Stanley Kubrick Wanted Bill Murray for EYES WIDE SHUT

Turns out Tom Cruise was not Stanley Kubrick’s first choice to star in his final film Eyes Wide Shut. Today we have word Kubrick wanted an actor with ‘a comedian’s resilience’ like Bill Murray, Tom Hanks, or Steve Martin.

True story.

In a new biography on the late director Stanley Kubrick: American Filmmaker author David Mikics writes: “In the Seventies, [Kubrick] fantasized about casting an actor in Dream Story who would have a comedian’s resilience, imagining Steve Martin or Woody Allen in the leading role. In a notebook from the Eighties, he listed a series of possible leading men, including Dustin Hoffman, Warren Beatty, Alan Alda, Albert Brooks, Bill Murray, Tom Hanks, and Sam Shepherd.”

You can read the full story when Yale University Press releases the book on October 13th. Will you be snagging a copy? Make sure to let us know in the comments below or on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram

Based on the 1926 novella Traumnovelle by Arthur Schnitzler, the story is transferred from early 20th-century Vienna to 1990s New York City. The film follows the sexually charged adventures of Dr. Bill Harford, who is shocked when his wife, Alice, reveals that she had contemplated having an affair a year earlier. He then embarks on a night-long adventure, during which he infiltrates a massive masked orgy of an unnamed secret society.

Rated R for strong sexual content, nudity, language and some drug-related material, the film sports a 75% approval rating over on Rotten Tomatoes with a Critics Consensus that reads: Kubrick’s intense study of the human psyche yields an impressive cinematic work.

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