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In March of 1999, one of the greatest filmmakers in history screened the final cut of his final movie. Six days later, he was dead. Stanley Kubrick was 70 years old. He had just finished a production credited as the longest shoot in cinema history. A film about a secret society of wealthy masked elites who gathered in a countryside mansion to perform ritualistic sex ceremonies and when outsiders get too close, threatens to kill them. The movie was called Eyes Wide Shut. It was shot in part inside a 19th century mansion historically tied to European banking aristocracy. It was based on research into 18th century secret societies, illustrations of the black mass, and a 1926 Austrian novella about a doctor who stumbled into a masked orgy he was never meant to see. And six days after Kubrick handed it in, he died of a heart attack. But here's what's crazy. Warner Brothers took Kubrick's movie and digitally altered the most disturbing scene. Major actors quit mid production, and the film's co star would later describe the shoot as the thing that broke her marriage. And 20 years later, when a financier named Jeffrey Epstein was arrested for trafficking children. Children. To a private island full of some of the wealthiest, most powerful men in the world, people started re watching Eyes Wide Shut and asking an uncomfortable question. Why does this 27 year old movie look so much like what's going on right now? Well, today we're going to be tracing the true story of Eyes Wide Shut. The research that Kubrick actually did, the mansion where they filmed, the censorship, the deaths, and the long, strange history of Hollywood itself. A town that has been dabbling with the occult since before Hollywood was even Hollywood. Because the scariest thing about Eyes Wide Shut isn't the idea that Cooper exposed the elites, and it's that he didn't have to expose anything. You just had to look. Well, sit back, relax, and welcome to camp. What's up, people? And welcome back to camp. My name is Mark Gagnon, and thank you for joining me in my tent, where every single week, we explore the most interesting, fascinating, and controversial stories from all time. Forever. Yes, that is what we do here in the campsite. We go down crazy rabbit holes and all sorts of left and right turns to figure out what's really going on. And I just want to say a few things up top. Before we dive into this episode, which is a banger, I just want to say thank you so much to you for tuning in and commenting and engaging with the content. Every time a video pops up on YouTube or Spotify and you click on it, it helps everything happen. It literally Keeps the lights on here in the tent, keeps the fire burning, and it takes care of Christos's hat collection. Right, Christos. Love you guys. Yep. Appreciate you. Now, I just want to say a few things. Up top. This is a wild one. If you're not familiar with the lore behind Eyes Wide Shut, behind what? The movie is behind Kubrick and his death, sort of suspiciously, or not so suspiciously, after the movie aired and kind of what it says about, like, elites and all sorts of stuff, this is a deep rabbit hole, and we're probably not gonna be able to hit everything. Everything today, but, oh, boy, I'm gonna try my best. Okay. This is, like, kind of the tip of the iceberg when it comes to, like, crazy Hollywood conspiracy stuff. It's. My mom was like, you need to watch this movie when I was, like, 12, and then I watched it when I was, like, 18, and I was like, this is the kind of graphic. She was like, yes, but it's the elites. You waited six years after she told you to watch it? Yeah, I actually. I actually lied. I think I watched when I was, like, 25. Wow. Yeah, I just, like. I never got around to it. But it's a wild movie. And no one's seen the actual cut. I shouldn't say no one. But the full cut. Well, the one that has is no longer with us. God rest his soul. We'll get into it. Where does it start? 1926, way before as wide show was ever a thing. There's an Austrian writer named Arthur Schnitzler. I mean, yeah, it's a hilarious name. I can't just. I can't start off the episode and talk about Arthur Schnitzler without talking about that. Makes me hungry. It sounds kind of delicious. Right? Little schnitzler you are. Now, he publishes a novella called Tromnovella, and in English, it literally means dream story. And it's set in, like, a turn of the century Viennese carnival. And it tells the story of this doctor named Friedelin, whose wife confesses the sexual fantasy that she had about another man. And he's not able to get over it, so he spends a single hallucinatory night wandering around the city. And eventually he stumbles into the secret gathering at a private mansion. And it's all masked. Everyone's wearing these strange face coverings, and it's very ritualistic and extremely sexual, and the society realizes that he doesn't belong there, so they threaten him. But a woman sacrifices herself to save him, and he escapes. And then the question hangs on him. Forever. Was any of this real? And that feeling right there, like, is this real or not? Is important because it's not just about the plot. It's about what the book is really doing. This book, at its core, is a psychological novel. It's about male insecurity and sexual paranoia. And it's about the way a husband's ego can kind of create this universe out of a single sentence that his wife says about a dream she had. And Schnitzler was right. Writing in the same Vienna at the same time as Sigmund Freud. This is explicitly a book about what the subconscious does when it's threatened. And think about that, because that's going to come up later. Now, Kubrick actually read this book, traumnovelle, in, like, 1968. 69ish. And he was, like, 39 years old, and he had just finished doing 2001 A Space Odyssey. He was at that moment, arguably the most respected filmmaker alive. And he bought the film rights to Schnitzler's novella, like, on the spot. He, like, called up his agent, was like, I need this. And then he sat on it for 30 years. Reportedly, he considered making the story, like, funny. Like comedy with Woody Allen, which would have been ironic, needless to say, probably a masterpiece. It would have been funny, yeah, but it would have been a very coincidental. And he also considered Steve Martin and then Tom Hanks and Dustin Hoffman and Bill Murray and all these people. And every decade, he'd kind of pick the project up and he'd look at it and put it back down, basically being like, yeah, this isn't ready. And wildly enough. It wasn't until 1994, 26 years after he read the book, that Kubrick finally hired a co writer, a British novelist named Frederick Raphael, and began the adaptation that would eventually become Eyes Wide Shut. And the changes that he made to the story are very important because Kubrick didn't just translate Schnitzler's novella into a screenplay. He, like, really interpolated it. He transposed it into something new. And he moved the setting from the 1900s in Vienna to the 1990s in New York City. He changed the timeframe from, you know, this, like, carnival, a