text: Development Eyes Wide Shut was developed after Stanley Kubrick read Arthur Schnitzler's Dream Story in 1968, when Kubrick was looking for a project to follow 2001: A Space Odyssey. Kubrick was interested in adapting the story, and with the help of journalist Jay Cocks, bought the filming rights to the novel. For the following decade, Kubrick considered making the Dream Story adaptation a sex comedy "with a wild and somber streak running through it", starring Steve Martin or Woody Allen in the main role. Kubrick also considered Tom Hanks, Bill Murray, Dustin Hoffman, Warren Beatty, Albert Brooks, Alan Alda and Sam Shepard for the lead in the 1980s. The project was revived in 1994 when Kubrick hired Frederic Raphael to work on the script, updating the setting from early 20th century Vienna to late 20th century New York City. Kubrick invited his friend Michael Herr, who helped write Full Metal Jacket, to make revisions, but Herr declined for fear he would be underpaid and have to commit to a long production.
  Adaptation
  Arthur Schnitzler's 1926 novella Dream Story is set around Vienna after the turn of the century. The main characters are a couple named Fridolin and Albertina. The couple's home is a typical suburban middle-class home. Like the protagonist of the novel, Schnitzler was Jewish, lived in Vienna, and was a doctor, although he left medicine to write.
  Kubrick frequently removed references to the Jewishness of characters in the novels he adapted. In Eyes Wide Shut, Frederic Raphael, who is Jewish, wanted to keep the Jewish background of the protagonists, but Kubrick disagreed and removed details that would identify characters as Jewish. Kubrick determined Bill should be a "Harrison Ford-ish goy" and created the surname of Harford as an allusion to the actor. In the film, Bill is taunted with homophobic slurs. In the novella, the taunters are members of an anti-Semitic college fraternity. In an introduction to a Penguin Classics edition of Dream Story, Raphael wrote that "Fridolin is not declared to be a Jew, but his feelings of cowardice, for failing to challenge his aggressor, echo the uneasiness of Austrian Jews in the face of Gentile provocation."