“FAMILY, ANIMALS, AND FILM”

By Raymond Benson

Only the most informed of Stanley Kubrick fans will know that Emilio D’Allesandro was, in short, the filmmaker’s personal assistant, driver, builder, repairman, cleaner, organizer, cook, amateur vet, house-sitter, pet-sitter, babysitter, and confidante for thirty years. D’Allesandro probably knew Stanley Kubrick better than anyone outside of the director’s own family. In many way, he was a part of the Kubrick family.

Stanley Kubrick and Me is a magnificent memoir that was first published in Italy in 2012. The English translation, by Simon Marsh, is now available and is a must for Kubrick fans. There have been numerous books about Kubrick—he’s likely the second most written-about director after Hitchcock—but these tomes are typically about the films themselves (analyses, the makings of, and so forth). There have been a couple of biographies, notably one by Vincent LoBrutto, but these fail to present Kubrick’s personal life in any substantial way—they rely on hearsay and interviews by other people and are inadequate in that regard. Emilio D’Allesandro knew Kubrick in such an intimate way that he was in the perfect position to tell the world exactly what the director was like as a man.

D’Allesandro began working for Kubrick in 1970, just as A Clockwork Orange was at the end of shooting and beginning the editing stage. He therefore was behind-the scenes for all the subsequent pictures—Barry Lyndon, The Shining, Full Metal Jacket, and Eyes Wide Shut, as well as the development of discarded projects like A.I.—Artificial Intelligence, and Aryan Papers. There are chapters in the book devoted to D’Allesandro’s work on all of these, but the bulk of the memoir is more about the rapport and camaraderie between the two men in-between productions.

For example, D’Allesandro talks about Kubrick’s love of animals—at one time there were nearly ten dogs and just as many cats in the Kubrick household. The filmmaker’s devotion to his animals bordered on obsessive compulsive disorder. The same is true about his three daughters. When Katharina, Anya, or Vivian finally grew old enough to leave the family home and go out on their own, Kubrick was a “concerned dad” to a painful, but endearing, degree. There was a lot of: “Oh, since you’re going to be in the city, could you possibly drop in on Vivian and make sure she’s okay?”

The author also goes into how Kubrick’s brain worked in “compartments,” that the man was capable of multi-tasking unlike anyone the assistant had ever known. D’Allesandro had to take it upon himself to organize Kubrick’s many-faceted projects, ideas, and paperwork so that anyone else—and Kubrick himself—could find things.

And, in opposition to the unflattering accounts in the press that speculated that the filmmaker was a mad “recluse” or a “hermit,” the author provides solid evidence that all this was nonsense. “In the collective imagination,” D’Allesandro writes, “Stanley Kubrick was a kind of ogre. A misanthrope, who lived alone in his castle, isolated from the world. Stanley was quite the opposite: he was an altruistic man, capable of generosity without the need for recognition, an artist who valued his privacy because it allowed him to devote himself to what he cared about most of all: his family, his animals, and the cinema.”

Stanley Kubrick and Me paints a beautiful picture of a genius who had perhaps the most unique arrangement for making films in all of cinema history. The book is not only essential reading for fans of the director, but for film buffs as well.

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