The Big Screen (60 page)

So Nabokov declined to write a screenplay and attended to butterflies and other books. Time passed, and then he thought he saw a way—“unusually compelling in sheer bright force”—that the script might be done. “Magically” a telegram came from Kubrick asking again, and promising a freer hand. A deal was done: $40,000 for the script, plus travel and living expenses, and another $35,000 if Nabokov ended up with the sole writing credit.

Vladimir and Vera Nabokov traveled to Los Angeles. He met Tuesday Weld, “a graceful ingénue” but not right for Lolita, and he wrote a script that Kubrick estimated would make a seven-hour picture. Kubrick urged the novelist to cut and rewrite. When the second version was delivered, Nabokov was told it was the best script ever written in Hollywood.

He was lied to. He went away, the film was shot, and the Nabokovs were brought back for the premiere. Nabokov noticed two things: he thought it was “a first-rate film,” but “that only ragged odds and ends of my script had been used.” That was less than accurate, too. Still, Nabokov got the sole credit and $75,000, while Kubrick had the promotional prestige of the great man's name on the film.

Nabokov stayed polite; he had a long-term view: he wanted to publish his script. And so he did, at last, in 1974—and so he should have done, for the script is a valuable variation on his great novel, not least in the stage note he offered the director in the scene in Room 342 of the enchanted motel when Lo puts words in Hum's ear: “could one reproduce this hot moist sound, the tickle and the buzz, the vibration, the thunder of her whisper?” But sharp-eyed readers might note that the copyright in the published script belonged to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.

In his foreword, Nabokov showed his need to emerge with superiority. He admitted that he was no dramatist, though if he
had
gone into the screen business, he said (and he was fond of movies), “I would have advocated and applied a system of total tyranny, directing the play or the picture myself, choosing settings and costumes, terrorizing the actors, mingling with them in the bit part of guest, or ghost…[and] pervading the entire show with the will and art of one individual.” It's the author theory.

No one acted on that advice more than Kubrick. He and his wife were disenchanted with New York: it was dirty, unsafe, and vulgar, they felt. In that era, a lot of Americans came to Britain for a nicer life. Bit by bit, Kubrick did the most unlikely things in England.
Dr. Strangelove
(1964) is gallows humor about the Strategic Air Command, but he filmed it in English studios because America lacked the space and the facilities, and crews eager to please or obey him. The film
2001
(1968) was a numb elegy to advanced technology, the American space program, and the kind of depersonalized heroes who manned it. But it was shot at Boreham Wood, with cameramen and designers from England. Soon enough, the Kubricks moved to an estate near St. Albans, in Hertfordshire—that is where he lived and died for everything from
A Clockwork Orange
(1971) to
Eyes Wide Shut
(1999). (Five films in twenty-eight years.)

In Britain he became a quiet-spoken emperor who often told his patron, Warner Bros., very little of what he intended to do. He promised the studio that
Barry Lyndon
would gross in nine figures—it earned just $3 million in the United States. But no one ever denied or controlled Kubrick. His career, like his best films, was black comedy. The actor George C. Scott (General “Buck” Turgidson in
Dr. Strangelove
) said of him, “He's an incredibly, depressingly serious man, with this wild sense of humor. But paranoid.”

Anyone who worked with him said that Kubrick was obsessed with perfection—seventy takes; special lenses; recasting roles after shooting had started; every detail, shoot forever, then edit for longer. Days after the release of
The Shining
, he decided to cut its prologue and sent editors by bicycle through New York and Los Angeles, the only cities where it was playing so far, to trim off the unnecessary opener. Yet in so many of his pictures the perfect plan goes wrong: the robbery in
The Killing
falls apart; the computer in
2001
goes rogue; the military training in
Full Metal Jacket
doesn't help in action; and Jack Torrance's ideal writer's colony in
The Shining
turns out to be a very haunted house. But maybe that's what Jack wanted—all work and no play could make him a dull boy. He is the kind of writer who would rather get into the movies than sit alone with blank paper. So the Overlook Hotel is his Room (as in
Stalker
).

You might say that
A Clockwork Orange
was hardly a fitting thank-you to Britain or St. Albans for its tranquil living conditions—and in time, in Britain, where he controlled the film, Kubrick had
A Clockwork Orange
withdrawn from circulation because he feared the picture inspired copy-cat killings. But he resided in England and in his own creative head, beyond challenge. This eminence is the more remarkable in that
2001
was his last modest success at the box office (it had U.S. rentals of $25 million on a budget of $10 million). He had overawed the system as no one else has ever done. More than an auteur, he was an emperor—and he did think of filming the life of Napoleon, with Jack Nicholson. At a more domestic level, amid the surreal expanses of the Overlook Hotel, Nicholson had already done a tyrant in
The Shining
(1980), which seems one of Kubrick's greatest works, the more disturbing because it is so funny and because it is about that central theme: making up a story and then entering it.

There are moments in
The Shining
that will never lose their sense of hallucination. When the morose Jack Torrance shambles into the superb but abandoned Gold Room bar at the Overlook, he closes his eyes, imagines for a moment, opens them, and there is Lloyd the eternal barman (played by a Kubrick favorite, Joe Turkel) asking, “What'll it be?” We suspect this dream means doom, but it's picture-perfect. The risky delight of thinking yourself into the screen, and belonging to fantasy, had seldom been captured so well.

Is there something English I've forgotten? Could it be the biggest franchise the movies have ever had and the phenomenon that brought more money into the British picture business than anything else has ever done? Is that Ursula Andress in a white bikini striding out of the ocean? Are we shaken or stirred?

