This is the first video of your I've ever watched. It was very well done and it's obvious you have a lot of interesting knowledge you can teach us, I'm definately going to watch more in the future. My only complaint is that ear blistering opening theme. Is it supposed to be that terrible? Please think about changing it.

Sorry, but I love the theme. I've received a lot of compliments about the choice of music. This is the first I've ever heard anyone disliking it. I understand that it isn't for you, but based on the reaction to it in general since the beginning of the show, I'm keeping it.

completely fair. And like I said, everything else was very good! I look forward to seeing more (and I'm already watching your previous episodes, great stuff)

Thanks very much.

@wericks3

I also didn't like that music theme before (the first time I ever heard it was in the opening of this show). It was loud and obnoxious.
But then I watched a great little film called Attack The Block (2011) and that song was featured in the last scene.
And I must admit, I liked it in context of the scene itself (I will not spoil it for you), and in the context of the characters and their place of living (crime filled district of London) and that led me to like it as music only, and of course, that led to me liking it as an opening to this show.
The song was made by Basement Jaxx.

Btw, keep on going, Leon, you always seem to have something interesting to talk about, concerning films.

It's not the music itself but the audio quality. It's staticky, like my speakers are eating crackers & trying to play music at the same time.

Unlike most times, tonight I'm watching TGWTG on a laptop with earphones, and I have to say that even with the volume turned down halfway, I also did notice that the opening theme sounded very loud, distorted and just really bad this time, like all the VU needles were pinned all the way into the red. I thought it was the volume level going into my headphone jack, but maybe there was some screw up with the levels on your end when you added the opening to this particular ep?

I had not noticed this, but I will look into it if there is an issue with the audio level on this episode.

i've noticed this too, sounds like the intro tune has been heavily overmodulated, giving an unpleasant distortion.
Outtro too, though less badly.

Edit: not only this episode, by the way (the rest of the clip is usually all ok)

Well I love the choice of song for the intro. and Think it fits in well with the edited videos you have for the intro.

I think it's deep and makes a powerful impact on the viewer and connects well with the powerful and impactful Films.

It's awesome.

Keep up the well thought out videos. I do very much enjoy them.

It's funny you mention Rob Ager. I've seen most of his videos, and whereas I do feel he makes many good points in his film analyses, I can't help but notice that he's also a narcissist and a conspiracy theorist. In other words, he's a nutcase. And even more dangerously, an egomaniac. If I were you I would seriously avoid using any of his work in a positive light unless you yourself are fond of tin foil hats.

Poor Shelley Duvall, Kubrick tormented the shit out of her.

In defense of Mister Kubrick, Robert Zemeckis once said "Pain is temporary, film is forever".

Excellent video. Nice to see insightful material on this website. Another interesting piece of insanity was that Kubrick forced (or at least tricked) actor Vincent D'Onofrio into doing over sixty takes of being slapped by R. Lee Ermey's character. Yikes.

If it's a black comedy, why is everyone white? Oh, you mean dark comedy....

"All work & no play makes Jack a dull boy" + "50 Shades of Grey" = Stwart Ashen's "50,000 Shades of Grey."

If you remade A Clockwork Orange set in the Internet Age, he'd already have been desensitized to the atrocities.

He sounds like the kind of guy who would have been slapped with lawsuits left & right. & I heard Alfred Hitchcock was quirky.

Clockwork Orange is a brilliant film with brilliant themes either way, thanks to the controversy just more people are aware of this.

Another question: When are they gonna make a Kubrick biopic, and who's gonna play him?

Old Jim Carrey?

But 2001 is not a movie...

The people who say that are pseudo-critics who have no concept of what a movie actually is. They claim the film has no plot and no characters, but it indeed has plot and characters. The anti-2001 fans have started a crusade to denounce the movie. Don't fall into the stupid hype surrounding the notion of 2001 being an "anti-film". Slow pacing and anti-film are two different things. If I made you sit through a REAL anti-film, like Empire, you would be GLAD to sit through 2001 afterward.

I'm a little disappointed in the theme here, it seems to perpetuate a once common notion of Kubrick as a complete "crazy" eccentric figure that's been at least partially debunked.

The idea really seemed to take hold in the long, seemingly dormant period between Full Metal Jacket & Eyes Wide Shut when he was living off in England and deliberately avoiding everything about the Hollywood scene. Among that insular Hollywood clique that was so envious of Kubrick and so impatiently waiting for his next masterpiece, wild rumors thus started to spontaneously spring up about the Mad Recluse who turned his back on Hollywood, America, and possibly Movies themselves and was living like a hermit in some English castle like a latter day Howard Hughes. Of course it turned out he was actually living quite a normal, sociable life across the pond, he was just avoiding dealing with crass Hollywood egomaniacs unless he absolutely had to, and being egomaniacs, they all assumed that if he didn't want to keep in touch with them, he must be nuts.

