The Big Screen

by David Thomson

  Why did they do Lolita when it was impossible? One answer could be that James Mason and Shelley Winters were merely perfect as Humbert and Charlotte, while Sue Lyon was a very cool sixteen-year-old (fourteen in fact during the shooting), instead of the twelve-year-old Nabokov had written.

  But why did Nabokov do it? His book had sold fourteen million copies in the world, the publishers said. It was in July 1959 that Nabokov had been approached by Kubrick and his associate James Harris about writing a screenplay from the novel to which they had acquired the movie rights a year earlier. They had paid $150,000 for the book and promised Nabokov 15 percent of the producers’ profits. There were prolonged discussions and a meeting during which Kubrick told the novelist that the venture might be less risky if Humbert and Lolita were actually married.

  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 gl
orious 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.

  When Blow-Up arrived in America, the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) declined to give it a seal of approval. The major distributors were signed on to a voluntary agreement to seek and accept that imprimatur for every movie. But M-G-M passed the film over to a subsidiary company (Premier Pictures) that was not an MPAA signatory. They went ahead with its release. Nothing happened, except that Blow-Up made a lot of money, received ecstatic reviews—Arthur Knight said in Playboy that it was as important as Citizen Kane, Open City, and Hiroshima Mon Amour—and Antonioni’s direction and the script were nominated for Oscars.

  One concern over the picture was for its flashes of nudity. Yet the more suggestive scene in Blow-Up was that photo shoot with Veruschka. She wore enough clothing to escape protest, but the scene’s sense of an exploitative thrust in photography was reason to be disturbed. It was asking the old questions “Is this a movie? Is it for us? Why are we looking?” Such questions were more radical or disconcerting than a tuft of pubic hair glimpsed in a scrum. But censorship didn’t always get its own point, and censorship was on the ropes in the 1960s.

  In 1958 Louis Malle had made Les Amants, in which his own lover, Jeanne Moreau, played a dissatisfied socialite who finds sex and love with a younger man she meets by chance. The film contained a good deal of nocturnal nudity, elegantly done, and a moment when the man performs cunnilingus on the woman. We do not see his action, but we see her face and hear her rapture—it is quite like the famous moment in Gustav Machatý’s Ecstasy (1933), where the young Hedy Lamarr (called Kiesler then) runs around naked and feels a rush like that enjoyed by Moreau. Les Amants was a big hit in France, but when it came to America, in 1959, a theater manager in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, was charged with the public depiction of obscene material. He was convicted, but he appealed all the way to the Supreme Court, which overturned the verdict in 1964. Justice Potter Stewart, writing about pornography, said, “I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that.” (However, later in life—he died in 1985—Stewart said he regretted the decision.)

  Increasing time and talk were given over to our “need” or “right” to see more sexual frankness on-screen, but very little consideration was given to how far this medium, with its breathtaking manipulation of reality, had always been about desire. Ever since the rule of Will Hays, American audiences had been resigned to the industry’s pious warning that it needed to be careful on our behalf. Otherwise local authorities might take the law into their own hands and ban films, or cut them. (Pennsylvania was one state that banned Ecstasy outright.)

  In most cases, motion pictures had always been stories about attractive people in which the lush craft of photography and the stealth of music combined to make them seem lovelier still, and more seductive. In nearly every genre (even the Western), love situations were obligatory, and Howard Hughes had seen no reason why a Western should not be about sex—witness Jane Russell in The Outlaw (1943), with the producer’s diligent efforts to create a bra for her that seemed not to exist. It wasn’t just that we learned how to fall in love, like “love at first sight.” There was a deeper message: that we should fall in love, because that was what life (and seeing) was about. Movies were dating events then—and usherettes had flashlights to make sure couples in the back row were not completely imitating the screen’s indicated action.

  So there were rules on-screen, the Code’s conditions: no nudity, no undue suggestiveness, no hint that sexual relations out
side marriage were pleasant, no miscegenation (no cegenation, either) and no undue kissing. The rules didn’t always work. For Notorious (1946), Alfred Hitchcock looked at the standards for how long a screen kiss could last and simply had Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman kissing and talking, and kissing again—who could have guessed that a lover might like to be talked to, or need to draw breath? On The Big Sleep (1946), late in the day, Howard Hawks threw in a conversation between Bogart and Bacall about horses and jockeys and being in the saddle, and the censors apparently missed the message and the lewd grin on Bacall’s face.

  With the pill, shorter skirts, rock and roll, and young purchasing power, it was only a matter of time before the Code gave up. But there were other pressures to take into account. The movies, as they withered, were looking for any possible advantage over the small screen. One had been to make the movie screen wider (CinemaScope) or “explosive” (3-D). Another was to get people to take their clothes off and talk dirty.

  In May 1966, Jack Valenti (formerly a special assistant to President Lyndon Johnson) was appointed to head the MPAA (a move engineered by Lew Wasserman). Valenti knew that changes had to be implemented before ridicule set in. The undermining had been years in the making.

  As early as 1960, Alfred Hitchcock had dined and finessed Geoffrey Shurlock, director of the Production Code Administration, over Psycho. Hitch had been warned by many people that Psycho would never be approved by the Code. So he cultivated Shurlock and talked to him about the problems an ingenious, creative movie director faced. Shurlock was flattered; he took an interest in the project and the dilemma. Just as a plot point, Hitchcock needed to have a toilet being flushed. Then there was the matter of the slaughter in the shower, to which Hitch said he would do it as quickly as possible and take care that we never saw a knife piercing skin. He was persuasive, and the times were ready. So a toilet was flushed, and the idea of a woman was slashed to pieces. You can hear the knife working on the sophisticated soundtrack.