Customer Reviews

Eyes Wide Open: A Memoir of Stanley Kubrick

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(12)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(16)

 

 

This book is framed early on as a "vaguely sadistic" chess match, between the awed, reluctantly supplicant Raphael and Kubrick the Mythic Director. Raphael, as often as he tries to crack the Kubrick code, carps about the uneven(although ideally symbiotic) relationship between director and writer. Raphael resents the fact that his own contributions to the Kubrick canon are at the mercy of the director's whim, and may not even be acknowledged, when the final credits roll.

Raphael treats his collaboration with Kubrick as an amicable battle of will -- he aspires to be Kubrick's artistic equal, but Kubrick never quite shows up for the duel the author imagines between them. His attempts to form an overall picture of Kubrick's Jewishness, artistic vision, and human weaknesses are ultimately futile, but still make up an interesting glimpse into an acknowledged genius and his fascinations.

Raphael is self-aggrandizing and too preciously clever for his own good, which spoils the book as a true portrait. It is as much a portrait of himself as long-suffering hired hand as it is a revelation of Kubrick. Even so, Raphael is an acutely intelligent writer, and flaws aside, I found it an interesting read. I will give him the benefit of the doubt on the issue of bald exploitation -- Kubrick can't possibly care, now.

This is a very funny book. Raphael's ostentatious name-dropping and displays of his learning are so hilarious, it's hard to believe he wrote them in earnest (such as the self-parodying passage in which an exchange with Kubrick reminds Raphael of the time he made a grammatical error while conversing in Italian with Marcello Mastroianni). However, the volume is so sloppily written and edited, that it appears to be direct, undiluted, and unironic Fred. What does Raphael's claim to write about the late director rest on? He and Kubrick met and spoke a few times, and Raphael completed a draft of Eyes Wide Shut. Kubrick then rewrote it and made the movie--it really wasn't much of a collaboration, since Kubrick sculpted the piece he wanted out of the block he had Raphael provide. The book tells us nothing new or interesting about Kubrick, and very little about the adaptation that cannot be gleaned from the omnibus screenplay/novella volume. [For an insightful and affectionate view of Kubrick by one of his collaborators, dig out the New York Review of Books from this spring with Diane Johnson's reminiscence.] Eyes Wide Open does, in its condescending and self-regarding way, inadvertently tell us something about the jealousy of a second-rate artistic mind toward a truly unique talent. I'm a little embarrassed at having bought the book and encouraged Raphael in his gross exploitation of his brief association with Kubrick. I'll probably never open Eyes Wide Open again.

Most detractors of this book have noted its "cloying pretentious" or some synonymous combination. I found Raphael's memoir to be wonderful, and over too soon. He is not, as many have attested, a hired hand - Raphael is an prolific and screenwriter with mythology of his own. To anyone interested in Kubrick, this would be a wise and interesting read. Surely you can handle some big words and big ideas? Novelists and screenwriters can easily develop reputations of pretentiousness because they are interested in things other people are not. I am interested in Kubrick, the man and the process.

This is a must for film buffs because it offers a unique look at both Kubrick and Raphael (whose brilliant screenplays of Two for the Road, Darling, Madding Crowd put him in that elite pantheon of screenwriters). Albeit (too) brief about both men, it does give us another look at the collaborative creative screenwriting process. And, yes, we may learn more about Raphael. But what an interesting, brilliant mind DESPITE the fact that he's VERY full of himself and an inveterate name dropper. But that's what makes the book so much fun. There are some charming, very funny lines in here too. I picked it up on a weekend getaway, while in the middle of two other books, and couldn't put it down!

