Kubrick's ABANDONED "Napoleon" - The Greatest Movie Never Made

this video is sponsored by Squarespace it was 6:30 a.m. in Hutchinson Kansas Jeff Clayman an executive with United Artists at the time was handed a hard hat a gas mask and a flashlight his small team climbed into a rickety suspect elevator with a shift of Miners and descended 600 ft underground into a functioning salt mine just the previous year in 1993 Jeff Clan had been listening in on a call between his boss John C and his close friend Stanley kubric Cali had worked previously with kubric on 197 Wes A Clockwork Orange and now ran United Artists but this wasn't a social call as Cali asked kubric about a long-forgotten project that he believed he had written for the studio a biopic a Napoleon C relayed that they had been searching for it but couldn't find it and ask kubric if he could send him a copy of the script kubri laughed and said John of the reason your guy couldn't find it it doesn't exist I made a deal but I never wrote it CI undeterred by this sent Clan out to try and find it in their storage facility and the salt mines Studios have kept archived materials and mines like these for decades and as cleman stepped out of the elevator and into the mine on an early morning in 1994 they began to search the miles of tunnels and archives that were stored there with only a flashlight toarch cleman and his team discovered forgotten Cinema Treasures like footage from The Wizard of Oz 17 minutes of deleted scenes from 2001 A Space Odyssey and various long-forgotten manuscripts and projects that never saw the light of day but they couldn't find the Napoleon script glean says just as he was about to give up I open up this one script and it's Napoleon he rushed back out of the salt mine and facts a copy of it to John C John C thrilled to have found this long forgotten script called up his friend Stanley you did write the script let's make it after a long pause kubric spoke definitively on the other end of the line I don't want to make it and I don't want it made this mysterious project derived from intensive research by kubric in 197 striking a deal with the Romanian Army to have over 30,000 extras years of meticulous research on the Napoleonic era and even a hunt for rare film lenses for the film's various sex scenes join us as we delve deep into the story of Kubrick Napoleon on our abandoned film [Music] series well I became interested in the idea that the Universe uh was full of intelligent civilizations which is the current scientific belief that there are so many stars in the universe that the likelihood of light evolving around them even if it were possibilities of one in a million there would be hundred million what you're seeing here is a rare interview with Stanley kubri about his 1968 film 2001 A Space Odyssey and it's at the conclusion of this production that we begin our story writing the wave of his first major box office breakthrough of his career and using the various Awards received for this film as leverage kubric knew that he could make any film he wanted and he used that power to persuade MGM to fund the development costs for his Napoleon film kubri declared there had never been a great historical film and there had never been a good or accurate movie about Napoleon and he was determined to be the person to change that he devoured previous films on Napoleon like AEL gans's 1927 5H hour Saga on Napoleon but kubri determined to to be terrible and crude and declared that this would be the best movie ever made he would continue on watching every other Napoleonic era film ever created and there were a lot of them IMDb has a list of 72 Napoleon films While others report close to 200 Napoleon films over the years and in Kubrick's time there were an average of three films a decade on Napoleon from the very start of Cinema after viewing and studying these films he began his painstaking research an obsession of all things Napoleon Malcolm McDow who starred in Kubrick's Clockwork Orange years later asked kubri on set why he was eating ice cream at the same time as his main course stake what's the difference said kubric it's all food this is how Napoleon used to eat accounts like these over the years by those who have worked for kubric have helped to almost mythz him to the point where who he truly was will never be known but when it comes to his work on this film it appears that kubri sees himself in Napoleon in several interviews kubri Likens running a major Film Production to that of organizing major campaigns for war and several others around him noted a change in his character during and after doing research on Napoleon and from the few hundred books and 18,000 documents on Napoleon he reportedly read kubri fell hard into this addiction that has claimed countless other directors and actors over the years particularly with the more aour directors with even Spielberg and Ridley Scott still chasing down the character of Napoleon today but we'll talk about them later on and you just can't help but wonder how Kubrick's obsession over Napoleon would show itself today maybe he'd use our sponsor Squarespace to publish all of his findings and research after he completed the film with squarespace's new fluid engine you can move your pieces around the board easier the Napoleon moved across Europe conquering everything in his path and when you get stuck out in the battlefield in the cold winter Squarespace will keep running that beautiful Gallery you have to show off for new clients because you know unlike Napoleon Squarespace thrives in the cold so head over to Squarespace /fr Voyager to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain using the code frame Voyager now back to an abandoned Napoleon for the next 2 years kubri devoted himself to researching anything he could find on Napoleon first hiring a renowned scholar and