centuries old religious festival, to Christmas, a centuries old religious festival based in America. And that's not like a little shift. Like the story was about this, you know, bourgeois anxiety at the edge of the Austro Hungarian empires collapse and all that stuff. Kubrick's version became something different and a lot more focused. It's a story about, you know, like this, you know, late capitalist kind of consumer malaise where, you know, the sacred ritual of the west, which is Christmas, is now replaced with shopping and. And sexual exploits. And the ancient traditions of, you know, the masquerade are now replaced by, like, this modern, wealthy class kind of ritual, you could say. Now, the most interesting thing about Kubrick's research on this was just the amount of work he does for every film. On Barry Lyndon, he used lenses originally designed by NASA for the Apollo moon missions to shoot by candlelight. When he did the Shining, he would read, like, every book he could find on the occult, on parapsychology, Native American folklore. That's just what he did. And for Eyes Wide Shut, this was no different. Kubrick seems to have dug into, like, entire anthologies on, you know, the history of secret societies and how they operate and how the elites sort of meet up with each other. And according to his longtime assistant, Anthony Freewin, in an interview given to Vulture, Kubrick consulted a researcher named G. Legman, who lived in the south of France. And Legman sent Kubrick illustrations of secret society rituals and the black mass, which was a satanic ceremony. He also provided extensive information on what he described as sexual mores. In Vienna at the time that Schnitzler wrote his original book, Kubrick studied the work of Belgian artist named Felician Ropes, who specialized in what Friedland would call, like, wheat, weird erotica. And Kubrick looked into the history of one secret society in particular, the Hellfire Club, which we did a whole episode on in regards to Ben Franklin. There's a lot of really interesting stuff on that. We should probably do a specific one specifically on Hellfire. I don't know if it's only on that we kind of reference it. I'll write it down. But we should add that now. Here's a look. A little reality check. And I want to be very clear, because this is a part where, like, a lot of videos will kind of go off the rails. When I say secret society, we're not talking about the modern Internet meme. I'm talking about, like, documented secret societies. Like, these are real clubs where people actually met up to actually do weird rituals and trade information. So, like, the Hellfire Club was a legit thing. It was founded in 1718 in London by Philip, the Duke of Wharton and revived most famously in the mid-1700s by a British aristocrat named Francis Dashwood, who at the time was like, the chancellor and the second most powerful political guy in all of Britain. And the club met in a set of Man Made Caves dug into the hillside, like in Buckinghamshire. And its motto carved in stained glass above the door was, fait CE que tu voutre. And in French, it literally means do what thou wilt. This is the exact phrase that would be adopted almost 200 years later by the British occultist Aleister Crowley. And this is the central tenet of his religion, Thelema. Now, members of this club included a bunch of British, you know, prime ministers and the first Lord of Admiralty and the son of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Benjamin Franklin. Like I mentioned, he was very much, you know, involved in this whole thing, though, I'll be honest with you. The documented evidence for Franklin's actual involvement is, like, still contested historically, but a lot of people kind of accept that he was involved in some capacity. Now, the members called themselves monks. They called the prostitutes that they brought in nuns. And they performed what contemporary records would describe as obscene parodies of religious rituals. And when things started to get too public, they ordered their secretary to basically burn any type of documentation or paper trail or anything. And then three days later, that same secretary died. Now, one interpretation, and this is the one that fits with what we know about Kubrick and how he researches stuff, is that he was drawing from this whole documented tradition. A 300 year record of wealthy, politically connected, powerful dudes gathering in secret, putting on robes and mass and doing a bunch of crazy sex acts. And a lot of which were kind of satanic and subversive to, you know, the church. And Kubrick knew about the tradition. He read about it. He had illustrations. He was talking to people on the inside track that were actual scholars in this. And if that's true, if Eyes Wide Shut is pulling from this very real documented history of elite ritual behavior, which, hey, personal bias it is, then the next question isn't just what the film shows. It's like, what is Kubrick trying to say through what he's showing? A film about secret rituals being made by a director who spent, I mean, at this point, like, probably at least a decade, maybe more, studying these societies. Like, the line between, like, research and, like, making a fun movie. And the reality of what he's trying to say all of a sudden gets a little thin. Now, the actual shooting of Eyes Wide shut began on November 4, 1996. And from the beginning, Kubrick didn't just direct scenes. He started to, like, actually, like, manipulate the people inside of them. So, of course, if you've ever seen the movie, it stars Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, a real married couple at the height of their fame, to play a fictional married couple whose relationship starts to crumble. And he did this deliberately, according to a lot of reports. He wanted to mine the reality of their marriage. He wanted that connection in their chemistry, in the relationship to be real. And he directed them separately. He discouraged them from spending time together while they were on set. And when Nicole Kidman's character has a fantasy about sleeping with a naval officer. Kubrick shot the scene over three days on a closed set with Tom Cruise barred from entering. Like, think about that. Kidman has said that Kubrick wanted the scene to be, quote, almost. And he wasn't just making a movie about jealousy. He was creating actual jealousy. I think about that. Tom Cruise is sitting outside the set. He can't go on. His actual wife is in there filming a scene about this erotic dream about a naval officer. And he's just out there being like, I wonder what they're doing. Like, I wonder she's not actually cheating on me, right? Like, that would be like, they wouldn't do that. But think about it. He's just stewing on this, going crazy now. The shoot was actually planned for three months. It ended up taking 294 days of actual filming spread across 579 calendar days. Think about that. A year and seven months at that. At the time, it was officially, like, the longest film shoot ever. A single scene of Tom Cruise walking through a door was shot 95 times. Other scenes were shot 70 