Trivia for
Eyes Wide Shut (1999)

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• Harvey Keitel and Jennifer Jason Leigh originally played Victor Ziegler and Marion Nathanson. After Keitel and Leigh had shot some scenes, Keitel, left the production due to his obligations to another project. His scenes needed to be re-shot, but Leigh was not available to reshoot them (due to a scheduling conflict with eXistenZ (1999)). Consequently, Sydney Pollack and Marie Richardson were brought in to play the respective roles.
  
  
• Melissa Joan Hart auditioned for a role in this movie.
  
  
• According to writer Frederic Raphael, the final form of Bill's family name (Harford, as opposed to Scheuer in the original story) was inspired by a debate about Bill's character. Raphael felt Bill should be Jewish as in the original, but Stanley Kubrick insisted Bill and Alice be "vanilla" Americans, without any details that would arouse any presumptions. Kubrick said that Bill should be a bit like Harrison Ford - hence the name Harford.
  
  

• In order for the film to be given an R rating in America, some scenes contain computer-generated people in the foreground obscuring some of the more explicit sexual action.
  
  
• When Bill Harford returns to Soho, a sign painted on the side of a building prominently features the name BOWMAN. David Bowman is a character in director Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968).
  
  
• One of the patients who Tom Cruise cancels is called Kaminsky, the name of one of the hibernating crew that HAL kills in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968).
  
  
• The mask that Bill Harford wears with his costume is modeled from the face of Ryan O'Neal, a reference to Barry Lyndon (1975).
  
  
• The password "fidelio" (from the Latin root "fidelis" meaning "faithful") refers to Ludwig van Beethoven's only opera, "Fidelio". In the opera, Fidelio is a woman who disguises herself as a man to save her lover.
  
  
• In the film, Todd Field plays a character who dropped out of medical school ten years earlier and now plays the piano. Ten years before this film was released, Field played a pianist who dropped out of medical school in Gross Anatomy (1989) which starred Matthew Modine who played "Joker" in Full Metal Jacket (1987).
  
  
• This film contains in-joke references to almost all of Stanley Kubrick's films, including his first feature Fear and Desire (1953). At one point we see a scene from Blume in Love (1973) on a TV set. "Blume" was directed by Paul Mazursky, who made his acting debut in Fear and Desire (1953).
  
  
• A real estate agent's sign that appears briefly in shot at the end of a street carries the name Vitali. The newspaper article that Bill reads announcing the death of Mandy mentions that she was a model and that she had been involved with a designer named Leon Vitali. 'Leon Vitali' is one of Kubrick's longest-serving colleagues and also plays Red Cloak.
  
  
• Stanley Kubrick died just four days after presenting Warner Bros. with what was reported to be a final cut of the film, after a legendary long shoot.
  
  
• A VHS copy of the movie Rain Man (1988) is seen in Alice and Bill's bedroom on top of their entertainment stand during their marijuana-enhanced argument.
  
  
• The tremendous hype around the release of this film resulted in several rumors about the plot. The most widely circulated was the mistaken rumor that in the film, Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman played married psychiatrists having affairs with their patients.
  
  
• When Bill enters his apartment for the last time (right before he discovers the mask on his pillow) we can see a stack of Stanley Kubrick videos from on the long table under the painting. The one on the top is Full Metal Jacket (1987).
  
  
• The letters and the newspaper read by Tom Cruise are written in Italian for the Italian version of this movie. Apparently, Stanley Kubrick shot those scenes with papers written in different languages, as he did for The Shining (1980).
  
  
• Stanley Kubrick had three assistants for "Eyes Wide Shut". Their credits are "Assistant to the Director" ('Leon Vitali' ), "Assistant to Stanley Kubrick" (Anthony Frewin) and "Assistant to Mr. Kubrick" (Emilio D'Alessandro).
  
  
• While VHS and region 2 DVD editions sold in Great Britain, Germany and France have always been completely uncensored the original region 1 DVD contained the USA theatrical cut which contained computer-generated people in the foreground obscuring some of the more explicit sexual action during the orgy sequence. However the USA version of 2007 double DVD special edition (encoded, as now appears to be Warner Bros. standard practice, for regions 1, 2, 3 & 4) contains the full uncensored European theatrical print, making it the first time Stanley Kubrick's final cut has been made directly available in any form to customers in the USA.
  
  
• Sky Dumont dubbed his part himself in the German release.
  
  
• Rade Serbedzija dubbed himself in the Italian release.
  
