3: How Did They Ever Make a Movie of Lolita? (1962)

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Trigger warning. This podcast involves discussions of child sexual abuse
and pedophilia. Listener discretion is advised. In nineteen fifty eight,
Stanley Kubrick was a director on the rise, but had
yet to release a big hit. Before the age of thirty,
he had already directed four movies, the most recent of

(00:20):
which was a war movie called Paths of Glory and
starred pretty big star Kirk Douglas. This was also his
first collaboration with producer James Harris. But Kubrick wasn't the
legend we know him as today. Yet we know him
now as the director of two thousand one, A Space Odyssey,
or The Shining or Doctor Strain Glove or Clockwork Orange,
and it wouldn't be until nineteen sixty that he released

(00:43):
his first major hit, Spartacus. Kubrick and Harris didn't quite
have the major cred yet, but they did have good
reputations in Hollywood, and most importantly, they had a hundred
fifty thousand dollars in nineteen fifty eight money to pay
for the rights to adapt Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita, convincing Nabukov
that Lolita should be adapted to the screen wasn't much

(01:04):
of a challenge. The book of had been a movie
buff for years, with a reputation for bursting out laughing
extremely loudly in movie theaters, and he'd even written his
nineteen thirty two Russian language novel Laughter in the Dark
with film adaptation in mind. What was not going to
be so easy was convincing Nabokov that he should be
the one to write the script. The first draft of

(01:25):
the Lolita screenplay was written by Calder Willingham, a very
British name for someone who was American. He was a
Kuber collaborator who had co written Paths of Glory and
would go on to write drafts of Spartacus and The Graduate. Now.
All we know about this draft now is that Kuper
didn't like it, and so Koper can Harris were essentially

(01:45):
begging Nabukoff to adapt the work himself. By nine, here's
a telegraph from Kuber to Nabukoff. Book a masterpiece and
should be followed even if Legion and Code disapproved. Stop
still believe you are the only one for the screen
a stop. If financial details can be agreed, would you
be available? And here's Nabokov's reaction. Written in the foreword

(02:08):
of the published screenplay, the idea of tampering with my
own novel causes me only revulsion. But there were some
butterflies worth catching in the region, so the Nabakos packed
their bags for Beverly Hills to meet with Stanley Kubrick.
It did not go well in person. Kubrick was far
more conscious of skirting their production code that held content
coming out of Hollywood in a vice gript from the

(02:30):
early nineteen thirties until the late nineteen sixties. Here's how
Nabakov describes that meeting. I was told that in order
to appease the sensor, a later scene should contain some
BEAUTI hint to the effect that Humbert had been secretly
married to Lolita all along. Nabukov says, no way, and
he turns the gig down. And at this time the
book off wasn't even totally comfortable with a young actress

(02:53):
playing Lolita at all, and was actively trying to think
of ways around it. But while he was back in
Europe this summer, he couldn't stop thinking about how he
would do the adaptation. Ideas continued to pop up, and
so when his agent came back with an offer from
Kubrick and Harris forty dollars to write the script. Nubukov agreed.
On March one, nine sixty, Kubrik and Nibakov met again

(03:14):
and they had a debate of what Nabokov would concede
to the Hollywood Code and what absolutely needed to stay.
On March nine, Nabukov began to meet with prospective Lolita's
and I am going to be calling her Lolita in
this episode because that is the name she is referred
to as for the entire movie. But the casting of

(03:34):
Lolita was a decision that had caused a lot of talk,
and over eight hundred young actors had auditioned for the park.
The first choice had been child star Hailey Mills, who
was and is most famous for her Disney roles in
movies like Pollyanna and The Parent Trap, not the Lindsay
Lohan one. Much later in her career, Mills had this

(03:55):
to say of Lolita. I wanted to do it. I'd
read the book but didn't under stand the implications of it.
My parents were put under quite a bit of pressure
to let me do it. They were offered a renoir
still under contract at Disney. It wasn't a huge surprise
that this did not end up happening, So Nabukov doesn't
meet Hayley Mills on March nine. Instead, he meets the

(04:16):
seventeen year old Tuesday Weld, who was a pretty interesting
choice for this part. Weld had been the main source
of her family's income since she was a toddler. After
her father suddenly died, she had suffered a nervous breakdown
by the age of nine. She, like Lolita, had been
a victim of sexual abuse as a child beginning at eleven,
and had been linked to several men far older than

(04:37):
her in her early teen years, and had it framed
as consensual, including a forty four year old Frank Sinatra
when she was fourteen. This is your annual reminder that
Frank Sinatra fucking sucks. Nabukov, however, did not think that
Tuesday was the right fit, saying this a graceful engineer,
but not my idea of Lolita. Later in life, Tuesday

(05:00):
Weld agreed and said this, I didn't have to play Lolita.
I was Lolita. Meanwhile, a lot of actors are chomping
at the bit to play European child sex abuser, Humbert Humbert,
We're talking Laurence Olivier, David Niven, Marlon Brando, but that
part ends up going to James Mason, who fits Nabokov's
description of Humbert from the book pretty well, although he

(05:22):
is in his fifties and the Humbert of the book
is thirty seven. And by September nineteen six, Nabokov had
written a six hour, sprawling version of the script that
Kuper said was unfilmable, and then a second draft that
would eventually be published that Nabukov was considerably less enthusiastic about.
The part of Lolita still hadn't been cast, and on

(05:42):
September twenty nine, Nabukov and Kubrick meet for the last time.
It's here that Nabuko first sees photos of an unknown
actor named sue Lyon, and he has this to say.
Su Lean was a demure nymphete of fourteen or so
who said Kubrick could easily be made to look younger
and grubbier for the part of Lolita for which he

(06:02):
had already signed her up. On the whole, I felt
rather pleased with the way things had worked out. Yes
he was supposed to have said, Sue Lion. They're not
su Lean, but Robert is really busy and I didn't
want to ask him to do it again. And it's,
you know, not the least funny mistake I've ever heard.
It is Sue Lion. Thank you, Robert Evans. The movie

(06:25):
was released in June two and lead with this tagline.
And that's actually a pretty easy question to answer. How
did they ever make a movie of Lolita? They didn't,
And Stanley Kubrick would never make a movie of even
a whiff of a female protagonist ever. Again, this is

(06:46):
Lolita Podcast. Yeah, welcome back to Lolita Podcast. My name

(07:21):
is Jamie Loftus, and today we are talking about the
first attempt and I cannot stress the word attempt enough
to adapt Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita to the big screen. Now,
when I say they didn't make a movie of Lolita,
here's what I mean. In this case. Kubrick's movie doesn't
just scale back the abuse towards Lolita and style her

(07:43):
to appear much older than the twelve year old of
the book or even the fourteen year old of the movie.
This movie has played as comedy for the most part,
with more focus on the inflated role of Claire Quilty
and Humbert. Humbert trying to deceive everyday people from the
reality of who and what they really are. What happens
to Lolita is not made clear is abuse, and more

(08:05):
often than not, her behavior is framed as inviting Humberd's attention.
The fact that a fourteen year old cannot consent to
an adult is a non issue, and the truth of
it is ignored entirely as far as nineteen sixty two
is concerned. This is a slightly problematic love story, and
I know I'm coming down hard on it right at
the beginning, but particularly after speaking with psychologists who specialize

(08:27):
in treating survivors of child abuse, these changes do matter.
We'll be speaking with her at length next week, but
I wanted to share this part of my interview with
author of reading Lolita to Understand child sexual abuse, Lucia Williams.
So he shows it with through literary, you know, in
a subtle way. But he shows her crying, He shows

(08:51):
how upset she is, that she's isolated, that you know,
he cannot play with her friends, cannot go to school
with her friends. So he showed is that. But one
of the issues that perhaps people get confused. And I've
seen very young modern writers talking about this, saying, oh,

