Would one have to be of a cynical turn of mind to tag the word "opportune" to Frederic Raphael's memoir of his two-year collaboration with Stanley Kubrick on the script of Kubrick's last film, Eyes Wide Shut? Kubrick is now deceased (although rumours persist that it was a staged death and that he'll re-surface when the ballyhoo of the film's opening has died down), and the movie is already making waves in America, so anything to do with film or director is bound to come clothed in hype.
Raphael is mentioned in John Baxter's recent biography of Kubrick, to the effect that his novel Who Were You with Last Night? was an up-dating of Arthur Schnitzler's 1926 Traumnovelle (Dream Novel), the very work upon which Kubrick intended basing his new movie. Possibly this is the reason that the famed director asked Raphael to work with him, although Raphael already had a track record in the movies, having won an Oscar for Darling in 1965.
The collaboration was mostly carried out by phone, Kubrick's favourite mode of communication, but Raphael was invited down to the director's large Victorian home near St Albans on a few occasions. He talks of the "air of pungent desolation" about the place and compares it to "a gargantuan cottage" rather than a mansion. Kubrick himself is described as "a smallish, rounded man (no belt) with a beard which less defined than blurred his features".
Later, over a lunch of cold chicken and salad, Raphael comments on Kubrick's small, white hands as he endeavours to uncork a bottle of wine: "As he strained at the cork, I remembered Billy Wilder doing the same thing and saying, `Forty-five years of masturbation and I still don't have a muscle in my hand' ."
Kubrick had sent Raphael part of the work on which he intended to base his film, but refused to identify the author. When Schnitzler's name does slip out in the course of the conversation, Kubrick becomes enraged and slaps one of his "small, white hands" on the table. A kind of grudging friendship does blossom over the next two years, as Raphael writes and Kubrick criticises. The director's famed obsessiveness about detail torments his collaborator - and also the fact that he wishes to transport the setting from fin-de-siecle Vienna to modern-day New York.
Raphael writes sections of his memoir in the form of clips from a film script, and these prove very effective in relaying the head-to-head conversations between the two men. As time goes by, Kubrick becomes more effusive, even to the point of recounting anecdotes about some of the actors he worked with: anecdotes about Kirk Douglas's voracious sexual appetite, about telling Marlon Brando to f..k off, about doing a silent love scene between Ryan O'Neal and Marisa Berenson in Barry Lyndon because of Berenson's strident American accent. At first Raphael is slightly over-awed by the director: "I wanted to impress and delight Kubrick; he had, after all, chosen me and I wanted him to be right", but familiarity eventually breeds . . . well, familiarity. Kept on edge by Kubrick's deliberate vagueness, Raphael finally finishes the screenplay, but one gets the impression that he never knows how much of his work will eventually reach the screen.
Invited to visit the set - modern-day New York recreated on the sound stages of Pinewood and in various London locations - Raphael never actually went, and he doesn't mention if he has seen the completed film. No doubt more weighty tomes about Kubrick will follow in due course, but for the moment this memoir is of passing interest - and will become even more so when the film opens here next Friday.
Vincent Banville is a writer and critic