Eyes Shut For Eyes Wide Shut

Almost three years in the making and ten seconds was all the stations could squeeze for a captive audience baited for the much publicised Eyes Wide Shut trailer - itself vying perhaps for first place among the Star Wars v. Eyes Wide Shut trailer battle. Released at the ShoWest convention last week, the trailer as reported yesterday has a 90 second running time, but censors found the material too explicit for television audiences and cut the raunchy 'mirror' scene back to a tenth of its intended size. The scene features Nicole Kidman standing in front of a mirror, Tom Cruise walks up behind her and begins kissing and caressing her before they make love. In the film, the real-life couple star as married psychiatrists who cheat on each other with their own patients. The screenplay by Frederic Raphael revolves around sexual jealousy and obsession and is based on Traumnovelle by Arthur Schnitzler. Not intended as an all-audience trailer and therefore undeserving of any censorship criticism, Warner Bros. Marketing vice-president Julian Senior said, "This is not intended as an all-audience trailer; it is an excerpt that was chosen by Stanley Kubrick to give cinema owners a sense of the film" Eyes Wide Shut is of course the final work of the late Stanley Kubrick, who died last Sunday at his Hertfordshire estate. Kubrick's last film was the war epic, Full Metal Jacket, which he directed back in 1987. The Manhattan-born director is to be buried today, both Cruise and Kidman have jetted in especially for the funeral.