(09:13):
she's the one who seduced him. She wasn't even a virgin.
Well why is first of all, is she really a
virgin or not? She describes to him that when she
was at camp she made sex for the first time, right,
but if she did, it was with the pal, it
was somebody with her own age. And that, you know,

(09:36):
a twelve year old kid having sex with a thirteen
year old kid. That's called an introduction to sex, which
might or not be violent. That's going to depend, right,
but it might be okay. But according to him, he
describes it in a way to say, you know, he

(09:57):
has to defend himself. He considered, and so poets never killed.
I'm a poet. I could never ever heard her. So
it's it's to his interest that she was already very
precocious sexually. Thanks so much to Lucia, and we'll be
talking to her again soon. And virtually all of the

(10:19):
misconceptions she's describing are represented to some degree in this movie.
Have the artistic merit argument all you want, but the
way Kubrick trivializes abuse. Here is undeniable, and he's not
doing this alone. And we're going to have a talk
about Nabokov's adaptation choices for his own work that I
found pretty surprising. But this movie does stand out among
other adaptations for a couple of reasons. It's the only

(10:41):
one that Nabokov himself was involved in writing. It sets
many of the precedents that haunt future adaptations, and maybe
more than anything else, it establishes a very particular aesthetic,
because seriously, when you picture Lolita, what are you picturing
Here's might be different, but the most common answer is

(11:04):
a teenage girl looking over a pair of heart shaped
sunglasses seductively at the viewer. Sometimes she's got a lollipop,
other times she doesn't. This is an image pulled directly
from the ninety two movie poster, and it's possibly the
most enduring and iconic image associated with Lolita the cultural figure.
It's an image that's referenced in pop culture up until today.

(11:25):
If you count laundel raised music as relevant, it still
has an impact on fashion and music and movies that
followed it. And guess what, that shot does not appear
in the movie at all. Lolita first appears in the
movie looking at Humberg, granted in a way that is
deeply sexualized that we'll talk about, but it's over regular sunglasses,

(11:47):
the dark glasses that Nabokov describes in his book, no lollipops,
no heart shapes, and yet this is the strongest image
we have of anything. So today we're going to talk
about how the sixty two Lolita movie got made, what
Nabokov's experience was working on it, and how the image
of Lolita the cultural product was cultivated through an unknown

(12:09):
actor named Sue lions excellent performance, as well as some
insight into how her treatment on the side of Lolita
and the media after affected her life. Moving forward, we're
going to talk Kubrick with a Kubrick scholar who has
some insight on how Kubrick and James Harris approached the
story and began a long line of misinterpretations of Lolita

(12:29):
that get us all the way up to Lana del
Rey singing Hey, Lolita Hey. And that's not to mention
details of Sue lions experiences on the production that have
only come to light in the public weeks before I'm
recording this. Sarah Wineman, who I will be speaking to
next week as well, has written about Lolita extensively and
is the author of The Real Lolita, The Kidnapping of

(12:52):
Sally Horner, and the novel that scandalized the world. In October,
she reported for Airmail that producer James Harris had taken
Sue Lyon's virginity either during the production when she was fourteen,
or shortly after on the subsequent press tour, depending on
who you ask in Lyon's life. We can't ask Lyon
herself because she passed away in late but we're going

(13:16):
to be dedicating a future episode to the experiences of
the girls and women who have played the part of Lolita.
But I did want to include this passage from her
piece here. Quote. A July fourteenth, nine sixty two column
by Dorothy Kilgallan carried the headline Lolita virus catching for
Sue Lyon. The item reads, quote within a quote, oh no, quote,

(13:40):
Sue Lyon, the pretty star of Lolita, has bowled over
her producer, James B. Harris. Her age is sixteen according
to her studio, and he's an old man of thirty three.
She prefers the company of mature men, and James maybe
her cup of tea when she's a little older and
decides that it's proper to court her. Unquote, Sue Lyon
later had used to say when the nineteen nineties adaptation,

(14:02):
directed by Adrian Line was first announced in nine quote,
My destruction as a person dates from that movie. Lolita
exposed me to temptations no girl of that age should undergo.
I defy any pretty girl who has rocketed to stardom
at fourteen in a sex nymphete role to stay on

(14:22):
a level path. Thereafter. We will pick up on lyons
experiences later in the series. And while this movie has
a generally negative legacy, Nabokov ends up getting an Oscar
nomination for Best Screenplay, which is ironic given how next
to nothing of his scripts actually appeared on screen. Here's
what he said in the foreword to the published screenplay

(14:45):
when adapting Low Leader to the speaking screen. Cubrick saw
my novel in one way, I saw it in another.
That's all. Nor can one deny that infinite fidelity maybe
an author's ideal, but can prove a producer's ruin. My
first reaction to the picture was a mixture of probation
and reluctant pleasure. So when we talk about the script
to the sixty two Lolita, the one we're referring to

(15:07):
is Kubrick's and Harris's. Kubrick fans don't discuss Lolita that
much when they talk about his work, because it's honestly
far from his best. But I finally excuse made for
why it's not his best to be pretty telling, and
it's this something he said years later. Had I realized
how severe the censorship limitations were going to be, I

(15:28):
probably wouldn't have made the film. So, you guys, he
like would have made an amazing movie that was respectful
to its central character, but like he couldn't. And he's
right in saying his Lolita doesn't tackle any of the
anti child sex abuse themes of the book, and part
of that can be attributed to the production code still active.

(15:49):
But no one had a gun to Kubrick and Harris's
head saying their adaptation had to be comedy heavy. No
one said, let's let Peter Seller's improvise in a movie
about a pedophile for minutes at a time about absolutely nothing,
and certainly no one forced them to lay the foundation
for Lolita's sexualized image through both the script and the

(16:10):
language of the camera. So the arcuman I'm going to
lay out here is that director Kubrick and producer Harris
scapegoating the production code as troubling andrewcon Ian as it
absolutely was, is a way of dodging a lot of
accountability about their own bad choices. And I say this
for many reasons that will discuss later in the episode,
but for starters, Kubrick, like every other man who was

(16:33):
attempted to adapt Lolita and it has been all men,
saw the source material as a love story. Here's a
clip from an interview he did with Terry Southern at
Esquire at the time of the movie's release. Is certainly
one of the great love stories, isn't it. I think
Lionel Trilling's piece and encounter is very much to the
point when he speaks of it is the first great

(16:54):
love story of the twentieth century, unless we forget the
tone of that Lionel Trilling piece he's referring to from
the magazine and counter from Here's a quote quote. We
naturally inclined to be lenient towards a rapist who eventually
feels a deathless devotion to his victim unquote. I mean,

(17:18):
if you don't laugh, you're just going to cry. So
the issues here extend past the production code. The director
and arguably co writer of the movie didn't get what
the story was about. But all right, Kubrick, I'll play ball.
What kind of Hollywood landscape was Lolita released into? Because
to understand the four D blame game being played here

(17:40):
and why it's taken until October for the abuse of
power associated with this production to come to light, we
do need some context what that code was, how it
was connected to Hollywood, and how it was connected to
the sexualization of young girls in nineteen sixty two. Buckle up, yeah.

(18:14):
The Hayes production code of was named for ex Republican
politician and ex Postmaster General William H. Hayes, who was
appointed the first president of the Motion Picture Producers and
Distributors Association. And this code is well, it's a lot.
Here are some excerpts from the original text read by

(18:34):
my dear friend Grace Thomas. Though regarding motion pictures primarily
as entertainment without any explicit purpose of teaching or propaganda,
producers know that the motion picture within its own field
of entertainment may be directly responsible for spiritual or moral progress.

(18:58):
For higher types of social life, and for much correct thinking.
The sanctity of the institution of marriage and the home
shall be upheld. Pictures shall not infer that low forms
of sex relationship are the accepted or common thing. Sex

(19:21):
perversion or any inference to it is forbidden. Children's sex
organs are never to be exposed. Misgenation, sex relationships between
the white and black races is forbidden. A book describes

(19:42):
a film vividly presents one presents on a cold page,
the other by apparently living people. So all of that
with the exception of protecting children from being exploited on film,
although as we will discuss, this did not protect them
from their own bosses and co stars behind the scenes.

