The greatest film never made
source: http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/film/article6923707.ece
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It should have been an epic endeavour that would have dwarfed his other films in both scale and ambition: Stanley Kubrick’s Napoleon was the great obsession of the director’s career. A three-hour portrait of the emperor and the man, Napoleon was scheduled to go into production right after the release of 2001: A Space Odyssey. The young Jack Nicholson was Kubrick’s preferred choice to play the lead; to support him, the director had negotiated the use of a sizeable chunk of both the Yugoslav and the Romanian armies — 50,000 soldiers in all.
Even by Kubrick’s usual standards, the research was exhaustive. He had an index-card file crammed with information about the 50 key characters in the script — in total there were a staggering 25,000 cards. Kubrick even applied a Method approach to his research, adopting some of Napoleon’s more distinctive character traits. He would alternate forkfuls of dessert with his main course, a practice he adopted because it was the way Napoleon ate.
So what happened? Why did Kubrick’s passion project never make it to the screen? The answer is depressingly prosaic. Historical dramas, even spectacularly ambitious historical dramas, were out of fashion at the time. And the formidable budget was deemed by the studios in question to be too much of a risk — even with a director who had repeatedly proved himself at the box office. Napoleon was not to be, but the project lived on in cinema mythology, and, as of this month, in a collector’s edition coffee-table book called Stanley Kubrick’s Napoleon: The Greatest Movie Never Made, with a price tag almost as hefty as the film’s original budget.
Even by Kubrick’s usual standards, the research was exhaustive. He had an index-card file crammed with information about the 50 key characters in the script — in total there were a staggering 25,000 cards. Kubrick even applied a Method approach to his research, adopting some of Napoleon’s more distinctive character traits. He would alternate forkfuls of dessert with his main course, a practice he adopted because it was the way Napoleon ate.
So what happened? Why did Kubrick’s passion project never make it to the screen? The answer is depressingly prosaic. Historical dramas, even spectacularly ambitious historical dramas, were out of fashion at the time. And the formidable budget was deemed by the studios in question to be too much of a risk — even with a director who had repeatedly proved himself at the box office. Napoleon was not to be, but the project lived on in cinema mythology, and, as of this month, in a collector’s edition coffee-table book called Stanley Kubrick’s Napoleon: The Greatest Movie Never Made, with a price tag almost as hefty as the film’s original budget.
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Mmmm
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This is marvellous - I too am personally responsible for the greatest artwork known to mankind..
the fact that I've not got around to it yet is neither here nor there...
So glib.. tsk tsk.. Let's face it - Stan did OK & if he left the world begging for more then he played his part well...
No doubt he would have approved of the 'depressive' hand wringing tho ...
- 2 years ago
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Mmmm
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artemis6
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How else is he young generation gonna learn history ? They don't read .
- 2 years ago
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artemis6
