This is the image to text, transcript. 14,691 text characters.
===================================
The real ending to EWS. (self.StanleyKubrick)
submitted 1 years ago by Ten4Fourteen to r/StanleyKubrick
The real ending to EWS.
NDA's up the ass on this thing, so chances are you'll never hear this from a direct source unless you know someone who worked on it in post or someone who was at the executive or financier level during post.
Here goes.
The toy store scene is not the end of the movie. They buy a teddy bear for their daughter. Tom notices the two men watching them. They smile at him and he smiles back.
Next scene, they exit the store and Kidman takes the daughter into a limo with the two old men. Tom is confused, Kidman tells him not to worry or he'll scare their daughter. She tells him not to ask questions and coaxes him to get inside of the limo. They drive to the manor in Long Island in silence while the daughter is finishing coloring a rainbow inside of a coloring book. A guard greets the two men and the two men exit with Kidman and her daughter. The guard tells Tom to wait in the car. Tom watches them all go inside. He asks the driver what's going on and the driver doesn't answer. Tom keeps looking at the manor door. Eventually Tom exits the car and goes inside the manor.
It's empty. He runs around looking for his family. He hears voices coming from inside of a room.
He opens the door and hears his wife saying "now suck it like a lollipop." His wife and daughter are naked in bed with the two men, who are wearing masks. They're all wrapped in a bed sheet so it's only implied nudity.
Two guards wearing masks enter and restrain Tom. He struggles and one of them punches him in the stomach. He collapses on the floor and starts crying. The two old men ask him "what's the matter," as if they are confused. Kidman tells them "he doesn't know." After a moment of silence one of the men simply says, "you've cost us a life. It must be replaced." His daughter begins to cry and Kidman comforts her. Then she walks over to Tom and comforts him, saying something along the lines of "they're not going to keep her, it's just every now and then." Then she assures him that they won't harm her or the two of them. She says "you're one of us now." As he is coming to terms with it, she puts a mask on him and then she starts disrobing him as the guards let go of him.
Before I get into the last scene, let me tell you what was explained to me about what I just told you. What was explained to me is that this is Tom and his daughter's initiation ritual into the society. The reason he never has sex in the movie after the party is because it's a part of the ritual. They are watching him, paying people off, and keeping him celibate for the initiation. Two other things. The toy store scene is about Kidman selling their daughter to the society. The two men are there to look at "toys." The end of the rainbow is about Tom finding out the dark truth about what the elites are doing, which will occur through Tom having sex. The last time we see it is before they go inside the manor.
The last scene.
The last scene is one continuous steady-cam shot following Ziegler. It begins on a painting of a baby, as Ziegler is getting dressed and then walking into a party that's going on at his house. The shot follows him through the party and during it we see Kidman surrounded by a group of men and laughing. Lots of pictures and symbols of "elitists" are seen in the background during this sequence. What can also be seen are pictures that allude to Kubrick's previous works; pictures of Ziegler with generals, astronauts, and either Jack Nicholson himself or a man that's supposed to be him. This was apparently Kubrick outing all of the people involved as well as saying his goodbye to cinema.
It ends with us seeing Tom off in the distance of the shot. He is standing by himself, away from other partygoers and staring off into the distance in a zombie-like fashion, as if disillusioned by everything. He's on the outdoor balcony. He casually jumps over the railing as no one even notices and the movie cuts to black. Kubrick has left the building.
Kubrick said the movie was simply about how the people who run the world are rich banking families who are profoundly evil. They are pedophiles and are holding women as sex slaves, while murdering anyone who challenges them. And no one is talking about it. That's it. There is no underlying theme about the need for intimacy. The only underlying theme is about how naive everyone is to what's really going on.
