did you pick it up?

• 1:27:37Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, it's only because you mentioned this person. And I didn't know why. I did not look it up. But then, as I was watching the movie and they're in the mansion, the woman with the headdress is Cate Blanchett's voice.

• 1:27:52Chris Winterbauer?

  It is. So, played by Abigail Good on the day, she was not able to do a convincing American accent. So, they dubbed her ironically-

• 1:27:59Lizzie Bassett?

  With an Australian.

• 1:28:00Chris Winterbauer?

  With an Australian actress. It was actually Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman who recommended Kate for the part in post. Now, the reason I mentioned, Lizzie, that the movie's length did not change is that they were terrified of changing the actual edit itself.

• 1:28:14Lizzie Bassett?

  Okay.

• 1:28:15Chris Winterbauer?

  So much so that jump- Cuts Kubrick had put in the film, meaning cuts within the same camera angle, were actually corrected with digital morphs as opposed to putting in different footage to make the cut make sense. The silver blue monochrome was laid over the naval officer fantasies per Kubrick's initial original intentions. And they needed to figure out voiceover. And I think this was the thing that may have been the biggest, could have gone either way in post-production about the film. So with the exceptions of 2001 and The Shining, and The Shining kind of has a little kind of voiceover in it. Every Kubrick film has voiceover of some kind, more or less. And the Stanley Kubrick archive, and you can buy it, it's published,

• 1:28:56Chris Winterbauer?

  contains a bunch of notes for voiceover that Kubrick was considering for the film. I don't want to bore you guys by reading them right now, but I do think they offer a lot of interiority that the movie's missing, as well as like a little bit of humor as well. It's basically like the interior thoughts of Tom Cruise as Bill. "But what insanity! After all, nothing happened. What was he thinking about? But then, wasn't it really just as bad if she'd actually fucked him?" Like, it's just him being neurotic, basically. And I actually think it might have added a little bit to the final film, just me personally. Now, I'm not going to talk a ton about music.

• 1:29:38Chris Winterbauer?

  There are some very famous classical pieces used, but there is a really wonderful piece of music with some reversed chanting that plays during part of the ceremony scene. That is a piece of music called "Backwards Priest" by British composer Jocelyn Pook. And it was an instance of temp love. Basically, the choreographer, Yolanda, was using it to choreograph the scenes. Kubrick heard it, loved it, gets in contact with Jocelyn, says, "This is great. Can you make more, quote, sexy music for me?" And she's like, "I don't know what sexy music is." And he goes, "Figure it out." And then she says, "Can I read the script?" And he says, "No." And then she says, "Can I see the movie?" And he says, "No." And then she just started working on the music.

• 1:30:19Chris Winterbauer?

  And eventually, he did relent and show her some of the movie so she could write the music, actually, to the movie. So he wouldn't even let his composer.

• 1:30:27Lizzie Bassett?

  In case anyone listening doesn't know, temp love refers to when temp music is placed in the edit. And then everybody becomes so attached to the temp music that they've seen there that it's extremely hard to replace it with any kind of original score that you would be coming in to drop in.

• 1:30:42Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:43Lizzie Bassett?

  And so they didn't. They just used it.

• 1:30:45Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah. Lizzie, you mentioned how tasteful the orgy scenes look, and that's in part because when they first sent the film to the MPAA, they gave it an NC 17 rating. But the studio and Kubrick's family don't want to alter the edit, so they don't want to just remove frames like they did in Die Hard with the murder of Takagi, for example. So the solution was to add in digital human figures to obscure the most explicit sex acts.

• 1:31:12Lizzie Bassett?

  What?

• 1:31:13Chris Winterbauer?

  Exactly. So in all, 22 shots were digitally altered by putting additional hooded figures in specific places to, for example, cover two women performing oral sex on one another on the table, creating 8,000 frames of digital material.

• 1:31:31Lizzie Bassett?

  That's pretty well done.

• 1:31:32Chris Winterbauer?

  It's very well done. And actually, there are some who believe that Kubrick may have been anticipating this because he did early digital scanning on this film and was testing out digital scanning of environments for AI, it's believed, the next film he was going to do. And the, basically like the notes of the lighting setups of those orgy scenes were more detailed than other scenes, which would allow a VFX team to be able to recreate the lighting more convincingly. So it's possible he saw this coming.

• 1:32:05Lizzie Bassett?

  It's also like a relatively, fortunately, it's a smart solve because those figures don't need to move. It makes sense that they would be there. It's sort of menacing and creepy that they're there. It doesn't, you don't lose anything by not seeing what they're covering. In fact, I think you actually gained something by it being a little bit shadowy.

