Kubrick's Game Read online

  www.EvolvedPub.com

  ~~~

  KUBRICK’S GAME

  Copyright © 2016 Derek Taylor Kent

  Cover Art Copyright © 2016 D. Robert Pease

  ~~~

  ISBN (EPUB Version): 1622534506

  ISBN-13 (EPUB Version): 978-1-62253-450-0

  ~~~

  Editor: Lina Rivera

  Senior Editor: Lane Diamond

  Interior Designer: D. Robert Pease

  Puzzle Consultants: Bob Glouberman and Larry Toffler

  ~~~

  eBook License Notes:

  You may not use, reproduce or transmit in any manner, any part of this book without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations used in critical articles and reviews, or in accordance with federal Fair Use laws. All rights are reserved.

  This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only; it may not be resold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, please return to your eBook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  ~~~

  Disclaimer:

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author's imagination, or the author has used them fictitiously.

  El Perro con Sombrero: A Bilingual Doggy Tale (Spanish Edition)

  Kubrick’s Game

  ~~~

  And Writing as Derek the Ghost:

  Rudy and the Beast: My Homework Ate My Dog!

  Scary School

  Scary School #2: Monsters on the March

  Scary School #3: The Northern Frights

  Scary School #4: Zillions of Zombies

  Simon and the Solar System

  ~~~

  Author’s Website:

  www.DerekTaylorKent.com

  Publisher’s Page:

  Derek Taylor Kent

  For Stanley, and all filmmakers whose imaginations soar beyond the infinite.

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Books by Derek Taylor Kent

  Dedication

  Introduction

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  The Game

  Book Club Guide

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  More from Evolved Publishing

  Please visit www.DerekTaylorKent.com/KubricksGame for expanded content and full-color images that accompany the book.

  “Nothing great was ever accomplished without suffering.”

  - Stanley Kubrick

  (As said to Shelley Duvall during the filming of The Shining.)

  There’s nothing like the smell of two billion meters of historic film mingled with Soltrol cleaning solution in the morning.

  Tony Strauss considered himself the luckiest man alive to enter his office to that one-of-a-kind aroma each day for the past thirty-two years.

  As the curator of the newly opened UCLA Film and Television archive in Valencia, a monumental complex six years in construction, he personally oversaw the cataloguing, storage, preservation and restoration of over 220,000 film and television reels, and the 27 million feet of newsreel footage, spanning over one hundred years. He presided over one of the largest archives of media in the world, second only to the Library of Congress.

  Most would consider Strauss’s daily routine tedious beyond all reason, but to him, each repetitive hour restoring precious frames of a forgotten classic might as well have been a day at the carnival.

  An added bonus: he could work all day in sweatpants and an old t-shirt. With his unkempt graying-black hair, glasses and pudgy frame, he looked like a certain famous director. “You’re an old-school Peter Jackson!” people would exclaim. Strauss would shake his head, thinking he looked more like another director who didn’t make as many talk show appearances.

  He lived for the moments each week when a lost reel of footage found in a dusty attic, or unearthed in a studio warehouse, showed up in his mailbox. Each delivery held a potential holy grail.

  Thousands of curious packages had come to him over the years, offering a tantalizing prize inside like little Cracker Jack boxes, or sometimes that rare pot of gold. But nothing could have prepared him for the package that had arrived this morning.

  The envelope was rectangular and black, except for the thin white scribble of the archive’s address and the sender’s name. When he read the name of the sender, his hands began trembling.

  “This can’t be,” he said.

  Bold instructions on the front read:

  NOT TO BE OPENED UNTIL MARCH 7.

  The day had arrived. He slipped on a pair of rubber gloves and delicately unclasped the large envelope, painstakingly unsticking the edges.

  He removed the contents, then ran to the phone.

  “Hello, Professor, this is Tony Strauss. I’m sorry to call you so early, but just like you predicted, something strange has arrived. Yes, I know it’s five in the morning, but I didn’t think it could wait. You see, it’s impossible that we could have received a package from this person, because.... Professor, the sender has been dead for more than fifteen years.”

  As Tony spoke the sender’s name, he heard a thud as if the phone had been dropped to the floor.

  After a moment, the professor said, “I’m on the way. Tell no one else of this.”

  The package had been sent by Stanley Kubrick.

  April 4

  I can’t believe this is a classroom, Shawn Hagan thought as he entered the movie theater. Red curtains hung loosely like a billowy dress. The lights were dimmed to a level just bright enough to find a seat. The speakers were positioned to create the ideal balance of echo and audial symmetry, as one might hear God should He speak.

  The movie theater is a temple of dreams. Today, it is a cathedral of learning.

