The classic movie Stanley Kubrick was desperate to make: “We would like to buy the rights”
Anyone who knows anything about Stanley Kubrick is fully aware that there was a massive difference between the director announcing his intentions to make a movie and actually getting around to making it.
The iconic auteur was so meticulous in his preparations and so committed to perfecting every detail that he dedicated years of his life and career to films that never shot a single frame, and that lack of productivity eventually made a new Kubrick picture one of cinema’s rarest and most hotly anticipated treats.
It wasn’t always that way, though. By most standards, he was as prolific as most high-profile directors for the first decade and a half of his career. Between his feature-length debut with 1952’s Fear and Desire and the release of Dr Strangelove a dozen years later, Kubrick helmed seven pictures, and there was never more than a three-year gap between them.
However, once the term ‘Kubrickian’ had seeped into the cinematic lexicon, the waits grew longer. You’d expect 2001: A Space Odyssey to take a bit of time, given the groundbreaking special effects and exhaustive research required to mount the seminal sci-fi epic, but Kubrick’s first four-year gap between films was far from the last, and the chasm continually grew wider.
There were five years between Barry Lyndon and The Shining, seven between his trip to the Overlook Hotel and Full Metal Jacket, and 12 between his war story and Eyes Wide Shut, with the intervening years punctuated by development on a number of titles, most notably Napoleon, that never came to fruition.
Back when he was cranking out new movies on a regular basis, Kubrick had his eyes on adapting Boris Pasternak’s 1957 novel, Doctor Zhivago. Film historian James Fenwick uncovered a letter dated January 8th, 1959, in which the director wrote directly to the author in the hopes of making his dream a reality.
In addition, he was planning to reunite with his Paths of Glory and soon-to-be Spartacus star, Kirk Douglas, and even touted their recent accomplishments to state his case. “The last film we made, Paths of Glory, received the best picture of the year award in Belgium, Brazil, and Finland,” Kubrick wrote.
“We would now like to buy the motion picture rights to Doctor Zhivago,” he declared. “We have contacted the law firm in New York who represent the Italian publishers of the book. Negotiations are at a standstill as they are not yet prepared to finalise a deal.” Obviously, the deal was never finalised, with David Lean swooping in and beating him to the punch.
In the end, Lean’s Doctor Zhivago sold almost 125 million tickets in the United States alone to become one of the highest-grossing films of all time and went on to win five Academy Awards from ten nominations, despite missing out on ‘Best Picture’ and ‘Best Director’ to The Sound of Music and its architect, Robert Wise.
From the outside looking in, Lean’s style was more attuned to the sweeping romantic epic than Kubrick’s more calculated approach, but it’s impossible to deny that seeing what he could have done with Doctor Zhivago, which was unlike anything he’d directed before or after, remains one of the industry’s most fascinating what-if scenarios.
