Sunday, June 15, 2014
Letter from Stanley Kubrick
This has been going around but worth sharing here. Stanley Kubrick was, of course, the esteemed director of such movies as DR. STRANGELOVE, PATHS OF GLORY, A CLOCKWORK ORANGE, and 2001: A SPACY ODYSSEY. James Aubrey, at the time, was running MGM. I can't vouch for its authenticity but who knows? It's hilarious.
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16 comments :
James T. Aubrey was a piece of work, incidentally.
I think Jack Benny wanted to do the same thing to Aubrey back in 1964. Would have made for a great comedy skit...
Sorry, it' s a fake, which originally came from this humor piece: Films That Almost Got Made That Time Forgot – 2002: Another Space Odyssey.
Jim appears to be correct. Too bad it's not real, it's hilarious.
Jim, good catch.
And if that image at the linked page is the original, I think it's even funnier that, somewhere along the way, someone decided to change the letter's coloring to make it look older.
Was reading the Wikipedia entry on Aubrey, and I can see why he was such a despised figure.
I believe that Orson Wells had a similar letter to a studio head about a possible sequel to Citizen Kane. Something about owning Rosebud and jamming it up his ass if they ever attempted to make one.
@Richard J. Marcej.
Yeh, I've heard that story about Wells and Rosebud up the ass. I think it was to be called "Game of Thorns".
RKO lost a great deal of money on CITIZEN KANE. Why in the world would they have the least interest in making a sequel to it? That's too stupid to make any sense.
One big giveaway that it's fake - the address listed for MGM on the letter is for the Beverly Hills office building the company moved to a couple of years ago. In the 70s, MGM was still at their longtime studio home in Culver City.
Still hilarious, though!
Ending the letter with "Seriously, don't fuck with me" is a dead giveaway if you ask me. Don't really think Kubrick would ever end a letter like that (not least because the obvious retort would be; "First you'll have to find your way across the Atlantic, tough guy").
Sad thing about the internet is that you can't trust when something is real anymore. By the last line, I was thinking "fake" and sure enough it is. Sometimes little gems like these are real, but the internet has cried wolf too many times.
The other giveaway about this is that the actual sequel to 2001 - 2010 Odyssey Two - was made in 1984 when Stanley Kubrick was still very much alive (he lived until 1999) and I never heard of any complaints he made about the existence of the film, which heavily borrowed from the visual elements of Kubrick's film.
I once heard that some Kubrick fans refer to the dismal sequel 2010 as Ten Past Eight. That still makes me smile.
2010 was based on a novel by Arthur C. Clarke, the co-creator with Kubrick of 2001. Whatever Kubrick thought of the novel or the film, he presumably accepted that Clarke had the right to continue the story.
The letter is a fake. Check the facts at Snopes.
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