CRITIC Alexander Walker is fending off charges by Stanley Kubrick’s family that he abused his special relationship with them by exclusively reviewing the late director’s “Eyes Wide Shut” weeks before its July 16 release.
The family held a secret screening for Walker, the critic for London’s Evening Standard, who raved about the film in a long, detailed piece that first ran Tuesday in England.
In a North American exclusive, The Post reprinted Walker’s scoop Wednesday, reportedly infuriating both the family and executives at the film’s distributor, Warner Bros., who said they considered the viewing a breach of studio security.
But Walker told the Evening Standard, “My association with Kubrick went back 40 years, and I have written the definitive Kubrick book.” The book, “Stanley Kubrick, Director,” is due out in the fall.
Meanwhile, “Eyes Wide Shut” screenwriter Frederic Raphael says he is angry at those in Hollywood who have condemned Raphael’s forthcoming Kubrick memoir. And he lashed out at The Post, which last week reported exclusive details from “Eyes Wide Open: A Memoir of Stanley Kubrick,” in which Raphael recounts working with Kubrick on the movie.
In the book, Raphael muses critically about the reclusive director’s enigmatic relationship to his own Jewishness, revealing that Kubrick once instructed him to expunge all Jewish references from the movie script, which is based on Arthur Schnitzler’s “Traumnovelle.”
At other times, Raphael writes, Kubrick anguished over anti-Semitism – yet cracked to Raphael that “Hitler was right about almost everything,” a remark Raphael took to be a baiting jest.
The Post story ran with the headline, “Stanley Kubrick, self-hating Jew.”
“I never said that Kubrick was a self-hating Jew!” fumed Raphael in a stormy, mostly off-the-record conversation from his home.
“I never thought he was a self-hating Jew, and I never said he was an anti-Semite. It is not my habit to work with anti-Semites.”
Raphael added, “You can also say that newspapers that put fallacious large headlines on stories are likely to mislead people.”
The Post report also raised the ire of Kubrick’s family and friends, including Kubrick confidant Steven Spielberg, who told Variety columnist Army Archerd that he “didn’t recognize the voice of Stanley” in the story.
Louis Blau, a Los Angeles attorney, subsequently told The Post that he and other close friends of the director had looked into filing a libel lawsuit against Raphael, but discovered it wasn’t legally possible to libel the dead.
Raphael, in turn, denounced Kubrick’s defenders in a letter released through Warner Bros.
“Kubrick’s reputation is unworthily defended by those who wish, in exactly the dictatorial style they affect to deplore, to burn or vilify a book which they have yet to read,” he wrote.
Copies of “Eyes Wide Open” are only now trickling into bookstores. Its publication date is June 30.