Sightseeing: A Pictorial Tour Of LACMA's Stanley Kubrick Exhibition

It should come as no surprise to anybody that I idolize Stanley Kubrick... me and just about every other living film geek. I own all but one (FEAR AND DESIRE) of his available films on Blu-ray. And among my most prized possessions are these two immense volumes:

I've had a membership to the Los Angeles County Museum Of Art (LACMA) for several years, and it has been well worth the money, if only for the occasional fascinating movie-related special exhibitions, such as their exhibition on Salvador Dali's film work a few years ago and last year's huge Tim Burton exhibition.

Today I got the chance to see the current Stanley Kubrick exhibition, and I want to go back and look at it all over again. One time isn't enough for a Kubrick fan, as you'll see in this pictures.

Upon entering the exhibition, you're immediately greeted by the director's chair that Kubrick used while shooting FULL METAL JACKET.

And then you enter the exhibition itself, and you find yourself in room after room of props, costumes, scripts, stills, research, camera equipment, and more.

Everything is arranged in roughly chronological order if you go through the rooms in a clockwise direction. The room in the last picture above is dedicated to Kubrick's early films, his film noirs KILLER'S KISS and THE KILLING, PATHS OF GLORY, and SPARTACUS. Here's a matte painting of ancient Rome by Peter Ellenshaw that was used for SPARTACUS.

Unfortunately, there's isn't that much on LOLITA, but here are a couple of interesting items related to DR. STRANGELOVE, a model of the War Room set and an actual survival pack prop from the movie.

Then comes two rooms dedicated to 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY. I could've taken dozens of more pictures of the items they had on display, but here are a few to feast your eyes on.

Most of the room devoted to A CLOCKWORK ORANGE is about the controversy surrounding the film's released and subsequent banning in England, but there are a few keep costumes and props to drool over.

Next up is a section about Kubrick's unproduced epic NAPOLEON biopic. See that huge green book in the first picture at the top? That's an entire Taschen book devoted to this project. For this exhibition, they decided to display a bookcase containing all of the books that Kubrick collected for research. Next to that, they placed his famous file card cabinet, where he organized index cards detailing Napoleon's life almost down to the day.

Kubrick was unable to get financing for NAPOLEON, so instead he made BARRY LYNDON using many of the same techniques he had been planning to use on NAPOLEON, such as lighting scenes with candlelight. Here's one of the cameras he used on BARRY LYNDON.

And here are Kubrick's personal copy of the novel THE LUCK OF BARRY LYNDON, a script with handwritten notes, and one of Ryan O'Neal's costumes from the movie.

Now you take a detour through a small room displaying several pieces of conceptual art from A.I.: ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE, which Kubrick started developing in 1980 (when he optioned Brian Aldiss' short story "Super-Toys Last All Summer Long") and continued working on until he handed the project over to Steven Spielberg shortly before his death in 1999. As you can see in these drawings by Chris Baker, mostly from the mid-1990s, just about everything in Spielberg's final film released in 2001 was part of Kubrick's vision for the movie.

For me, the most fascinating part of the exhibition was the large room devoted to THE SHINING. To begin with, you are treated to Kubrick's copy of Stephen King's novel and an early manuscript when it was still called THE SHINE, both covered with Kubrick's handwritten notes.

Here are some poster designs by Saul Bass along with letters between Kubrick and Bass discussing them.

And then come the props. Just let these wash over you like an wave of blood pouring out of an elevator.

The sections about FULL METAL JACKET and EYES WIDE SHUT are relatively small, though there are some iconic props on display from both films.

The final part of the exhibition is of personal interest to me, since it's about Kubrick's unproduced project ARYAN PAPERS, a Holocaust drama based on the novel WARTIME LIES by Louis Begley, the author of ABOUT SCHMIDT (a film I worked on). Kubrick had scripted and cast the film, but he abandoned the project when SCHINDLER'S LIST went into production. The exhibition has Kubrick's copies of the manuscript and novel of WARTIME LIES.

This is really just a small fraction of the items on display in the exhibition. And these are really only about a quarter of the photos I took today. For now, I'll just leave you with this:

#Sightseeing #StanleyKubrick #LACMA