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Kubrick by Michael Herr

© Michelle Troutman

Grove Press
June 2000
ISBN #: #0-8021-1670-1
$18.95, hardcover
96 pages, illustrations

In Kubrick, author and screenwriter Michael Herr recounts stories from his 19-year friendship with director Stanley Kubrick (Dr. Strangelove, 2001: A Space Odyssey, among others) and comments from people who knew him and worked with him to deflect the media's criticism of his personality and his films.

Herr argues Kubrick wasn't the cold, obsessive recluse written about in the media and by some biographers: "His distance from people, his 'impersonality,' were always attributed to his supposed neuroses, his 'misanthropy,' but I think they were more probably signs of his clarity. He lived a simple (outer) life, and a largely devotional one, although admittedly secular. His enormous house was as much a studio as a home, a double studio actually, one for him and for his movies and one for his wife Christiane, and her painting. It was a space of perpetual creative activity. He was thought by the press, and so by the public, to be sequestered there, lurking, scheming, like he was Howard Hughes or Dr. Mabuse or the Wizard of Oz, depending on which paper you read. This is because none of them could actually imagine living the kind of live Stanley lived. Anyway, he wasn't misanthropic, he was irreverent; and come to think of it, he wasn't irreverent, either."

His anecdotes show the reader the man he knew, such as his accounts of their marathon phone conversations ("For the most part, we talked about writers, usually dead and white and Euro-American, hardly the current curriculum: Stendahl [half an hour] , Balzac [two hours] , Conrad, Crane, Hemingway [hours and hours--'Do you think it was true that he was drunk all the time, even when he wrote? Yeah? Well, I'll have to find out what he was drinking and send a case to all my writers.'] , Céline ['My favorite anti-semite.'], and Kafka, who he thought was the greatest writer of the century, and the most misread: People who used the word 'Kafkaesque' had probably never read Kafka."). He often bugged Herr to read the books he sent him. One of the books, the novella Traumnovelle by Arthur Schnitzler ("Dream Novel") (1926), Kubrick would later base Eyes Wide Shut on.

Kubrick himself inspired Kubrick: he suggested Herr interview him for Vanity Fair articles published to help promote Eyes Wide Shut upon its release in July 1999. By then, Kubrick had died (on March 7, 1999) and Herr had decided to expand both articles into a book.

Eyes Wide Shut was one of Kubrick's most ill-received movies. Herr quotes critic Lee Siegel in his belief that many

book's cover

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