For a guy who one only one Academy Award (for special effects) and is currently dead, Stanley Kubrick still gets his fair share of action in the headlines. For instance, the mind boggling bulletin that appeared recently announcing a lost 90 page treatment of a film noir story Kubrick commissioned in the late 1950s called Lunatic at Large had been found... and is about to be made into a movie starring What's His Face (Sam Rockwell) and Bewby Girl (Scarlett Johansson).
Right on the heels of this announcement came
a story in Paste magazine, where a well meaning writer took the five "lost" Kubrick projects and tried to cast them ("well meaning" here standing in for "hack").
Or this.
Needless to say, in the best tradition of Indiana Jones movies, he chose... poorly. Even for a hack. And now it's left to our Fearless Leader to right these grievous wrongs in the Crusader Justice League of internet blogging.
So thus, allow me to present the...
Only Annual Lost Kubrick Project Cast-a-Thon.
Seriously, I just trademarked that.
The Project: Napoleon
Plot: You know, the life of Napoleon. This project became Kubrick's obsession even before he filmed A Clockwork Orange, and he fully planned to film it afterward. Kubrick read hundreds of books on the French emperor and according to legend could tell you what Napoleon was doing on virtually every day of his life.
Why it failed: The movie Waterloo, about the same subject. Despite having Herbert Lom in it, the movie failed critically and at the box office, leading Kubrick to use his period research to make Barry Lyndon instead.
Paste casts... Tom Cruise?
Are you fucking kidding me? Tom Cruise? First of all let's clear up a few things. Despite the syndrome named after him, Napoleon was of perfectly average height for his time. If anything, he was of above average height. Casting Tom Cruise just because he's 5'7 and has a touch of insane megolomania in him is just ridiculous.
By all accounts Napoleon in his personal life was a detail oriented workaholic without much in the way of people skills. "The death of a hundred thousand men means nothing to me," he once said. Though he had the ability to inspire, he was a ruthless cold fish with ambition too big for the small planet we live on.
That doesn't sound at all to me like charming, bizzaro, Thetan hunter Tom Cruise.
Hollywood Humiliation casts... Christopher Walken.
Ok, not really.
It appears Kubrick had considered Nicholson for the role before settling on relatively unknown English actor David Hemmings, best remembered for his role in Antonioni's Blowup, for the part.
This is basically the right strategy, in my opinion, as it's generally harder for audiences to believe big name actors as historical figures they're already very familiar with (Kevin Costner's role in the Cold War drama Thirteen Days as an underling -- rather than John F. Kennedy -- is a particularly good example of this principle).
But if we're going on relative unknowns, here's one I'll throw out: Ben Foster. Now, Foster is only 30 and very lean, but watch him in 3:10 to Yuma and in Alpha Dog. He's the best and most intense thing in both movies. Strip off the hair, pack on the pounds and teach him French, and I think you've got Napoleon.
The Project: God Fearing Man
The Plot: Based on the true story of a priest who becomes a bank robber and a suspicious bank teller who tries to convince the bank manager to close his account before it's too late.
Why it failed: This was one of many treatments Kubrick and producer/collaborator James Harris wrote in the 1950s and pitched to the major studios. Given the time, it's not hard to imagine the religious content being the culprit for it's demise. Given the climate, it's pretty amazing a movie like Night of the Hunter ever got made. Then again, they buried Night, so maybe Kubrick was better off.
Paste casts... Phillip Seymour Hoffman and Meryl Streep
Another lazy pick, as Hoffman and Streep just starred together in a movie about the clergy: Doubt.
Their quote: "Hoffman as the clergyman putting to rest all doubt as to whether he was a good priest or a bad priest."
All Doubt! Haha. Good one!
This is the fifth image that comes up when you do a Google search for "assclown."
The problem for Hoffman is he's been down this road too many times before. Especially in Owning Mahony, where he played a bank executive who abused his position to gamble obsessively. And also in Before the Devil Knows Your Dead, playing a broke finance executive who schemes to rob his parent's jewelry store with the help of his dimwitted brother (Ethan Hawke).
Hoffman clearly specializes in playing characters on the edge of morality who slip over and find themselves in over their head, so it's frankly hard to argue against the casting except to say that eventually as an audience we get tired of seeing the same thing over and over again. I mean, we got tired of Harrison Ford as an action hero, right? We can get tired of Phillip Seymour Hoffman as a man whose morals are corrupted under the strain of constantly looking like he's about to have a heart attack.
Penciling in Meryl Streep for a role is always a good idea, because she can pretty much do anything, but the problem is it's like forming a band and going, "yeah, and we'll get Jimi Hendrix on guitar."
Only Streep's alive. We think.
Hollywood Humiliation casts...
Peter Sarsgaard as the priest and
Dianne Wiest as the clerk. Sarsgaard has Hoffman's wide, open face and his morally unbalanced energy. He also projects the kind of sneakily charming intelligence you always read about in the great thieves.
Wiest is something of a sentimental pick, as I think she's one of the most underused actresses around. No one plays the cheerful, tired, working woman better. The kind of person stuck in a rut but just waiting to unfurl their sail on the wind. Wiest's dogged pursuit of the thief against the backdrop of the troubles her face always implies would be fun to watch.