From what I was told this isn't even a real secret to people who worked in the industry at the time. Over 7 hours of film did not make it into the final cut. The argument over final cut was over defamation and explicitness. One of the names in the movie sounded like someone powerful apparently and they wanted Stanley to cut it. Supposedly he didn't. A lot of people think it's the guy at the beginning named Sandor. There was a gray area over how much power Stanley's director's cut had over the run time. The studio could not change the content of the film, but they were allowed to cut it off before it ran over two hours and forty minutes. The reason they cut down the film is because they thought the pedophile angle would piss people off and ruin Tom and Nicole's career. Supposedly it had nothing to do with illuminati button pushers stopping what was being said. It was more of an appearance thing. But again, this is just the Hollywood insider story about why they cut the film's ending. It's not the insider insider's story, if you get my drift. Keep in mind that they told Stanley to cut the ending and he didn't want to do it. There is a strong chance he was waiting for them to cave and then he died and they cut the ending without him being around to agree to it. My belief is that if he had lived and he knew they were threatening to cut the ending to fit the run time, he would've probably recut it so that he didn't go over the run time and audiences got to see the ending.
If you work in the industry and want to hear this from a direct source, my advice is to find someone who worked in post or as a studio rep or exec during that period. Those people are the ones who see the first cuts. You might get lucky.
[-] Ten4Fourteen (deleted by user) -1 points 1 years ago
I'm going to reply to as many as you as I can in this reply because I don't feel like talking to you all individually.
I'm anonymous for a reason. I work in Hollywood and I don't want to piss anyone off. My uncle was in the business for over 40 years. One of his best friends who left the business in the mid 2000's worked at WB back when the film was in post and saw the cut. He told me what happened. That's as far as I'll go with my source.
I believe him over Kubrick's daughters. He's been a mentor to me in showing how the business actually works and has no real reason to lie. He wasn't just some extra or someone's kid. He was in it. And, well elephant in the room, good chance Stanley didn't talk to his kids or anyone else for that matter about a lot of the darkness he had seen or was in his head. As far as they know he's adapting a novella about relationships. Despite the fact that pretty much every movie he has made has been about powerful people and institutions abusing their power and society failing to stop them.
What my uncle's friend and a lot of people in the know believe is that Kubrick got whacked over the movie. It sounds far fetched if you're not familiar with the industry. But if you know how life is out here, then it just sounds like business. Out here, everyone knows about the prostitution rings that cater to celebs. It's no secret that they're using 15 and 16 year olds and even grooming children as young as 12. But the thing is, despite everyone knowing that it goes on, no one talks about it. You never see it in the news or anything. Imagine overhearing someone making fun of an actor who likes to fuck kids, and they're not shocked by it. They're making fun of him as if he's just some weirdo, like he likes to get peed on or something. This is the kind of conversation you hear out here regularly and the type of shit that is happening.
One of the biggest jokes is that everyone is going crazy over metoo right now and there are literally kids being driven up to the hills to mansion parties every weekend in the middle of the night. To give you an idea of how crazy it is, one time I picked up my buddy who was a bartending a party at a producer's house. He told me there were four 12 year old looking girls walking around in swimsuits at 3 A.M. in the morning. Everyone else there was a grown man. There were no women there. At first he said he's thinking that these girls live in the house or that they were someone at the party's kids. Then he sees them get herded into an SUV by some scumbag and then it just drives off.
It's not even a secret, it's just something that no one is talking about. From what I know, a lot of people who've seen or heard about the ending think that Kubrick simply made a film about something that no one was talking about and it made a lot powerful people uncomfortable and they had him poisoned, which gave him the heart attack. The reason it's called Eyes Wide Shut, isn't because it's about the need for intimacy, it's about something everyone is allowing to happen but is ignoring it. The current version, a lot of people read into it and think it was meant to be some sort esoteric, ambiguous thing, when in reality it was supposed to be a pretty concrete statement with a definite ending. Still a metaphor, but one that's very readable.
Now if you don't know about this world, it seems far fetched. But the thing is, the guy was known for editing his stuff down to the wire... but he decides to just deliver final cut months before the release? And this isn't even insider knowledge, he got in a verbal fight over not cutting the film and then he died days later. I mean, he was old, but really? The guy makes a movie about powerful pedophiles, argues over the cut, and then dies shortly after that? Red flags.
