Has anyone checked this out before? I haven't read the script yet, but his notes are at the end of it, and it's interesting to read about things like how much extras would have cost for the movie, and just how big he planned the battle scenes to be (he wanted 15k extras minimum for the battles). In his notes he also talks about scouting for locations across Europe, and he mentions some considerations you wouldn't expect to have been addressed at such a date far from the planned production.
It has to be a nightmare to budget these things. In one country, it was going to cost like 2 dollars per head for a soldier in a battle scene, and in another it would be 5 dollars It's like
shit.
The script and notes I have were first drafted in 1969, and apparently some of the notes at the end date from the early 70s. Kubrick talked about making this movie up until around the time FMJ released, at which point I guess he figured it was never going to happen because he got to old. Apparently, in the early 70s, Jack Nicholson was his pick to play Napoleon, too, which I think is a FUCK AWESOME casting choice.
I dunno. It's interesting to read about this. Kubrick wanted to make this movie for like 20 years, and he never got the opportunity to do so. I'm kind of surprised that nobody has ever tried to buy the rights to the script, since it's probably his most famous unmade movie, and the script is totally cooked. I guess those extra prices from 1969 are a
lot higher today though, and god knows audiences are too dumb these days to be interested in a movie about Napoleon.
Most famously, he never filmed his much-researched biopic of Napoleon (Bonaparte) I of France, which was originally to star Jack Nicholson as Napoleon after Kubrick saw him in Easy Rider. Kubrick and Nicholson eventually worked together on The Shining. After years of preproduction, the movie was set aside indefinitely in favor of more economically feasible projects. As late as 1987, Kubrick stated that he had not given up on the project, mentioning that he had read almost 500 books on the historical figure. He was convinced that a film worthy of the subject had not yet appeared.
Napoleon
After the success of 2001 Kubrick planned a large-scale biopic of Napoleon Bonaparte. He did much research, read books about the French Emperor, and wrote a preliminary screenplay. With assistants, he meticulously created a card-catalogue of the places and deeds of Napoleon's inner circle during its operative years. Kubrick scouted locations, planning to film large portions of the story in the historical places where Napoleon's life occurred.
In notes to his financial backers, preserved in The Kubrick Archives, Kubrick told them he was unsure how his Napoleon film would turn out, but that he expected to create 'the best movie ever made.' Ultimately, the project was cancelled for three reasons: (i) the prohibitive costliness of location filming; (ii) the release, in the West, of Sergei Bondarchuk's epic film version of Leo Tolstoy's novel War and Peace (1968), and (iii) the commercial failure of Bondarchuk's Napoleon-themed film Waterloo (1970). Stanley Kubrick's screenplay for this film has been published on the Internet. Much of his historical research would influence Barry Lyndon (1975), set in the late eighteenth century, just before Napoleon's wars.
How could somebody not have picked up this script? Kubrick wrote gold, and he did this one all by himself.
