[gary]

Originally Posted by doug mc

Wow. People thought i was strange when i told them i had watched the movie13 times back in1968 to 1969 before it left the screens in Brisbane.

Hi Doug,

That's really impressive just in the first year of release!

Decades later, whenever I re-watch it, I will often make some new connection
or derive some new supposition that I had not made before.

As for trivia, I enjoy any in particular that requires one to segue between
Kubrick films. That way one can fire-up one's associative memory
and do a brain dump.

So for example, if I were in the pub and someone asked the Also sprach
Zarathustra question, then most of us would answer Richard Strauss
but also be able to point out he was of no relation to Johann Strauss
who wrote The Blue Danube.

But if I were in the pub bet, I would likely then keep segueing indefinitely.

Someone mentioned the beautiful, melancholic, Gayne Ballet Suite
used in the opening sequences of when we first see and are non-board
Discovery. Now Khachaturian also wrote a ballet called Spartacus and
of course Kubrick directed the movie Spartacus (though it was not
'his' film) when we was hired by Kirk Douglas after Douglas had
sacked director Anthony Mann.

In the opening scene of Kubrick's Lolita, when James Mason
asks Peter Sellers whether he is Clare Quilty, Sellers drunken
character, adorned only in a bed sheet after a night of a
drunken orgy replies, "No, I'm Spartacus. You come to free the slaves?"

Douglas had hired Kubrick to direct Spartacus after Kubrick had previously
hired Douglas to star in Paths of Glory.

The name of the actress that plays the captured German girl at the end of Paths of Glory
that reduces the French soldiers to tears when she sings was Christiane
Harlan. Kubrick began to date her at the time, apparently to the chagrin of Kubrick's
fellow producer, James Harris.

Kubrick then goes onto marry Christiane and the two remained
together for Stanley's remaining life. A talented artist who paints in
vivid colors, we see many of Christiane's paintings adorning the walls in
Eyes Wide Shut and in a Clockwork Orange.

Christiane's brother, Jan Harlan, Stanley's brother-in-law, acted
as an executive producer and researcher on several of Stanley's films.

A copy of the 2001 soundtrack LP appears in the front of the rack of
a music shop in A Clockwork Orange where Alex picks up the two girls
with the phallic iceblocks. Legend has it that it was a real music shop
and the album just happened to be there.

When Alex takes the two girls back for the comedic threesome, the
soundtrack is a fast played version of the William Tell Overture played
on a Moog by then Walter Carlos.

Additional Carlos pieces are heard in the theatre used to condition
Alex, including a composition called Timesteps (the entire piece appears
on the album but only an excerpt is heard in the movie) and of course
Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, Fourth Movement, the conditioning
against which particularly distresses Beethoven aficionado Alex.

Walter Carlos of course later becomes Wendy and the opening theme
sequence of The Shining is being played by her.

One of the pieces of music in The Shining with the ethereal voices in
the background is by Ligeti and of course Ligeti pieces appear throughout
2001.

Originally Kubrick had commissioned composer Alex North, who had
written the music for Spartacus, to score the music for 2001, which he did.
During the editing of 2001, apparently Kubrick used The Blue Danube
as a fill-in during the editing process, but grew to like it so much that
it became the piece used. North was apparently disappointed his score
was never used.

One of Stanley's daughters, Vivian, scored some of the music on
Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket. We see Vivian make a cameo in 2001
as Heywood Floyd's daughter that he refers to by the nickname of
"Squirt" when he phones her from the Bell Picturephone at the orbiting
Hilton. When Floyd asks her what she wants for her birthday (there
are many birthdays in 2001), she replies "a bushbaby" and apparently
a sequence was shot but never used of one of these tiny primates being
purchased at a futuristic Macy's store. The bushbaby reference obviously
has an evolutionary connection, the central theme of 2001.