Stanley Kubrick

When director Stanley Kubrick and novelist Vladimir Nabokov brought Nabokov's controversial novel "Lolita" to the screen in 1962, they cast 15-year-old newcomer Sue Lyon in the title role without specifying her age, which in the book was only 12. Most critics said that Lyon looked closer to 17, thus undercutting seriously the impact of the exquisite torture Nabokvov's middle-aged Humbert Humbert endured in his fixation on what the novelist described famously as a "nymphet."

I can remember the ad campaign for "Lolita" clearly. It was 1962, I was 9, and the advertising suggestively screamed "How did they ever make a movie out of 'Lolita'?" Then there was Sue Lyon, the 14-year-old unknown chosen to play novelist Vladimir Nabokov's most famous erotic symbol. Her pretty adolescent features were the top of beauty to a kid just beginning to sense the links between aura and sex appeal.

For months, it has been the grist for gossip: Just what exactly is director Stanley Kubrick's new movie, "Eyes Wide Shut," all about? Tom Cruise and his actress wife, Nicole Kidman, who have been shooting the film in and around London since last fall, have occasionally broken their silence to dispel rampant speculation. No, Cruise said, he does not wear a dress in the film. "I've read a lot of stuff," he told the New York Daily News. "No one's gotten it right. They're reaching."

First comes the predictable shock: Stanley Kubrick, dead, the youthful creator felled with so much left to do. Then comes a different kind of shock: Stanley Kubrick was 70 years old. For several interconnecting reasons, Stanley Kubrick will always be young in the film world's eyes, always be the passionate baby auteur who made his first feature, the war-themed "Fear and Desire," when he was 25 years old.

The first glimpse of the late director Stanley Kubrick's final film "Eyes Wide Shut," turned out to be very short and very provocative. How provocative? Well both of its stars--Nicole Kidman and Tom Cruise--are nude, for starters. Warner Bros. gave theater owners gathered here at the ShoWest exhibitors convention Wednesday a 20-second sneak peak at the film with a scene that depicts Kidman standing in front of a mirror as she is being kissed by Cruise, who is shown from the waist up.

The first footage of Stanley Kubrick's final--and extremely hush-hush--film, "Eyes Wide Shut," will be shown Wednesday when Warner Bros. unveils its 1999 product reel at the exhibitors' convention ShoWest in Las Vegas, studio executives said Monday. About 90 seconds of the film will be shown. After more than two years in production, the sexual thriller starring Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman will debut on July 16 on 2,500 to 3,000 screens in the U.S., followed by a European release in September.

Visual effects visionary, director and producer Douglas Trumbull has a "broad" philosophy of film. He believes that everything in a movie is, in essence, a special effect. "Movies are all about illusions, whether it is makeup or wardrobe or some location or being in a period of time or being on an alien planet," says Trumbull, 69. Trumbull has created some of the screen's greatest illusions in such seminal sci-fi films as Stanley Kubrick's 1968 masterwork "2001: A Space Odyssey," his own 1972 cult classic "Silent Running" and Steven Spielberg's 1977 "Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

Just how much money Stanley Kubrick's psycho-sexual drama "Eyes Wide Shut," starring Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, will wind up costing Warner Bros. is one of the best kept secrets in Hollywood. Industry guesstimates have ranged from $65 million to far higher for a movie that had the longest production schedule in modern motion picture history--18 months--and will sit in the can another 10 months before its mid-July release. Warner Bros.