times. An actress named Vanessa Shaw was contracted for two weeks, and she ended up working on the film for two months. Two major actors actually quit the film mid production. Harvey Kettle, originally cast as the wealthy socialite Victor Ziegler, just walked off the set. And years later, he said that he felt that Kubrick had disrespected him. His co star Gary Oldman, would later confirm that the breaking point was Kubrick demanding dozens of takes of Kettle walking through a doorway around the same time. Actress Jennifer Jason Lee also left, and both of them had to have their scenes entirely reshot with new actors. And the cast wasn't just cracking from the artistic pressure. Some people say that they were breaking from some darker things at play. Now, Tom Cruise, of course, one of the most famous Scientologists in the world, was, according to one former Scientology executive, was being monitored by the church during the shoot. And this is just an allegation, so I want to be careful with how this is framed. But a former senior executive of the Church of Scientology who left the church and became a critic, detailed these claims in a memoir called A Billion Years and according to this account, Cruz began ignoring phone calls from Scientology leaders and top executives during the Eyes Wide Shut shoot. Render alleges that Scientology became concerned about Cruz's involvement in a film centered on cult like rituals and sent one of their top people, a man named Marty Rathbun, to London to kind of try to liaise and, you know, work with Cruz. And in this specific memoir, there's further allegations that the church arranged to actually listen in on Nicole Kidman's phone calls through a private investigator. But again, these are purely allegations. Now, the Church of Scientology has officially denied these claims, and the people that have made these claims, like the investigator, have been controversial for years and was actually convicted on unrelated wiretapping charges. Now, the credible witness in all this has testified on the record repeatedly, but nothing here has been confirmed in any type of court. But here's what we do know for certain. During filming, Cruz developed severe ulcers and abdominal pain. And according to Nicole Kidman, they were trying to use their actual marriage for material. That's kind of how Kubrick set it up. And she said, quote, there were ideas he was interested in from their marriage. And two years later, after the film's release in February 2001, Cruz filed for divorce from Nicole Kidman. Their divorce was finalized shortly after, and Kidman's relationship with her two older children, by her own accounts, became complicated. So just back up and think about this for a sec. Kubrick casts a real married couple, arguably two of the most famous actress actors and actresses in the world, to play a fictional married couple whose marriage was being destroyed by hidden forces that they couldn't see. And by the time the movie came out, their real marriage, by Kidman's own account and by the public record, was under a strain that most people could never even get. Now, whatever it was, the stress and content of the movie seem to have created a real psychological and relational crack between a lot of people, including the stars. That would have a ton of consequences. What's up, guys? We're going to take a break really quick because I want to tell you a scary story. Yeah. Specifically for the dudes. All right? Imagine you're going out with your wife, okay? You're having some dinner. You know, you get some drinks. The vibes are good. And you go back to your apartment, your house, the lights are low. 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And we thank Blue Shoe for sponsoring this podcast and making this show possible. Now let's get back to it. Now, there's another creative decision that happens here that makes the whole film process very strange. And this is how it kind of comes together. So for the infamous orgy scene, the kind of the centerpiece of the entire film, Kubrick didn't just want a convincing mansion. He wanted a real mansion. He wanted the Mentmore Towers. Now, the Menmore towers is a 19th century mansion in Buckinghamshire, about 40 miles northwest of London. And it was built in in the 1850s for Baron Mayer de Rothschild, a member of the famous Rothschild banking dynasty. And the estate stayed in the Rothschild family for over a century. But by the time that Kubrick filmed there in the 1990s, it had been sold to a different owner. And this is where we should be very careful because a lot of the Eyes Wide Shut stuff just goes crazy. But here's what we can say responsibly. Across his filmography, Kubrick consistently gravitated towards locations tied to old wealth. You know, Barry Lyndon was shot in, like, English manor houses. The Shining was modeled on the Stanley Hotel in Colorado. And for Eyes Wide Shut, he picked three different English country estates. The Mentmore Towers, Elvedon hall and Lutton who to create the composite Somerton Mansion. And he wasn't just looking for a Rothschild connection. He was looking for the visual equivalence of aristocratic power. And if you're shooting in England in the 1990s looking for that exact thing, half the mansions that fit the bill have connections to old banking families. I mean, that's just the history of London. Now, there's a separate story about a party that the rothchilds threw in 1972, this famous masked ball at their French estate, the Chateau de Frise, organized by Baroness Marie Helene de Rothchild. It was called the Dinner of the Surrealist. The Surrealist Ball. And the guest list included some of the most glamorous people of the time. I mean, Bridget Bardot, Audrey Hepburn, Salvador Dali and Marissa Berenson. Every famous actor you could imagine. Now, the invitations were printed backwards. Guess even wore, like, these very surreal masks that were designed, like, in some cases by Dali himself. The chateau was floodlit and red, so that appeared to, like, be on fire. There were even some photographs that are still around. I mean, could you pull up some of these pictures? Like, they're pretty weird. If you look at them, you're like, this is. I mean, you can definitely see that there was some type of inspiration. I mean, this is one of the famous photos where, like, everything is very surreal. You see, like, the wealthiest, most powerful people in the world meeting up in the chateau wearing these strange animal type heads. It's just one of these things. Once again, it's just. At the very least, it's weird. I mean, here's another one. He's, like, gold mass and just, like, the height of aristocracy. Like, you can see this. She's got, like, basically, like, a record player on her head. It's just all very strange. And this is how the, you know, wealthy and powerful kind of got down. Now, if you look at these photographs next to the orgy scene in Eyes Wide Shut, you can see why people draw you know, they. They draw connections, right? The mass, the theatrical staging, the luxurious sort of grotesque kind of atmosphere. Now, one thing that's worth mentioning here is that there's no