But "he had finished it," his friend Joe Hyams told me Sunday. "A print was shown on Thursday night in New York to just four people--Tom, Nicole, and [studio executives] Terry Semel and Bob Daly. They loved it."
Kubrick's death "was a bolt from the blue," said Hyams, an executive vice president at the studio. "He had been working every day, those 18-hour days. He was such a perfectionist." Pending a coroner's report, Hyams said, it was assumed that the cause of death was a heart attack while the director slept.
In recent decades Kubrick's contract with Warner Brothers specified simply that he would make a film of his own choice, at a cost to be determined, and the studio would release it exactly as he supplied it to them. Even at a time when powerful directors have the right of "final cut," this arrangement was extraordinary; at Warner's, only Kubrick and Clint Eastwood enjoyed it. "Whatever those guys want, they get," Hyams said.
Kubrick was rarely photographed and had not given an interview in years. He did most of his business dealings by phone. His estate in the English countryside included editing and sound facilities, and he was famous for creating his own locations instead of traveling to them; his Vietnam movie "Full Metal Jacket" was shot entirely in England, and of course so was "2001," which took place in space. Some have called "2001" the greatest film of the century.
Certainly it was the most inimitable -- an epic with little dialog for much of its length, special effects that have not been surpassed for their grandeur, an enigmatic ending that is still argued about, and human characters so wooden they were upstaged by a talking computer. When orbiting American astronauts were asked what the view was like, they replied, "Like in '2001'."
Kubrick worked slowly in recent years, marching to the sound of his own drum. His prestige was so great that he could command the services of top stars like Cruise and Jack Nicholson, who put other projects on hold to accommodate Kubrick's lengthy shooting schedules and demands for many takes of every shot.
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