Again, it's hard to believe if you've never been around the kinds of weird shit that these people get into. But you need to keep in mind that they are very powerful and have all sorts of things at their disposal that normal people don't even know exist. If you drive around some of these mansions you would think that there is no security. In reality, they have cameras with 4K res' scoping you out, that are about as big as the camera in your iPhone. And they've had them since 2008. I've heard stories about celebrities having people disappear for road rage incidents. It's not hard to believe they'd kill a guy for exposing their secrets and rubbing their faces in it with a film starring the two biggest names in Hollywood. That ending could've easily triggered investigations.
The way I heard it went down was like this. He cut his 3 hour version and showed it to the studio. No kiddies and actors are present during these screenings, it's all above the line, major money people, which is why his daughters probably never even saw the ending. They told him to scrap the ending for the NC-17. He called their bullshit and said deal with it. They told him it was too long. He said he'd bring it down to 2:40. Then the studio made their own cut of the film that the execs and financiers liked. This is the version we got where they lopped off the ending. They screened it for Stanley and the actors in an effort to get him to agree to this cut.
Chances are he said no and went back to work on it. Then he died shortly afterwards. The studio then just lops off the ending of his 3 hour cut and says this is the movie Stanley wanted to make. He had final cut. We didn't touch his footage. We just made it adhere to run time and covered up some tits for the R-rating. See it's in the contract, we can't touch his footage(unless he goes over the run time.) They put that all out to the press, that this is the film he wanted to make, and contractually they can't mess with it so it really is his cut, blah blah blah, lies..... and then everyone just believes them. Studios lie all the time and the public just believes them. One of the biggest lies of all time is that it costed 300 million to make Avatar and people just ate that shit up. The big secret/joke is that in reality Avatar costed 65 million dollars to make and went on to make billions. Hollywood reports its own numbers. So whenever you see a budget, 9 out of 10 times it's made up. Budgets are usually precisely calculated, but look at any major movie and it will give you the same numbers 100 mil, 150 mil, 175 mil, 200 mil. The point is, they're liars.
So no, I don't believe his daughters or some lady who says she's his daughter, even though she really isn't. None of them saw the first cut, because it's a workprint plain and simple. Thus they probably never saw the original ending. My guess is the studio brought his daughter in for their cut in which Stanley was present at and then she just assumed it was the final cut of the film. She probably didn't have any idea that he was in the process of changing the entire ending. He probably kept his true intentions and ideas from her, like he did with everyone.
A lot of Kubrick fanboys don't want to hear about this ending because the ambiguity makes it spooky and the possibility that he's a genius who made something that's telling multiple stories is very interesting. To them ambiguity = intelligence.
But when you find out he's just a guy who had seen some shit, was mad that society ignores it, and decided to critique society and the powerful... then you realize he's just another man with a message. That being said, I feel that this ending would still be in line with his other work.
They're all metaphors that serve as indictments of institutions and their failures. In Dr. Strangelove, Full Metal Jacket, A Clockwork Orange, he was criticizing the powerful (army, corrections) and their influence over the delusional(soldiers, criminals.)
Eyes Wide Shut is no different in that regard. It's a metaphor about society and how it's being influenced by an institution. The story is about society(Bill), ignoring what's going on, and letting their children get abused by the wealthy. On the surface, everything is prosperous, but underneath it, it is allowing the powerful to get away with horrible things. Eventually, it falls. It's a statement about humanity and it's failures and is very pessimistic, which sounds like 100% Kubrick.
That ending completely unwinds all the themes of marital strife that are actually very front and center in the movie.
It also introduces a hidden connection between Kidman and the elites, which was never even hinted at after the opening party scene. The implication when Tom Cruise's mask is put on his pillow is that someone put it there while his wife was asleep, not that his wife is in on it, too. It would be a Deus Ex Machina to include that fake ending.
Also, that fake ending doesn't comport with the sex scenes of the elites. The elites in Eyes Wide Shut never use a bed when they have sex. It's artistically intentional to make the sex cold.
Even the scene where the teen girl is having sex with Asian business men, they are using a sofa. The teen isn't shown nude, thankfully, but the teen enters as a character. The daughter of the married couple main characters is never really introduced as a character in the movie, so it would be weird to make an entire scene about her especially at the end in a scene setup that is completely different from the rest of the movie.
