Stanley Kubrick's Napoleon: The Greatest Movie Never Made [Englisch] [Gebundene Ausgabe]

Ten books inside this massive green behemoth tell and illustrate the story of how Kubrick attempted to make this period epic for MGM right after 2001: A Space Odyssey. But a cash crunch in Hollywood at the end of the 60's, 2001's not-blockbuster numbers, and a flop from DiLaurentis called Waterlloo convinced MGM to pull out. The production was shelved, stored by Kubrick on his farm, where it sat until recently. Finally his estate has decided to revive this treasure trove of research, scriptwriting, costume planning and location scouting to a small monument of books filled with terrific historical text, photos of archived notes and correspondence, photographs, production details and techniques, and the final script. It's a movie in a box, waiting to be made. Serious, scholarly discussion of the subjects complement an embarrassment of photographic riches to fill up this beautiful, one of a kind volume for serious study of the process of independent film production. The product design of this monster is one-of-a-kind. It's worth every penny.

I'm a Kubrick nut. If you're also a Kubrick nut, you will find NAPOLEON endlessly fascinating -- the literary equivalent of an ten-course meal at a five-star restaurant at the best restaurant you could ever possibly formulate in your imagination. Despite its cost, this publication does not disappoint. And what's fascinating to me is that -- despite NAPOLEON's comprehensiveness, from a "macro" standpoint -- a studious reader garners true, unbridled insight into the quotidian methodology of Kubrick's wholly astringent sensibility. This is thanks to the exhaustively collected (and beautifully reproduced) letters and memos (both from and to Stanley) and -- even more significantly -- the "hand-written annotations" that appear, throughout the material, in Kubrick's own hand. Particularly given the time-frame during which the bulk of this material was created -- in the immediate aftermath, for the most part, of 2001 -- it's fascinating to witness the means by which Stanley was leveraging his success (to ostensibly actuate his dream project), and the extent to which his reach occasionally (and ultimately) exceeded his grasp. Kubrick's insight into the workings of the Hollywood studio system is also on evidence; viz., there's a full draft of the NAPOLEON screenplay included, but the script's (somewhat schematic) side-stepping of the contemplated scope of the more ambitiously contemplated battlefield-centric production sequences (for example : Wellington appears, in the climactic clash, but has nary a line of dialogue) subtly suggests Kubrick's savvy insofar as making the project as financially palatable as possible to Hollywood's powers-that-be. As mentioned by other reviewers, the ancillary "costuming," "production design," and other magnificently-reproduced photographic volumes add immesurably to the experience. I spent a full weekend plumbing this thing, and it was a weekend well spent (and one I look forward to undertaking again, at some point in the future) (as with future viewings of Kubrick's masterpieces).

In this book one can pore over Stanley Kubrick's personal correspondences as well as the screenplay, saying nothing of the 100's of photos. The content is incredible.

Stanley Kubrick's passion for research, beauty, and functional organization is no secret. It is ironic and unfortunate, that this book was incredibly well researched, meticulous in what was put in (and left out), well organized, but was printed in an odd format, in a way that stifles clear communication of the book's own content. It was not formatted for function, but for concept.

The volume is over 1000 pages yet uses a distinctly vertical format to feel like a book from the Napoleon era. The pages curl tremendously towards the center, and the text documents within the book fan out from the binding of the book, for that feel of actually looking through originals. Unfortunately, the information close to the center of the book becomes so curved due to the book's size that the reader has to angle their head or move the book to read (particularly around page 500). The hundreds of sequential photos do not read well across a vertical format; they are just over an inch wide and unclear. Often these images are of etchings from napoleons era, an art form whose beauty resides in the details.

I get the conceptual appeal of the book format. It looks nice on my coffee table. It just needed to be a much bigger book to feel clear, or in another format to properly use.

Instead of focusing on the type of BOOK that was produced in the napoleonic era, it would have been much more pleasurable for the reader, to design the format of the book around the FILM Stanley Kubrick designed. Stanley wasn't going to film Napoleon in the common aspect-ratio of prints and paintings from the Napoleonic era. He was going to film it in the clearest way possible to show us the Napoleonic era itself. Sweeping vistas of armies, their patterns of war, and the european countryside might have been just as central a tenet to this film as Napoleon himself. Despite having excellent content, Castle's take on Napoleon doesn't give us enough room to properly enjoy it.