• 1:32:25Chris Winterbauer?

  Well, some people who didn't agree, Lizzie, were the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, who issued a statement saying that by censoring Eyes Wide Shut, Warner Brothers and the MPAA have acted as if Stanley Kubrick made a pornographic movie. He did not. So there were a lot of people that were up in arms about taking the sex out of Eyes Wide Shut.

• 1:32:46Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, you can tell what's happening.

• 1:32:49Chris Winterbauer?

  Well, unfortunately, it seems like the problem is they needed more sex at the end of the day, because Kubrick's need for secrecy and the studio's need to hype the film led to speculation that Eyes Wide Shut was going to be not only the sexiest movie of the summer, but maybe of the year and maybe of all time.

• 1:33:07Lizzie Bassett?

  No.

• 1:33:08Chris Winterbauer?

  The trailer for the film, Lizzie, is erotic. I'd like to play it for you right now.

• 1:33:13Lizzie Bassett?

  Great.

• 1:33:17Lizzie Bassett?

  So, listeners, what we just watched was a montage of every moment in the movie that could potentially be hot out of context, set to Chris Isaak's Baby Did a Bad Bad Thing, which, listen, if you're putting Chris Isaak on something, it's gonna sound sexy. That's right.

• 1:33:33Chris Winterbauer?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:33:34Lizzie Bassett?

  But that is so funny, because they're like, they're trying to not totally hide the very sinister and creepy Illuminati sex party and make it look sorta hot. And it like, kinda works, sandwiched in there, but you're still like, nah.

• 1:33:50Chris Winterbauer?

  Now, Lizzie, fun fact, Stanley Kubrick cut that trailer.

• 1:33:54Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, he's a troll, because that is not this movie.

• 1:33:59Chris Winterbauer?

  Well, it sounds like he didn't want to necessarily. One Warner Brothers exec said, quote, "We all persuaded Stanley that the way to sell the movie was that first trailer. It promised a different kind of film. That trailer promised something the movie didn't deliver," end quote.

• 1:34:15Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:15Chris Winterbauer?

  Now, Kubrick is famously hands-on, all the way through marketing, all the way through the release of the film. He continued to edit The Shining after it had been released. When Frederick Raphael first went to his house, he was reviewing the ad placements for screenings of Full Metal Jacket in Jakarta.

• 1:34:33Chris Winterbauer?

  To make sure that they were measuring the correct amount of lines for the ad that he had placed.

• 1:34:39Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh my god.

• 1:34:39Chris Winterbauer?

  Years after the film's release. So without Kubrick there, it was kind of a hodgepodge of Warner Brothers, plus Pat Kingsley and Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman selling the film. And everybody felt, you know, the best thing that we have to sell this is the sexiness of these two stars. So Eyes Wide Shut opens wide on July 16th, 1999, and just doesn't meet expectations. The reviews were mixed at best, I would say. Many felt the film was boring, that the sex and sets felt very artificial and stilted. A lot of people pointed out that like, the New York City streets felt very strange. If you pay attention, they're actually reusing the same two blocks, just redressing them five or six times.

• 1:35:21Lizzie Bassett?

  Also, is he like, walking on a treadmill in front of a screen?

• 1:35:25Chris Winterbauer?

  Yes, he is at a couple of points, yeah. It doesn't quite look right.

• 1:35:29Lizzie Bassett?

  I liked that. I liked that they do it in the car, too.

• 1:35:32Chris Winterbauer?

  It's a dreamlike effect, which I think is cool, but it is very heightened

• 1:35:35Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 1:35:36Chris Winterbauer?

  as a result. The movie, of course, had its champions. Janet Maslin of the New York Times was a big supporter of the movie. And the movie started pretty well, because it had all this hype, right? It opened to just under 22 million its first weekend. It's 60-plus million dollar film, though, so it's gonna need a lot of legs to continue. But it flagged quickly. It grossed about 55 million in the United States. It did fare better overseas, in particular in Latin America and Japan, where it was much better received than in kind of the Anglo world. In the end, it grossed $162 million worldwide, which I have to believe it went over budget at its 60 million and had a very expensive marketing campaign. So it probably didn't lose money.

• 1:36:16Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, maybe it broke even.

• 1:36:17Chris Winterbauer?

  Broke even, did, you know, fine on ancillary markets eventually. It was, though, Stanley Kubrick's highest grossing film, not adjusted for inflation.

• 1:36:26Lizzie Bassett?

  Wow.

• 1:36:26Chris Winterbauer?

  Which is odd. Now, conspiracy theories popped up immediately. Most around the secret society portrayed in the film, was Kubrick sending a message to the Illuminati, Lizzie? Had he been murdered for trying to reveal them?