In truth, in most everything he did Kubrick was eventually shown to be crazy like a fox. One famous example: he was every bit as obsessive & calculating about his films' commercial performance as he was about making them, and in the case of Clockwork Orange this meant going through lists of every theater in the US to find the ones that his film would perform best in. To do this, he needed data on which types of films had performed how well at which theaters, but back then those types of specific theater-by-theater figures weren't available, it just wasn't how box office performance was reported. So Kubrick had a small team of people actually go & assemble this massive database by hand, calling up theaters & distributors to get the numbers per film per screen, and booking Clockwork Orange into specific theaters accordingly.

Yeah, it was nuts, totally insane when you realize this was all done in the days before personal computers, probably with pencil & paper with file cabinets full of numbers. But it worked so well that once Hollywood finally understood what he was doing & saw how much sense it made, the very figures that Kubrick had to go digging to uncover became the basis of way that box office figures are calculated & reported in the trades to this day.

(I'll comment on the specific items in your list in another post, I think this one might get cut off as it is.)

Don't take "insane" to mean I actually think Kubrick belonged in an institution. It's hyperbolic. I'm obviously a great admirer of his work, but some of his practices towards his cast, though successful, were a bit out there.

This was a really fun and informative video. I knew that Kubrick was a little off, but I didn't know he was that friggin' obsessive about his art. It's rather scary. actually. Keep-up the good work!

To make the typewriter scene even more insane, it was made in several languages.

I have to comment on this one, because Kubrick is my favorite director.

1.Kubrick was not insane. It's debatable if he was or not, but I can easily call him obsessive. But read interviews, watch interviews, read stories, and realize that he was in no way abusive like people think, he was in no way intolerable, he was in no way insane. That's what a few actors said about him, but not most of his actors. He was a mega genius who knew exactly what he was doing at just about any point in his films. He did go too far in a few places, namely Malcolm McDowell's injuries... but when the end result is the film that came out of it? I say it's justified if Malcolm has no problems with it. Kubrick was really smart and knew how to get the film that he wanted, out of the people he worked with. He was definitely obsessive, but madness is not a word I'd use to describe his actions. Insensitive at times, but not mad. and if anyone thinks he was insensitive, the counter-point is when he STOPPED PRODUCTION on FMJ when he learned that a production member accidentally killed a RABBIT. He was a very kind person, and his cruelness was mostly safe and mostly effective.

2.R. Lee ERMEY. You said "Emery", but it's "Ermey"

3.In a similar way, ROBERT Ager. You said "Roger Ager". It's Robert. Or Rob.

4.All of his films are great, and 2001: A Space Odyssey is his best. If he's insane, it doesn't show in his movies, because he clearly knows a lot more about the world and the nature of reality than we do.

David Lynch is insane. Stanley Kubrick is rational yet demanding. Both of them are geniuses.

I hate to repeat myself from a post a few notches above, but here it is anyway: Don't take "insane" to mean I actually think Kubrick belonged in an institution. It's hyperbolic. If I said "Questionable, Albeit Mostly Successful, Though Still Sometimes Dangerous Decisions" instead, the already long title would be rather cumbersome.

As suggested in the video by calling him a genius, I'm a great fan of his work, but some of his practices with his cast can't be swept under the rug.

you talk about the muppets one day

My name is actually Leon, and I'm not sure what you mean. Are you asking if I will talk about the various Muppets films? Guessing you're joking, but...no? Probably not.

Nice. I Checked out the Kubrick exhibit at LACMA a few weeks ago. Very interesting. My favorite part was seeing the tiny Russian phrase book and Bible.

Dude, that was fantastic! You blew me away, I actually like it a lot more than your old series(nothing wrong with your video games videos). Keep them coming, I really feel your love and understanding of films shine through. =)

As for the specific items in your list, Many of them don't really seem like particularly outrageous examples of Directorial excess compared to the many other legendary tales of out-of-control directors out there, from Chaplin to Hitchcock to Michael Cimino. Some of the items you mention which I think there might be at least some justification for:

10 The Green table -I suppose one justification of this could have been that it served as some sort of psychological cue to the actors, to subconsciously put them more in the frame of mind of playing a high stakes poker game. Yeah, it sounds weak, but I know that some directors, in particular Woody Allen & I think also James Cameron, have insisted that actors in period costume must go authentic period dress all the way, right down to their underwear that will never be seen onscreen because it supposedly helps them to "inhabit" their character more, so maybe Kubrick thought it was important the actors see the green table even if we couldn't.

