The New Yorker, June 14, 1999 P. 40
ONWARD AND UPWARD WITH THE ARTS about working as screenwriter on Stanley Kubrick’s “Eyes Wide Shut”... Writer describes getting a long preliminary phone call from Kubrick and receiving a gray photocopy of a novella set in Hapsburg, Vienna, with the author’s name and title excised... He guessed it must be the work of either Arthur Schnitzler or Stefan Zweig... Kubrick, in a subsequent conversation siad he wanted to transfer the action from fin-de-siecle Vienna to contemporary New York... It was possible, I told him, but hadn’t many things changed since 1900, not least the relations between men and women? “Think so?” Kubrick said. “I don’t think so.” Writer describes Kubrick’s house in St. Albans, built by a South African millionaire before the Great War... He was a smallish, rounded man with a beard that blurred rather than defined his features. His black eyes were enlarged by big spectacles... It was a vast shell for the shrewd snail who found protection in it... He was a great filmmaker, and I wanted to see this thing through, whatever it was. To do so, I should have to combine tact with forthrightness, deference with independence. I expected to hear specific notions of how he wanted the story transferred to New York, but evidently this was the problem I had been hired to handle... Writer describes several discussions with Kubrick... Kubrick was not being indecisive; he was postponing decision... In one of our many subsequent talks, I pointed out to Kubrick how deeply Schnitzler’s novella—entitled “Dream Story” in English—is infused with Jewishness. Kubrick was firmly opposed; he wanted Fridolin to be a Harrison Fordish goy, and he forbade any reference to Jews... Joe Mankiewicz used to say that a good script had, in some sense, already been directed. That is not the kind of script Kubrick would ever want. Anything too finished left him with an obligation to obedience. The only kind of rebel he was, in fact, was a rebel against being told what to do. The fourth or fifth version of the script was blanched of nearly all the duplicity that had made it alive for me. I was now compiling a color-it-yourself book in which the spaces might have seductive outlines but were not to carry any instructions. I recalled that when Henry James finally renounced working in the theatre a friend asked him whether he could explain why his plays were flops. Were they too intellectual? James doubted it. “After all,” he said, “I tried so hard to be base.”...Tells about delivering a final draft, then rewriting from Kubricks alterations to this draft.... I rewrote the script several times, and I talked with him, always at length, on the telephone, but I never saw him again.