From: salyavin808 <no_re...@yahoogroups.com> That's all my EWS stories from Mentmore but I did read an article about Kubrick by Guardian journo Jon Ronson, he was invited to have a look round Kubrick's office after he'd died and one of the curios he found was a box of photographs of doors. Thousands of them. Apparently he'd sent scouts round London taking pics of every door they could find and when he found the one he wanted he had a replica made. Pretty obsessive, especially since it was used only once in the film when Tom Cruise visits his friend and knocks on it, the door opens and he walks through. That was it! Although as I mentioned before Kubrick is not one of my favorites, I love stories like this. I heard another one about Michaelangelo Antonioni. He was filming a scene on a beach for one of his films, looked through the viewfinder just before he was about to start shooting, swore, and sent the actors back to their trailers. Their action was in the foreground, with the rest of the beach curving around in the background of the shot. But something wasn't "right" with that background, so he sent a bunch of people to ask the people who owned one house half a mile away whether he could paint it red for the shot. After much wrangling (and days wasted because the scene couldn't be completed until this was done), the owners agreed, as long as he painted it back to the original color again when he was finished. These days you'd just take care of this in post-processing with CGI.
Kubrick was a notorious perfectionist, he was working on a movie about Napoleon and he had boxes of index cards detailing every single day of his life. Not all of it was known obviously but what isn't was inferred from what is known and the whole thing was cross indexed to every known letter sent or received and every book, newspaper, magazine about him. You realise why his films have that very controlled look about them when you know this. But he was apparently very hard to work with due to his perfectionism, you had to live up to it too. My Dad worked in the technical side of the film business based at Pinewood Studios and knew what it was like having to process everything to his standards. I used to help out there during school holidays which was cool. Cool. What a fun thing to do. The closest I ever got to a movie set was skipping school and working as an extra on an Italian Bible epic being filmed in Morocco. Appropriately enough given criticisms people have of me here, the film was called, "The Last Days Of Sodom And Gomorrah." :-) Kubrick ended up living near Pinewood because he hated flying so much and he only got on a plane once to come here and do some filming for "Paths of Glory" (I think) and he never went home, just stayed in England! So the sets of all his films, no matter where they were set, had to be recreated between Slough and Watford. This is what spoiled "Full Metal Jacket" The US boot camp scenes all have those concrete municipal lampposts that English councils put up in the 30's. I don't believe they have identical ones in Florida, and it destroyed the illusion for me. Odd for an obsessive like Kubrick to overlook it though. Although Eyes Wide Shut was talked down by the critics I really loved it (I've seen the movie three times so far). The sexual paranoia that pervades the film really appeals. But to learn that the house where the sex party/rites scene was shot has at least a tenuous link to Maharishi's Mentmore Towers means that I myself can fantasize that I have at least a flimsy connection to the sinister cult portrayed! I didn't like EWS actually, I thought it was too late into the modern world to be effective. I got the impression Kubrick must have had a sheltered life for him to think that women having sexual fantasies was shocking enough to send men into a dark night of the soul like Cruise went on. Exactly. I found myself hideously bored by all of the characters in EWS, especially Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman. There was simply nothing about them and their lives that I found interesting, so it was difficult for me to find the film interesting. I like his distinctive directing style though but it works best on 2001 I think. The "Kubrick film" I find most revealing in terms of what I didn't like about him as a writer and a director wasn't even filmed by Kubrick. He wrote the screenplay but died before making the film, so it was created as a tribute by Steven Spielberg, and called "A.I." For me, this film pinpoints Kubrick's biggest weakness -- he really didn't "get" human beings...how they think and act, and what makes them tick. He was so stuck in his own head that the things he came up with as plots often felt so *false* as to be unbelievable. The example in "A.I." is that ostensibly (according to the voiceover introduction and Kubrick's script) the film was all about, "Can a robot feel love?" Yet if