This is complete fanfic, guys. I have at least 3 more reasons this is a fake ending, but I'm already feeling pretty gay getting into themes and concepts of art and film. Kubrick was a genius, not a rube.
Yes, Eyes Wide Shut is based on the 1926 novella Traumnovelle (published in English as Dream Story) by Austrian author Arthur Schnitzler.
Stanley Kubrick was fascinated by the story for decades before finally adapting it for his final film. While the movie is quite faithful to the source material's plot and structure, Kubrick made several key updates:
Setting: He moved the story from 1920s Vienna to 1990s New York City.
Characters: The protagonists' names were changed from Fridolin and Albertina to Bill and Alice Harford.
Tone & Additions: Kubrick added the character of Victor Ziegler (Sydney Pollack), who does not exist in the original book, to represent the "elite" connection between Bill's world and the secret society.
The Password: In the book, the password for the secret party is "Denmark"; Kubrick changed it to "Fidelio" (the title of Beethoven's only opera, which deals with themes of marital sacrifice).
The film captures the novella's "Kafkaesque" blurring of reality and dreams, exploring the psychological tension between sexual fantasy and domestic reality.
If you want, you can tell me:
If you’re looking for a comparison of the endings (they differ slightly in tone)
If you're interested in the other film adaptations of this same book
Whether you want to know more about the real-life inspirations Schnitzler used for the story
hows the movie differ from this novel
While Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut is remarkably faithful to the plot of Arthur Schnitzler's Dream Story (original German title: Traumnovelle), it introduces several major changes to modernize and deepen the story's themes.
Setting and Tone
Time and Place: The novel is set in fin-de-siècle Vienna (around the 1890s/1900s) during the Pre-Lenten Carnival. Kubrick moved the action to 1990s New York City during the Christmas season.
Ethnicity and Class: In the book, the protagonist's Jewish identity and the era's anti-Semitic anxieties play a role in his feeling of being an outsider. Kubrick removed these specific ethnic tensions, focusing instead on broader themes of class, money, and power.
Character Additions and Changes
Victor Ziegler: This character (played by Sydney Pollack) does not exist in the novel. In the film, he serves as a bridge between the protagonist's normal life and the secret society, suggesting a more calculated and conspiratorial power structure than the "random" secret party in the book.
The Protagonists' Dynamic: Critics often note that in the book, the wife (Albertine) is portrayed with a certain "innocence" that highlights the husband's irrational jealousy. In the film, Alice (played by Nicole Kidman) is more provocative and active in challenging Bill's ego.
Plot and Imagery Differences
The Masked Ball: In the novella, the protagonist (Fridolin) is never forced to unmask; instead, a woman unmasks herself to save him. In the movie, Bill is famously forced to remove his mask in front of the entire assembly.
The Dream Scene: Alice’s confession of her dream in the movie is famous for the couple's use of marijuana, whereas the book features a more sober, traditional confession. Additionally, the dream itself is darker in the movie, adding more graphic and violent imagery.
The Password: As mentioned, the password changed from "Denmark" (book) to "Fidelio" (film).
The Ending
Final Scene: The movie ends with a famous scene in a toy store, where Alice delivers the film's blunt final line. The book concludes more quietly and ambiguously in the couple's bedroom, with them simply drifting into a "dreamless sleep" together.
If you'd like, I can:
Clarify why "Fidelio" was chosen as the password
Explain the symbolism of the mask on the pillow at the end
Detail more about the real-life organizations people think the film’s secret society was based on
These articles compare and contrast the novel Dream Story with the film Eyes Wide Shut, detailing differences in setting, character dynamics, plot points, and ending.
Full sized image, is clicking the thread title link (640 x 2227 pixels)
https://media.scored.co/post/SbSA1ubajwW3.jpeg
This is the image to text, transcript. 14,691 text characters.
===================================
The real ending to EWS. (self.StanleyKubrick) submitted 1 years ago by Ten4Fourteen to r/StanleyKubrick
The real ending to EWS.
