“It’s kinda disgusting”: the Stanley Kubrick movie Walt Disney hated with a passion
They may have been among the heaviest heavyweights of their chosen industries, but beyond that, there wasn’t much in common between Walt Disney and Stanley Kubrick.
One of them launched one of the most successful and all-conquering entertainment empires the world has ever seen, turned an animation house into a cultural behemoth, spawned a multi-billion-dollar merchandising machine that’s rolling in more cash than he could have ever imagined, and may or may not have been cryogenically frozen and stored for rainy day under one of his theme parks.
The other carved out one of cinema’s most innovative, influential, and iconic careers, becoming an inspiration to every generation that followed in his wake, leaving behind a catalogue of trailblazing, ground-breaking, pioneering, and seminal films that will be forever enshrined in history.
Disney was a populist, and Kubrick was an artist. You can’t imagine the former backing a picture like 2001: A Space Odyssey, A Clockwork Orange, or Barry Lyndon, and you definitely can’t imagine the latter wearing a hat with Mickey Mouse ears on it, having a whale of a time singing along to ‘It’s a Small World’.
The differences are as obvious as they are stark, and they were at their most pronounced in the early 1960s. When Disney was on the hunt for an actor to play the lead role in his family-friendly comedy, The Parent Trap, Kubrick was auditioning to find the perfect title character for his adaptation of Lolita.
Those two things are not alike, and the ‘Mouse House’ mogul was abhorred by the decade’s newfound fondness for themes of a sexual nature. “It’s kinda disgusting,” he offered. “If you can’t find anything to say about people except sordid things, you shouldn’t make films. I always felt you ought to deal with the nice side of life.”
“The reason these sort of films are made is that the people who make them figure they’re gonna make some easy dough that way,” he maintained. “That’s the only reason they make them.” What furthered that distaste was that the team behind Kubrick’s film was eying the star of his Parent Trap for the lead, which he quickly shut down.
“A film like Psycho, I just wouldn’t want to see,” he elaborated. “I don’t see why Hitch makes stuff like that. I don’t hold with that sort of thing. Same as when I was approached to let Hayley Mills, who’s under contract to me, play Lolita.” As soon as those overtures were made, he made himself perfectly clear: “I wouldn’t want her to see it, let alone play it.”
Lolita was a controversial undertaking from the beginning, and as far and wide as Kubrick searched before hiring Sue Lyon for the job, the last place he was ever going to find a star was in the house that Walt built.
