Kubrick's unmade film on Jazz under the Nazis

[brownie]

The Atlantic Monthly carries an article about Stanley Kubrick's idea about making a film on Jazz under the Nazis:

http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2013/03/stanley-kubricks-unmade-film-about-jazz-in-the-third-reich/274225/

A great might have been film no doubt!

A photo of Dietrich Schulz-Koehn in full uniform with various musicians including Django Reinhardt, at left. in Paris around 1942.

[BillF]

"Heil Benny!"

[Big Beat Steve]

A photo of Dietrich Schulz-Koehn in full uniform with various musicians including Django Reinhardt, at left. in Paris around 1942.

A subject well-covered by now (recommended reading: "Different Drummers" by Michael H. Kater), and that picture has indeed been printed often. Though that uniform is not that surprising and may actually have been a sly move to get any bloodhounds off the trails of certain jazz activities in France. He may have lent a degree of occupants' "officialdom" to those in his immediate vicinity where they were likely to be seen by other 3rd Reich officers who may have been far less sympathetic towards jazz. And there were other occupant solidiers who sympathized with jazz and who more or less openly went to the jazz events that took place in occupied France. Recent French books on jazz in occupied France mention this in several places.

Sometimes this seems to have led to strange scenarios. There is the story of a letter that Charles Delaunay received (during WWII) from a German soldier who asked him where to obtain another copy of his "Hot Discography" - because this soldier had been forced to abandon his copy when his tank burnt at the Russian front and he barely made it out of the tank but could not salvage his discography that he had carried along ...

At any rate, whatever this Kubrick article linked in the opening post says about that abandoned project, maybe it is for the better that the story behind Dr. Schulz-Köhn (who was very active in jazz all his life and whose jazz activities in the 3rd Reich and in WWII weren't all reported correctly by Zwerin - so Dr. Schulz-Köhn himself had asserted later on) was not mutilated by Hollywood. Would we have needed another "Clint Eastwood let loose on Bird" or another over-the-top "Swing Kids" à la Hollywood or worse examples of what could have been done?

This man's biography and life was a complex and multi-faceted one.

And if Kubrick would have been genuinely interested in the first place, no doubt he could have talked to Dr. Schulz-Köhn without any problem in 1985 - "Dr Jazz" was still alive and active then (incidentally I remember listening to his jazz radio shows ever so often in the 80s - authoritative and highly informative for the collectors ...).

Edited March 26, 2013 by Big Beat Steve

[sgcim]

We're currently in post-production on a sequel: "Jazz Under The Bloomberg Regime". ; - )