In July 1999, Stanley Kubrick released what ended up being his final film, Eyes Wide Shut. The mystery-thriller revolves around Manhattan doctor Bill Harford, played by Tom Cruise, who finds himself at a strange, ritualistic sex party one night after learning of his wife’s desire to cheat on him. Based on Arthur Schnitzler’s 1926 novella Dream Story (originally known as Traumnovelle), Kubrick was considering making the movie as early as 1968. The director purchased the rights a little while later, but had a slightly different vision for the project in those early stages.

Initially, Kubrick was picturing the movie as a sex comedy. Ideally, he was looking for a lead actor with a comedian’s resilience, like Woody Allen, for one. In a notebook of his from the 1980s, Kubrick had written down a number of other names he was apparently mulling over at the time, including Bill Murray, Alan Alda, and Albert Brooks. Another actor he was especially interested in for the Cruise role was Steve Martin, who he’d loved in Carl Reiner’s 1979 classic The Jerk. 

Kubrick caught Martin on Michael Parkinson’s British talk show in 1980 and invited the comedian to his mansion in England to discuss the possibility of collaborating. The pair spent eight hours together, during which time they had dinner, toured Kubrick’s estate—where he kept boxes full of both good and bad movie reviews—and even played a game of chess (Kubrick won). Martin read Schnitzler’s book at Kubrick’s request and thought it was beautiful, but joked years later that he wasn’t sure if he was supposed to call Kubrick back or not, and nothing ultimately came of their visit. The likely reason was because Kubrick simply didn’t develop the idea much further until the ‘90s.

But there was at least one other amusing story that came out of this legendary meeting, and it was courtesy of one of Kubrick’s dogs. As author Nick de Semlyen explains in his 2019 book, Wild and Crazy Guys: How the Comedy Mavericks of the ‘80s Changed Hollywood Forever, when Kubrick and Martin stopped in to take a look at the director’s pool room that day, Martin caught a whiff of something terrible. It turns out the dog had gone number two out in the hallway right in the middle of their visit. According to Martin, Kubrick just acted as though the incident never even happened.