As the Venice Film Festival is going on I was reminded of a funny thing that happened while I was at Independent Pictures, Cary Woods’ company, we had two films in the Festival, they were Mark Hanlon’s Buddy Boy and Harmony Korine’s Julien Donkey-Boy. We travelled there with a group which included Harmony Korine and Chloe Sevigny (who also had Boy’s Don’t Cry at the festival). This was the year that Eyes Wide Shut was opening the festival and Stanley Kubrick had just passed away. We arrived in Venice and all of our luggage was missing. It had not made the connecting flight from Rome so it seemed that the only sensible thing to do while in Venice was to buy all new clothes. We took a car to our hotel, Hotel Des Bains on the Lido (this is the hotel that Death in Venice was shot in) and as we walked up the entrance were greeted by Bernardo Bertolucci, Jean Labadie and Emmanuelle Seigner and Roman Polanski who were all having Bellini’s on the terrace. My job as head of acquisitions was to look for new films to acquire for the US market (we had a deal with New Line), my colleague and good friend Gina Mingacci was head of production and had produced Buddy Boy. We went to check into our rooms (which were enormous) and I went over to Gina’s room so we could figure out what to do about our missing luggage. Her phone rang and she answered it “hello”. The voice on the other line said in an Italian accent “hello this is Bernardo Bertolucci, is Stan Kubrick there”, Gina was of course surprised and confused as we had just seen Bertolucci downstairs and he seemed perfectly sane and everyone knew that Kubrick had died. She answered “i’m sorry he is no longer with us” the voice paused and said “Ah he checked out?” Gina answered “Yes he is no longer with us” and the call was concluded. We were both sure that Cary Woods (our boss) had played a trick on us and so the rest of our trip we kept asking him if he did it, made jokes about it etc but he kept denying it and it became a running joke. We had a great week there and it was amazing to spend time with Roman and Emmanuelle. Roman had been to the Biennale and could tell us about every artwork and its artist. We also had dinners at Harry’s Bar and Delmonico’s with people like Tony Shafrazi, Gianni Nunnari and others. Then it became time to leave and we had to get up at 4am to get to the airport. As we were standing in line for he front desk with our crew and publicists we all clearly heard the front desk answering a call and saying “No Sir Stan Kubrick has checked out”. We couldn’t believe what we heard – who was this Stan Kubrick? Was there another one? I guess we may never find out ….
Sofia Sondervan 