hard evidence that Kubrick knew about this specific ball. Like, photos of this event didn't really circulate until, like, the 2010s, long after Kubrick had died. Author Mike Rothschild, which ironically has no relation to the Rothschild family, makes this point in his book that basically the Rothschild family been the target of a lot of anti Semitic conspiracy theories for hundreds of years. And every time Western culture is kind of talking about, like, a wealthy dynasty, the Rothschilds get volunteered. Now, don't get me wrong, the Rothschilds probably have done some terrible stuff, but obviously not everything that's bad that's ever happened can be attributed to them. Right. I think that's a pretty. A pretty fair point. Now, a huge amount of the Eyes Wide Shut stuff is specifically, you know, targeting the Rothschilds. And I think a lot of that probably comes from these specific photographs. But I think the Rothschilds are probably participating in this specific event, kind of in this grand sort of absurd, you know, a luxury that we're. I think that a lot of these secret societies are tapping into. What Eyes Wide Shut is doing here isn't exposing one particular family. Right. What's interesting is that when a filmmaker is trying to depict the visual culture of extreme European wealth, the mansions and the mass and all the ritual kind of grandeur, the results are showing this pattern. The fact that Kubrick didn't even know about the Throatchild party, allegedly, and the fact that they did this kind of party that really kind of looks like Eyes Wide Shut to me is almost more credibility that he's tapping into the same source material that they perhaps were tapping into. I mean, the Hellfire Club in the 1700s, the Rothschild Ball in 1972, Kubrick's movie in 1999. These events resemble each other not necessarily because they're, you know, connected all by, like, the same puppet master, but because extreme wealth performs itself the same way in private across generations. Like extremely wealthy people want places where they can go to do whatever they want to do outside of the public eye, and people will facilitate that. And Kubrick didn't invent this visual language of wealth and elites, society and all that stuff. He just synthesized it. And across centuries of different reference points, he distilled this into one piece. And what's interesting about all of this that ties Kubrick back to so many conspiracy theories is that shortly after they finished filming and the Film was cut and then presented. Kubrick's story abruptly ends. So on March 1, 1999, Stanley Kubrick delivers the final cut of Eyes Wide Shut to Warner Brothers. And the screening took place in New York at the Warner Brothers headquarters on Fifth Avenue. It was attended by Bob Daly and Terry Simmel, the co chairman of Warner Brothers and by Tom Cruise and Nicole Cole Kidman. What's interesting is that Stanley Kubrick wasn't there. He hated flying. He had a fear of flying, and he hadn't been on a plane in decades. However, his longtime editor, this guy Nigel Galt, flew over from London with the print, the final film and conducted the screening. The reaction, by all accounts, was extremely enthusiastic. When Galt called Kubrick afterwards to report back Galt later said, and this is a quote, Stanley was jubilant in that conversation. They discussed the few remaining items to finish. Some exterior establishing shots, some sound stuff, music stuff. And that was Wednesday, March 3rd. Galt flew home to London. He had Thursday off. He saw Kubrick on Friday. And they talked about the screening response, which, again, was extremely positive. Everyone was stoked. That was Friday, March 5th. Stanley Kubrick died in his sleep sometime during the night of Saturday, March 6, into Sunday, March 7, in 1999. He had, according to all the official reports, a massive heart attack at his home in Hertfordshire, England. He was 70 years old. And this was just six days after the screening of the final cut of Eyes Wide Shut. And let me just say for the record, there's no credible evidence that Stanley Kubrick was murdered. He was 70 years old with a reported history of, you know, being kind of indifferent to doctors. And he just finished one of, like, the most grueling, you know, tedious, agonizing productions of his entire career. His family, his editor, the collaborators, his wife, all of them said the same thing, that he went to sleep, his heart stopped, and that was it. His Funeral was held five days later and it was attended by about 100 people, including Tom Cruise, Nicole Kidman, Steven Spielberg and the Jewish morning prayer, the Kaddish was recited. He was buried the very next day near his favorite tree on the estate. And that is the official story. But once you start looking at what happened to the movie after Kubrick died, you kind of see why the conspiracy theorists have a little bit of a point, okay? Because Warner Brothers immediately started to make changes. The film was contractually obligated to receive an R rating. But the mpaa, the Motion Picture association of America ratings board screened Eyes Wide Shut. And they said that it was NC17 that's basically an adults only rating. That means, you know, that's basically commercial death for any film studio. Right. If you get an NC17 rating, like most movie theaters won't even show it. And the problem, according to the board, was this masked orgy scene, which is literally the pinnacle of the entire film. So Warner Brothers, with Kubrick dead and unable to object, did something pretty extraordinary for the time. They digitally inserted computer generated cloaked figures into the orgy scene to block the view of the most explicit moments. In some shots, robed figures would just kind of appear from nowhere. In others, there'd be nude women walking across the frame to obscure what's happening behind them. Nigel Galt, the editor, has confirmed that he personally authorized this and was the. It was basically the only way to deliver the contractually required R rating without actually reshooting or re editing the final version. And the result was, you know, basically that the entire United States had a theatrical release, the original dvd. You know, American audiences saw a censored version, and the rest of the world got a truer cut. It wasn't until 2007 that Warner Brothers finally released the uncensored version in the United States. And this is where a new theory emerges. And this is just a rumor, I should say, but the rumor is that Warner brothers actually cut 24 minutes of footage from Eyes Wide Shut after Kubrick's death. That this missing 24 minutes contained something so disturbing or so dangerous that the studio just completely buried it. In the most extreme versions of this theory, they cut footage showing a real satanic ritual or possibly child abuse or human sacrifice or all of the above. And let me just say, here's what's confirmed. Nigel Galt has been unequivocal for years that no 24 minutes were ever cut. In a 2025 interview, Gault said plainly there was no Illuminati. The only changes made to Kubrick's cut were the original cloaked figures for the motion