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Stanley KubrickStanley Kubrick (July 26, 1928 - March 7, 1999) was a Jewish-American film director. In a career which spanned five decades, he created a notable body of work consisting of thirteen feature films, many of which are considered classics of 20th century cinema. Kubrick's films, most of which were adapted from literary sources, are characterized by technical brilliance, inventive cinematic storytelling, and sardonic wit. His stylistic trademarks include long tracking shots and extensive zooms, as well as the clever use of popular and European classical music. Among his best known works are the Cold War satire Dr. Strangelove (1964), the landmark science fiction film (1968), and A Clockwork Orange, whose graphic portrayal of violence caused a controversy when it was first released in 1971. Following a string of commercial successes throughout the 1960s, Kubrick was able to enter into a uniquely secure and loyal financial relationship with Warner Brothers. The backing of a major Hollywood studio made it possible for him to retain creative freedom and high control over the production process while enjoying such benefits as large budgets, major stars, and media exposure. Subsequently, Kubrick also became known for the great demands his exacting working methods imposed on his cast and crew. Biography Early life Stanley Kubrick was born on July 26th, 1928 to a middle-class family of Austro-Hungarian descent in the Bronx, New York. He had one sister, Barbara, and his father, Jacques, was a well-known physician in the area. At age twelve, Jacques taught Stanley how to play chess, sparking an interest that would provide pleasure, and frequently income, for his son throughout his nascent career and beyond. A year later at the age of thirteen, Kubrick's father, who was something of a shutterbug, introduced photography to Stanley and presented him with his first camera, a Graflex, for his birthday. At the time Stanley had high hopes in becoming a jazz drummer and was seriously studying the technique. Ultimately, Kubrick invested himself in photography, occupying much of his time in the coming years in the darkroom. For reasons other, Kubrick was a poor student and had a desultory 4 years at William Howard Taft High School in inner Bronx. He passed with a meager grade-average of 67 and outright failed English one year, having to make it up in a summer class. Reflecting on his experience; - "I think the big mistake in schools is trying to teach children anything, and by using fear as the basic motivation. Fear of getting failing grades, fear of not staying with your class, etc. Interest can produce learning on a scale compared to fear as a nuclear explosion to a firecracker... I never learned anything at all in school and didn't read a book for pleasure until I was 19 years old."
While Kubrick would later become an infamously voracious reader, he had relatively little interest for reading during his teens -- a notable exception to this being the book Paths of Glory by Humphrey Cobb, which he stumbled upon and read in his father's office during his teens and would later turn into a film of the same title over a decade later. When he graduated in 1945, colleges were flooded with soldiers returning from service in the second World War, and any hope he had of proceeding into a post-secondary school was eliminated. Luckily for Kubrick, his adolescent hobbies, chess and photography, had began to come to fruition. Photographer for Look magazine While in high school, Kubrick's interest in photography had become especially active. He was made official school photographer one year and began seeking out job opportunities. In this he succeeded, and by the time of his graduation he had already sold two picture-stories to New York's Look magazine -- one, ironically, about an English teacher at Kubrick's high school who attempting to strike interest for Shakespeare into his students by acting out scenes in class. But his first contribution to the magazine, famously, was a snapshot of a solemn newspaper vendor surrounded by headlines announcing the death of Franklin D. Roosevelt. Kubrick, who took the photo on his way to school, sold the photograph for $25 to Look, which offered him ten dollars more than the New York Daily News. To supplement his income, Kubrick also began playing "chess for quarters" in Washington Square Park and in Manhattan chess clubs. Often playing up to 12 hours a day, he sharpened his skills and earned enough money to purchase food for himself everyday. Meanwhile, Kubrick registered for night courses at New York's City College, hoping to improve his average to increase his odds at getting into a school the next year. Before he could attend classes he was back at Look with some more pictures