NDA's up the ass on this thing, so chances are you'll never hear this from a direct source unless you know someone who worked on it in post or someone who was at the executive or financier level during post.
Here goes.
The toy store scene is not the end of the movie. They buy a teddy bear for their daughter. Tom notices the two men watching them. They smile at him and he smiles back.
Next scene, they exit the store and Kidman takes the daughter into a limo with the two old men. Tom is confused, Kidman tells him not to worry or he'll scare their daughter. She tells him not to ask questions and coaxes him to get inside of the limo. They drive to the manor in Long Island in silence while the daughter is finishing coloring a rainbow inside of a coloring book. A guard greets the two men and the two men exit with Kidman and her daughter. The guard tells Tom to wait in the car. Tom watches them all go inside. He asks the driver what's going on and the driver doesn't answer. Tom keeps looking at the manor door. Eventually Tom exits the car and goes inside the manor.
It's empty. He runs around looking for his family. He hears voices coming from inside of a room.
He opens the door and hears his wife saying "now suck it like a lollipop." His wife and daughter are naked in bed with the two men, who are wearing masks. They're all wrapped in a bed sheet so it's only implied nudity.
Two guards wearing masks enter and restrain Tom. He struggles and one of them punches him in the stomach. He collapses on the floor and starts crying. The two old men ask him "what's the matter," as if they are confused. Kidman tells them "he doesn't know." After a moment of silence one of the men simply says, "you've cost us a life. It must be replaced." His daughter begins to cry and Kidman comforts her. Then she walks over to Tom and comforts him, saying something along the lines of "they're not going to keep her, it's just every now and then." Then she assures him that they won't harm her or the two of them. She says "you're one of us now." As he is coming to terms with it, she puts a mask on him and then she starts disrobing him as the guards let go of him.
Before I get into the last scene, let me tell you what was explained to me about what I just told you. What was explained to me is that this is Tom and his daughter's initiation ritual into the society. The reason he never has sex in the movie after the party is because it's a part of the ritual. They are watching him, paying people off, and keeping him celibate for the initiation. Two other things. The toy store scene is about Kidman selling their daughter to the society. The two men are there to look at "toys." The end of the rainbow is about Tom finding out the dark truth about what the elites are doing, which will occur through Tom having sex. The last time we see it is before they go inside the manor.
The last scene.
The last scene is one continuous steady-cam shot following Ziegler. It begins on a painting of a baby, as Ziegler is getting dressed and then walking into a party that's going on at his house. The shot follows him through the party and during it we see Kidman surrounded by a group of men and laughing. Lots of pictures and symbols of "elitists" are seen in the background during this sequence. What can also be seen are pictures that allude to Kubrick's previous works; pictures of Ziegler with generals, astronauts, and either Jack Nicholson himself or a man that's supposed to be him. This was apparently Kubrick outing all of the people involved as well as saying his goodbye to cinema.
It ends with us seeing Tom off in the distance of the shot. He is standing by himself, away from other partygoers and staring off into the distance in a zombie-like fashion, as if disillusioned by everything. He's on the outdoor balcony. He casually jumps over the railing as no one even notices and the movie cuts to black. Kubrick has left the building.
Kubrick said the movie was simply about how the people who run the world are rich banking families who are profoundly evil. They are pedophiles and are holding women as sex slaves, while murdering anyone who challenges them. And no one is talking about it. That's it. There is no underlying theme about the need for intimacy. The only underlying theme is about how naive everyone is to what's really going on.