Gee, ain't it nice to cash in on a famous person--especially when that person is no longer alive to defend himself against greedy, here's-my-15-minutes-of-fame hangers-on? What precisely, I ask you, is little Freddy Raphael's motive--by first publishing his oh-so-perceptive accounts of his few hours of "intimacy" with Kubrick in all the papers and magazines in both the U.K. and the U.S., and then this, THE book--but to couple his own tired name to that of a genius? I have personally always found Raphael smugly self-satisfied--apparently he thinks himself a polymathic genius (you only have to read a few lines in his regular reviews for the TLS to know that Narcissus ain't got nothing on him), but he is of course entitled to his own vanity. And more power to him. But this book is something else entirely: it's a vile rip-off of another person's hard-fought achievement and even harder-fought privacy. Words like opportunism and intellectual fraud are too mild for this kind of para-tabloid treatment. What's next? A memoir of Wittgenstein because the author used to sit in the same chair at Cambridge as once did the touchy Austrian?

I bought this book the same week it came out, read it in about two days, and it's been sitting on a shelf for the past two years. Ever since I finished reading this piece of self-aggrandizing garbage, I was wondering if it was just me. From reading these customer reviews though, I see that it wasn't just me! Anyone who reads this book will get a glimpse of an ego so large that it could easily dwarf not just Kubrick's, but David Lean, Alfred Hitchcock, AND Steven Spielberg. Anyway... all the bad reviews are dead-on, if you must find out for yourself, you've been warned, but if you're just looking for some decent reading about Kubrick, a true cinematic genius, then read Vincent Lobrutto's book or even John Baxter's.

This book has been baned by Stanley Kubrick's family and by friends and colleagues at Warner Brothers.(Look for "Christiane Kubrick's Website") This means that the author acted in a deceitful and ungrateful maner towars those who trusted him. Now, how much can you trust in a book by a man who acts like that?

Read the book if you have nothing better to do, but be very careful in not taking everything you learn from it as a fact.

No one likes an iconoclast. But why should Raphael be so disparaged for trying to humanize Kubrick and not worship him?

Does Raphael come across as mildly effete, moderately self-absorbed and overly intellectual? Absolutely. He also makes the mistake of hoping for a collaboration with Kubrick while approaching him from the outset as an opponent. None of that takes away from the fact that this is an incredibly interesting and insightful read. Does it ultimately reveal as much about Raphael as it does about Kubrick? It does. It is "A Memoir of Stanley Kubrick" not a work of unbiased journalism.

Those reviewers who have a more limited knowledge of cinematic history, choose to conclude that Raphael was envious of Kubrick's greater fame. But Raphael was superbly successful in his own right long before Kubrick came calling. A more careful read reveals that the highly-schooled Raphael sparred with the autodidactic Kubrick, and the two played their unfortunate game to a draw. In the end, it's Kubrick who seems the cagier but also gentler soul. We're left to wonder if they may have worked together better had Raphael not so focused on disassembling, but never actually solving, the Kubrick enigma. None of that takes away from Raphael's very personal accounting.

For those too timid to have the myth of their cinematic God challenged, by all means go read Herr's "Kubrick" for a more respectful portrait. But if you're looking for a sense of the frustrations and rewards of working sometimes for sometimes with one of the giants of cinema and are willing to finish with a sense of his imperfection as well as supreme talent, read this. I couldn't put it down.

I didn't know who Frederic Raphael was before I read this book, but I sure as hell know who he us now. This is an ego driven self glorifying one sided account of what was probably an interesting collaboration. I find it astonishing that he calls this book a memoir of Kubrick when it's obviously the book that Raphael wishes someone else would have written about him. As for insight into Kubrick's world, check out the current issue of Playboy, there's an excellent article that reveals far more in a few pages than Raphael does in this whole book. The pretentious and sometimes shameless name dropping only seems to point towards the fact that this writer seems to want his share of the limelight, and isn't afraid to thrust himself into it by disguising his memoir as being about someone people actually give a damn about.

All of the reviews are correct, just as they are equally incorrect. Yes, Raphael is an intellectual egotist -- the book is slight, and undoubtably exists to make money off of "Eyes Wide Shut." However, like Kubrick's films, he doesn't dwell on the machinations of why this character is the way he is. He shows instead of tells. There are a few journal entries that attempt to probe Kubrick's personality, though much can actually be learned by observing the things he does and says. For example, check out his repetitions of certain greetings, or even his thoughts regarding Schindler's List. This is undoubtably the closest inside account of Kubrick's work method. As a book, though, it's a quick read.