The Ian Fleming books about James Bond had been around some time. (
Casino Royale
, the first, was published in 1953.) The role had been tried out on American television (with Barry Nelson as Bond). But no one could see how to turn the rather brutal, old-fashioned books into something more modern. And it was plain in the 1960s that Britain was greedy for anything modern. Real spies were still in the news: Kim Philby vanished from Beirut in 1963 and turned up in Moscow. But popular taste felt that secrecy and espionage might be laughed at.

The producers on Bond were Harry Saltzman and Cubby Broccoli. But it was Kevin McClory who had the idea of reappraising the books as espionage parody, with the sex and violence done in an insolent tongue-in-cheek manner. The pictures had double entendres instead of real dialogue, with Bond girls by the yard, splashy minor-key music from John Barry, and those booming theme songs delivered like artillery by Shirley Bassey.

And they had Sean Connery. So many actors were considered for 007. But history would prove, with painful regularity, that while others might do a decent job, replacing him was like trying to be Groucho Marx. Only Connery had the insolent touch and tone. He was upper-class British, if you liked, but he was saucy Scottish, too. Right in the first glorious age of British auteurs, the actor made the Bond series, and the films came running:
Dr. No
(1962),
From Russia with Love
(1963),
Goldfinger
(1964),
Thunderball
(1965). The total box office income from 007 is said to be $4.8 billion, and it can't be over yet.

Despite the changes and the new seriousness, the business could not give up on the marriage of art and silliness—getting respect and earning big money at the same time. Look at
Blow-Up
(1966), they said. Who could have believed that Michelangelo Antonioni could leave Italy, land in swinging London, and have a sensation?

Antonioni had come to London with a far-fetched package. Carlo Ponti (an old-style producer and Mr. Sophia Loren) and M-G-M were putting up the money for a short story by Julio Cortázar. Antonioni and Tonino Guerra had done the script, but the English dialogue was by playwright Edward Bond, whose
Saved
had given Royal Court audiences the shudders in 1965 with the onstage stoning of a baby. No one felt sure Antonioni could understand English talk.

Thomas (David Hemmings) is a modish photographer of a type springing up to fill the new Sunday newspaper color supplements. He covers all of life, he thinks. He does fashion work—the film has a famous sequence where he drives Veruschka (a real model) to a point of dry orgasm to get the best shots. But he spends the night at a doss house to catch the poorer underside of London. In the actual magazines of the day, faces like Veruschka's stared at reportage shots of derelicts or famine victims, and the cross-cut was reckoned to be deadpan, or worldly.

Thomas is the film's protagonist, but he's a shit; he knows it, yet he reckons the knowingness lets him slip by. So he visits a suburban park in the middle of the day and starts to take a few shots—snaps, really—without much purpose. Then he sees a couple caught up in some obscure crisis. The woman (it's Vanessa Redgrave, one more new English beauty) sees Thomas and demands the negatives. She comes to his studio in pursuit and seems ready to trade her body for the film. Then, later, Thomas starts to process the pictures and wonders if, inadvertently, he has photographed moments in a murder. There is a lengthy sequence where he makes a storyboard of these frames, and we begin to see the pattern, too. As we read the line of the stills, we hear the foliage in the breeze from the park. It is an exquisite mix: a distillation of
Rear Window
and a witty reference to all the controversy over the Zapruder frames.
Blow-Up
is both a mystery film and an absurdist comedy in which Thomas gives up on distinguishing reality from imagery and decides to regard the plot he thinks he saw as a joke.

There are other assets. The summery color is pretty (shot by Carlo Di Palma). There is music by Herbie Hancock and the Yardbirds. This is a visitor's view, and an acute portrait of London just before the merchandising frenzy of “swinging” took over from the real novelty. So it's a document of its time as particular as that out-of-the-way park (it was Maryon Park in Charlton).
Blow-Up
also offered the first female pubic hair in a mainstream film, and from M-G-M, too, less than ten years after the demise of Mr. Mayer. (You had to be quick to see it, but it's a film predicated on the sharp glance.) Vanessa Redgrave veers in an instant from gauche to perfect. Hemmings is an ill-mannered child.
Blow-Up
has that astringent unexpectedness that made
Some Like It Hot
so unnerving. It leaves us saying, “This is a movie, isn't it? But how am I supposed to take it?” Budget, $1.8 million. Worldwide gross, $20 million.

The comedy was made complete when the numbers on
Blow-Up
were so stimulating that Ponti and M-G-M decided Michelangelo must go to America and do the same thing there for that emerging youth culture. In Panavision, with an orgy sequence in Death Valley. The result was
Zabriskie Point
(1970), perhaps the most beautiful, empty, and pretentious film Antonioni would ever make. On a budget of $7 million, it had gross income of under $1 million.

For M-G-M, the gamble was fatal; in 1969 the studio was sold to Kirk Kerkorian. He assigned control to James Aubrey, who had come from CBS. Aubrey cut back film production, trashed studio files, and sold off memorabilia, including Dorothy's red slippers from
Oz
. (The rightful museum of Hollywood is still a pipe dream.) Gradually, what had been the most secure studio became a trading card in obscure deals of real estate, resorts, and technical bankruptcies. A movie lesson was also there for the seeing in
Zabriskie Point
: solemn, auteur beauty could turn out foolish. Still, the endless slow-motion repetition of its exploding desert house (with Pink Floyd on the sound track) was like a mantra for the new antimaterialist mysticism. Yes, it was gorgeous—so long as it wasn't your house. But slow motion could be another drug in this frantic age.