picture purposes and the addition of, like, the exterior establishing shots and stuff like that that Kubrick had already agreed to be added. Jan Harlan, Kubrick's brother in law and executive producer, has also confirmed the very exact same thing. Leon Vitale, Kubrick's close collaborator for decades, spent the rest of his life defending the film as Kubrick's intended work. This is actually what he wanted. There was no 24 minutes cut out. But, and this is a very important and interesting detail in 2025, Todd Field, who played Nick Nightingale in the film and who later became a major director in his Own right gave an interview to Indiewire where he argued that what we see is still only a rough cut. He says, what we have is Stanley's first cut. He died six days after screening that cut. If Stanley's post production on past films is taken to even modest consideration, it's clear that the film would be different. Now, that's not necessarily saying that there's 24 minutes of, you know, human sacrifice that's cut out. But by these credible accounts, the movie that we're watching is not the movie that Kubrick would have ultimately released. That there's still something, perhaps, that Kubrick wanted to show that we're not seeing. So to be clear and fair to the official record, the official account is that there's no, you know, 24 minutes missing. There's no proven murder, no secret exposed footage, anything like that. But, I mean, maybe these people are also, you know, in fear of their lives. Maybe this is also them saying, hey, we just want to move on. We see what you did to Stanley Kubrick. If you can do that to Kubrick, what are you going to do to us? We're just going to all keep quiet. It's not crazy. It's very possible. That's, you know, a part of it. Now, he argues that this isn't the final version, but what he was building towards, maybe we never saw, maybe it just would have had an additional scene, maybe another, like, romance part. Maybe there would have been, you know, a retake of, you know, something innocuous. But that's just the perfection of Kubrick, and that is kind of what he's saying by this quote. Now, that doesn't change the fact that there were things that were changed afterwards to get the rating and potentially some footage missing. But again, there's no verifiable source that we can responsibly say that's not, you know, that's not included in the film. Now, in fairness to Warner Brothers, they said that what he handed over was the final cut. That outside of, like, changing the exterior shot, this was the final, final version. So to all the people that are like, well, he would have, you know, tweaked it and he would have fiddled with it. Warner Brothers says, hey, this is the final thing. And furthermore, Nicole Kidman and Tom Cruise both said that the version that they saw, according to their quote, wasn't radically different from, you know, what actually premiered. So maybe that's them saving face. Maybe that's them also contributing to the big cover up. But maybe what they filmed was actually what it Was. I mean, you got to think how many people worked on the film. If there was some crazy, crazy scene that got cut out, would someone have said something? Would there have been a leak somewhere? Would there have been some type of substantial evidence that we could actually hang our hat on? What's up, guys? 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That's how confident Morgan Morgan is that they can get compensation for you and your injuries. So for more information, go to forthepeople.com gagnon that is f the people.com g n o n or dial pound law. That is £529. And let them know that you got sent by the people here at the campsite. Also, this is a paid advertisement. Now let's get back to the show. So where does this 24 minutes of film theory come from? From what I can find, people have been talking about this for a long time. They look at the original run time of the film, they look at the version that was then released, and they say that 24 or 25 minutes were cut, according to one comment from the notorious Internet theorist David Icke. He says it's kind of interesting. Eyes Wide Shut became Eyes Wide Shut because Stanley Kubrick was trying to. Trying to tell us something. He gave the film to Warner Brothers, but when he gave them the original movie, Warner Brother executives were watching the theater, and when they walked out, they basically went to him. He's claiming that they weren't ecstatic. And they told him that 25 minutes of the movie had to be cut. Stanley Kubrick was apparently angry and he refused. And then a few days after refusal, he apparently passed away after that point. Other people are then added into the post production process and they claim that the runtime of the film was 2 hours and 59 minutes. And then in a screening held a few days before Stanley's passing, they were told that the final cut would be 2 hours and 39 minutes long. And this is more or less where the idea comes from. And this footage to this day has never surfaced. There is a scene that was storyboarded that then was cut out out, which shows them boating. And it shows Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman and their daughter in the film basically boating around. And that we have stills of of that image, but it was never actually included in the final version. Why was it not included? We don't know. But for, you know, all intents and purposes, it doesn't look like this was shown in the actual final, you know, cut of the movie that was shown to the Warner Brothers executives. Now, there's another thread that I found on Reddit that's interesting where people are pointing out some of the scenes in the film don't make sense. So they say in the pool table scene between Bill and Ziegler, they speak as though they have seen something terrible. Now, again, this is not my research. This comes from a Reddit thread. And they say that when you think about it, does it really make sense? They just saw like a swingers party where there was like a big orgy with hookers. And, you know, people do that all the time. This is 1990s in New York City. You know, poor people can have hookers and have crazy orgies. So what horror is it that they're actually talking about? What this person's claiming is that in this scene you have these two characters saying that they just witnessed something horrible. Now, is the swingers party horrible? I mean, it's strange, maybe it's grotesque, but is it horrible? And they're implying here that what was cut from that scene was something that was actually horrible. Cannibalism, the abuse of underage girls, and something that, you know, some type of satanic ritual, something that would actually make them horrified. The horror of Bill and Ziegler at the pool table scene doesn't make sense because the footage was deleted. Had the footage been included, everyone would have understood why they were so horrified. The horror and exaggerated reaction of Bill and Ziegler to the masked ball commonly mentioned online as a plot hole, or maybe just a kubrick gaffe. You know, maybe Kubrick just didn't really get it right. Maybe the