Good Day, Mr. Kubrick…

If YouTube is going to be forced to remove much of the copyrighted content that makes the site so entertaining, they’ll presumably have to find something else to keep us visiting. How about audition tapes? You just know there are plenty of such tapes lying around, just begging to be viewed by a wider audience.

I thought it was a particularly nice touch to add the clip from the film at the end, just to point up the contrast with what had gone before. However, it’s not really fair to Brian Atene to put his rendition up against the film of the novel from which he’d chosen his audition piece, since Ralph Macchio and C Thomas Howell had the benefit of sets and costumes and direction and … how can I put this politely? … being in possession of a modicum of acting ability.

I wonder if Stanley Kubrick ever laid eyes on that tape? I’d imagine that he had assistants to trawl through the tapes that were submitted to weed out the clearly unsuitable, the way that editorial assistants in publishing houses are assigned the delightful task of wading through the slush pile.

[Via Nerve Screengrab]