From KCRW Santa Monica and KCRW.com, it's The Treatment.

Welcome to The Treatment, the Home Edition. I'm Elvis Mitchell, and my guest, scholar and writer David Mickhicks has made quite a name for himself, I think, writing about obsessives in the culture.

His new book, Stanley Cooper, American filmmakers, another of those.

And let me welcome into the show, David, thanks so much for being here.

Oh, thanks, Elvis. I'm very happy to be here, And I'll have to ask my psychotherapist about this

obsessive. I didn't realize that I always wrote about obsessive, but you're probably right.

I think you are right, in fact. So many of Kubik's obsessions really emerge and then submerge and then

reemerge. I was thinking about his interest in Stefan's Weig and how that became a thing from very early on.

And then he continued to go back to it and back to it to the very end of his career, didn't he?

Svig was a big influence on him. He wanted to do, it's a wonderful novella by Svig called Burning Secret.

And he wanted to make that in the late 50s.

It never got made.

But he was really taken by a very similar writer,

also Viennese Jewish writer, Arthur Schnitzler.

And Schnitzler wrote Dream Story,

which is the basis for Eyes Wide Shut.

Kubrick wanted to make a movie based on Dream Story on Schnitzler's novel for about 40 years.

So it was very long in the making.

And at the beginning, he was frightened of making it.

He had just gotten married, and he would remain married to Christian, his third wife, for the next 40 years until the end of his life.

But at the beginning of that relationship, they were both very afraid of making a movie out of this novel.

So, yeah, it took him 40 years, and he thought about it that whole time.

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