Oxford Professor Felix Markham as his historical adviser for the film even purchasing the rights to the biography he had written on Napoleon this was built as a bit of a tactic to keep everyone else in the historical community and other authors from trying to claim that kubric stole their work for his film a bit of a legal protection you could say and one to avoid the headache of dealing with that specific problem it wasn't the only headache that kubri set out to solve as he began his research during his time making his previous film 2001 A Space Odyssey he had been bombarded constantly with questions from costumers and set details inevitably taking up a lot of his time this time around he was determined to get all of this organized from the very beginning creating an entirely new picture file retrieval system that included 15,000 photo entries on anything he could find on Napoleon in his research this allowed costumers to cross reference and find any detailed information they needed to keep to the historical accuracy of the film without having to bother kubri and that wouldn't be the only extensive system that he would create for this film either kubri was absolutely devoted to telling the story as accurately as possible and that started with the historical happenings of his characters in the film for all of the 50 principal characters in The Script he organized their positioning and life concurrent with Napoleon from birth to his death he constructed this with index cards that were matched up with key moments in Napoleon's life that way when he was writing the script for the film he would be able to see where each character was historically at that time and what they were doing in relation to Napoleon while all of this organization would be key in not only pulling off a film of the scale but also to do an accurate historical portrayal kubric had other problems that needed to be solved namely the budget there were several elements that were noted to be issues in the budgeting of this film the massive amounts of extras needed making uniforms for all of those extras set construction and as he said overpriced movie stars and also cost of reenacting sea battles for the extras and locations kubri tackled several issues the first being location originally he wanted to film all of the battle scenes at the locations where the battles had originally occurred he quickly found that to be a difficult process ECT because of modernization and many of the battlefields had already been overtaken by buildings or development projects making them unsuitable locations oddly enough kubric would take soil samples from these locations to ensure that when they did find a location for the battle scenes they would bring in the right color soil to put under Napoleon's feet these locations also had another issue though and that had to do with the enormous amounts of extras to recreate these battle scenes Kubrick reportedly wanted around 50,000 soldiers for this reenactment and he estimated that it would take around 1,000 000 trucks to get those 50,000 extras out onto the set and at the same time there had to be accommodations for that amount of people to make it work further limiting the locations he could choose from but you don't just sign up 50,000 extras from some casting agency so after he settled on Yugoslavia as a location for his battle scenes he approached the Romanian government to hire tens of thousands of troops for a reported $2 a man per day Yugoslavia also offered to supply troops for the film at the rate of $5 a day per man it's kind of a bizarre thought to imagine this many troops in today's world just walking around in another country for a film without causing some sort of international incident though he had the troops and Extras needed to pull off these massive battle sequences he also needed to make costumes for all of them a lot of them at first Romania and Yugoslavia offered to jointly make the costumes at $40 per person a drastic reduction in what he was quoted in England but a New York firm came in and spoiled this deal for the two countries figuring out a completely new way of manufacturing these uniforms to a cost of $4 each helping to massively reduce the budget and while the battle scenes would be a major focal point for this film not all of the scenes were set on the battlefield and sets needed to be developed for those scenes as well but making historically accurate castles and numerous palaces proved to be a costly Endeavor with estimates ranging from $3 million to $6 million which back in 1969 was kind of unheard of and considering the film Cleopatra one of the most expensive films ever made had bombed at the box office office and had made Studios gun-shy on unusually large budgets building sets for Kubrick's Napoleon was not an option instead through his research kubri identified several palaces and venues within France and Italy that he could use instead that would require little to no alterations to maintain their historical accuracy of the Napoleonic era he was able to rent these out for only a few hundred a day which is a massive difference in cost um well you know Stanley his strength I would say is probably not in communicating actors as for the actors that he built overpriced his plan was to use a couple great actors and then a bunch of new actors and actresses to keep that aspect of the budget on the low end for the lead role of Napoleon he had his eye on Jack Nicholson which is kind of hilarious considering the actor playing Napoleon in Ridley Scott's version of the film Walkin Phoenix also acted as the Joker just like Jack Nicholson would later famously do as well lastly the sea battles were a massive issue expense wise to combat this issue he decided that he would show a map version of the sea Battle with voiceovers explaining what happened and cutting to easy to shoot scenes