Blog From The Bench

I dunno how I got to this point, but The Stanley Kubrick Archives is, simply put, a loaded book. It's broken into 2 parts, the first being stills from the films themselves (and they look really sharp, by the way), and the 2nd part is all of the on-set pictures that Kubrick and others shot while on the sets of his films, and there are a ton of them. I haven't really pored over it, but it was nice to see still shots of the omitted pie-throwing sequence from Dr. Strangelove, and there's even a shot of Peter Sellers as Major Kong, before Sellers had to bow out from that role. There are also script notes, and even a section on projects Kubrick didn't finish, specifically Wartime Lies, a Napoleon biopic and A.I.. You really do have to set aside a block of time (and several sittings) to go through this 14 pound book, but it's time well spent.

Oh, and any first-print copies that are out there have a piece of a 70mm print of 2001 in them too.