When Tony Zierra set out to make a documentary about Stanley Kubrick, who passed away in 1999, he knew he would need to speak with the director's longtime right-hand man, Leon Vitali. As he got to know Vitali, though, he switched gears and decided to make Vitali the focus of the film. The result is a dual portrait of two obsessive personalities, one who got all the glory and the other who got none. Vitali, an engaging raconteur with a smoker's rasp, was a busy television and theater actor when Kubrick began work on 1975's Barry Lyndon. A big fan of 2001: A Space Odyssey and A Clockwork Orange, he auditioned and won the role of Lord Buddington. Kubrick was so pleased with his work that he expanded the part, while Vitali enjoyed working with him so much that he set out to keep the collaboration going. After picking up behind-the-scenes skills on another set, he reunited with Kubrick for 1980s The Shining for which he served as casting director and acting coach. He would never leave Kubrick's side again. Danny Lloyd (The Shining) and R. Lee Ermey (Full Metal Jacket) both credit Vitale for running lines with them until they had them down cold. For the Oscar-nominated Ermey, a former Marine drill instructor, the experience marked the beginning of a whole new career. Matthew Modine, another Full Metal Jacket alum, marveled at Vitali's ability to do anything Kubrick asked, including location scouting and color correction, adding, "I love Leon, but he makes me sad." To Modine, Leon gave up a promising career to cater to the needs of a famously exacting taskmaster, but there's a sense that Vitale felt he had peaked as an actor with Barry Lyndon, even if he never actually says so.
Nonetheless, he would end up playing eight different masked characters in Eyes Wide Shut, Kubrick's final film. If there's no mention of earlier efforts, like The Killing or Paths of Glory, that's simply because Vitali wasn't involved with any of them, though Zierra includes clips from every significant work, including Kubrick's photography for Life magazine. He also includes interviews with Vitali's children and siblings, Ryan O'Neal (Barry Lyndon), and a number of other actors, directors, and studio representatives, some with only a tenuous connection to Kubrick, like Stellan Skarsgård and Pernilla August, who worked with Vitali on a Swedish production of Hamlet, and Phil Rosenthal (Everybody Loves Raymond), who appears to have befriended Vitali after he relocated to the States in the wake of Kubrick's passing. At that time, Vitali felt lost as he was no longer an actor and no longer a film worker, as he describes his role for Kubrick, but an end credit states that the Kubrick Estate hired him as a consultant, at least for the purposes of a 2001 restoration. Though some reviews have described Filmworker as a tragedy, it's clear that the 72-year-old Vitali has few regrets, and there's no doubt that Kubrick's indelible work wouldn't have been quite the same without his dedicated assistance. Recommended.