Eyes Wide Shut

✍ Scribed by Stanley Kubrick; Frederic Raphael

• Publisher: ePubLibre
• Year: 1999
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 53 KB
• Category: Fiction

✦ Synopsis

Eyes Wide Shut is a 1999 erotic drama film based on Arthur Schnitzler's 1926 novella Traumnovelle (Dream Story), with the story transferred from early 20th century Vienna to 1990s New York. The film was directed, produced, and co-written by Stanley Kubrick. It was his last film, as he died four days after showing his final cut to Warner Bros. Pictures. The story, set in and around New York City, follows the sexually charged adventures of Dr. Bill Harford, who is shocked when his wife, Alice, reveals that she had contemplated an affair a year earlier. He embarks on a night-long adventure, during which he infiltrates a massive masked orgy of an unnamed secret society.
Kubrick obtained the filming rights for Dream Story in the 1960s, considering it a perfect novel for a film adaptation about sexual relations. The project was only revived in the 1990s, when the director hired writer Frederic Raphael to help him with the adaptation. The film was mostly shot in the United Kingdom (aside from some exterior establishing shots), and included a detailed recreation of some exterior Greenwich Village street scenes at Pinewood Studios. The film spent a long time in production, and holds the Guinness World Record for the longest continuous film shoot period, at 400 days.
Eyes Wide Shut was released on July 16, 1999, a few months following Kubrick's death, to mixed critical reaction and intakes of $162 million at the worldwide box office. Its strong sexual content also made it controversial; to ensure a theatrical R rating in the United States, Warner Bros. digitally altered several scenes during post-production.