The Project: Blue Movie
The Plot: In the midst of the Civil Rights era, critically acclaimed director Rusty Shakleford tries to make a beautiful, big budget porno. In the midst of all the glitz and glamour, two of the male performers fall in love.
Why it failed: A plot featuring a critically acclaimed director who tries to make a beautiful, big budget porno. Do I even need to mention the homosexual part?
Paste casts... Bill Murray as Shackleford and one-note nerd actors Michael Cera and Jesse Eisenberg as porno "performers."
First of all, according to the Bureau of Actual Scientific Studies, if Cera and Eisenberg were ever to appear in a movie together, there would be a Back to the Future-esque temporal paradox resulting in the rupture the space time continuum and be, uh... bad. And these dorky dopplegangers kissing? Anyone who would rather watch that than stick their head in a vat of flesh eating bacteria should be put to death immediately.
Casting Murray is also all wrong, even as much as we at the ol' HH love him. Murray really only has two modes as an actor: his joking, mugging side -- ala Ghostbusters, and his vaguely suicidal melancholy side -- ala The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou.
The role of Rusty Shackleford would require someone of deadly earnestness and determination. Cast in a satire with himself in the middle, there's no way Murray makes it all the way through without winking at the camera at least once. And right there, when he does it, there goes the movie.
Hollywood Humiliation casts... Ed Harris as Rusty Shackleford.
Harris is usually cast as a strong, moral type, but he has unexplored range as an extrovert and has the command presence of both an artist and a director. Peter Weir recognized this when he cast Harris in The Truman Show and Harris recognized this when he cast, um... himself, as Jackson Pollock.
I'm tempted to put down failed Superman Brandon Routh as one of the performers after his funny performance in Zach and Miri Make a Porno, but that's the easy way out. Frankly, most male performers in pornographic movies are grotesque trolls rolling along in life on the strength of one, uh, attribute. Given this, we reluctantly pick Vincent Gallo and Danny Trejo for the roles of the two performers and hope this means we don't have to think about it anymore.
Danny Trejo. When you've just got to have a guy who looks like he clubs baby seals for a living, accept no substitute.
The Project: The Aryan Papers
The Plot: A Jewish boy and his aunt are forced to flee across Poland after the Nazis invade.
Why it Failed: Conceived during the late 80s and 90s, Aryan Papers failed for the same reason every Holocaust project (including one in the works by Billy Wilder) failed: Schindler's List. Spielberg's masterpiece made any additional statement temporarily unnecessary, shelving pretty much every major project on the subject until Roman Polanski's The Pianist in 2002.
Paste casts... Kate Winslet as the aunt and Bill Milner as the boy.
This is once again classic lazy casting, ripping the top two names from the WWII drama The Reader and putting them in another WWII movie because, uh... that's the easy thing to do.
When Aryan Papers was nearly made in the early 90s, Uma Thurman had been considered for the role of the aunt and production actually got far enough along that Joe Mazzello -- he of the annoying-kid-from-Jurassic-Park fame -- was actually cast as the kid.
Blearrgh.
On the one hand, that sounds awful, but the alternative was Eyes Wide Shut, so beggars can't exactly be choosers.
Hollywood Humiliation casts... Lily Taylor as the aunt and... crap, this is another case where an unknown usually does the trick. Is it out of bounds to pencil Spencer Breslin in here? Probably. Does Judd Apatow have any male children, because his daughters are certainly pretty good actors? No, huh? Damn you.
Probably the best choice right now would be Jimmy Bennett, who gave a pretty crappy performance as a young James T. Kirk in Star Trek but has been hailed for his role as Michelle Monaghan's son in Trucker, a movie we at Hollywood Humiliation were keen on when it came out but somehow missed and are now hustling to catch up on.
The Project: The Down Slope
The Plot: Written with Civil War historian Shelby Foote, you can sort of guess the subject (10 demerits for anyone guessing aliens). The movie would have been set in the late stages of the war in the Shenandoah Valley, when according to Foote, the war got particularly ugly (we at Hollywood Humiliation are still waiting for a Civil War comedy).
Why it Failed: The Down Slope is one of the least known of all of Kubrick's lost projects. Foote wrote to a colleague reporting a finished script in 1956, but the contents of the movie are barely known. One account has the movie dealing with a guerilla Southern force. All accounts label it a strongly anti-war film, lending credence to the idea that in the mid to late 1950's Kubrick had it in mind to make an anti-war film and decided against Foote's Civil War script in favor of 1957's Paths of Glory.
Paste casts... Michael Moore.
Double Bleaargh, with Cheese.
Jesus. I can barely stand this anymore. Putting down Michael Moore's name because it's an anti-war movie goes so far enough beyond unconscionable it sinks to the level of the pathetic.
And besides, as anyone who enjoys The Outlaw Josey Wales knows, roles of a Southern guerilla force have already been cast. And while John Vernon, Sam Bottoms and company might be somewhat dead these days, their legacy lives on. I'd look into a mix of the old and young. Say... a list of guys like Peter Skarsgard, Zach Quinto, Peter Stormare, Nathan Fillion (who's descended from Confederate general Jubal Early) and Josh Charles, who's fallen off the national map since Sports Night for reasons passing understanding.
Seriously, people. Give the man a job!
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