Stanley Kubrick Wanted to Make ‘Eyes Wide Shut’ As Sex Comedy With Steve Martin
The German novel Traumnovelle, also known as Dream Story or Rhapsody: A Dream Novel, served as the loose basis for Stanley Kubrick’s erotic drama, Eyes Wide Shut. But before enlisting Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman to act out their cuckold fantasies on film, Kubrick had a much goofier take on Traumnovelle in mind.
Kubrick bought the rights to the story as a potential follow-up to his 1968 film, 2001: A Space Odyssey, then spent the next 25 years trying to figure out just how he’d adapt the story. His first (and maybe best) idea? Turning the story into a sex comedy. “Stanley thought it would be perfect for Steve Martin,” revealed Michael Herr, screenwriter of Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket, in Vanity Fair. “He’d loved The Jerk.”
“His idea for it in those days was always as a sex comedy, but with a wild and somber streak running through it,” Herr wrote. The screenwriter, as well as other writers with whom Kubrick discussed the idea, didn’t think that approach made much sense. In Herr’s opinion, Traumnovelle just wasn’t very funny with its attempted rape and implied impotence. At best, it would make for a “pretty severe and upsetting” comedy.
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Herr figured he was “too square” to imagine what Kubrick saw in Martin’s Jerk performance that would translate to Traumnovelle. But Kubrick’s weird choices usually panned out. Crew members were always telling the director that something couldn’t be done, only to be proven wrong when Kubrick insisted on his idiosyncratic choice.
The sex comedy version with Martin never happened, of course, but Kubrick didn’t give up on the idea for years. He pondered other comic actors with whom he could make such a farce, including Woody Allen, Bill Murray, Albert Brooks, Alan Alda and Tom Hanks, according to the biography Stanley Kubrick: American Filmmaker, per The Independent.
That book suggests that Kubrick pivoted to a drama to kneecap his protagonist. Instead of employing Martin’s manic irony, he “cast an actor without a comic bone in his body, the earnest, highly deliberate Tom Cruise,” according to the biography. “Comedy would have been a weapon for the hero’s self-defence; Kubrick makes him, in the end, defenceless.”
The final film, completed just days before Kubrick died in 1999, received no major award nominations and mixed reviews from critics. Roger Ebert lamented that Eyes Wide Shut didn’t have enough bare boobs for his taste. “The orgy, alas, has famously undergone digital alterations to obscure some of the more energetic rumpy-pumpy,” he wrote. “A shame.”
Would a Steve Martin version have been any better? Based on Kubrick’s only other comedy, Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, it sure as heck could have been an interesting satire. But it still wouldn't have had enough nudity to satisfy Roger Ebert.