energy was off. And they say that it's a plot hole. And one potential theory for why this plot hole exists is because a scene or a collection of scenes was cut out from the movie. Secondly, in one of the scenes in the beginning with a hooker on the toilet, Ziegler calls the hooker a kiddo. He says, you gave me one hell of a scare there, kiddo. That's the line. Now, she's supposed to be, according to this comment, underage. And notice how Ziggler worriedly tells Bill not to tell anyone what happened in the bathroom. Now, if there's just a hooker in the bathroom, would you say kiddo? Probably not. If there's, you know, like. Like, would you tell someone? Like, hey, don't tell anyone what you saw. It's terrible if there's just a hooker. Maybe you'd just be like, hey, just keep it cool. You know what I mean? Like, I'm cheating on my wife. But just be. Be cool about it. And then thirdly, if you look careful at the models in the Cooper cast for the middle part of the mast ball, according to this comment, they're suggesting that he deliberately chose petite and short models who you could infer, perhaps were underage. Now, the lost footage would have confirmed all of this. It would have, you know, cleared up this entire thing. The plot holes, the disproportionate emotional reaction, the horror that they saw, the reference to kiddo. All of this stuff would have been confirmed. But, alas, the lost footage is gone. Now, let me just say, once again, Stanley Kubrick's own daughter has said in interviews that there was no scene that was cut out. Again, maybe she was intimidated. I can't say. It's also been said by all the other editors that nothing was actually cut out. But it is implied by this person, based off of the, you know, watching this film, that there seems like there's some type of emotional disalignment and that something was cut out. Now, where does that leave us? Well, 20 years after Eyes Wide Shut came out, I'm 27 years now. It's mostly remembered as, you know, kind of a disappointment. People actually kind of panned it a little bit, and critics felt like it was a little too slow, a little too long. One famous critic actually quipped that it is the dirtiest movie of 1958. I mean, just. That's hilarious. It's kind of funny. But, like, once again, like, even for the time, people were like, I Mean, it's, like, pretty crazy, but, like, it's not that crazy. You know what I mean? Like, we're trying to see, like, crazy stuff. And, like, this is just kind of like just an orgy. Like. All right. And since the movie came out, the opinion is actually reversed. Today, Eyes Wide Shut sits in the Criterion Collection, which is basically, like, the cinematic equivalent to, like, being in, like, the hall of fame academic film study departments teach it. And it's one of the major late works of Kubrick's whole career. And there's all sorts of literature on it. And this movie that audiences kind of rejected in 1999 now is kind of seen as one of Kubrick's great achievements. And this isn't just because of what Kubrick is saying. It's how he's saying it. Because he didn't shoot Eyes Wide Shut like a thriller. He shoots it like, kind of like a ritual. Every scene has, like, distinctive symmetry. Crews walking down the exact middle of a hallway. The camera tracks with them in these slow, unbroken kind of moves that feel like pageantry. The lighting is very cold. It's all very ritualistic. One other interesting detail in the actual production is the music. So there's these really, like, gorgeous, sweeping, sort of, like, you know, beautiful scenes with this kind of, like, sardonic kind of music underneath it. You know, there's. You know, the whole movie was, like, one piece of music. And it's this very ominous piano. It's like this tolling key that repeats and repeats. And Kubrick found it late in post production, and he was like, this is the perfect sound. Now, it's important to note that that key that they're playing is a minor key. It sounds crazy, but it's like they're playing a minor key and that's the scene that they're using for this whole masked ball. Just makes you think. Another interesting detail is that there's a composer, Jocelyn Pook, who was brought in to actually create original music for this ritual. And one of the sounds that PUK actually put together was a Romanian Orthodox chant, but it was played backwards. It's not like your typical, like, horror movie thing. It's not. It's like a piece of sacred music that is ultimately inverted. Now, that's kind of what the ritual is. And this is also why conspiracy theorists have talked about this, because they're like, oh, they're taking this classic religious traditional song and they're inverting it. This is, like, to, in my opinion, to indicate, like, you know, something sacred. And then what these people are doing is the inverse. It's something satanic or insidious. And Kubrick's method, over and over, is to take visual and sonic language of religion and of the sacred things and to invert it or to play with it. The people at Somerton are going through the motions of something that looks like worship, but there's nothing holy or righteous. They're just worshiping themselves. Another interesting scene from the movie that a lot of people online have talked about is the costume shop where Bill actually rents his mask. It's called Rainbow Fashions. And the shot beneath it, visible in the same shot, is called under the Rainbow. Two women early in the film offer to take Bill, quote, where the rainbow ends. And in that exact same costume shop, the owner is caught pimping out his own teenage daughter to a pair of wealthy older men. And the movie pauses on this for several minutes, right? The men are in formal wear, the daughter's in costume, and no one calls the police. The father actually, like, demands a higher fee. The daughter, when Bill returns the next day, kind of, like, smiles at him, like, kind of, you know, conspiratorially. And that scene is in the theatrical cut. This is in the, like, home video DVD release. This has been in the movie since 1999. And people don't always notice that part. There is this ritual, underage, pimping, Epstein esque ritual that goes on early on in the film that then conveniently is not really addressed in a direct way later on. Is it because there was some stuff cut out? I don't know. Now, the victim who dies at the ritual, a character named Mandy, is the same woman that Bill Harford saves from a drug overdose at the very beginning of the movie. Saves her in the upstairs bathroom of Ziggler's luxurious Christmas party where she's naked and barely conscious, having an OD that she was basically brought in as, like, a. A high class prostitute. Ziggler makes Bill promise not to tell anyone. And this is the same scene where he says, kiddo, you gave me quite a scare. Once again, why would you say kiddo? Just seems a little strange. I mean, Kubrick is so precise. I'm like, does that seem like a mistake? Now she shows up dead at the ritual. She shows up dead in the newspaper. Ziggler tells Bill at the end of the movie that her death was an accidental overdose and nothing more. But Bill doesn't