(20:06):
So again, really normal stuff. It goes without saying racist, sexist, homophobic. Really,
every bad thing you can be is what this code is.
And there is no doubt that this code had a
huge effect in suppressing progress in popular art. I mean hell,
next to the amount of pushback writers and directors got
while the code was in place. Nabokov's concerns about being

(20:27):
simply taken to court over the Lolita Manuscript in the
publishing industry seems kind of like a cakewalk. Back in
the early days of the production code and the nineties,
the concept of Hollywood was full of powerful men exerting
pretty extreme control, both financially and sometimes sexually, over young
girls in the name of art and more significantly profit.

(20:49):
And there's some overlap between the literary and film world here.
We talked in the last episode about how much of
Nabokov's female characters across his fiction suffer extensively while their
stories are being narrated by men. Kind of exactly what's
going on in Hollywood too, thanks mainly to, as in
literature and in life, men exerting an extreme amount of

(21:10):
creative control, particularly over their female and child leads. So
over on the director side, there are notoriously antagonistic and
abusive directors like D. W. Griffith, Alfred Hitchcock, Howard Hughes,
the list goes on, And on the other side we
have draconian profiteering producers with stars under contract that squeeze

(21:31):
every last drop of labor out of actors like Louis B. Mayor,
Jack Warner, David ol Selznick. The list goes on there too,
and the long term issues that these creative heads had
on their stars, particularly younger ones, really can't be overstated.
One needs to look no further than examples like the
long term abuse and exploitation of child stars like Judy

(21:52):
Garland and Mickey Rooney, or the endless promotional tours and
photos that starlets were required to do in order to
promote men's move fees using their bodies like Jane Russell,
like Marilyn Monroe. And there are a number of wonderful
books podcast documentaries that cover this time in Hollywood in
gruesome and fascinating detail, and I'll include them in the

(22:13):
footnotes of this episode. Particular recommendations are Karina longworths you
must remember this and be kind rewind on YouTube. So
Hollywood is not an industry known for being kind to
really anybody except rich white men, and had no vested interest,
especially at this time, in changing that. But this exploitation

(22:34):
wasn't limited to the profiteers alone. It extended to the
consumers to an extent. When child stars first came into
the mainstream, they were immediately made to act more like adults,
and for young girls, this automatically led to being sexualized
from a very early age, and this is ridiculous. A
writer named Graham Green, who you might remember from the

(22:56):
last episode is the English critic who would later be
the first to give Lolita the book its first big
critical break back, says this about Shirley Temple's movie from
seven called Wee Willie Winky. He says that she has
quote a certain adroid coquettery which appealed to middle aged men. Unquote, Okay,

(23:20):
it does get worse from here. I didn't even feel
right having a friend voice this because it's so gross,
So I am I'm doing it myself. Trigger warning. Graham
Green continues, quote in Captain January, she wore trousers with
the mature suggestiveness of Dietrich. Her neat and well developed
rump twisted in the tap dance. Her naked eyes had

(23:42):
a sidelong, searching coquetterie. Now and we Willie Winky wearing
short kilts, she is completely TAZZI watch the way she
measures a man with agile studio eyes with dimple depracity,
using her well shaped and desirable little body on quote
Jesus Christ. So twentieth century Fox files a libel lawsuit

(24:06):
and bankrupts the magazine these words were published in. But
Graham Green goes on as a writer and hails the
novel Lolita by Vladimir Nabulkov as a great work in
nineteen fifty five. And yes, the distance between nineteen thirty
seven and nineteen fifty five isn't insignificant. But knowing Graham
Green's attitudes in nineteen thirty seven about young girls at

(24:28):
age thirty three and then his opinions on Lolita in
nineteen fifty five, it's worth saying, were these nineteen fifty
quotes said with a full understanding that the book Lolita
is not taking Humbert side. And this is a somewhat
extreme example of how child stars were talked about at
this time. But there is no doubt that the child
stars of the nineteen thirties were asked to be adults

(24:50):
in many ways and were sometimes physically and sexually abused
by their employers. Again, Judy Garland's experience as a girl
with Louis b. Mayer is a tragic and clear example
of this. In the nineties, this same wave of child
stars became preteens and teenagers in the industry evolved to
make new stories and develop new tropes for them. Elizabeth

(25:12):
Taylor transitions from child roles to young on Genuine Love.
Judy Garland's body continues to be regulated as her plotlines change.
Within the same couple of years, She's asked to sing
you made Me Love You at age fourteen to Clark Gable,
and just a few years later, her breasts are taped
down to play Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz to
appear more childlike. And this isn't even to mention the

(25:35):
handful of high profile child sex abuse cases surrounding stars
of early Hollywood who are still held in extremely high
regard today. Consider Charlie Chaplin, one of Hollywood's biggest stars
ever who made a number of slapstick comedies that involved
very young girls and not for no reason. In the
biography Tramp, written by Joyce Milton, and there's an anecdote

(25:58):
about Chaplin being fixated on a fifteen year old named
Hetty Kelly, who turned him down when propositioned. Chaplin remarked
on seeing her a year later that he quote was
disappointed to notice that she had developed breasts which he
did not find attractive unquote. There's another example Chaplin fixated
on a twelve year old named Maybelle Fournier around this

(26:19):
time and said this, I have always been in love
with young girls, not an enamorous way. I just loved
to caress and fondle Maybell, not passionately, just to have
her in my arms. Really a master class in absolute bullshit.
And then there was Mildred Harris, who met Chaplin at
age fourteen and was pregnant by him at sixteen, just

(26:42):
from being in his arms. I'm sure they got married
and divorced pretty quickly. Then again, Lolita Gray was fifteen
when thirty five year old Chaplain got her pregnant and
married her. This was disturbing to both Lolita and her mother,
who kept careful records of Chaplin's behavior under the assumption
that they would have to go to court over it
some day. When that divorce happened, the media finally reported

(27:04):
on Chaplin's repeated history of child molestation, but it didn't
damage his reputation enough to end his career. I mean, hell,
it barely affects how we view him now if people
know about this at all, which honestly I didn't. And yes,
that's Litlita, not Lowlita, but it's a near certainty that
Nabokov was aware of this scandal and may have had

(27:26):
the name in the back of his head when he
began writing. Then there's Errol Flynn, who is accused of
statutory rape by two teenagers, Peggy Saturley and Betty Hansen
in ninety two, and Flynn is actually brought to a
very public trial for twenty one days. He is, as
rapists often are, acquitted and returns to stardom. And he

(27:47):
is accused again at the end of the nineteen forties
by a different fifteen year old girl. He's acquitted again.
All evidence proved that he knew the girls were under
age and had in fact glorified it, calling things like
jail bait and san Quentin quaile. The reason he isn't
found guilty appears to be that his victims may not
have been virgins. And again there is that glimmer of

(28:10):
Lolita the book. Humbert assuages his obvious guilt after raping
Lolita for the first time by reminding himself that she's
had sex before, as if that matters. And that's not
even to mention how the abuse of child performers, women
and people of color would continue into today. In the
forties and nineteen fifties, the Hollywood Blacklist and the production

(28:32):
Code worked seamlessly together under McCarthy is um to prevent
progress in what could be shown on screen. The majority
of Hollywood got on board with persecuting any writer or
director that had so much as indicated a mild interest
in the idea of communism, and this caused a number
of writers to be fully blacklisted and sent the message

(28:52):
to those that were not blacklisted that the envelope was
not to be pushed. Interestingly enough, the first of the
Hollywood ten black listed, Dalton Trumbo, would only come back
into prominence under his own name, when Kirk Douglas publicly
and proudly recognized him as the credited writer of Stanley
Kubrick Spartacus in nineteen sixty. By the time Lolita is

(29:14):
first published in ninety five, the Hollywood landscape has shifted
yet again. The Code is still in place, but now
Marilyn Monroe is the world's biggest star, and she is
most frequently cast as a very childish character within a
very adult body. In the book Chasing Lolita, which I
can't recommend enough, writer Graham Vickers makes this argument about

(29:35):
Monroe quote had the nineteen fifties version of the damaged
little Victorian girl syndrome and projected it with an impersonation
of mental vacuity, physical vulnerability, and a constant need for
a father figure to look after her. Unquote. Within Monroe,
the child woman's stereotype was solidified as an image. On
the other end of that was Andre Hepburn as well.

