Filmworker, Shirkers

Two documentaries on Netflix.

Filmworker is about Leon Vitali, an actor who became the devoted assistant to Stanley Kubrick. He had played Barry Lyndon's battered, abused stepson. He became completely devoted to Kubrick. That was his life after that, doing whatever Stanley Kubrick wanted. Kubrick only made three movies after Barry Lyndon.

I thought Paths of Glory and Dr Strangelove were great and I liked his second feature, Killer's Kiss (1955). I found his other movies disappointing. His perfectionism was unnecessary, a waste of time and resources. It severely limited his output and his movies were known for being emotionally dead. And it turns out he was a horrible person.

Shirkers is about three girls from Singapore who make an independent  film in the early '90's. They had somehow become followers of a charismatic film guy who claimed to have worked on Apocalypse Now among other things. He directs a script one of the girls wrote. The girls' relatives, friends and strangers appear in the film. Their fourteen-year-old production assistant defiantly chews gum, illegal in Singapore, while slating scenes. At one point, the girls drove around Singapore going from ATM to ATM, emptying their bank accounts to finish the film. Then the "director" absconds with it. They realized they had never seen any of the footage they shot. We know it it exists because they show it throughout the documentary, but one of them remembers a moment when the camera fell open during a scene and there was no film in it. They're not sure they filmed anything at all.

The two movies are very vaguely related, about people who came under the thrall of a screwed up movie director.