  Shawn had waited patiently outside t
he James Bridges Theater at UCLA’s Melnitz Hall for fifteen minutes before it was unlocked to the public. Seat selection mattered more than most realized, as sound designers calibrated their music and sound effects to be optimally experienced by those closest to the center of the theater.

  For this reason, the advent of reserved seating was convenient, but Shawn had fond memories of camping out in front of the theater a week in advance of the big summer blockbuster. He missed the bonding experience of the line—the trivia, the arguments, and of course being mocked by passersby. The snarky insults were like badges of honor earned toward becoming a troop leader of film geeks.

  Shawn stood at the back of the theater, taking his time to scan the three hundred empty seats, study the speaker locations, and approximate the screen distance until it was clear which seat was the one.

  His outfit looked strangely formal compared to the shorts and T-shirts most students wore in the southern California sunshine, but modes of fashion were utterly lost on him. He might fit in better if he untucked his white dress shirt from his brown khaki pants, but why give a false impression that he was slovenly?

  Shoes. Now those are important. His gray New Balance sneakers were mismatched with his dress shirt, but light and cushy. It gave him peace of mind knowing he could shift into full sprint at a moment’s notice—a remainder of being chased by bullies every day in grade school.

  The oversized glasses were hand-me-downs from his maternal grandfather, who also passed along his stigmatism. He hadn’t bothered to look in a mirror that morning, but knew his brown hair was just as scraggly as ever. His boyish face didn’t require shaving more than once a month—kind of embarrassing at twenty. He always kept shaving cream next to the sink so his roommates wouldn’t have more ammo to tease him.

  Shawn stressed-out less about such things now that he was officially a student of the UCLA School of Film and Television, one of the most exclusive and prestigious in the nation. In high school, he couldn’t escape his label as the weird kid, but in film school, he could be deemed an eccentric genius.

  Shawn had high hopes for Cinema of the 60s and its professor. Antonio Mascaro’s film La Festa Cattiva had won the Golden Lion at the Venice International Film Festival twenty-five years ago. Though he never broke through in Hollywood, Mascaro was one of those European auteurs whom UCLA loved to bring in as visiting professors.

  Today’s film: Stanley Kubrick’s Lolita.

  Leave it to an Italian to open a film history class with that one.

  He strolled down the aisle toward his seat, stopping to remove his backpack and pull out his laptop for note-taking. Just as he was about to sit down, someone jumped the row behind him and snagged his seat.

  “Sorry, man, too slow.”

  “Please move,” said Shawn. “I want this seat.”

  “You gonna make me?”

  Shawn felt a wave of adrenalin rush through his torso. That phrase: You gonna make me? How often was it the preamble to being shoved to the ground and spat upon?

  Wilson busted out laughing. “Come on, Shawn, you know I’m just messing with you. It’s my new favorite pastime.”

  Wilson hoisted himself up and plopped down in the seat to the left.

  “Of course. I knew that,” Shawn covered.

  Shawn and Wilson had become friends during the fall quarter, when they were matched together for the Intro to Filmmaking lab. Wilson had bragged to Shawn about his eye for talent. Growing up, his own acting prowess made him a household name before the age of twelve. Then came the spectacular, tabloid-riddled burnout. He wanted to direct, but even his agents would scoff when he brought it up. Who would possibly trust their project in the hands of the kid from Slice of Cheese, Hold the Ghosts?

  Watching the show on Saturday mornings was one of Shawn’s fondest childhood memories. Wilson had played Billy, who thought he was the luckiest kid alive when his parents bought an old pizza parlor. Just one problem: it was haunted by the ghosts of its past patrons, and much to Billy’s chagrin, only he could see them. His catchphrase—“Holy cheesy pepperoni!”—garnered canned applause on all one hundred twenty-two episodes, and it haunted him to this day. Not even a BET award for Best Actor in a TV series earned him respect from the mainstream.

  Thus, film school had become his last chance for career salvation.

  Wilson had once told Shawn that the best directors were the alphas of their creative packs. Once they found a winning combination, they worked with the same crews on all their projects. Wilson believed he had found the perfect counterpart in Shawn: someone more skilled than he was, but who lacked the charisma to direct.

  Shawn had to agree with the assessment. He felt his place was behind the scenes as a screenwriter or cinematographer, something that wouldn’t require schmoozing or interpreting the emotions of volatile actors.

  Fifteen minutes later, as more than two hundred students filled the theater, Shawn’s enthusiasm for the class waned. It was packed with jocks, and clusters of fraternity and sorority types, who clearly thought a class where they got to watch movies would be an easy A.