(29:58):
As the increasing popularity of rock and roll, film is
becoming edgier and sexier. And I sound like a freshman
film professor, but it's true. There's a movie called Bonjour
Tristees by Auto Premature, which is based on a French
novel where a young Jeane Sieberg plays a teenager with
a fixation on her bachelor dad's sex life. Writers and

(30:20):
directors like Tennessee Williams and Elia Kazan entered the mainstream,
which continue to push the boundaries even further. And this
is a time in Hollywood that can be viewed a
number of ways. On one hand, teenagers sex lives or
something that hadn't really been acknowledged in mainstream cinema at
this point, even with the bizarre Olympian loopholes that Hollywood

(30:41):
movies of this time needed to find in order to
be up to code, because, of course, teenagers were exploring
their sexuality, and it's good that popular art was recognizing
that that's worth representing on screen. The inverse of that
is who were the people in charge of putting it
on screen and who is profiting the most? The nifties
bring us movie like Baby Doll, and nineteen fifty six

(31:02):
movie starring actress Carol Baker that's adapted from a Tennessee
Williams comic play twenty seven Wagons Full of Cotton. The
movie concerns a failed cotton gin owner named Archie Lee Megan,
whose nineteen year old wife Baby Doll Megan and yes
that's what she's called, will not have sex with Archie
until she turns twenty, although she seems pretty open to

(31:25):
doing so with another character called Silva. The way the
movie was marketed played to the sexualized child persona Marilyn
Monroe had made famous before, but turned it up to
an eleven. Baker is seen in press stills in a
short ninety sucking her thumb and sleeping in a broken
down child's crib, and the backlash to this was so

(31:45):
intense that Warner Brothers actually pulled the movie from a
national release shortly before the movie came out, so only
a year after Alita the novel is first released in
France and three years before it reaches shelves in the US.
Carol Baker as Baby Doll bears a striking resemblance to
how Sue Lion will later appear as Lolita in nineteen

(32:06):
sixty two. At the time of Baby Doll's release, it
was considered the dirtiest American made motion picture ever dot
dot dot legally exhibited, according to Time magazine. Like Lolita,
status as a band book only increasing its popularity, so
it was for Baker for Baby Doll. She's eventually nominated
for an Academy Award for Best Actress for her performance,

(32:29):
a Golden Globe for Best Actress, and one a Golden
Globe for Most Promising Newcomer, which she ended up sharing
with Jane Mansfield and Natalie would But Baker's career never
gets too much higher than Baby Doll. She went on
to appear in a number of other films and turned
in some really great performances, but the shadow cast by
her role and Baby Doll one that deeply sexualized and

(32:52):
stressed her. In terms of the type of media attention
it drew proved to be too intense to escape from under,
no matter how talented and she really was. That is
to say, she did incredible work in classic films for
years after, survived being blackballed by Hollywood over being over publicized,
and made a name for herself an independent film and publishing.

(33:13):
But even as of last year, Baby Doll is what
leads her headlines. Baker is still alive today and has
written four books, both her autobiography and some fiction, and
is an absolutely fascinating person. I highly recommend her work.
And in a twist that could only happen in Lolita,
Carol Baker of Baby Doll later has a daughter who

(33:35):
is also an actor, and Blanche Baker goes on to
star as Lolita in a failed Broadway adaptation by Edward
albe In. Seriously more on that in the future episode.
To borrow an example from the Lolita saga, you can
be Vladimir Nabokov and write an anti child sex abuse book,

(33:56):
and one of the people who glorifies what you're condemning,
Graham Green can be the same person that makes your
book famous. It doesn't change anything about the content, but
it does change the way it's framed to the general public.
So by nine sixty two we're reaching the tail end
of the production code Heyday, after nearly thirty years as

(34:18):
the law of Hollywood. It would be skirted with increasing
cleverness throughout the early sixties and would ultimately be abandoned
by the end of that decade, making way for greedy
mail auteurs of the seventies. And if you want to
talk about a class of directors that really loved to
brutalize women, will that's more time than we have here.

(34:38):
But ninety two doesn't just see the release of Kuperck's Lolita.
It's also the year the original version of Cape Fear
is released, a movie that really pushes the production code
to its absolute limits. Robert Mitchum's character Max Katie, a
convicted rapist, swears to take revenge on the lawyer who
landed him in prison, and there is an a specially

(35:00):
vicious scene where he clearly intends to rape the lawyer's
teenage daughter, Nancy. It's terrifying, and director Jay Lee Thompson
fought to keep this scene in the movie. When Cape
Fear was remade by Martin Scorsese in the early nineties.
The scene appears completely differently. While it's clear that Katie
still intends to rape Nancy, this time she appears to

(35:22):
be turned on by it, and she kisses him consentually
with an open mouth. It's yet another coincidence that's shared
with Lolita. The nineties update of the sixties adaptation is
you know what, We're still in the nineteen sixties. Let's
stay focused, Stanley Kubrick, What say you? There is demonstrable
proof that it was possible, even in a flawed way,

(35:45):
to present a predator as a predator in Hollywood movies
in nineteen sixty two. If we're using Cape Fear as
an example, you just didn't Now that we have an
idea of the media landscape, the kuber caress Lolita is
being released in to what are we working with here?
I want to give you a quick summary of what
happens in the movie to give you an idea of

(36:06):
exactly how much is changed from the book. It's a lot,
a lot changes. The movie starts on a long credit

(36:29):
sequence where Humbert Paint's lowlitast to nails, arguably the most
erotic scene in the entire movie, setting the president for
many adaptations to come. This movie starts at the end
of the book. Humbert shows up to Quality's mansion to
murder him. Humbert again is played by James Mason, and
Quialty is played by Peter Sellers, who will later be
famous for being in movies like Dr. Strangelove and the

(36:50):
Pink Panther series. And Peter Sellers is improvising a whole
lot in this movie. And so are you and I tonight,
She's mine, yours? So Quilty dies and we flash back
to four years earlier. Now, this adaptation does not take
place in seven. It seems to be taking place closer
to nineteen fifty seven based on context clues we get.

