Any film directed by Stanley Kubrick has 22-caret publicity value locked into its DNA: think Lolita, 2001 - A Space Odyssey, A Clockwork Orange, Dr Strangelove. In Eyes Wide Shut, his latest and last, the already volatile mix of fantasy sex with Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman ignited when the maestro died three weeks after finishing the final cut.
Kubrick was the most famous movie-industry recluse since Howard Hughes. Born in New York in 1928, he had lived in seclusion north of London since the early 1960s. He never gave interviews, never appeared in public. In the 30 years since 2001, he made only five films, yet he had become all-powerful, even succeeding in getting A Clockwork Orange off our screens, big and small, wherever Warner Brothers (who appear to have been as in thrall to him as a mouse to a snake) still controlled the rights. Like all Kubrick's films, Eyes Wide Shut is based on a novel, in this case by Arthur Schnitzler, friend of Freud and author of Max Ophul's classic, La Ronde. Kubrick wanted to film this dark story of sexual games-playing well before Lolita in 1961 but never found a writer able to transpose 19th-century Vienna to 20th-century New York.
Enter Frederic Raphael, whose Hollywood credentials were unassailable: Oscar for Darling (from his own novel), Oscar nominations for Two For The Road (original screenplay) and Far From The Madding Crowd. Like Kubrick, Raphael was born in the US - Chicago, 1932; like Kubrick he lived in England. Both men were Jewish and of an age. While Kubrick never made it to college, Raphael is a Cambridge scholar whose literary credits include 21 novels, two biographies (Byron and Somerset Maugham), translations of Catullus, Euripedes and Sophocles.
Now comes the odd bit. Since Kubrick's death, Warner has tried to make out that Raphael had no hand in the version of Eyes Wide Shut that reached the screen - or as little as makes no difference. The screenwriter's credit, second to Kubrick, was simply a contractual obligation. "They sought by every possible means to disparage any contribution I had made, for better - I hope for better - or for worse (I don't fear, but I hope not)," says Raphael. "They cannot accept that, if Kubrick hadn't asked me to work with him, they would not have this film which pays their salaries and enables them to fly first class to a premiere that I am not asked to." Raphael has no idea how much of his dialogue or storyline remains in the film - he hasn't seen it. The parting with Kubrick was perfectly amicable - indeed a month or so before he died, Kubrick invited him to his stately fortress near London to view the finished cut, which he never got to see. The rift with Warner arose after Kubrick's death when Raphael decided to publish his Eyes Wide Open memoir.
"Warner Brothers believe that everyone should be slaves to their publicity machine. But I am not interested in slavery and, by an omission which they bitterly regret and blame me for, they did not include a clause in the original contract forbidding me to write anything about this."
The crime, Raphael believes, is that he has told the truth. And there's the rub: in this wonderfully observed, highly instructive and fascinating account of their involvement, Kubrick, the genius-enigma of massaged hype, emerges as Kubrick, the still genius-but-basically-bit-of-a-bore. (For the record, I met Kubrick in November 1966 when he was shooting 2001 at a family firework party at his house and certainly Raphael's portrait rings true to my personal memory.) "I just don't understand," says Raphael. "I mean, these companies turn out vast tracts of publicity, full of dishonesty, of self importance, of self praise, all the rest of it. One small word of truth and they are in a state of unbelievable indignation." However, Raphael was never under any illusion as to the nature of his role in terms of Kubrick himself: Eyes Wide Open, the title of the book is not simply a genial pun. "I must have no expectations of gratitude," he writes quoting his journal after first meeting Kubrick, "or of genuine collaboration. I must make satisfied curiosity (or fairly satisfied), my best reward." Plus, of course, his usual rewards for writing screenplays - the same, he says, as Walter Raleigh's for leaving Cadiz: "for gold for praise for glory".
("There is a certain amount of gold, not an awful lot of praise and not a hell of a lot of glory, but such is the folly of man that one keeps on doing it. And the gold is nice, since I can't live by my books.")
We meet in Raphael's high-ceilinged London flat, the drawing-room walls dominated by two vast oils painted by his daughter, Sarah Raphael. He sprawls comfortably on the sofa, generous mouth always smiling, eyes merrily a-twinkle even when his views on film executives take the language up to an unprintable rant. "You have to understand I entirely understood the role I was going to have. In a sense the very quality of Kubrick's films - limited in some respects as they are, and extraordinary as they are in other respects which I still believe - they all carry the mark of being made by Mr Kubrick. He did not want the sign of anybody else on them. And, in so far as he could get away with that, that's his affair. You did not enter this arrangement with any blithe hopes that you were going to dance with Fred Astaire and get equal billing because you weren't. Not much dancing with Mr K."
It was Raphael's still-unshaken belief in Mr K's genius that convinced him to accept his offer in the first place. As to why Kubrick wanted him, he has no doubt that it was the autodidact's need to have power over someone he considered his intellectual superior. "I think Kubrick was obsessed with missing things, in particular intellectual matters and he was somebody who substituted to some degree obsession for organised knowledge. He wanted me to fill in the bits which he couldn't do - known as writing. Afterwards, of course, as often happens, people tend to think `Oh, I could have done that,' and then, of course, even worse, - though not, I'm saying, in Kubrick's case as I have not seen the film - they think that by effacing the traces of somebody else's personality, that creates a personality."
The relationship Raphael describes is not one of equals. For the first time in his life, he says he finally understood what it meant to be a woman. "I discovered that, if you're physically weaker in a relationship, the only device left to you is charm, guile, buying the right scent etc. That's the way it works. It's no use saying `You bastard, I'll thump you.' Not to be too vulgar about it, I was the one underneath. You have to make the best of it."
This subservient role was new to Raphael. In normal circumstances, his reaction would have been "I'm outta here". "I don't spend a lot of time stamping my foot because you don't need to. People either like you or they don't, like your work or not and on you go."
But this was different - "because I wanted so badly to believe Kubrick to have been right to have asked me." It's the whore's rationale, he explains, the "he chose me, he chose me, he chose me".
In Eyes Wide Open, Frederic Raphael has Kubrick pinned down like a moth. Rare but drab. Certainly, we don't see him fly.
Revenge? No. Raphael still believes that, as a film director, he is a genius. But he "never encountered Stanley Kubrick the director. I encountered somebody who was preparing to be the director. What he was concerned about was getting together a bunch of pages which gave him a buzz or an impulse that went through him when he was ready to go." The bunch of pages Frederic Raphael wrote now belongs to Warner, consequently his memoir of the experience contains no snippets of that original screenplay. Indeed, Raphael has been scrupulous, he insists, in not disclosing anything about the movie. "Not that I have had any thanks. Warner's view is that I am trying to destroy their masterpiece - to which they have contributed nothing."
What you do get is an unrivalled insight into how a story becomes a script - indeed, much of the memoir is in screenplay form with dialogue which you just know brings you as close to Kubrick as you are ever likely to get.
Eyes Wide Open, by Frederic Raphael is published by Orion, £12.99 in the UK