From what I was told this isn't even a real secret to people who worked in the industry at the time. Over 7 hours of film did not make it into the final cut. The argument over final cut was over defamation and explicitness. One of the names in the movie sounded like someone powerful apparently and they wanted Stanley to cut it. Supposedly he didn't. A lot of people think it's the guy at the beginning named Sandor. There was a gray area over how much power Stanley's director's cut had over the run time. The studio could not change the content of the film, but they were allowed to cut it off before it ran over two hours and forty minutes. The reason they cut down the film is because they thought the pedophile angle would piss people off and ruin Tom and Nicole's career. Supposedly it had nothing to do with illuminati button pushers stopping what was being said. It was more of an appearance thing. But again, this is just the Hollywood insider story about why they cut the film's ending. It's not the insider insider's story, if you get my drift. Keep in mind that they told Stanley to cut the ending and he didn't want to do it. There is a strong chance he was waiting for them to cave and then he died and they cut the ending without him being around to agree to it. My belief is that if he had lived and he knew they were threatening to cut the ending to fit the run time, he would've probably recut it so that he didn't go over the run time and audiences got to see the ending.
If you work in the industry and want to hear this from a direct source, my advice is to find someone who worked in post or as a studio rep or exec during that period. Those people are the ones who see the first cuts. You might get lucky.
[-] Ten4Fourteen (deleted by user) -1 points 1 years ago
I'm going to reply to as many as you as I can in this reply because I don't feel like talking to you all individually.
I'm anonymous for a reason. I work in Hollywood and I don't want to piss anyone off. My uncle was in the business for over 40 years. One of his best friends who left the business in the mid 2000's worked at WB back when the film was in post and saw the cut. He told me what happened. That's as far as I'll go with my source.
I believe him over Kubrick's daughters. He's been a mentor to me in showing how the business actually works and has no real reason to lie. He wasn't just some extra or someone's kid. He was in it. And, well elephant in the room, good chance Stanley didn't talk to his kids or anyone else for that matter about a lot of the darkness he had seen or was in his head. As far as they know he's adapting a novella about relationships. Despite the fact that pretty much every movie he has made has been about powerful people and institutions abusing their power and society failing to stop them.
What my uncle's friend and a lot of people in the know believe is that Kubrick got whacked over the movie. It sounds far fetched if you're not familiar with the industry. But if you know how life is out here, then it just sounds like business. Out here, everyone knows about the prostitution rings that cater to celebs. It's no secret that they're using 15 and 16 year olds and even grooming children as young as 12. But the thing is, despite everyone knowing that it goes on, no one talks about it. You never see it in the news or anything. Imagine overhearing someone making fun of an actor who likes to fuck kids, and they're not shocked by it. They're making fun of him as if he's just some weirdo, like he likes to get peed on or something. This is the kind of conversation you hear out here regularly and the type of shit that is happening.
One of the biggest jokes is that everyone is going crazy over metoo right now and there are literally kids being driven up to the hills to mansion parties every weekend in the middle of the night. To give you an idea of how crazy it is, one time I picked up my buddy who was a bartending a party at a producer's house. He told me there were four 12 year old looking girls walking around in swimsuits at 3 A.M. in the morning. Everyone else there was a grown man. There were no women there. At first he said he's thinking that these girls live in the house or that they were someone at the party's kids. Then he sees them get herded into an SUV by some scumbag and then it just drives off.
It's not even a secret, it's just something that no one is talking about. From what I know, a lot of people who've seen or heard about the ending think that Kubrick simply made a film about something that no one was talking about and it made a lot powerful people uncomfortable and they had him poisoned, which gave him the heart attack. The reason it's called Eyes Wide Shut, isn't because it's about the need for intimacy, it's about something everyone is allowing to happen but is ignoring it. The current version, a lot of people read into it and think it was meant to be some sort esoteric, ambiguous thing, when in reality it was supposed to be a pretty concrete statement with a definite ending. Still a metaphor, but one that's very readable.
Now if you don't know about this world, it seems far fetched. But the thing is, the guy was known for editing his stuff down to the wire... but he decides to just deliver final cut months before the release? And this isn't even insider knowledge, he got in a verbal fight over not cutting the film and then he died days later. I mean, he was old, but really? The guy makes a movie about powerful pedophiles, argues over the cut, and then dies shortly after that? Red flags.