(37:13):
And speaking of context, here's the only context we get
for who Humbert. Humbert is. I decided to spend a
peaceful summer in the attractive resort town of Ramsdale. No Annabelle,
no sanatorium, no valeria, no psychologist genre jr. No letting
us know that the protagonist is well aware that he

(37:34):
is a pedophile. Another thing I find interesting is that
they used the word nymphed very early in the movie,
but never define it. Then we go straight to the
Hayes household, where Shelley Winters as Charlotte Hayes is playing
this character to the comedic hilt as in the book.
Humbert sees Lolita for the first time, and there is
sue Lyon su Lean in a bikini gazing at him

(37:58):
over dark sunglasses. Lolita is aged up to be fourteen
years old in this adaptation. Sue Lyon is fifteen at
the time of shooting, and she's been styled to look
closer to seventeen. There's a lot of word play in
this movie, which Nabokov is famous for, but this word
play is gross. What was a decisive factor? Hi Gard

(38:24):
Humbert spends his time in Ramsdale watching Lolita. There's a
short scene where he grabs Lolita's hand during a movie
all goals her hula hooping, and watches her go on
a date with some kid named Kenny at a local dance.
Claire Quilty is also at this party, although in this
version he is a TV writer who is apparently hooked
up with Charlotte in the past. Later that night, Lolita

(38:45):
goes to a sleepover, which means Charlotte gets Humbert alone,
and Humbert tries to give in Charlotte that she needs
to keep Lolita on a shorter leach, I didn't think
beginning to grow out. Charlotte is in the middle of
coming on to Humbert strong when Lolita gets home, which
noise Charlotte. They have this short exchange when Humbert is
out of the room. Do you have a good time
dancing with Claire quilty? Of course, he's a very area

(39:09):
that a gentleman. Yeah, I know all the girls are
crazy about him too. And after Lolita goes upstairs, Charlotte
pitches a fit. He isn't my thought. If I feel young,
why shouldn't min child resented? You don't resent it, do you?
When this is the start of another popular adaptation trope,
making Charlotte completely unstable and interpreting the hysteria that Humbert

(39:32):
describes in the book as simply what happens. Lolita and
Humbert talk alone for the first time and guests which
author they read Edgar, who's the divine dragon? Then she
feeds him a piece of ham As in the book.
Lolita is then sent to camp. She hugs him before
leaving instead of the book's kiss, and as in the book,

(39:54):
Humbert receives Charlotte's confession of love. He finds it hilarious
on me as much as I do you as a
lifelong maid, and so they get married. Charlotte is insecure
in his affections and during one night, says she will
kill herself if Humbert doesn't believe in God and takes

(40:14):
out a gun. Then they make out while Humbert stares
at a framed picture of Lolita. Humbert's blatant sexism towards
his new wife is captured pretty cleanly here. Even in
the most harmonious households such as ours, not all the
decision to taking brother female. Then, while she's out of
the room, Humbert loads her gun and fantasizes about shooting
her and framing it as an accident, calling it the

(40:35):
perfect murder. But then chickens out and Humbert's voiceover is
used pretty sparingly throughout this movie, but this is one
of the only times it sounds like the voiceover is
addressing a jury or an audience. What do you know, folks,
it's goodn't to make myself do it? Charlotte finds his journals,
is horrified what he's written about her daughter, and then,

(40:56):
unlike the book, she yells at her dead husband's ashes,
you are the soul of integrity. How do we produce
such a little beast? She leaves, is hit by a
car and is killed. Another deviation from the book. This
blow of her death is softened for some reason when
Humbert learns that she didn't have long to live anyways,
and that her kidneys were failing. Humbert then picks up

(41:17):
Lolita at Camp Climax and tells her that her mother
is sick. On the way to the Enchanted Hunter's Hotel,
where Quilty is there with Vivian dark Bloom and he's
talking to his secretary about their kinky sex life. For
some reason, when Humbert and Lolita arrive, they go up
to the one bed hotel room. Lolita lays kicking her
legs sleepover style, and this exchange happens two people showing

(41:39):
one inevitabody into into KINDI. Why is she gonna go
down to say about the cut? Now? You might remember
from when we discussed the book that this is ordinarily
where Dolores says the line it's called incest. This adaptation
avoids the idea of drugging women altogether, both Charlotte and Lolita,

(41:59):
but Humbert still goes downstairs to the hotel lobby and
unknowingly has a discussion with Quilty. Again a lot of
Peter Sellers improvising here, she was really lovely. I wish
I had a lovely, pretty, tough, lovely little girl like that.
I mean my daughter. This scene is too long. Humbert
then goes back up to the hotel room, almost doesn't
bring in the cot the hotel has provided for him,

(42:20):
but then decides to, and there's a long physical comedy
scene where the hotel employee and Hubbert try to set
the cot up without waking Lolita. Now, if you remember,
this is a significant deviation from the book, as this
next morning at the Enchanted Hunter's hotel is when Humbert
first rapes Dolores. In the movie, the physical intimacy only
gets as close as them touching hands and twirling hair.

(42:43):
Lolita talks about a fun game she learned a camp,
and they get pretty close to towing the nineteen sixty
two production code line. Here, I learned some real good
games in camp one in particularly was fun, but I
played it with Charlie. Are you sure you can't us
what came I'm talking about? She then whispers the answer
to him, and his eyes bug out. I mean you'd

(43:05):
never played that game when you were a kid, he
or She laughs, leans over to him on his cot
and we fade to black. They hit the road. There's
no expression of physical pain from Lolita as there is
in the book, and Humbert tells her that her mother
is dead. That night at the next hotel, Lolita weeps
from the other room. She says this to Humbert, true,
and she'll never leave me. I don't want to ever

(43:27):
be in one of those horrible places for juvenile linquds.
We then flash forward to Beardsley several months later, as
Humbert is already in his second semester of teaching. Humbert
is painting Lolita's nails and grills her about what she's
doing in her personal life, and it's clear to us
that he's been following her around. He mentioned one of
her friends, and we get this. But now for a change,

(43:49):
I'm going to ask you something about Michelle. You can't
have her. She belongs to Marie, and she asks him
if she can be in the school play written by
Quilty and Vivian dark Bloom. For some reason, Humbert doesn't
remember that he definitely knows who these people are. Then
Doctor zemp arrives and it's Quilty in disguise doing a

(44:09):
Doctor Freud cosplay. I think, but it really is just
Peter Sellers doing an accent anybody instarted Lolita in the
Fix of Fly. It ends with Quilty and Disguise convincing
Humbert to let Lolita do the play. So Lolita is
in the play and Humbert attends. Back at home, Humbert
and Lolita have a blowout argument, and Humbert ends the

(44:32):
discussion by suggesting they leave Beardsley. Lolita is resistant and
finally says how she really feels about him Hi. They
leave again. Lolita doesn't feel well and she goes to
the hospital. When back at the hotel, Humbert gets another
mysterious call from Quilty, even though he still somehow doesn't

(44:55):
know it's Quilty. Then Humbert goes to pick Lolita up
and finds out she's already left with her quote unquote
uncle Flash too. Lolita writes Humbert the letter asking for money,
saying she's married and pregnant. Humbert turns up at the
house and there's Lolita. She and Dick aren't as poor
as they are in the book, and she starts this
scene by apologizing to him, fine thing he's dropping out

(45:16):
aside for so long and then writing you for a
hand off. Humbert insists on knowing who took Lolita away,
and she admits it was Quilthy, saying the following he
wasn't like you and me. He wasn't a normal person.
He was a genius. She says she had a crush
on him, and he took on a number of disguises
to help her escape, and instead of saying she was

(45:39):
asked to do pornography as she does in the book
the movies, Lolita says that he had a bunch of
weird friends. What kind of weird friends, weird painters, nudice writers, weightlifters.
He gives her the money, and we find out at
the end that Humbert has died of coronary thrombosis. But
Lolita of the end, and I really do think that

(46:02):
this last choice is kind of a beautiful deviation from
Dolores's death during childbirth in the book strictly on a
cathartic level, because in this movie, the survivor of all
of this abuse actually survives. I was actually really touched
by this. Having her survive at the end is a
really heartening message for survivors who are watching the movie.

