The Greatest Movie Never Made
"Ten books in one tell the fascinating tale of Kubrick’s unfilmed masterpiece.
Tucked inside of a carved-out book, all the elements from Stanley Kubrick's archives that readers need to imagine what his unmade film about the emperor might have been like, including a facsimile of the script. This collector's edition is limited to 1,000 numbered copies.
For 40 years, Kubrick fans and film buffs have wondered about the director's mysterious unmade film on Napoleon Bonaparte. Slated for production immediately following the release of 2001: A Space Odyssey, Kubrick’s "Napoleon" was to be at once a character study and a sweeping epic, replete with grandiose battle scenes featuring thousands of extras. To write his original screenplay, Kubrick embarked on two years of intensive research; with the help of dozens of assistants and an Oxford Napoleon specialist, he amassed an unparalleled trove of research and preproduction material, including approximately 15,000 location scouting photographs and 17,000 slides of Napoleonic imagery. No stone was left unturned in Kubrick's nearly-obsessive quest to uncover every piece of information history had to offer about Napoleon. But alas, Kubrick’s movie was not destined to be: the film studios, first M.G.M. and then United Artists, decided such an undertaking was too risky at a time when historical epics were out of fashion."
More info
Holy crap! Then again, Napoleon seems to attract this sort of excess. Abel Gance went so far as to throw a camera off a cliff to get a shot for his version.
ReplyDelete