believe her him, and neither do we. And the movie just kind of ends with that ambiguity, like, unresolved, and the power of eyes Wide Shut isn't like that. It proves a single theory that it really operates on a ton of different levels. There's a psychological level, there's the social level, the symbolic level, and it never really fully resolves any of them. Like, is it a movie about an actual event? Is it by a movie kind of like showcasing the structure of power? Is it just one man's, like, internal collapse? I mean, it's difficult to really say day, this isn't just a, you know, scary thriller, right? It's kind of reflective of real, documented, and dark figures in Hollywood history that were there long before Kubrick. There are genuinely documented cases of prominent people in early Hollywood very much involved in real occult practices. There are also tons of Internet rumors about modern celebrities being in the club. So in short, okay, 1939, there's an American rocket scientist named Jack Parsons. We actually did a whole episode on him, which you should check out. But he's a rocket scientist connected with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory that is also very much involved in the occult. He goes to the Church of Thelma, and he's one of the most brilliant young engineers in America that's simultaneously doing engineering work and rocket propulsion, but is also completely connected to the occult and dealing with the British occultist Aleister Crowley. Now, I mean, this guy is, like, so big, there's, like, a crater on the moon named after him. Now in 19, in the early 1940s, Parson is running the American branch of Crowley's order, the Ordo Templi Orientis, out of a mansion in Pasadena. He recites Crowley's hymn to Pan as like a good luck charm before rocket launch tests. And in 1946, Parsons invited a failed science fiction writer into his inner circle. This is a guy, allegedly a Navy veteran named L. Ron Hubbard. And this is the same guy who would later go on to found Scientology. Now, according to the story, Parsons and Hubbard performed a ritual called Babylon, working an attempt to incarnate a goddess on earth documented in biographies. And there's actual historical info on these two Americans. You know, programs like the space program, jet propulsion, and one of the most powerful celebrity religions in all of Hollywood. Parsons died in 1952 in an explosion at his home laboratory when he was 37 years old. Now connected to Parsons inner circle was a filmmaker named Kenneth Anger, a former child actor who became an experimental director who called himself a filmmaker magician. And he believed that his films were actual magic rituals cast onto the audience. Anger's friends and collaborators included Mick Jagger, Jimmy Page, Anton lavey, who founded the church of Satan. And, you know, there's a massive web of documented people all connected to this guy. Why is this important for Eyes Wide Shut? Well, because Anger's World, this weird overlap of, you know, like, rock royalty from Mick Jagger to experimental film to Crowley and occultism is exactly what produced, you know, in 1968, the first major Hollywood movie that tells the same basic story as Eyes Wide Shut, and that's Rosemary's Baby. Rosemary's Baby is about a young woman who discovers that the wealthy, cultured, socially connected neighbors in her elegant New York City apartment are members of a satanic coven and that her husband has traded their unborn child to them in exchange for success in his acting career. And the movie was a massive hit. It kind of saved Paramount from bankruptcy. And it's sort of the same story in Eyes Wide Shut. It's an ordinary person that discovers there's an elite cult operating in plain sight and inadvertently gets involved. A year after that movie came out, followers of Charles Manson broke into the home of the director Roman Polanski and they murdered his wife, the pregnant actress Sharon Tate, along with four other people. Polanski was in London at the time. Now, Joanne Didion wrote the most famous line about that night. Many people I know in Los Angeles believe that the 60s ended abruptly on August 9, 1969. Now, here's the thing that's important. Charles Manson wasn't a satanic cult leader. He was a career criminal, potentially a, you know, MK Ultra patient and a failed musician who put together this religion slash cult of, you know, people basically based off, like, a Beatles lyric and had his own kind of psychotic, you know, messianic vision. And the murders at the Manson family weren't necessarily a satanic ritual. But in the cultural imagination, Rosemary's Baby plus the Tate murders equaled something bigger than either one. It's the sense that Hollywood is playing with forces that are satanic and that it's dealing with something that they can't really control and that these forces finally came to collect. And people just broadly in culture kind of implicitly understood this or believed it. So from secret societies to satanic panic to rumors about people operating in, you know, like, closed rooms, all of this stuff continued to build. And it builds even to this day. Like, think about this whole thing with Jeffrey Epstein, right? 2019, Epstein's arrested and for the first time, Eyes Wide Shut didn't seem like it was just a crazy movie. It seemed like, oh, this is what Kubrick was telling us about. The details about Jeffrey Epstein would come out over the next several years. And of course, as you know, if you've watched this channel before, they're crazy and disgusting and disturbing, and they're still coming out. Epstein had allegedly spent decades building a network of wealthy, powerful men who traveled to his private island in the Caribbean and to his estates in New York and New Mexico and Paris. And the allegations involve a systematic scheme of abuse involving underage girls trafficked from vulnerable backgrounds. And the list of men connected to Epstein's social circle, you know, include former presidents and billionaires and academics and entertainers. And just one month after Epstein's arrest, he's found dead in his cell. And the ruling is now, of course, no one really believes that. And a lot of people, you know, start looking at Eyes Wide Shut, and all of a sudden they're like, wait a second, was this a. This is a documentary? Because if you look at Eyes wide shut from 2019 onwards, it doesn't seem like a weird art film. It seems like a warning, right? You have this wealthy, mysterious financier who hosts glamorous parties in his mansion. Women are procured from vulnerable circumstances potentially, you know, I mean, definitely with Epstein underage and potentially underage in the movie if that 24 minutes wasn't cut or, you know, if it ever existed, who knows? And you have this ritualistic gathering at a private compound where no one tells secrets and everyone knows, but no one talks about it. And then a whistleblower, someone who accidentally witnesses too much, is intimidated into silence. A woman dies under suspicious circumstances, and it's ruled as an overdose. And there's cover ups by powerful men. I mean, it's all just. The connections