(46:24):
But of course Kuper did not make this movie for
survivors of abuse. He made it for men. Ending a
book of scholar including the book of himself, will admit
that his talents did not always translate to scripts. In fact,
a lot of what he wrote in the screenplay would
have been pretty impossible to translate to a scene at all.
But it wasn't a total novice like he claimed na

(46:46):
book of had written a number of plays and had
been in talks to write Hollywood screenplays in the past.
So the script is far from perfect, but reading through
his published lowly to screenplay was really interesting. He includes
several key elements from the book that are critical to
understanding who Humbert is. The psychologist John Ray Jr. Contextualizing

(47:06):
Humbert as a clear cut child sex abuser, the story
of Annabelle and Humbert's childhood fixation, and glorification of a
young girl. There's even an entire scene at the beginning
taking place at a sanatorium where Humbert frankly discusses his
obsession with underage girls with the psychologist John Ray and
acknowledges it as a serious issue. It is maybe my

(47:29):
favorite choice he makes in the entire screenplay is Nabukov
has Humbert's voiceover kind of instruct the director from the
very beginning of the movie. So Humbert's voiceover will say,
give me a shot of two hands being held, and
then we'll cut to that shot. He'll ask for a
shot of the French riviera, and that shot will appear.
And it's one of the more elegant attempts ever made

(47:51):
at making it clear that Humbert is the person pulling
the strings here, and it's not just the omniscient no
name narrator that we're used to. There is no tracted
quality disguises. Humbert is actually a lot more unlikable and
a lot less debonair, and there's more focus on the
road trip. One of my favorite editions is a short
scene where Humbert and Lolita run into Vladimir Nabokov himself,

(48:14):
Nabokov is like catching butterflies on the side of the road,
and it's really funny. I was surprised to read that
a lot of the issues and perpetuating of false ideas
about child abuse and framing Lolita as temptress are very
rooted in what Nbulkov writes in the adaptation of his
own work. So while our knowledge of what his discussions

(48:35):
with Kubrick and Harris about adaptation are are very limited,
we do know that Nabukov was resistant to having a
real underage actor play the role of Lolita, and that
by the time he was writing the screenplay it had
been decided that Lolita was going to be aged up
to fourteen. So nabukov script includes a lot of scenes
between Humbert and Lolita, but the scenes taking place earlier

(48:57):
in the movie in Ramsdale, in particularly, lean more heavily
on making Lolita seemed flirtatious, teasing in a way that
his book leaves extremely ambiguous. So instead of letting the
viewer wonder how much Humbert is projecting onto Lolita's behavior,
the script makes it clear that she is flirting with
him the entire time, and Humbert's voiceover interjects into the

(49:20):
script less and less as the movie goes on, and
there are fewer and fewer reminders that this account is
not to be taken at face value. The physical assaults
on Lolita are implied in a book of script and
are unsurprisingly scaled back considerably in an attempt to appease
the code, but again, in doing so, Nabukov takes the

(49:40):
root of making this more of a seduction that she's
very much in on and a consenting participant with it.
These are issues that are exploited and turned up to
an eleven in future adaptations, and Kubrick certainly would have
been wise to include a lot of the necessary contact
that Nabulkov includes. But even if Nabokov's published script had
been made to the letter, there is still a fair

(50:01):
amount of blame and asking for it put on Lolita,
and of course we have little to no clue what
he included in his six hour draft of the script,
And after seeing the movie in nineteen sixty two, the
Book of grows less kind to Cooper and Harris's adaptation
of his script over time, and by the nineteen seventies
he referred to the movie like this, a scenic drive

(50:23):
is perceived by the horizontal passenger of an ambulance. So yeah,
I would say that even in the book of script
there's not much of the books Dolores Hayes to be found.
The culture was certainly the one to shape Lolita as
a sex icon, but Nabokov is not pushing very hard
back in this screenplay. So while there's no doubt that

(50:47):
the advertising surrounding Lolita is one of the largest issues
with how Dolores the character became corrupted in the minds
of the general public, but it doesn't let this movie
all the way off the hook. For example, the cinematography
of Kubrick's Lolita was done by Oswald Morris. Morris is
a legend in the field. His cinematography works fans from

(51:07):
Lolita to Oliver to Fiddler on the Roof to the
Great Muppet Caper What's Up? He definitely knows what he's doing,
And again, the nineteen sixty two Lolita is certainly not
the worst offender of framing the character of Dolorous Hayes
hands down. That goes to the Vassiline lens used in
the version, but some choices are worth pointing out here.

(51:30):
Also worth mentioning is that Kubrick was a very hands
on director who edited his own films, so he is
very involved in these choices as well. Generally, their writing
and cinematography of a movie jail together. That is to say,
the cinematography serves as a way of making the writing
clearer and serves as being complimentary. This isn't a hard
and fast rule, and doing so doesn't make a movie

(51:52):
good or bad, but it is common in some cases
though the script and the cinematography of a movie seemed
to be saying something slightly to a great example of
this is and bear with me Michael Bay's first Transformers
movie in two thousand seven, in which a lot of
pretty innocuous dialogue said by Megan Fox's character is directly
at odds with the camera's fixation on her body when

(52:14):
she is saying the words. Lindsay Ellis has a wonderful
video series on YouTube on this exact subject. So listen
to this line of dialogue from Megan Fox's character, MICHAELA,
it looks like you're distributor caps a little loose. Yeah,
how did you know that? My dad? He was a
he was a real grease monkey. He taught me all

(52:36):
about this. I could take it all apart, clean it,
put it back together now just hearing it. That's not
a hyper sexual line of dialogue. But how do people
generally remember that character as being hyper sexual? One of
the reasons that is is likely because for that entire line,
the camera is slowly panning over her body. It's just

(52:58):
like male gaze one oh one. So as a viewer,
we are actively encouraged by the camera to sexualize her,
even though the character herself is not inviting that. And
the cultural takeaway, as it was with Megan Fox at
this time, seems to hold an actor or character accountable
for how a director or cinematographer is encouraging us to
look at her. It's foxed and Kuprick's Lolita has small

(53:22):
whiffs of this tame by comparison, but worth noting two
examples that come to mind our Lolita's introduction, she is
gazing at Humbert in her bikini, posed very deliberately like
a centerfold, looking directly at him. Another images Lolita laying
on the bed at the Enchanted Hunter's hotel, kicking her
legs while teasing him about his clear desire for her.

(53:44):
She's even kicking her shoes off seductively, and we see
a nervous Humbert shot from over her legs. It's certainly
less egreed to than future adaptations, but the camera does
frame her as it would a romantic interest in a movie.
She's framed the same way that a consenting adult female
star would be. The camera is giving you permission to
look at her the way Humbert Humbert does. Now, if

(54:06):
you're thinking, like Jamie, how else would they have framed it? Well.
Contrast this with the way that the camera treats Lolita
when she's seventeen and pregnant. It is very static. It
seems pretty uninterested in her physically. The Book of even
adds in the book what doubles as cinematic shorthand for
undesirable woman by throwing a pair of glasses onto her
like never been kissed style. The closer Lolita gets to

(54:29):
becoming a legal adult, the less the camera sexualizes her. Now,
for all the Kubrick fans that are maybe possibly very
mad at me right now, this movie does have some
unique strengths. I think it succeeds in a way that
many of the adaptations don't by making the on screen
relationship between Humbert and Lolita pretty stiff and stilted, and

(54:50):
it's clear that it's difficult for them to connect because
she is a preteen and he is a fifty year
old English professor. And although Lolita is aged up and
is definitely styled to be closer to college age than
middle school, their age difference and worldview are clearly in
extreme conflict, and Humbert comes off as much more of
a stiff, uncomfortable older guy than the romantic hero Humbert

(55:14):
that he presents himself as in the book's pages. Now,
of course, this compliment can kind of fall apart when
you consider that the movie sort of wants you to
believe that they are an odd couple, and because movies
at this time can't show or tell much of anything
regarding humbrig criminality, he is still humanized in the process.
It's again the comedy of manners more than anything else.

(55:36):
We get a lot more dialogue with Lolita here, and
Sue Lyon really makes a meal of what she's given,
but ultimately this movie does miss the point, yes, due
to the production code to an extent, but also willfully
misses the point prioritizing Peter Seller's comedy monologues that feel
like they belong in literally any other movie. It actually

(55:57):
reminds me of like Jotapatow movies from the mid two thousand's,
where it's clear that he just won't tell his actors
to stop talking. And James Mason actually agrees with me here.
He commented rather snarkily at the time this movie was
released the following Kubrick was so besotted with the genius
of Peter Sellers that he never seemed to have enough

(56:19):
of him. Yeah, James Mason went off and in the
final sinister commonality with its literary predecessor, that was a
lot of fancy worth him brow. A lot of the
reviews of Kubrick's two Lolita missed the point of why
the movie doesn't seem to work, winds up the Lolita
doll and it goes to Hollywood and commits him fanticide,

(56:42):
and closed with Lolita is the saddest and most important
victim of the current reckless adaptation fad. It's a film
about this poor young English guy who's being given the
runaround by this sly young broth Sue Lion makes an
auspicious film debut as the deceitful child woman who's just
soon go to a movie as Romp in The Hay.

