The movie Stanley Kubrick wanted to make with Steve Martin: “Not a very funny one”
Stanley Kubrick had bold ideas and a knack for kicking your brain into high gear with his visuals and layered storytelling.
Only he could bring something as ambitious as 2001: A Space Odyssey to life with such vibrancy, pulling off a psychedelic light tunnel, or the discovery of an alien monolith set in the prehistoric era with apparent ease in an era before special effects in cinema had advanced to become what they are today. A sign of Kubrick’s unwavering genius, his magic touch extended across genres, culminating in the stunning erotic mystery Eyes Wide Shut.
The film saw Tom Cruise deliver one of his best performances, far removed from his shiny Hollywood blockbuster roles. If I were Kubrick, I certainly wouldn’t have picked Cruise as the star, but that’s exactly why I’m not Kubrick: he could see something in actors that not everyone else could. Cruise traded in action movie stunts for masked orgies in his role as Bill, starring alongside his then-wife Nicole Kidman as the mesmerising Alice.
Eyes Wide Shut was based on Traumnovelle, also known as Dream Story, by Arthur Schnitzler, although Kubrick and Frederic Raphael’s screenplay differs rather significantly from the German tale. In the silver screen world, the characters are transported to 1990s New York, which makes for the perfect gritty backdrop for Cruise’s late-night excursions into a seedy world of sex and death.
However, when the director first started planning an adaptation of Traumnovelle, he had a completely different idea in mind, according to Michael Herr, the co-writer of Full Metal Jacket. This alternative direction would, believe it or not, include Steve Martin, the father of the bride, the dirty rotten scoundrel himself.
How could the comic actor possibly fit into the world of Traumnovelle? I can’t picture it, and I bet you can’t either, but somehow Kubrick could. “Stanley thought it would be perfect for Steve Martin. He’d loved The Jerk,” Herr wrote for Vanity Fair. “I know that his idea for it in those days was always as a sex comedy, but with a wild and sombre streak running through it. This didn’t make a lot of sense to us; we were just responding to the text as a work of literary art, and not a very funny one.”
Would he possibly be able to make the darkness of Traumnovelle work as a sex comedy? Sure, Eyes Wide Shut has a few funny moments, but a sex comedy it is not. I’m glad he realised that this wouldn’t have worked, and to put Martin in it too would’ve been a turn most unexpected for Kubrick, against which Cruise’s selection seems almost natural.
“The way we writers saw it, it was as frightening as The Shining. Now I think we were all too square to imagine what Stanley saw in Steve Martin, because this was not The Jerk,” Herr added. Luckily, Kubrick honed in on the darker approach, which resulted in his final masterwork, a haunting stumble into the darkest facets of sex, relationships, power, and the elite.
