"You could always count on Stanley every time to choose Beauty over Content, since he didn't think of them as two separate things."

An entertaining collection of memories from a friend. Insightful at times about the man, at other times it falters (eg. when Herr attempts to offer rebuttals to the criticisms of Kubrick's work). Definitely worth a read. Warm, endearing and short.

A loving and lovely account of Kubrick as a friend, Herr is an unabashed fan of Kubrick and doesn't dwell on the negative, instead writing as someone who has lost a friend that few people understood. He knew Kubrick for 2 decades, and could surely have written a weighty volume on the man, but you can breeze through this in a day and feel you know Kubrick a little better, understand him a little more, and perhaps look at his work a little differently. There are many more detailed looks at Kubrick's films, go here for a look at the man through a lens most never had. Short, sweet and unbalanced, and a touching clue to the the Kubrick enigma.

There doesn’t seem to be a ton of effort into this book. It’s just shy of 100 pages so you can read it one sitting. The author (who worked on Full Metal Jacket) gives you some brief glimpses into Kubrick, because let’s be honest, no one will ever be able to figure him out. The organization of it was not well done and it’s a set of different musings about his interactions and views on the famous director. There is much defending of Kubrick who know was a nightmare to work with (although a genius) with an odd post-script defending his last movie, Eye Wide Shut.

one of the best books on kubrick that i've read - lots of personal info, analysis of the films, all in a nice compact volume.

This was a fairly short read but felt long as Michael Herr included an almost scene by scene rundown from the movie Eyes Wide Shut.

I sensed a hint of insincerity on Herr’s part as he spoke of Stanley Kubrick. He bounced back from claiming to like him and then claiming to be annoyed by him. There was something off-putting about his vernacular that I can’t quite pinpoint.

Overall this book gives a glimpse of Kubrick’s personality from Herr’s perspective. It might be interesting to Kubrick fans, but also feels like there’s nothing new here.

A mildly satisfying memoir topped up with an unexpectedly brilliant, heartfelt critical defense of Eyes Wide Shut.

One of the most remarkable things about Dispatches is the way in which Herr makes the great abstract horror of war clear and present through his incredible ability to conjure real people through speech and small action.

What he did there for the marines and green berets and generals of Vietnam, he does here for Stanley Kubrick. There are no great revelations or scoops, just an intimate portrait of the man and myth, made flesh without diminishing any of the mystery and majesty of his legend.

A bit of a puff piece but recommended reading for those interested in knowing more about Kubrick as a person.

Michael Herr (1940-2016) wrote Dispatches, one of my ten favorite books, and unfortunately not much else. I remember listening to a podcast a couple of years ago with Graydon Carter, former editor-in-chief of Vanity Fair, when he was asked if there were any writer he'd always wanted to get for the magazine, but had never been able to. "A writer I used to speak to", he began,

sometimes for almost three hours a day, for years and years, was Michael Herr. He'd written Dispatches, he was one of the great journalists of all time, and he...became a Buddhist after Vietnam. Michael was a wonderful, peaceful person...[but] in ten years of constant talking, I only got two pieces out of him. I would have liked more, but he said, "I'm done writing."

Herr didn't completely disappear down the river like Kurtz, though. He co-wrote the screenplay for Coppola's Apocalypse Now, and Kubrick got in touch with him about a year later, but not primarily because of that movie; Kubrick had loved Dispatches, and their first meeting (arranged by mutual friend David Cornwell, a.k.a. John le Carré) led to a future collaboration on the script for Full Metal Jacket (which also involved the writer Gustav Hasford, whose novel The Short-Timers inspired the movie- I'm convinced "the Jungian thing" came from Herr, though), as well as a friendship that lasted, at varying levels of intimacy, until Kubrick's death in '99.

He called me a couple of nights later to ask me if I’d read any Jung. I had. Was I familiar with the concept of the Shadow, our hidden dark side? I assured him that I was. We did half an hour on the Shadow, and how he really wanted to get it into his war picture. And oh, did I know of any good Vietnam books, “you know, Michael, something with a story?” I didn’t. I told him that after seven years working on a Vietnam book and nearly two more on the film Apocalypse Now, it was about the last thing in the world I was interested in.

...We talked this way, with occasional visits to his house, dinners and movies, until he found Gustav Hasford’s The Short-Timers, bought the rights, wrote a long treatment of it, and asked me to work on the script with him. Then we really started talking. By then I knew I’d been working for Stanley from the minute I met him.

Of course I'd always known that Kubrick made some great movies- Full Metal Jacket and 2001 are probably my favorites, and Dr. Strangelove and The Shining aren't far behind, though I'm not a huge Barry Lyndon or A Clockwork Orange fan, and Eyes Wide Shut didn't do much for me- but I found myself in the mood to read Herr's essay mostly because I decided the other day to watch a couple of Kubrick's older films, which I'd never seen. The Killing is...well, it's okay. No, it's better than okay. It's a very well-done exercise, and I particularly enjoyed the chess-playing Georgian wrestler (now I know what to say- "hey, you Irish pig, how about some service?"- if I ever need to start a fight with a bartender), and the story (written by Jim Thompson, "the toughest pulp novelist of them all, [who] made [Stanley] nervous when they were working together on The Killing, a big guy in a dirty old raincoat, a terrific writer but a little too hard-boiled for Stanley’s taste. He’d turn up for work carrying a bottle in a brown paper bag, but saying nothing about it—it was just there on the desk with no apology or comment...") is maybe not all that profound. But then I watched Paths of Glory. Paths of effing Glory...and man it's a fantastic film, and the last scene almost made me cry.

So yes, it was Paths of Glory, and the fact that my friend Billy added a book of Kubrick interviews to Goodreads at just the same time, that reminded me of Herr's essay, written for Vanity Fair after Kubrick's death, which can be found here. It's a moving portrait of a friend, more convincing for its absence of sentimentality and unwillingness to abet the myth of Kubrick, as well as the erudite, painterly style and existential vision- you know what I mean by that, the Jungian thing- that Herr brought to everything he wrote. Certainly worth reading if you're a Kubrick fan...or a Herr fan, for that matter.

Michael certainly has a way with words, and reading this short book reminds me just how dull and straightforward much other 'journalistic' writing is. Herr seems to play with words in the way that Kubrick played with ideas and light. And both produce result is works that feel significantly different to other in the same field.

Clearly I have no real idea of what Kubrick was like as a person, but this book does provide some pointers to both his genius and his limitations.

Rather wonderful. SM

Yes, a wonderful portrait