(57:02):
The distinction is fine, we will grant you, but she
is definitely not a quote unquote named fact. As played
by Sue Lion, a newcomer, she reminds one of Carol
Baker's baby doll right away. This removes the factor a
perverted desire that is in the book and renders the

(57:24):
passion of the hero more normal and understandable. It also
renders the drama more in line with the others we
have seen. Older men have often pined for younger females.
Sue Lion is perhaps a little less than enough, but
not because she looks seventeen. Have the reviewers looked at

(57:45):
the schoolgirls of America lately? The classmates of my fourteen
year old daughter are not nearly new vile. Some of
them look badly used. Pauline Kale. That said, Koprick and
Harris's voices are far louder than the source material in
the finished product, and Kubrick, like Nabokov, was not known

(58:07):
for his strength in writing and representing female characters. Unlike Nabokov,
Kubrick worked in a deeply collaborative medium, and this general
mistreatment of some of his female stars extended off the
page and the celluloid and caused very real harm to
a number of women who worked with him. But to
examine this and to wear Lolita falls into his cannon.

(58:30):
I got to speak with James Fenwick, one of the
leading living Kubrick scholars, who has gotten personal access to
Kubrick's archives and is releasing a new book called Stanley
Kubrick Produces on December eight. I was really excited to find,
like Nobukov scholars, I spoke with, how open he was
to examining his subjects less savory aspects. I also want

(58:51):
to mention that this interview was recorded about a month
before the story regarding James Harris's treatment of Sue Lion
was broken. Here's a little bit of our conversation. So
this adaptation scales Lolita's roll back and enhances Charlotte's present,
And it seems like Lolita is styled and written to

(59:12):
seem like a consenting participant, which is impossible, but this
movie seems to appear that it feels that it is,
and that's definitely like a far cry from the book.
I mean, whether Charlotte Hayes one, I always feel it's
kind of very vindicted what Kubrick does to that character.
She's made to be almost kind of a villain, you know.
It's kind of the shrieking voice and the way that

(59:35):
it's really kind of a funny scene, but at the
same time I find it really dark, where after Charlotte
is killed in the street, you know, the natives think
that's really depressed, but secretly it's absolutely relieved to be
rid of Charlotte Hayes. And I think it was kind
kind of similarly with the scale back of the kind
of you know, roll off Loli to herself. It almost
seeks to the way that kubric lies to kind of

(59:56):
position his films about men. His films are masculine films.
In the book, you kind of start to kind of
feel sympathy for the lead kind of you know, here
her kind of thought processes in the way that she's
kind of being treated in the film that just doesn't happen,
And I think it is all about bringing to the
fall of the male characters and almost kind of reducing

(01:00:17):
the women to kind of um you know, props for
the narrative, and with kind of Thelita, you never really
do kind of get a sense that she has any
kind of emotion whatsoever. And I think that is just
part and passed up kind of the way that Kubrick,
you know, as a kind of creative visionary, that is
the way that he approached his kind of films generally.

(01:00:39):
I kind of in the archives you can see kind
of examples of this is you know, kind of early
scripts that he was right in the nineteen fifties that
very similar in tone to the leit. It's often kind
of very vindictive to female characters, kind of you know,
punishes them kind of an act kind of really cruel
kind of episodes upon these women, you know, with it

(01:01:00):
being so controversial, and as you kind of said that
about kind of you know, making Lolita herself, which one
kind of adult character kind of you know, booking the
age and so forth, I think that is all the
kind of again, part of the reason why you get
this kind of the changes to the film that you know,
compared it to the novel, and it is because it
kind of got to get it past the production code

(01:01:21):
that you know, ensure there is acceptable towardiences. Um, and
I think kind of that is one of the ways
of kind of achieving that. Um. And then speaking to
the casting of Lolita, I mean I've heard different accounts
of the casting and and similar to Humber, a lot
of young women passed it over and didn't want to

(01:01:41):
get anywhere near it. So, um, yeah, I'm curious about
what you know about her casting. Well, I mean the
kind of due a range of people to kind of,
you know, take on the role. I think it did
come down very much to kind of the idea of
the Lolita image. Um. Now, one thing to say with

(01:02:02):
kind of Kubrick when it comes to casting, he um,
how do I put it? He has certain kind of tendencies,
He had a certain image of what a woman should
look like. He was sexist in terms of his kind
of a professional approach to casting, and I think that
is very much the way that you know, he approached
kind of Lolita as he did with other films. He

(01:02:24):
would make notes about the physical appearance of an actress
rather than think about candy actually act It was always
about appearance, and I think that is essentially what kind
of sold kind of you know, Sue Ian casting. So
it was very much about does this fit this image
of this kind of girl that I have in my
head rather than anything else. Essentially. Also, I also think

(01:02:48):
with the treatment of Sue Lion when you look at correspondence,
because she was eventually contracted to Harris Cube Pictures and
to Seren Arts, and she was treated essential as an
object again kind of this is somebody that we now own,
let's decide what kind of projects we're going to put
her in. She had no kind of agency essentially at

(01:03:11):
that time, the kind of os the age, and therefore
in the publicity, this is an eighteen you kind of sorry,
next races You're going to kind of you know, you
want as an audience, you want to see if Humba
is going to have sex with Clarita. That's the entire
point of this film. And so in all of the publicity,
not just the birds stern Folk photographs, kind of essentiality

(01:03:32):
and the kind of you know, the kind of adult
image of Sue Line was completely exploited to the max.
Any inside of you know who who was looking out
for her and she she describes having a wonderful friendship
with James Mason, but a slightly more complicated one with
Kubrick where she describes at times being afraid of him,

(01:03:54):
um and intimidated and I mean, you know, you know
way better than I do. That that seems to be
kind of a trend in how Kuber relates to actresses
throughout his career. So yeah, I just want to talk
about that. I imagine kind of the relationship being very
similar to the one with kind of Shelley Davao and
kind of shining. Um. Kubrick had a job to do.

(01:04:16):
He needs to get performance out of someone, and he
would kind of behave in whatever way necessary to kind
of elicit that performance. Um. From my own experience again,
going through the kind of Kubrick archive and kind of
talking to people, you often kind of get a different
kind of conflicting accounts. If you talk to the Kubrick family,
they always kind of defend Kuber and say, yep, he's
a kind of an artist, the genius. You know, he's

(01:04:39):
kind of allowed to do whatever he wants. But when
he starts to look at other kind of evidence, she
just had to kind of question his behavior and the
way that he was treating someone. Someone particularly it's kind
of as young as Sue Lion was and the way
that she perhaps was susceptible and kind of, you know,
susceptible to kind of manipulation. Um, particularly when he kind
of think about the sub such a matter of the

(01:05:01):
film as well. You know, this is not necessarily a
nice way that she was treated by all these kind
of men in powerful positions. Correspondence between Kubrick, they both
kind of start suggesting, how can we exploit Sue Lion
to the max. We got our own contract, we need
to use her and kind of, you know, get as
much publicity out of there as possible. And constantly she's

(01:05:23):
kind of reduced to the Lolita image. That's all she's about.
It's not somebody that's kind of you know, that should
be respected. This is somebody that we now essentially own.
She's on our payroll. How can we go about now
using that? So for me, there's always uncomfortable kind of
aspect the way that uh Kubrick did kind of use