8: The typed pages in the Shining -It seems possible that at one point Kubrick intended some sort of really spectacular visual reveal of the pages where Duvall or Nicholson dramatically threw the entire ream up in the air and they scattered & fluttered everywhere, with cameras from multiple angles picking up page upon page randomly landing showing the repeated phrase, which would have required that many pages typed out. Why not just photocopy 20 pages over & over again then? Good question. But I remember when I was a real little kid seeing a photocopier in my Dad's office for the first time, the copies that came out weren't on regular paper, but some kind of shiny paper like rolls of old fax paper used to be before plain paper faxes. (Yeah, I'm real old.) I don't remember exactly how long ago this was, but the Shining was made in the 70's when I was a real little kid, maybe photocopies still weren't on regular paper indistinguishable from the originals yet, and so would have been easily spotted onscreen?

7: Bombed out building in FMJ -I'd just like to see an account of how Spielberg created the bombed-out villages that served as the setting for elaborate battle sequences in Saving Private Ryan (including a half-blown away house where the French family could be seen exposed but still living in). I honestly don't know, but I wonder how precisely he blew up or smashed a hole in each wall to get just the right shot, or if he even built some of those buildings from scratch only to precisely blow them up, and see how that compares to Kubrick's meticulous destruction of the abandoned factory or whatever to try to make it look like bomb damage.

5: IBM in 2001 -Sorry for the abrupt change of tone here, but this one really bugged me. I'm sorry, but saying that the appearance of "IBM" in the film somehow lends credence to the whole delusional HAL letter shift conspiracy is downright idiotic...

5: IBM in 2001 -Sorry for the abrupt change of tone here, but this one really bugged me. I'm sorry, but saying that the appearance of "IBM" in the film somehow lends credence to the whole delusional HAL letter shift conspiracy is downright idiotic, it's just a complete load of crap.

Look at the film, from the moment the bone turns into a satellite, it's absolutely *loaded* with real-life corporate logos. Heywood Floyd flies to the space station on a Pan-Am space shuttle, once there he passes by a Hilton hotel to make a call on a videophone that displays the old "Bell" telephone logo once the call is over, and the more carefully you look, the more additional examples you'll see. Kubrick did this to establish a familiar real-world connection from the audience to the future being depicted and oh yeah, also it was a pioneering leap forward into the world of product placement. And while Kubrick might not have foreseen BluRay (actually, I suspect he probably did), he did intend 2001 to be seen on huge big-ass Cinerama screens in 70 millimeter, where that paid product-placed IBM logo would have been perfectly visible.
...Not to mention, Arthur C. Clarke who collaborated with Kubrick on the story & came up with the name HAL, always, repeatedly insisted that the IBM letter shift thing never entered his mind, it's just an amusing little coincidence.

3: Using the crop sprayer as fog machine -This is really just a typical story from the world of no-budget independent film-making & its aesthetic of improvising from necessity. Fear & Desire was really just one step up from a student film, to get a tracking shot without the ability to lay down an actual track Kubrick just stuck the camera sideways in a shopping cart. So when they needed a fog machine & they somehow happened across a crop sprayer, they no doubt thought they were again being really clever & frugal. OK, they didn't think it through, but hell even Kubrick is allowed to make at least one really dumb mistake on his first film. It's the kind of thing I can easily see happening even to Brad Jones (if Brad were to ever get ambitious enough to even try to create a foggy atmosphere in one of his films)

1: Making Lolita -Actually, I suspect it would be even a lot harder to make Kubrick's version of that movie today than it was in 1962. I know there was another adaptation of the novel in the late 90's, and that even though it's considered a more faithful adaptation overall, it contained none of the dark humor which was central to the novel & which Kubrick captured wonderfully. And that's the point, I'm not sure you *can* get away with doing an at all humorous treatment of that subject today, we just know too much of the ugly truth of how these things really work.

I don't really agree with that last part, there is Broken Flowers for example. And American Beauty of course.

Although, heck, if American Beauty was first made today, I doubt even that would fly. A lot's been going on these last ten years, apparently. The same might apply to Lolita, who knows, maybe it did affect our social consciousness enough to have made those kinds of movies generally more acceptable since the sixties. But today it's worse than that. Sure we can finally have our Gran Torino's with such groundbreaking statements as "gang violence is bad and racism isn't really cool either", but those jolly transgender individuals sure better be thankful for getting "Boys Don't Cry" back when they did because they sure wouldn't get one in 2013.

