Last year, we rolled up our sleeves and dove into The Lost & Unmade Projects Of Stanley Kubrick, detailing the numerous movies that the legendary filmmaker developed or considered over the course of his career. As you know, Kubrick wasn’t the the most prolific of filmmakers, but when he latched onto something, it became a near obsession, and the director meticulously pored over every aspect of the production to meet the exacting standards of his vision.
But if you don’t have time to flip through that feature (though you should), this 20-minute documentary, "The Unfinished Films Of Stanley Kubrick," does a good job of highlighting some of the more well known movies he never got to. Narrated by Malcolm McDowell, the doc touches up “Napoleon” (which is now an HBO series set to be produced by Steven Spielberg and directed by Baz Luhrmann), “The Aryan Papers” and “A.I.” (which Kubrick passed off to Spielberg). But there was so much more, including the WWII film "The German Lieutenant," "Lunatic At Large" and more. Read more about those here. Watch the doc below.
Most of Agalma's comments are pretty well documented in various Kubrick bios. You may want to start w Vincent Lobrutto's bio. Although not great it covers Napoleon in pretty decent depth.
There are so many substantive inaccuracies in this blandly superficial pseudo-doc that it is only possible here to highlight some of the more glaringly obvious ones:
1. Kubrick never "handed over" A.I. to Spielberg. He was contracted with Warners to produce and direct A.I. immediately upon completion of Eyes Wide Shut. After – a year after – Kubrick's death, Spielberg appropriated Kubrick's A.I. pre-production materials from the Kubrick Estate (ie Jan Harlan, Christiane, mainly) and cynically INVENTED the myth of "My Friend Stanley" wanting the infantile-nihilist philistine Spielberg to "direct" A.I.. It's yet another obscene example of Hollywood Mogul-generated hype based on lies. All of this is so widely documented that it's quite disturbing that the doc's narrator, Malcolm MacDowell would stoop to such a low level of sheer ignorance.
2. The Napoleon project was not abandoned because of the box-office failures of other Napoleon projects/films. The Napoleon project was abandoned because at the end of the 1960s most all Hollywood studios/majors were virtually bankrupt. MGM was bailed out by being taken over by a casino operator , who bought MGM so that he could change the public image of gambling casinos, adding the logo to all his casinos and hotels, while completely shutting down all film production. This era was a transition to predominantly low-budget Hollywood movies (a regime that would last until the late-1970s), which is why Kubrick's next movie, A Clockwork Orange, had a budget of just $1.8m. Given that Kubrick, a few years later, could raise $11m to make Barry Lyndon, based on a totally obscure 19th century novel by Thackeray about a purely fictional, socially marginal character, it's clear that Kubrick had reached some underlying narrative and structural deadlock in his own attempts to make a film about Napoleon ie it wasn't due to any financial or studio drawbacks.