Eyes Wide Shut

Eyes Wide Shut is a 1999 drama film loosely based upon Arthur Schnitzler's 1926 novella dream story. The film was directed, produced, and co-written by Stanley Kubrick. It was his last film, as he died five days after showing his final cut to Warner Brothers studios. The story, set in and around New York, follows the sexually charged adventures of Dr. Bill Harford, who is shocked when his wife, Alice, reveals that she had contemplated an affair a year earlier. He embarks on a night-long adventure, during which he infiltrates a massive masked orgy of an unnamed secret society

Kubrick obtained the filming rights for Dream Story in the 1960s, considering it a perfect novel to adapt on a film about sexual relations. The project was only revived in the 1990s, when the director hired writer Frederic Raphael to help him with the adaptation. The film was wholly shot in the United Kingdom, including a recreation of some exterior Greenwich Village street scenes at Pinewoods Studios. The film spent a long time in production, and holds the Guinnes World Record for the longest continuous film shoot period, at 400 days.

Eyes Wide Shut was released on July 16, 1999, a few months following Kubrick's death, to positive critical reaction and intakes of $162 million at the worldwide box office. Its strong sexual content also made it controversial; to ensure a theatrical R Rating in the United States, its distributor Warner Brothers digitally altered several scenes during post-production. The uncut version has since been released in DVD,HD DVD and BluRay formats

Segments Alluded To

 * Fidelio