Friday, January 8, 2016

KUBRICK AND THE BEATLES: APPENDIX

On Thursday, September 3rd, 2015, this blog ran a story entitled Kubrick, The Beatles and the Rolling Stones, about how The Beatles almost starred in The Lord of the Rings, how The Rolling Stones wanted to appear in A Clockwork Orange, and how Kubrick was tapped by both bands to direct these projects.

Well, it turns out there is yet another, albeit smaller, connection between the Fab Four and Stan the Man, and it's been hidden from view since 1967. It involves the now legendary photograph used as the album cover for Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, which features a massive collage of life-sized cutouts of people chosen by Lennon, McCartney and Harrison (but not Ringo for some reason).

Take a look at this:


Looks familiar, right? But look again... it's a photograph from the same shoot from which the cover of Sgt Pepper's was taken, but the band is positioned differently, which exposes some of the collage members who ended up obscured on the final image.

And to whom does that menacing, grimacing face positioned directly above John Lennon's head belong? Why, it's none other than early Kubrick favorite, Timothy Carey! And the image itself is taken from the scene in Kubrick's The Killing (1956) in which Carey's character, the incredibly-named Nikki Arcane, is first introduced!

You may have noticed that there are a couple more differences between the above photo and the final album cover image. In fact, there are seven missing people from the final shot, including five faces that ended up airbrushed out or obscured by band members, one that was printed but left out of the collage at the last second (Hitler), and one that was called for, but never printed (Jesus). To learn more about this fascinating bit of historical trivia, check out this article on FeelNumb.com.

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