Again, it's hard to believe if you've never been around the kinds of weird shit that these people get into. But you need to keep in mind that they are very powerful and have all sorts of things at their disposal that normal people don't even know exist. If you drive around some of these mansions you would think that there is no security. In reality, they have cameras with 4K res' scoping you out, that are about as big as the camera in your iPhone. And they've had them since 2008. I've heard stories about celebrities having people disappear for road rage incidents. It's not hard to believe they'd kill a guy for exposing their secrets and rubbing their faces in it with a film starring the two biggest names in Hollywood. That ending could've easily triggered investigations.
The way I heard it went down was like this. He cut his 3 hour version and showed it to the studio. No kiddies and actors are present during these screenings, it's all above the line, major money people, which is why his daughters probably never even saw the ending. They told him to scrap the ending for the NC-17. He called their bullshit and said deal with it. They told him it was too long. He said he'd bring it down to 2:40. Then the studio made their own cut of the film that the execs and financiers liked. This is the version we got where they lopped off the ending. They screened it for Stanley and the actors in an effort to get him to agree to this cut.
Chances are he said no and went back to work on it. Then he died shortly afterwards. The studio then just lops off the ending of his 3 hour cut and says this is the movie Stanley wanted to make. He had final cut. We didn't touch his footage. We just made it adhere to run time and covered up some tits for the R-rating. See it's in the contract, we can't touch his footage(unless he goes over the run time.) They put that all out to the press, that this is the film he wanted to make, and contractually they can't mess with it so it really is his cut, blah blah blah, lies..... and then everyone just believes them. Studios lie all the time and the public just believes them. One of the biggest lies of all time is that it costed 300 million to make Avatar and people just ate that shit up. The big secret/joke is that in reality Avatar costed 65 million dollars to make and went on to make billions. Hollywood reports its own numbers. So whenever you see a budget, 9 out of 10 times it's made up. Budgets are usually precisely calculated, but look at any major movie and it will give you the same numbers 100 mil, 150 mil, 175 mil, 200 mil. The point is, they're liars.
So no, I don't believe his daughters or some lady who says she's his daughter, even though she really isn't. None of them saw the first cut, because it's a workprint plain and simple. Thus they probably never saw the original ending. My guess is the studio brought his daughter in for their cut in which Stanley was present at and then she just assumed it was the final cut of the film. She probably didn't have any idea that he was in the process of changing the entire ending. He probably kept his true intentions and ideas from her, like he did with everyone.
A lot of Kubrick fanboys don't want to hear about this ending because the ambiguity makes it spooky and the possibility that he's a genius who made something that's telling multiple stories is very interesting. To them ambiguity = intelligence.
But when you find out he's just a guy who had seen some shit, was mad that society ignores it, and decided to critique society and the powerful... then you realize he's just another man with a message. That being said, I feel that this ending would still be in line with his other work.
They're all metaphors that serve as indictments of institutions and their failures. In Dr. Strangelove, Full Metal Jacket, A Clockwork Orange, he was criticizing the powerful (army, corrections) and their influence over the delusional(soldiers, criminals.)
Eyes Wide Shut is no different in that regard. It's a metaphor about society and how it's being influenced by an institution. The story is about society(Bill), ignoring what's going on, and letting their children get abused by the wealthy. On the surface, everything is prosperous, but underneath it, it is allowing the powerful to get away with horrible things. Eventually, it falls. It's a statement about humanity and it's failures and is very pessimistic, which sounds like 100% Kubrick.
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Lol no.
That ending completely unwinds all the themes of marital strife that are actually very front and center in the movie.
It also introduces a hidden connection between Kidman and the elites, which was never even hinted at after the opening party scene. The implication when Tom Cruise's mask is put on his pillow is that someone put it there while his wife was asleep, not that his wife is in on it, too. It would be a Deus Ex Machina to include that fake ending.
Also, that fake ending doesn't comport with the sex scenes of the elites. The elites in Eyes Wide Shut never use a bed when they have sex. It's artistically intentional to make the sex cold.
Even the scene where the teen girl is having sex with Asian business men, they are using a sofa. The teen isn't shown nude, thankfully, but the teen enters as a character. The daughter of the married couple main characters is never really introduced as a character in the movie, so it would be weird to make an entire scene about her especially at the end in a scene setup that is completely different from the rest of the movie.