(01:05:44):
and treat to line. I think almost two months after
our first interview, following the story detailing the allegations of
James Harris's sexual abuse of Sue Lion, James Fenwick and
I caught up again and preparing for This interview was
interesting because listening back to our first talk, I was
kind of taken it back because, based on all of

(01:06:06):
the press that I had read up till that point,
Harris had very much been characterized as an ally to
Lion until a reporter like Sarah Weinman took a closer
look and asked the right people the right questions. So
the tone of my second conversation with James Fenwick was
very different. Here's a little bit of that. Yeah, I mean,

(01:06:27):
I saw the story only a couple of weeks ago,
and for me, it wasn't a surprise as such, by
which I mean kind of. I was already kind of
aware of the stories from the early nineties sixes in
the Washington Post, you know, I mean it almost kind
of in a weird way. The film is an allegory
of the kind of production itself, and I find that

(01:06:48):
dynamic now you know, it can be unseen again. You know,
people clearly within Hollywood knew that there were rumors. That's
the one thing that I think is kind of important.
Rumors in the sense of, you know, the friendship and
the closeness of James B. Harris and Sue Lion, not
suggesting that there was kind of an outrun allegation at

(01:07:11):
the time that it was sleeping with her. But you know,
this suggestion that, oh, Sue Lyon, you might want to
kind of one day Mary James B. Harris, Um, I
think perhaps now for me, you know, it reframes the
whole film. It reframes the way that we view that film.
It reframes I think the relationship between kind of powerful producers,

(01:07:33):
as I said a bit back, and child stars. Um.
And I think that is the bigger issue here really
actually now, and also the issue with the fact that
again Sue Lyon's voice is not part of this or
you know that the moments that she ever has talked
about stuff, it's kind of being ignored. The example I

(01:07:54):
always used, for instance, is this official Stanley Cooper exhibition,
and there's one letter in that exhibition, and he said
kind of a letter that almost exonerates anyone any responsibility
for the way that her life and career panned out,
kind of saying thank you, Stanley, you know you did
wonders for me, I loved at etcetera, etcetera. Actually kind
of forgetting the few moments where she said that Lolita

(01:08:16):
damaged her. That kind of was the start of the
kind of downfall of her own personal life, and James
Fenwick and I will be discussing this more at length
in an episode about the actors who played Lolita. Thank
you so much to him. So as we discussed in
the interview, Kubrick proved himself famously antagonistic and cruel towards

(01:08:37):
many of his female stars. But Kubrick's willingness to torture
his female stars extends far beyond Sue Lyon. Shelley Winters,
who played Charlotte Hayes in the movie, had had a
bad relationship with Kubrick as well that almost resulted in
him firing her in the middle of a take. The
most famous example, as you might know already, is Shelley

(01:08:57):
Duval in The Shining, who Kubrick prided him himself on
antagonizing in order to get a heightened performance from her,
and he actively encouraged his crew to ignore her clear distress.
There is literally footage of this. He refused to encourage
or praise her, he wouldn't tell her what was going
to happen before very violent shots, and she said later
that she was crying. Twelve hours a day while Kubrick

(01:09:19):
and Jack Nicholson were hanging out and playing chess. Here's
how Nicholson and Kubrick talked on set. Very good, check, excellent.
And here's Kubrick talking to Duval. Look at this, pull
all my hair, pulled, honks of hair out, and the

(01:09:42):
windows sill and the bat got caught of hair. Okay,
I don't sympathize with Shelley, And as we talked about
with Griffith and Hitchcock and Chaplain, there was a clear
precedent for this behavior. And while I can't stand that
the Kubrick estates still defends his doing this, he certainly

(01:10:03):
had no reason to believe the culture he worked within
would ever have a problem with it, and he was right.
By and large. He was rewarded for this type of
behavior up until very recently, and this is not at
all unusual for male auteurs. It's it's a discussion that's
been had at lengthen is continuing to be had throughout
the Me Too movement. But since Kubrick up until the

(01:10:25):
last few years have allowed a number of abuses to
take place in the name of art. Think Gaspar No,
Lars von Trier, James Tobackwoodie, Allen David o' russell, and
it hits especially ironically in the case of Lolita, because
Humbert Humbert, while committing abuses against an adolescent girl, uses
this same bullshit artist argument to attempt to get away

(01:10:48):
with the abuse of Dolores Hayes. He is a poet,
He is an artist. Poets don't kill the book off.
The novelist knows this argument is bullshit. The culture Lolita,
the book is released into, not entirely, but in no
small part, allows Humbert to get away with it by
declaring it the greatest love story of all time. The

(01:11:09):
Hollywood Stanley Kubrick worked inside of let him get away
with mistreating the women he worked with, because he argued
that the art demanded he do so. We let James B. Harris,
according to these allegations from October, get away with it.
We let Poe get away with it, We let Chaplin
get away with it, we let Louis Carroll get away

(01:11:30):
with it, and in many cases we still are. Ultimately
Kubrick's Alita has it a number of different ways and
is trying to claim a number of different cakes. Sue
Lyon embodies closer to the child woman that Marilyn Monroe
had popularized, instead of a child being strategically and falsely
presented as a woman by a predatory, unreliable narrator. It's

(01:11:54):
unfortunately not that difficult to see why this happened. After all,
the male directors, writers, and produced hers served as real
life predators at times, nearly always projecting a false narrative
about their female stars whose lives were rigidly controlled by them,
and in missing the point of the book Lovelita entirely
knowing the history of Kubrick's adaptation almost serves to reinforce

(01:12:17):
the novel's ideas. Even more so, it is my deep
displeasure to tell you that Stanley Kubrick's sixty two adaptation
of Lolita is possibly the best one that currently exists,
Given that I have just spent over an hour unpacking why,
it has little to nothing to do with the message
behind the source text. So I would like to close

(01:12:38):
this episode with Sue Lyon First, a quote from her
at fifteen during the relentless promotion of this movie. We
know now that this is very well the same time
that her producer is having sex with her on this
press tour while remaining in complete control of her career. Well,
I have a five year contract. I have a have

(01:13:00):
a year contract with Harris Kubrick. There will be five
years left and they make the decisions from now on.
Mr Harris is reading properties now looking for something for
me to do. And when he finds it and we'll
be making another picture. Have you any special wishes? I
heard the many and then her leader reflecting on this
experience in the nineties, they felt that they were going

(01:13:22):
to build a star and in the fashion of the
old studios, UH, create an image and it would go
on for there. And but after they realized that and
understood my motivation for doing the film, and also I
pointed out to them, I said, you know, you've made

(01:13:44):
a tremendous amount of money off of me, and I
think you owe me the respect to be who I am.
I was once on a television show, a talk show.
My brother had just died two days before that. The
inner viewer opens his show by saying, and now I
was sixteen years old. He said, did your brother kill himself?

(01:14:07):
Because you played Lolita? I didn't say a thing. I
gotta walk up. So by all accounts, Stanley Kubrick's Lolita
is a failure and continues the domino effect of the
active harm surrounding the stories legacy. Next week, we're going
to talk about what that active harm entails and what

(01:14:29):
some have done to combat it. A discussion about abuse,
the abductions that inspired the story, how Freud fucked us
all over, and one psychology professor's argument for reclaiming Lolita
on behalf of Survivors next week on Lolita Podcast. This
has been a production of I Heart Radio. My name's
Jamie Loftus, I right and host the show. My producers

(01:14:51):
are the wonderful Sophie Lichtman, Myles Gray, Beth Ann Macaluso,
and Jack O'Brien. My editor is the amazing Isaac Taylor.
Additional rece search and transcription work from Ben Loftist music
Kid by Zamie Blade, and her sin is from Brad Dicker.
Thank you so much to my guest boyson on this
episode as well. Robert Evans as Vladimir in a Book

(01:15:12):
of Anna Has Name, Jeri Monti, Unis, Grace Thomas, and
Miles Brant will be you next week. M

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3: How Did They Ever Make a Movie of Lolita? (1962)

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