Vivian Kubrick posts remarkable photos from the sets of her father’s movies

 
What’s going on with Vivian Kubrick?

In November, we reported that she’d showed up at an Alex Jones rally in Dallas and appeared to be a big fan of the conspiracy-obsessed radio host. Why was that surprising? It was if you knew the backstory: Vivian is the daughter of Stanley Kubrick, and the great filmmaker appeared to be grooming Vivian to follow in his footsteps before his death in 1999: At only 17, Vivian made a documentary, Making ‘The Shining’, then seven years later composed the score for her father’s 1987 film, Full Metal Jacket. Then, sometime around 1995 we believe, Vivian became involved in Scientology. A year later, Kubrick began shooting his final film, Eyes Wide Shut.

“Stanley asked Vivian to compose the score, but at the last moment she said she wouldn’t,” Kubrick’s widow Christiane told the Guardian in 2009. “They had a huge fight. He was very unhappy. He wrote her a 40-page letter trying to win her back. He begged her endlessly to come home from California. I’m glad he didn’t live to see what happened.”

Vivian had disconnected from her family in the Scientology way. Kubrick died in March 1999, a few months before Eyes Wide Shut opened that summer.

In 2010, the Daily Beast’s Nicole LaPorte talked to Katharina Kubrick, Christiane’s oldest daughter and Vivian’s half-sister, who said that Vivian was still not talking to the family. All they knew was that Vivian had showed up at her father’s 1999 funeral with a Scientology handler.

“When his funeral was held in England, Katharina says that Vivian showed up with a Scientology member…The person sat on a bed, saying nothing, while Vivian complained of back pain that she said had been caused 10,000 years ago,” LaPorte wrote.

Ten years later, in 2009, Vivian didn’t come to England for the funeral of her sister, Anya, whom she had been extremely close with growing up.

“She has completely changed as a person. And it’s just very sad. We’re not allowed to contact her…Something happened to her. She has been changed forever,” Katharina told LaPorte.

When our story came out in November, it was the first time that Vivian had surfaced in more than a decade. We heard from a family friend that Katharina and her mother, Christiane, were stunned to see Vivian on the video, talking politics with Jones, who gushed about Vivian’s father, apparently clueless about the family history.

A few weeks before that Dallas event, Vivian had started a Twitter account. We’ve been following it since then. And we weren’t the only ones who noticed that beginning on Sunday, she’s been posting some remarkable photographs from her childhood and from her father’s sets. Let’s look at a few of them, each with the captions that Vivian put on them…

2001: A Space Odyssey. Here’s another photo of me and baby Chimp : )

The Shining: This is me in my ‘Making The Shining’ cutting room 1979

‘Making The Shining’ Me 1980 at EMI studio’s in my cutting room, using 16mm Steenbeck … my Dad took this

Full Metal Jacket: 1986 Dad and me on location. Me with Aaton Camera & my beloved dog Fanny, the brilliant&beautiful!

Clockwork Orange: Me 1969 Pablo Ferro took this: I helped cut out those Styrofoam letters on the wall : )

In Memory of my Dad, who I loved with all my heart and soul … Dad and Me 1979 on the back veranda of Abbots Mead.

 
After some 15 years separated from her family, Vivian is suddenly reminiscing about her dad. Could this mean that, at 54, she’s having second thoughts about disconnecting from him?

We traded messages with Katharina Kubrick yesterday, who confirmed that she was taken by surprise when we posted the video of Vivian in November. We asked her if anything had changed — did she have any knowledge of Vivian leaving Scientology or re-connecting with the family?

But Katharina told us that nothing has changed, and Vivian is still disconnected from her and her mother.

We’ve sent a message to Vivian, and we hope she’ll get in touch with us and explain what’s happening in her life. We’re burning with curiosity about her experience in the church, which seems somewhat odd.

LaPorte talked to a friend of Vivian’s who said she was living near Scientology’s Hollywood Celebrity Centre and leading a very quiet life. But we wonder about Vivian’s status as a Scientology “celebrity.” We’ve talked to many of our regular sources, some of whom held positions at the highest level in the church, and others who had experience at the Celebrity Centre, and none of them knew anything about Vivian and her involvement. She doesn’t seem to have been held up as a big celebrity ‘get’ by the church itself.

As for her current status, Vivian still sounds like a Scientologist. Just five days ago, she put out this tweet, railing against Scientology’s traditional bogeymen — psychiatry and the pharmaceutical industry — and provided a link to CCHR, the church’s front group that attacks the psychiatric profession…

 
Hey, Vivian, drop us a line. Let’s talk about those amazing photos, your dad, and your journey in Scientology.

 
UPDATE: We see a lot of speculation about Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman and Eyes Wide Shut in the comments, and we can understand why. It may be important to point out that when Kubrick began filming Eyes Wide Shut in 1996, Tom and Nicole were out of Scientology — but they kept that secret at the time. As former Scientology official Marty Rathbun has pointed out, when Tom and Nicole split up at the end of 2000, it became his job to bring Tom back into the fold, and he did such a good job of it, by 2004 Tom Cruise was the most gung-ho celebrity in the church.

 
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Posted by Tony Ortega on March 12, 2014 at 07:00

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