are just absurd. And in 2020, the novelist Rich Cohen wrote an essay for the Paris Review titled Behind the Mask of Corruption. And he wrote, Eyes Wide Shut is an eschatological guide to that era. A book of revelation that prophesied terrible events. And he argues, not as a conspiracy theory, but just as a cultural criticism that Eyes Wide Shut is not fiction, that it is a documentary. The Hollywood Reporter actually ran a piece in 2025 with Larry Smith, the cinematographer who knew Kubrick and shot films with him, discussing the restored Criterion Collection version. And Smith was asked about the Epstein parallels and said, plainly, there's so many conspiracy theories out there now, it's hard to know what's to be believed and what isn't. But I think we're intelligent enough to understand just how the cards are stacked, aren't we? What does that mean? Aren't we how the cards are stacked? I'm like, yeah, the cards are stacked. We're like the elite Epstein class of satanic pedos are out here doing these terrible rituals. And that. Yeah, that's. Yeah. I'm like, yeah, it's a documentary. The parallels are so obvious. And then Kubrick dies six days later. I mean, what are we talking about? So, but you can't. You can't say definitively that Kubrick is, you know, knew about Epstein and is, you know, pointing out to everyone, like, look, book. But maybe he just shows, like, how the system works. At the very least, that's what happened, right? He was able to identify a pattern and started to reveal what he understood about the pattern. And then, you know, Epstein fell into the same pattern. It's how the elite of our society continue to operate right in front of us. And, you know, to live in this world, right, the one that Kubrick is talking about, you can't look away. You learn not to see stuff. You see, like, a charity gala, a private jet, the islands, the rooms full of powerful people. And the people that are ins of those rooms just kind of don't ask questions. And they just let it happen. Because the illusion only works if you believe these people are better than you. You know? So people go into these places and they're like, man, all these rich, powerful people, they're all better than me. I'm just going to keep my mouth shut. Kubrick didn't, you know, invent this idea. He researched it and spent literally over a year shooting the film. And just when he was done finishing it, he was gone. And what's left behind has been called everything, right? Like a disappointing movie, an erotic thriller, maybe the greatest movie of all time, a conspiracy film. I mean, the list goes on. And this isn't just about Eyes Wide Shut. It's like how people connect dots, you know, like, the pattern is there, the signals are fairly obvious, and for whatever reason, we don't see them. But for the people like Kubrick that were willing to do the research, not only did he see it, but he was able to put it into, I would say, a remarkable piece of art. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is a brief history on Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut. I mean, a very, like, symbolic, heavy and influential film. Especially, like. Especially in, like, the occult space. There's so many little details of, like, you know, like, oh, this line, like, the kiddo line is just weird. Like, maybe it's just a part of speech, but, like, you were alive in the 90s. Like, to call, like, a grown woman, especially Someone in, like, a sexual connotation, a kiddo, just seems bizarre. Are. And the fact that they were so disturbed at the pool table, and then it's like, all right, you just saw, like, a swinger's orgy. Like, it's not crazy, you know, it just. It makes you think, like, oh, maybe there was something cut out, right? Like, what do you think? Do you think something was cut out? I think you. The speculation isn't unfounded from nothing. I think that's a good way to put it. And all these people that are like, oh, it's nothing at all. See, his own daughter said it. I'm like. Like, respect to her. But still, it's like, really? And the fact that, like, people point this out all the time. With Kubrick's death, no autopsy was performed. And the story is like, okay, if someone is not in the greatest health, they seem old, and there's no, like, strange circumstances around their death, then you don't do an autopsy. He's 7 years old, doesn't really like doctors, has a heart attack. That's it. But it does leave room for questions where it's like, no autopsy. No one checked in. But again, if his own family said that he passed away on his own accord through a heart attack, then so be it. I'm not. I know I'm not in the family. I didn't know the guy. But still, it just makes you. It makes you wonder. You know, there is part of it, too, where, like, Nicole Kidman and Tom Cruise being, like, the status that they are and their connection to Scientology also, like, leaves a lot of questions. There's just a lot of weird stuff with that film in particular. So much symbolism. The sounds, the music, like, the ritualism. It, like, feels like a Catholic mass, but, like, it's inverted. It feels like a black mass. And the fact that Kubrick was researching black masses before the list goes on, there's also having, like, Tom Cruise outside of the door of the scene with Nicole Kidman doing what she did. There's, like, a. That C word aspect to it. And. But Kubrick was famous for making actors actually feel like they're in that role to get the best out of it. Exactly. Yeah. I mean, yeah, I think that's also a good point. Like, he was willing to go there and, like, push, like, very famous, successful people to, like, the brink to get what he wanted. Right. I mean, what do you guys think? Is there anything that I missed from this? Is there any major stuff from Eyes Wide Shut that I glossed over? I'D love to know. Please drop a comment. If there's a bunch of stuff, then we'll, you know, we'll maybe make another episode. We'll do a sequel to this one. I wanted to maybe do a sequel of a bunch of, like, Hollywood movies that I think have like a lot of. Of occult undertones. Like Rosemary's Baby. Like we talked about Mulholland Drive. There's a bunch of them. Like the Matrix has like all sorts of like, weird occult sort of, you know, like Neo's passport in the matrix expires on September 11, 2001. You ever seen that? I love that. It's crazy. And there's so many of these weird symbols in all these movies. So if you guys want, maybe we'll do another episode of Diving in on that stuff. But I would love to know what you guys think. If there's anything I skipped over, please drop a comment. I read all of them. YouTube, Spotify, and again, thank you so much for being a part of this channel. I have great news. If you like history history stuff, we got history camp. That's where we go through everything that's ever happened in history. If you like religion stuff, we got religion camp. That's where we go through all the religious beliefs of the world. And if you just like going on crazy rabbit holes with your boy, well, you are welcome in the tent anytime here at camp. God bless you all and I'll see you next time. Peace.