• 1:36:42Chris Winterbauer?

  Of course, these conspiracy theories have been given fresh fuel in recent years with revelations surrounding the likes of Jeffrey Epstein and many others. I don't think there's anything to any of these. In fact, there's a funny part in Frederick Raphael's book where he gave a backstory to the secret society and he sent it to Kubrick and said, like, "I learned this from an FBI friend of mine about this, like, secret sex society." And Kubrick called him and he was like, "Are you sure we can use this? Like, are we gonna get, like, whacked by these guys?" And he's like, "I made it up. I made it all up. None of it's real." Kubrick was very paranoid, too. Now, of course, Lizzie, the biggest question was, is this a Kubrick film? Are we seeing his vision at the end of the day? Or is this just an incomplete edit manipulated by the studio?

• 1:37:25Chris Winterbauer?

  In 2006, actor Arlie Ermy, who of course plays Drill Sergeant in Full Metal Jacket, said that Kubrick had called him two weeks prior to his death and said the film was terrible and that he was, quote, "disgusted with it," end quote, which does not seem likely. Todd Field has directly called this bullshit, basically saying that Kubrick had even told Field not to cast Ermy in one of his films and that they really weren't very close, and he doubted Kubrick even called him. But Todd Field did not go so far as to say that Eyes Wide Shut was a final cut. Basically, he says, "If Stanley's post-production on past films is taken into even modest consideration, it's clear that the film would be different. However, it would be foolish to

• 1:38:09Chris Winterbauer?

  try and speculate about what might have changed had Stanley lived to make it."

• 1:38:13Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:14Chris Winterbauer?

  Leon Vitale, for his part, said that he had completed his final cut. He said that, basically, all that was left to do was re-record missing dialogue and fine-tune the color. There's much to do in post-production, but Stanley had left instructions for much of it, including the film's marketing campaign. And there are a lot of people that agree with this, basically saying he never would have screened it for Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman if he didn't think it was ready.

• 1:38:40Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, I believe that.

• 1:38:42Chris Winterbauer?

  I tend to as well. Now, Kubrick, according to some, had said that he was very excited about the movie, and he'd actually called it his best work and his greatest contribution to cinema. But the recognition that some had hoped for did not come. So briefly, Lizzie, the aftermath for Mr. Tom Cruise. He was nominated for an Oscar in 1999, I guess in 2000 for a role in 1999, but it was not for Eyes Wide Shut. Do you know what movie it was for?

• 1:39:09Lizzie Bassett?

  Magnolia.

• 1:39:10Chris Winterbauer?

  Magnolia. Kind of the opposite role of his character.

• 1:39:14Lizzie Bassett?

  Yep.

• 1:39:15Chris Winterbauer?

  His performance in Eyes Wide Shut was, at best, ignored. I do personally, and I love Tom Cruise, think he feels flat and out of his depth, especially compared to Kidman, in my opinion, who I think gives a Sphinx-like performance.

• 1:39:29Lizzie Bassett?

  I don't agree. I think Tom Cruise is really good in this.

• 1:39:33Chris Winterbauer?

  I don't, but whether he's good or bad, he is exactly as Kubrick wanted him, is the point. So you can't say he's bad necessarily. You can say you don't like it, right? But it's whatever Kubrick wanted. Now, perhaps Cruise should have looked at Kubrick's own history to know that he could never be the star of a Kubrick film. Kubrick was always the star of a Kubrick film. I think only Peter Oostman and Spartacus had won an Oscar, and Peter Sellers got nominated for his turn in Doctor Strangelove. And of course, Sellers didn't do 50 Takes. He only did two or three for Kubrick, and that was it. And so he didn't even do the Kubrick method.

• 1:40:09Lizzie Bassett?

  Also, which performance? He plays like four or five people in that.

• 1:40:14Chris Winterbauer?

  Exactly. Everybody. And as Amy Nicholson said, Cruise couldn't even turn to his director for support. And after a year or so after the film had come out, Cruise came as close as he ever would to criticizing Kubrick, when he said, "I didn't like playing Dr. Bill. I didn't like him. It was unpleasant, but I would have absolutely kicked myself if I hadn't done this." To your earlier question, Lizzie, he filed for divorce from Nicole Kidman in 2001, and he would eliminate another close member of his circle when he fired Pat Kingsley in 2004. And if you want to continue that story, listen to our guest performance on The Big Flop with Wondry.

• 1:40:53Lizzie Bassett?

