You know what would be a great gift you guys could get me for Christmas? I know I’ve only been around for a couple of weeks and I know the economy is terrible, BUT… Taschen’s new “Stanley Kubrick’s ‘Napoleon’: The Greatest Film Never Made” sounds mighty nice. And it’s only $700! People, I think I’m being entirely reasonable here… *crickets*
A little history on NAPOLEON, courtesy of Variety: A notorious perfectionist, Kubrick, with the help of a research team, pored through hundreds of books on the subject, amassed 17,000 images from the period, cross-referenced events in the lives of key figures and wrote a voluminous treatment followed by a literate screenplay featuring a voiceover from three different POVs. Budgets were drawn, costumes were made, locations were scouted and photographed, actors approached (Oskar Werner was offered the title role, while Audrey Hepburn turned down the part of Josephine) and even the armies of Romania and Yugoslavia were approached for the requisite “cast of thousands” accuracy that Kubrick demanded in his battle scenes, which he described as “vast lethal ballets.”
But even if seven bills for a gift is too much to even imagine (and it is), the news of a newly compiled tome featuring just about everything any Stanley Kubrick fanatic could possibly want in relation to his almost-but-never made epic is totally fantastic in and of itself. The book features a selection of Kubrick’s correspondence, various costume studies, location scouting photographs, research material, script drafts, a reproduction of Kubrick’s final draft, the complete original treatment, essays examining the screenplay, and lots and lots more.
If you wanna see for yourself or even buy this beast, head over to Taschen (who publish GREAT books, btw) RIGHT HERE.
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