This is complete fanfic, guys. I have at least 3 more reasons this is a fake ending, but I'm already feeling pretty gay getting into themes and concepts of art and film. Kubrick was a genius, not a rube.
This reads more like grok than chatgpt. That's my bet. Which one did you use?
Rawdog PES (Public Ejication System).
Old skool machine learing environment with a garbage user interface. One major benefit is that we watched a lot of movies and talked about them a lot.
AI is too stupid and uncreative to come up with such observations. It sounds hyperautistic 90% of times. You seriously can't tell it's organic?
I think "lol,no" and your last paragraph were more likely organic.
Thanks for the tl;dr.
eyes wide shut based off a novel?
Yes, Eyes Wide Shut is based on the 1926 novella Traumnovelle (published in English as Dream Story) by Austrian author Arthur Schnitzler.
Stanley Kubrick was fascinated by the story for decades before finally adapting it for his final film. While the movie is quite faithful to the source material's plot and structure, Kubrick made several key updates:
Setting: He moved the story from 1920s Vienna to 1990s New York City.
Characters: The protagonists' names were changed from Fridolin and Albertina to Bill and Alice Harford.
Tone & Additions: Kubrick added the character of Victor Ziegler (Sydney Pollack), who does not exist in the original book, to represent the "elite" connection between Bill's world and the secret society.
The Password: In the book, the password for the secret party is "Denmark"; Kubrick changed it to "Fidelio" (the title of Beethoven's only opera, which deals with themes of marital sacrifice).
The film captures the novella's "Kafkaesque" blurring of reality and dreams, exploring the psychological tension between sexual fantasy and domestic reality.
If you want, you can tell me: If you’re looking for a comparison of the endings (they differ slightly in tone) If you're interested in the other film adaptations of this same book Whether you want to know more about the real-life inspirations Schnitzler used for the story
hows the movie differ from this novel
While Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut is remarkably faithful to the plot of Arthur Schnitzler's Dream Story (original German title: Traumnovelle), it introduces several major changes to modernize and deepen the story's themes.
Setting and Tone Time and Place: The novel is set in fin-de-siècle Vienna (around the 1890s/1900s) during the Pre-Lenten Carnival. Kubrick moved the action to 1990s New York City during the Christmas season. Ethnicity and Class: In the book, the protagonist's Jewish identity and the era's anti-Semitic anxieties play a role in his feeling of being an outsider. Kubrick removed these specific ethnic tensions, focusing instead on broader themes of class, money, and power.
Character Additions and Changes Victor Ziegler: This character (played by Sydney Pollack) does not exist in the novel. In the film, he serves as a bridge between the protagonist's normal life and the secret society, suggesting a more calculated and conspiratorial power structure than the "random" secret party in the book. The Protagonists' Dynamic: Critics often note that in the book, the wife (Albertine) is portrayed with a certain "innocence" that highlights the husband's irrational jealousy. In the film, Alice (played by Nicole Kidman) is more provocative and active in challenging Bill's ego.
Plot and Imagery Differences The Masked Ball: In the novella, the protagonist (Fridolin) is never forced to unmask; instead, a woman unmasks herself to save him. In the movie, Bill is famously forced to remove his mask in front of the entire assembly. The Dream Scene: Alice’s confession of her dream in the movie is famous for the couple's use of marijuana, whereas the book features a more sober, traditional confession. Additionally, the dream itself is darker in the movie, adding more graphic and violent imagery. The Password: As mentioned, the password changed from "Denmark" (book) to "Fidelio" (film).
The Ending Final Scene: The movie ends with a famous scene in a toy store, where Alice delivers the film's blunt final line. The book concludes more quietly and ambiguously in the couple's bedroom, with them simply drifting into a "dreamless sleep" together.
If you'd like, I can: Clarify why "Fidelio" was chosen as the password Explain the symbolism of the mask on the pillow at the end Detail more about the real-life organizations people think the film’s secret society was based on These articles compare and contrast the novel Dream Story with the film Eyes Wide Shut, detailing differences in setting, character dynamics, plot points, and ending.