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I work at an independent video store on the Drag in Austin, across from the university. On
Sunday, March 7, a little after noon, a regular came in to return Barry Lyndon and said,
"You heard, right?" and I hadn't.
I took 2001: A Space Odyssey off the shelf, tied a strip of black electrical tape around it, and stood it on the counter by the register. By closing, every Kubrick tape in the store was rented, including the second copy of Spartacus, which nobody has rented since 1996. People kept coming up to the counter to talk. A guy who comes in every Friday for kung fu movies told me he saw 2001: A Space Odyssey in 1968 in a theater in San Antonio when he was fifteen, went back nine more times that summer, and has never been the same. A girl from the film school cried. I didn't cry until I got home. I'm Nora Kincaid. I'm 24, I dropped out of film school after two years because I couldn't afford it, and I have seen every Kubrick film at least four times, Fear and Desire excepted (once, on a terrible bootleg, and that was enough). This is my page for him. |
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THE FACTS
Born July 26, 1928, in Manhattan, and grew up in the Bronx, the son of a doctor. Bad student, great chess player. At seventeen he was a staff photographer for Look magazine, and he taught himself the rest: how to light, how to cut, how to shoot a movie. He made his first feature in 1953 on money borrowed from family and friends. In the early sixties he moved to England to make Lolita and never really came back. He made every film after that from a house outside London, took years on each one, and controlled every piece of it, down to which theaters showed it. The papers liked to call him a hermit. From everything I've read, he was a man who liked to be home with his wife and his daughters and his dogs and cats, working, and who didn't see why he should have to go to parties to prove anything to anybody. His only Oscar was for the special visual effects on 2001: A Space Odyssey. Think about that for a second. He died in his sleep at home in Hertfordshire on Sunday, March 7, 1999. It was his heart. He was 70. He had finished cutting Eyes Wide Shut and shown it to the studio just days before. |
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JULY 16
I took the day off and went to the first show of Eyes Wide Shut on opening day, a Friday, 11:40 in the morning, alone. There were nine of us in the theater. Nobody talked. When it was over nobody got up for a long time. I'm not going to review it. I don't think I know what I think about it yet. I didn't know what I thought about The Shining for about four years either, and now it's one of my favorite films in the world. He always made movies that were ahead of you. You had to catch up. This one I'll be catching up with for a while, and that's all right. It's the last one. I'm in no hurry to be finished with it. |
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IF YOU'VE NEVER SEEN ONE
People come up to the counter and ask where to start. Here's what I tell them. 1. Start with Dr. Strangelove. It's the funniest movie ever made about the end of the world, and it's short. 2. Then The Killing and Paths of Glory, back to back. Black and white, lean, perfect. You'll see he had it all before he was thirty. 3. Then 2001: A Space Odyssey, on the biggest TV you can find, with the lights off and the phone unplugged. Don't talk. Don't get up. If you fall asleep, try again another night. 4. Barry Lyndon is for a rainy Sunday afternoon. Every shot looks like a painting, because that's what he was going for. 5. Save The Shining for when you're ready. Do not watch it the night before you check into a big old hotel. I say this from experience. The whole list, all thirteen, with my notes, is here: THE SHELF. |
| A note on this page: no pictures, and no lines from the movies. The pictures are his and the studios', and the lines work better where he put them, in the films, with the music and the faces around them. Go rent them. If you're in Austin, come rent them from me, I'll tell you everything you never wanted to know. |