I mean, if it wasn't there already. Now that the ground has already been broken for that issue sure somebody could make the essentially same movie again, but i doubt there's much leeway to make a thoughtful movie about some lesser known yet just as important problem that currently happens to be outside public consciousness.

Yeah, if anything, the existence of an IBM logo in the setdressing disproves the theory, because it means that in the eyes of the production team, both companies coexist in the film's universe.

You also might be interested to know that not only that Kubric made her secretary to type English language pages he also made pages with other languages and shot scenes with those pages to be used in localation edits. I've been told that "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy" has been translated at least to Spanish, Italian and German just because the dubbed versions..
That's insane (and also ingenious).

Stanley Kubrick is my god. Hands down my favorite director.

"What is the line between Genius and Madness"

I've always believed that madness is an essential part of genius (Obviously though, if one becomes too insane then their thoughts become completely incoherent). However, being slightly mad is perfect. It allows the genius to view the world in a different way, and dare to challenge typical conventions and ideologies that most people sub-consciously take for granted. If Stanley Kubrick was perfectly sane they he wouldn't have made adaptations of 'Lolita' and 'A Clockwork Orange'.

I've always thought Kubrick made his secretary type out those papers just so if some snark went "Oh, they just copied the pages again and again! The magic of film is ruined!" then Kubrick could turn around and say "Actually, my secretary wrote every single page of that..."

Honestly, I think one of the most insane things Kubrick did was his research on 'Napoleon'. Kubrick researched so much that one could name any day Napoleon was alive, and Kubrick could pull a card out of a filing cabinet that would detail where Napoleon was and what he was doing that specific day. This is insane when you consider this was all just for a film, and even more insane when you consider that the film was never even made. There is research and then there is RESEARCH.

Although I don't know much about kubrick aside from watching his films and watching this video but I would assume Kubrick is a bit mad. Yes his films are work of genius but is it because of how it was filmed or the context of the film? If Clockwork Orange wasn't that controversial in its day would it be still a great film? For instance in the Shinning making actress go nuts over a scene was extreme yet we wouldn't know because we expect an acting performance. So does that make it justifiable because of the results? what does the saying go "the ends justify the means." I would say no because there is always an alternative. For instance the beating scene in Clockwork Orange was unnecessary. Also it didn't have much impact on the film so why make it real? Even if we knew it was real we would think about the actor instead of the character. I'm going to go off on a limb and say from his action Kubrick is a psychopath.

I have heard stories about the Shelly Duvall thing behind the scenes of "The Shining" but this is the first time I heard about the typewriter thing.


Jesus, that poor secretary.

The line between genius and madness is very fine, very very fine. Those I use as canvass for my surgical arts find that out the hard way.

Gotta point out you're misusing the word "factoid." A factoid is a thing that resembles a fact, specifically something that's been repeated so often its treated as true by most people.

This implies that you're aware that these weren't entirely true...

My new favourite reviewer

Good one, Leon, this one was really good...

You could say it worked the same for some scientists in the past, performing crazy experiments and then finding out new technology or methods. I assume some of those were not all too sane as well... :-P

Magnificent, you certainly went into detail here.

great video.

Reference McDowell in Clockwork Orange:

He also nearly drowned in the scene where he was getting dunked in the barrel of water. They had a little air pipe in the bottom of it but they forgot to put it in so he was flailing about for real

Great Video, Leon! I appreciate your insight into one of my favorite filmmakers. You gained another fan!

In Eyes Wide Shut, Sydney Pollack notoriously complained that they spent TWO WEEKS shooting the scene where he walks from the billiard table to the door. Surprised that wasn't on this list.

Believe me, this could have gone on and on with odd stories. I could have done a Top 20, but I try to keep Renegade Cut around ten minutes.

Wow, awesome video.
I think it's your best so far actually.
It really made me think, how much accuracy is really needed to portait something (like in the no. 1).
I think I wouldn't wanted to work with that man, that's for sure...

About your theme music...
I always hear the episodes over headphones. Every video on this site in fact, since I'm used to watching them at night and I don't wanna wake someone up.
So yes, there's a heavy dissortion during the theme in every single video.
As I heared it for the first time, it really disturbed me and hurt me in the ears. But the more I heared it, the more I felt like it's just perfect for the show itself. I actually thought that it was meant to be this way - and got used to it very well.

Thanks to MihailoSRB I now know where the song comes from, so I compared the original with the intro. While the original sounds a bit dissorted, too, it's definalty not that heavy as your intro.
At least for me ^^

Great video man!

Very informative.

Although, Eyes Wide Shut is crap.
So is 2001.

;)