Colour Me Kubrick: ATrue … ish Story

This is not a Kubrick film, and it’s not even about Kubrick, but it seemed like a nice place to end this saga. It is based on a true story—considerably embellished, as is the norm in this sort of story—but it seems to stick to the main facts. It’s the story of Alan Conway who, during the 1990s while the real Kubrick was directing Eyes Wide Shut in England, successfully impersonated him for several years and fooled a great many people, even though he looked nothing like Stanley and was flamboyantly gay. Because there were few pictures of Mr. K, he was able to say he had recently shaved off his beard. For a while he fooled Frank Rich, the Broadway critic for the New York Times. He was able to mooch off a great many people until he was caught, whereupon he promptly suffered a “nervous breakdown” and took it easy at a hospital. This, too, was a scam. Some of it is pretty funny, and John Malkovich is very good, hamming it up. My favorite scene, though, was when he was chatting up a guy at a bar and the guy says his favorite Stanley Kubrick film is Judgment at Nuremberg. Oh, sure, Conway says, and starts to tell a story about the filming. “That film was directed by Stanley Kramer,” the guy says. “If you’re going to impersonate someone, at least get your facts right.”