Inside the First Screening of “A Clockwork Orange”
Thanks to Roger Ebert for this link:
“I think it’s my most… skillful film,” Stanley Kubrick stated in his calm, equanimous voice, the day after screening the first assembly of A Clockwork Orange.
We were standing on either side of Stanley’s desk in his functionally chaotic home office at Abbots Mead in Elstree, England, going over the agenda for our imminent meeting with Dick Lederer, senior vice president of advertising-publicity at Warner Bros.
Stanley always spoke precisely, especially on matters of great importance, and he had to have contemplated all available adjectives before deciding on “skillful” to contextualize Clockwork within his body of work. It was a word I’d never heard him use before.
The highest echelon of Warner executives, headed by chairman Ted Ashley, had flown in from Burbank for the event, their first look at any frame of Kubrick’s latest film. Overwhelmed at what they saw, they conveyed their enthusiasm in a euphoric meeting immediately following the screening.
After they left, Stanley kept Jan Harlan, his brother-in-law and executive producer, and myself, his head of marketing (though “marketing” was a word yet to be adapted into industry parlance) in the wood-paneled conference room at Pinewood Studios (where Clockwork had been screened) and grilled us for two and a half hours, extracting our response and opinion about every scene and detail in the film. It was both exhausting and exhilarating — an unscheduled and unexpected display of his trust in our honesty… and loyalty.
Gawd, to have been in that room! Kubrick made so many great movies, but his most controversial and perhaps most visceral has to be A Clockwork Orange.
http://static.movieclips.com/embedplayer.swf?shortid=84Kmi
I have featured Kubrick a lot since I started this blog. Here are a few posts:
Great Scene: A Clockwork Orange, Part 1
Great Scene: A Clockwork Orange, Part 2
Who thinks A Clockwork Orange is a masterpiece and why?
For more of the article, go here.
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