  
• Director Trademark: [Stanley Kubrick] [114] The room in the morgue visited by Bill is in wing C, room 114 (C-Rm114, or CRM-114). CRM-114 was the name of the decoding machine in Kubrick's film Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964), as well as the number printed on the medicine that Alex is given in A Clockwork Orange (1971).
  
  
• Cameo: [Emilio D'Alessandro] Kubrick's assistant appears as the book vendor.
  
  
• Stanley Kubrick's daughter Katharina Kubrick and his grandson Alex Hobbs appear as the mother and the kid patient who had his face examined by Bill.
  
  
• The music during the ceremony at the masked ball is a fragment of an Orthodox mass played backwards; the priest is singing in Romanian.
  
  
• The film was "pushed" two stops in processing, thus enabling Stanley Kubrick to film using existing source lighting (table lamps, overhead lights, etc.) whenever possible. The light level remained low even when lighting had to be supplemented with Lowell or Chinese paper ball lamps as fill or key lights.
  
  
• Entered into The Guinness Book of World Records as "The Longest Constant Movie Shoot".
  
  
• Though often referred to as Stanley Kubrick's "unfinished masterpiece", the final edit of the film was actually presented to Warner Bros. (by Kubrick) a full four days before his death.
  
  
• Filming on this movie lasted 400 days.
  
  
• The 13 and-a-half minute billiard room scene between Tom Cruise and Sydney Pollack took about three weeks of filming. The greeting scene at the party early in the picture took only two hours.
  
  
• Early on in production, Stanley Kubrick, a huge Woody Allen fan, considered casting him in the Victor Ziegler role eventually given to Sydney Pollack. He also considered casting Steve Martin in the role of Dr. William Harford, eventually given to Tom Cruise.
  
  
• Stanley Kubrick's first film to open at #1 at the US box office.
  
  
• When Stanley Kubrick was first developing ideas for the film in the early 1980's his first choice for the male lead was Steve Martin. Kubrick had greatly enjoyed The Jerk (1979).
  
  
• CAMEO(Lisa Leone: the set decorator and second unit production manager is playing Lisa.
  
  
• Cameo: [Brian W. Cook] served as co-producer and first assistant director and played the tall butler.
  
  
• Due to Stanley Kubrick's fear of travel virtually the entire film was shot in and near London (despite the movie's New York setting). Elaborate street sets built at Pinewood Studios were used for all the scenes showing Tom Cruise walking around the city.
  
  
• Christiane Kubrick (Stanley's wife) and Katharina Kubrick (Kubrick's stepdaughter) contributed original paintings to the film.
  
  
• Next to the Sonata Jazz club is a café called "Gillespie's", named after famous jazz musician Dizzy Gillespie.
  
  
• Paul Thomas Anderson made a visit to the set, where he offered the role of Frank T.J. Mackey in Magnolia (1999) to Tom Cruise.
  
  
• In a few shots of Tom Cruise walking through the city, background plates of actual New York streets were rear-projected behind the actor walking on a treadmill.
  
  
• The Harford's apartment is based on a New York apartment where the Kubrick family lived during the early 1960s.
  
  
• This movie spent almost a year in post-production.
  
  
• Variety reported that Stanley Kubrick himself selected the movie's release date after analyzing scores of box-office data provided to him Warner Bros.
  
  
• Stanley Kubrick and director of photography Larry Smith tested out different film stocks and finally settled on one that had been discontinued by Kodak. As a courtesy, Kodak offered to supply as many rolls of this film as would be needed for the project.
  
  
• Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman signed open-ended contracts. They agreed to work on this project until Stanley Kubrick released them from it, however long that turned out to be.
  
  
• The article Bill Harford (Tom Cruise) is reading in the café titled "Ex-beauty queen dies in hotel drugs overdose" credits "Larry Celona" as the article's author. Larry Celona was the journalistic advisor for the film.
  
  
• Director Trademark: [Stanley Kubrick] [Bathroom] At the party, a girl overdoses in Victor's bathroom.
  
  
• The last movie that Stanley Kubrick ever directed.
  
  
• 'Vincent D'Onofrio (I)' , who played Leonard "Private Pyle" Lawrence in Kubrick's film Full Metal Jacket (1987), had this open advice for Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman when it was announced they'd be making ‘Eyes Wide Shut’ and working with Kubrick: Rent a house or apartment, because you're going to be in England for a while.
  
  
• Eva Herzigova was offered the role of Mandy by Kubrick, but she refused because there were too many naked scenes and Kubrick didn't want to modify them.
  
  
• According to writer Frederic Raphael a few of the proposed titles for the film were "You and Me" and "The Female Subject". Kubrick personally chose "Eyes Wide Shut".
  
  

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