  Lolita had begun after a brief introduction by Professor Mascaro. This was Shawn’s first time seeing the film on a large screen, and he did his best to drown out the giggling and hooting and soak it in.

  When the film ended with the frame frozen on the bullet hole beneath the eye of the Gainsborough portrait, Mascaro appeared behind the podium. He wore a burgundy button down with a diagonally striped blue tie and a corduroy tan blazer. Shawn thought he resembled Tony Bennet with his long nose and thick helmet of graying curly hair.

  Aided by his Italian accent, the first thing the professor said got the biggest laugh of the day, “Well, whatta you think?”

  An athlete in the front row blurted, “Awesome. I didn’t think a black and white movie could be funny.”

  “Yes. Mr. Kubrick was a master of commedia nera, or ‘black comedy,’ where he shows us the darkest, ugliest side of human nature, but allows us to laugh at it. Mr. Kubrick made four movies in the 1960s: Spartacus, then after Lolita came Dr. Strangelove, and then 2001: A Space Odyssey.” He accentuated 2001: A Space Odyssey with a dramatic twirl of his wrist, which had everyone laughing again.

  He continued. “These four films would forever change the history of cinema, and that is why we will study each one in this class. So who can tell me how Mr. Kubrick achieved the light tone of the film?”

  Shawn stopped taking notes. This was obviously going to be “Kubrick for Dummies,” as he should have expected for a class open to the general student population. As Professor Mascaro lectured, Shawn found himself getting more and more aggravated. Every time Mascaro said Kubrick, he pronounced it Koo-brick instead of Kyu-brick. When discussing the motifs, he failed to connect the themes of deception and entrapment with any of the film’s chess imagery or symbolism. Worst of all was how Mascaro decided to conclude the lecture.

  “In conclusion, I will point out two things that require a sharp eye to notice. When Humbert first enters Quilty’s mansion, the large painting of the woman is lying on its side at the front entrance. But then later, what is this?...” Mascaro jumped forward to the closing scene, when Quilty ascends a stairwell and hides behind the same painting before being shot. “It’s the same painting! Somehow it grew legs and walked up the stairs? Continuity error-issimo!”

  Shawn stuck a pencil between his teeth to prevent them from grinding.

  “And here is something even worse!” Mascaro rewound to the beginning of the film, where Humbert drives toward the mansion.

  As the scenes crossfaded, Mascaro paused the film exactly where Shawn knew he would.

  “It is there only for a few frames, but watch the crossfade and you can see the figure of a man quickly exiting the frame. Who could it be?” The image cut to a grainy blow-up of the figure. “It is Kubrick himself! He forgot that the camera started rolling! As you can see, even the greatest directors make the bonehead mistakes.”

  The pencil sna
pped loudly in Shawn’s mouth, echoing throughout the theater.

  “Is everything okay out there?” Mascaro asked, looking to where the sound originated.

  “No,” Shawn responded, not hiding the contempt in his voice.

  “What’s wrong, young man?”

  Shawn stood up so the professor could see him. “Perhaps you could explain your assertion that the mistakes you referred to are in fact mistakes.”

  Wilson tugged Shawn’s shirt and urged under his breath, “Sit back down, dude.”

  Shawn swiped Wilson’s hand away without breaking his glare.

  “Scusi... what is your name?” said Mascaro.

  “Shawn Hagan.”

  Mascaro quickly glanced at his notebook and chuckled to himself. “Ah yes, Shawn Hagan. The other professors informed me about you. They say you have a... unique brain function. Yes?”

  “Unique brain function? Exactly what is that supposed to mean?”

  The exchange shifted to the politically incorrect and the other student’s were loving every second of it.

  “It means, how do you say?”

  “Autism? Is that the word you’re searching for?”

  “I am no expert.”

  “Clearly. I’m non-neural-typical, but my ‘brain function’ is not the question here. I’d like you to please explain how you know those are mistakes.”

  “I am a filmmaker. When you make a film, sometimes props get moved from here to there and nobody notices. Later, in editing, you say, ‘Oh no! Those flowers were on that table in the last shot!’ But you have to live with it.”

  “So your evidence is that you made mistakes on your films, therefore Stanley Kubrick also did?”

  Mascaro was speechless.

  Shawn turned from Mascaro and addressed the class. “Beginning with Lolita, Kubrick had full control and final cut on all his films. He planned and designed every frame he shot down to the smallest detail. The painting was the most important prop in the whole scene, so he would have kept a close eye on it. If it moved, it’s because that’s what Kubrick wanted it to do. And as for the “editing mistake,” Lolita was Kubrick’s sixth feature film. He was a master editor. Professor, are you really contending that Kubrick didn’t know how a crossfade worked?”