  I will say, it is interesting. That it feels like potentially Scientology was sinking its claws deeper and deeper into him. This is all conjecture, but this is a time when it seems like he was very insecure. Going through this, going through a really rough shoot. It took forever. You know, he's trying to please a director that's impossible to please. There's a handler with him on set the entire time. The timing of his divorce from Nicole Kidman after this does feel a little creepy. Especially because that I believe was pretty heavily influenced by the church in terms of labeling her a suppressive person, an SP, which we referenced earlier with Stanley Kubrick's daughter as well.

• 1:41:37Lizzie Bassett?

  It's weird. It is a little weird. This is a movie about, you know, a very controlling, secret society seemingly with a lot of money. And that both Kubrick lost his daughter and Tom Cruise's marriage ends up falling apart as well. And then to Chris's point about the big flop, there's a lot more discussion there that he does lose his publicist who had been kind of successfully keeping the sort of Scientology monster at bay.

• 1:42:06Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:06Lizzie Bassett?

  For a long time. And then, once it was gone, it really gets weird. I wonder, I wonder how much they took advantage of his psyche during this time.

• 1:42:18Chris Winterbauer?

  I agree. And there's a, this is a quote from one of these books. I'm going to mistribute it. So generally speaking, what the person said was basically they weren't surprised that Vivian had turned to Scientology because for so long Stanley had loomed so large in her life. And when she disconnected from him, she needed something else to fill that void. And it could be said that Cruz experienced a not dissimilar thing with disillusionment with somebody that he had worshipped prior to working on this film.

• 1:42:49Lizzie Bassett?

  Also, I guess we should probably legally say that Scientology, I think, is still classified as a religion.

• 1:42:54Chris Winterbauer?

  Sure. Now, I struggled to find an appropriate ending for this episode because this movie, like Kubrick's life, was cut short and had kind of an unexpected end. And so what I tried to parse is was Stanley Kubrick a genius, which is a question that came up again and again, and people seem to have very strong opinions on. I don't know. I think he was always interesting and he was relentless. And there's a great quote that Frederick Raphael has in his book, attributed to Thomas Carlyle, a Scottish essayist and historian. Genius is an infinite capacity for taking pains.

• 1:43:35Chris Winterbauer?

  And so it seems like Kubrick did meet that definition of genius, which brings me back to that acceptance speech for the D W Griffith Award. Because I think he was less interested in the heights that his wings could achieve than the construction of the wings themselves. So, in honor of the man who insisted on removing all jokes from this movie, I would like to end with a joke, Lizzie. A rabbi brings some fine material to a tailor and asks him to make a pair of pants. When he comes back a week later, the pants are not ready. Two weeks later, still not ready. Finally, after six weeks, the pants are ready.

• 1:44:18Chris Winterbauer?

  The rabbi tries them on. They fit perfectly. Nonetheless, as he pays, he can't help but take a dig at the tailor. "You know," the rabbi says, "it took God only six days to make the world, and it took you six weeks just to make one pair of pants." "Ah," says the tailor, "but look at this pair of pants, and then look at the world." And we'll end it there with Stanley Kubrick and his pair of pants. And that concludes our coverage of Eyes Wide Shut.

• 1:44:49Lizzie Bassett?

  Chris, what went right?

• 1:44:53Chris Winterbauer?

  You know what? Fuck you, Lizzie. Nicole Kidman.

• 1:44:57Lizzie Bassett?

  All right, fine.

• 1:44:58Chris Winterbauer?

  No, no, I'm not. I actually think Larry Smith's cinematography.

• 1:45:02Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, it looks great.

• 1:45:03Chris Winterbauer?

  They did some interesting things we didn't discuss. They shot the film. I believe they underexposed it and pushed it a stop in post. And, you know, this is kind of right before the transition to digital. And I just think the movie looks so saturated and vibrant and punchy. And so many of the movies, you know, we watch today, especially on streaming, feel very gray and muted. And I love the colors of this film. So really, to the entire production design and costume team, I would have to say, just an incredible use of color. And obviously Kubrick was hyper-specific with what he wanted. But let's just say Larry Smith's cinematographer, you went right.

• 1:45:39Lizzie Bassett?

  Great.

• 1:45:41Lizzie Bassett?

  I think that what went right in this movie is also what bothers me the most about it, which is that both times I've seen it, I, I do not know what I'm, what exactly I'm supposed to take away from it. And like immediately after viewing, including when, when David and I watched it just last night, I had the same feeling where I was like, I enjoyed it, but I don't get it. And you know, David was like, I don't think you're supposed to necessarily be able to get it. Like you're not quite supposed to be able to put your finger on it. And I actually think that that is what went right about this. And I think that has to be down to Stanley Kubrick. There is just something, there is something really

• 1:46:22Lizzie Bassett?

  creepy about this film that I think works really, really well. And whatever happened in terms of the edit after his death, their ability to maintain that sort of ambiguity across this and to not fall into the trap of trying to explain exactly what happened or even to verify whether or not what Tom Cruise thinks happened is what really happened, I think is very successful. So Stanley, hats off to you. I don't know what this movie is about, but I do enjoy it. And it does leave me feeling very unsettled.