you watch the movie and pay attention, the entire movie is the robot obsessing about whether anyone loves *him*. Kubrick never noticed. But we had a video collection at Mentmore of everything that had been filmed there, Inspector Morse, The Mummy. Loads of pop videos, the Spice Girls did one there, I didn't meet them but they were really hideous apparently, load and obnoxious, always swearing and sneering at everyone. Friends of mine living there had a daughter who was 10 at the time and she asked for an autograph and they said no. The public image of girl power slipped a bit there! Until you mentioned it, I hadn't realised that the orgy scene was set to a recitation of The Bhagavad Gita . This is getting better and better! The icing on the cake would have been if they had used MMY's translation (!). Unfortunately I just Googled the details and it turns out that Hindus objected to the use of the Gita (on the film's original release) and it was cut from the movie you can see on DVD today. (There's some chanting earlier in the scene which is a Catholic text played backwards! I've pasted a link below.) The original Sanskrit recitation that Kubrick intended (damn Warner Brothers for getting cold feet and deleting it!) read: "Parithranaya Saadhunam Vinashaya cha dushkrithaam Dharmasamsthabanarthaya Sambhavami yuge yuge" which means: "For the protection of the virtuous, for the destruction of the evil and for the firm establishment of Dharma (righteousness), I take birth and am incarnated on Earth, from age to age." Amazing they deleted it. It's the professionally offended again. Curse their eyes! Re Mentmore Towers: say what you like but MMY knew how to pick some prime real estate. Beautiful building and grounds.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTwRRwUb4IE I loved living there. I was recruited by the media officer because I'd worked in PR and quit my job and moved in without even knowing if I was going to be paid - such was my love of TM and the promise of rapid evolution living among the enlightened, did I have a surprise coming! Quite a shock to find out what it's actually like in that atmosphere. My first impression of Mentmore was that it was like a cross between One Flew Over The Cuckoos Nest and The Addams Family I fitted right in! I could write a book about my year there and it would be funny as well as illuminating about the inner workings of the TMO. I was there when they sold it and we all moved to Roydon Hall in Kent which I loved even more. Maharishi certainly did know how to invest in property. It was real shame when he sold those houses, most of the money went to international but a bit stayed in England to go towards a Peace Palace which they are just about to start work on in Suffolk, ten years later. But it wont be the same. Mentmore was a palace and Roydon was a cosy home from home with oak panelled walls and walk-in fireplaces. Henry the Eighth stayed there once, probably in the same room Marshy did. If those walls could speak! ---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <no_re...@yahoogroups.com> wrote : Thanks, it's most interesting to see all the Masonic symbolism that I didn't notice before. Or is it not realy there and we are just getting a power of suggestion thing now that it's been pointed out? I haven't watched it all yet but I can add a bit to the Rothschild story. The house the orgy scene from Eyes Wide Shut was filmed in was indeed a Rothschild home but the one shown at 3.31 is Mentmore Towers, owned by the TMO at the time, and not the same one where the actual sexy bits were filmed. Kubric was apparently a bit of a character and wanted to knock down the main supporting wall inside Mentmore because he wanted the room to be 20 feet larger! The guy in charge of location work said that, of course he could knock the wall down as long as he rebuilt it perfectly! Even Kubrick balked at that idea and ended up moving to the Rothschild house down the road to complete the filming, only using the exterior shots of our pad in the final cut. The Rothschild's had loads of homes, they thought it would be a wheeze to be able to see them all from each other, and you can indeed see each one from the grounds of next. Hard life. Everyone at the Towers was upset when they heard that the orgy scene was set to someone reciting the Bhagavad Gita. Great place to live though, I really enjoyed the filming work there, I remember bumping into John Thaw when I was going to breakfast once, and I opened the door to Michael Cain when he was filming "Quills" about the Marquis De Sade. Gave a bit of colour to the day! They were both really friendly and didn't mind us watching them acting. The director of "Quills" was overjoyed with Mentmore, he said he could film the grandiose palace scenes in the main hall and the seedy brothel scenes in the staff quarters. 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