like a drowned French Admiral floating in the water or ships lying on the bottom of the sea now that kubric was somewhat settled on getting everything worked out for the budget he also had to figure out how he wanted to film it and if there is anything to be said about Kubrick's work it's his willingness and passion to push cameras lenses and the film itself past the boundaries of Technology at the time and some would say that that is Kubrick's greatest gift to the world of Cinema for Napoleon it was no different he hunted down lenses that would allow him to shoot well past the hours film cruise and that day would have worked he wanted to shoot Napoleon with natural light whenever that was possible sometimes with barely any light at night one of the specific use cases for these lenses would be to film the various sex scenes between Napoleon and his wives and Mistresses throughout the film many of these would only be filmed with candl light to illuminate the scene or as a script details for one scene the candlelit oval bedroom completely encircled with floor to ceiling mirrored panels which multiply the erotic images of Napoleon and Josephine making love as kubri was wrapping up his all-consuming 2-year research the film industry was on the Move MGM by 1969 was in financial trouble and would soon be Under New Management that was more interested in television and building casinos than it was funding a massive historical film initially when MGM agreed to fund Napoleon's pre-production budget it did not actually green lit the film so when kurick finished up this screenplay and sent it off to MGM in September 1969 he was unable to persuade MGM to finance his film and to make matters worse there were three other Napoleon films in production at the time with the film waterl releasing in 1970 and the others by 1971 all of them were box office disasters likely not giving MGM any more confidence in this expensive film kubri would have to walk away from MGM after they cut funding and he had to fire his entire team working on the Napoleon film after a while he would land at Warner Brothers where he would sign a three-film deal that gave him total control over the projects with Warner Brothers just agreeing to distribute the films no questions asked additionally 5 to 7 years after the films were released he would get soulle rights to the film with this new freeing deal in place Warner Brothers announced their partnership with kubric in the start of a new film A Clockwork Orange which kubric stated in the release that he would make his Napoleon Epic after completing this film Kubrick would quickly complete this then x-r film and release it by 1972 to success and also a lot of controversy around the same time another British television production of Napoleon Napoleon and love would air and also completely fail around the same time Jack Nicholson also decided he was not interested in playing Napoleon anymore kubri would never submit his Napoleon script to Warner Brothers and it's not really known why if he couldn't work out the script if the other Napoleon projects failing and audiences showing a lack of interest in the topic or the difficulty that this film presented no one knows exactly why he never submitted a finished screenplay and after the long years spent meticulously researching for this film despite kubric talking about the film a few more times and even considering turning it into a 20-hour television show and using the research for the film Barry Lindon this film was abandoned and seemed likely to never be resurrected with Kubrick's death in 1999 Strange Love 2001 A Space Odyssey and A Clockwork Orange has died at the age of 70 at his home in hartfordshire Stanley Kubrick was widely regarded as one of the greatest and most controversial masters of Cinema he just finished what was to be his last film Eyes Wide Shut despite it being abandoned it would indirectly Inspire Ridley Scott to make his first film the Duelist and Ridley Scott would eventually somehow acquire the screenplay but decided that it was underwhelming because of its length and in covering his birth to his death decided to go a different direction for his Napoleon film in 2023 but a decade ago in 2013 Spielberg announced on a French TV network that he would be making a minseries based on Kubrick's screenplay however almost a decade would go by with very little information or confirmation on whether or not Spielberg still intended to make this series and then finally in February 2023 Spielberg would finally make an announcement so we are working on Napoleon as a a seven-part uh limited series but we are U mounting a big production uh with the cooperation of uh Christian Kubrick and Yan Harland were mounting a large production for HBO on based on Stanley's original script Napoleon while Kubrick never got to realize his dream and vision for the Napoleon film before he died it seems that almost 45 years later that Vision might finally become a reality someday turning the status of an abandoned project to a finished one and if you like abandoned projects and movies you should definitely check out our other episode The Abandoned backroll movie right here which has been surprisingly quite controversial

Channel: Frame Voyager

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Keywords: Stanley Kubrick's ABANDONED Napoleon Film, the best film never made, Stanley Kubrick's abandoned film, ABANDONED napoleon film, napoleon trailer, Napoleon 2023, ridley scott napoleon, Ridley Scott and Stanley Kubrick, Behind the scenes of Napoleon, stanley kubrick's napoleon, Stanley kubrick abandoned film, ABANDONED movies, ABANDONED films, Frame Voyager, abandoned batgirl movie, The making of Napoleon, The making of napoleon 2023, MGM and stanley kubrick

Id: tr0RTmzCKIo

Length: 16min 0sec (960 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 16 2023