• 1:47:00Chris Winterbauer?

  I think he would love that answer because he famously never wanted to explain any of his films. And when people said, what is it about? He said, I said what it's about in the movie and that's all you're going to get. So I think he'd be very happy with that.

• 1:47:14Lizzie Bassett?

  Great. You're welcome, Stan.

• 1:47:15Chris Winterbauer?

  All right. Now, guys, we really appreciate you listening to this podcast. And if you want to go one step forward and support this podcast actively, there are three easy ways to do it. You can tell somebody about it. You can say, and then hand them your phone and play them what went wrong. You can also. Leave us a rating and review on whatever podcast platform you're listening on. And of course, you can join our Patreon. That is www.patreon.com/whatwentwrongpodcast. What is Patreon? Patreon is a platform for creators such as ourselves to elicit support from our fanbases so we can continue to remain independent and produce this podcast for you guys. You can join for free. You can also join at a $1 a month level to vote on films that we'll cover in the future.

• 1:48:00Chris Winterbauer?

  For $5, you get an ad-free RSS feed. And for $50, you can have a shout out at the end of this episode and be part of our special secret society with none of the benefits that you're gonna get in this film. But there are only 50 slots and they're filling up fast. They surprisingly are. So make sure you sign up if you want a shout out. And of course, we have to give our shout outs now. So Nicole, could you just do one more take with that incredible performance you've been giving? Tom, you can leave now. Tom, you can go back to America. But Nicole, could you stay? Because you're just a thoroughbred.

• 1:48:44Lizzie Bassett?

  Could I stay? Sorry, I will do it momentarily, but that's my other bone to pick with this movie is all they do is repeat each other's lines. All right, here's Nicole. Kate Erlington. M. Sodia Benton Brown. C. Grace B. Jen Mastromarino. Christopher Hellner. Mark Demetrick. Blaise Ambrose.

• 1:49:21Lizzie Bassett?

  Just remember the password is Fidelio Jerome Wilkinson Lance Stater. Make the knife.

• 1:49:37Lizzie Bassett?

  Lena, Andrea, Ramon Villanueva Jr., Half Grey Hound. There's something very important that we have to do as soon as we get home. Lauren Dunn, Brittany Morris, Darren and Dale Conkling, Jake Killen, Andrew McFagel Bagel, McFagel Bagel, Matthew Jacobson, Grace Potter,

• 1:50:19Lizzie Bassett?

  Ellen Singleton, JJ Rabidow, Jewy Sri Samat, Scott Gerwin, Sadie, Just Sadie, Brian Donahue, Adrian Peng, Korea, Chris Leo, Kathleen Olson, Leah Bowman, Steve Winterbauer, Don Scheible, George,

• 1:51:02Lizzie Bassett?

  Rosemary Southward, Tom, Kristen Somen Chinani, Michael McGrath. Thank you all.

• 1:51:19Chris Winterbauer?

  All right. Thank you guys so much. Lizzie, what are we coming back with in two weeks?

• 1:51:23Lizzie Bassett?

  We have got a heavy, heavy hitter coming to you in two weeks. It is one of the most bonkers movies, movie productions we have covered on this show, and that is The Godfather, Part One, but it will be a two-part episode, a two-part episode on The Godfather, Part One. So come back for Part One of our two-part coverage of The Godfather.

• 1:51:48Chris Winterbauer?

  No, it's The Godfather, Part One, Part One, and then we're gonna have The Godfather, Part One, Part Two.

• 1:51:54Lizzie Bassett?

  The following week.

• 1:51:55Chris Winterbauer?

  And then eventually we'll have The Godfather, Part Two, Part One. Yeah, exactly.

• 1:51:59Lizzie Bassett?

  So yes, come back next week for Part One of our coverage of The Godfather.

• 1:52:04Chris Winterbauer?

  Bye.

• 1:52:05Lizzie Bassett?

  Bye.

• 1:52:08Speaker 04

  Go to patreon.com/whatwentwrongpodcast to support What Went Wrong and check out our website at whatwentwrongpod.com. What Went Wrong is a Sad Boom podcast presented by Lizzie Bassett and Chris Winterbauer. Editing and music by David Bowman.