to sell and, after the then photo editor, Helen O'Brien, heard about his situation, was hired full-time as an apprentice photographer at the magazine. While his peers spent the coming 4 years in college, Kubrick spent them developing his talents at Look, reading and watching film insatiably, and maintaining an ethic of independence that would colour his entire career. This twist of fate was pivotal for Kubrick. Kubrick would often refer to these years as tremendously fortunate. Foray into film A few years on, Alex Singer, a friend of Kubrick's who would later become a respected director in his own right, introduced Kubrick to the idea of making short documentary pieces. Singer worked as a office boy at March of Time, a film company, and told Kubrick that there was a fortune to be made in producing shorts; telling Kubrick that March of Time was spending $40,000 to produce a 10 minute film. This impressed Kubrick and, after calling some equipment rental shops and doing some calculations, predicted that he could produce the same length documentary, with original score and all, for under $1000. In an interview many years later, he reflected: - "We assumed that March of Time must have been selling at a profit, so if we made our film for a thousand we couldn't lose our investment"
Excited, Kubrick invested the money he was saving from his job at Look into a short piece, Day of the Fight, about the middle-weight boxer Walter Cartier. Kubrick, who had recently completed a photo-story on the fighter for Look entitled Prizefighter, rented a spring-wound 35mm Eyemo camera and began shooting. Independent as always, Kubrick did almost everything in the film himself, screwing photo-floods to existing light fixtures and employing a friend of his, Gerald Fried, to produce a score. Finally, $3900 later, the film was done and Kubrick set out to rake in the money. In his own words; - "We were offered things like fifteen hundred or twenty five hundred. We told one distributer that March of Time was getting fourty thousand for its documentaries, and he said "you must be crazy." The next thing we know, March of Time went out of business."
Eventually, he found a buyer, RKO Pictures, and sold the film for $4000 -- a $100 profit. Kubrick was not the least bit discouraged. His film played preceding a Robert Mitchum-Ava Gardner feature at the local Paramount Theatre, satisfying Kubrick and pushing him to work on a new picture. Now devoted to his new career, he quit his job at Look to work on his second documentary, for which RKO put up $1500. The documentary,The Flying Padre, was about a priest who traveled through the southwest from one Indian parish to another in a Piper Cub. The documentary, again, made meager profits. Back to playing chess in the park, Kubrick became convinced that he could make better, less expensive full-length films than the films he was seeing every week. A friend of his in the Village provided a story, and Kubrick secured $10,000 from his father and uncle, a wealthy pharmacist. The film, titled Fear and Desire (1953), was about a team of soldiers trapped behind enemy lines in a fictional war and was largely a commercial and creative failure for the young director. Commenting on the film many years later in an interview, Kubrick described it as an "exceedingly serious, undramatic, and pretentious allegory" and the film did not turn a profit. Nevertheless, the film garnered some respectable reviews as it went through the arthouse circuit in New York, many acknowledging the young director's potential. Similarly, Kubrick next film was co-written by a friend of his and was again funded largely by his uncle. The film, Killer's Kiss (1955), revolves around a young welterweight boxer at the end of his career, and also achieved limited commercial and critical success. In retrospect, Kubrick views both films poorly, describing Killer's Kiss as "nothing but action sequences strung together on a mechanically constructed gangster plot" and refusing to allow the Museum of Modern Art in New York to screen the two films at a career retrospective of his that they held in the 90's. Regardless, Kubrick's cinematic style began to develop in these pictures with the introduction of techniques that were to become his trademarks, such as long takes and extensive tracking shots. Harris-Kubrick Productions Once again, Kubrick was back at the chessboard. While it would be another 3 years until Kubrick released another film, progress towards his goals was constantly being made. At the time, Alex Singer was serving in the Signal Corps in the Korean War and had met a young filmmaker named James B. Harris. Harris, who was the son of an executive of a successful film distribution company, Flamingo Films, was in Korea making Signal Corps training films and was informed by Singer of "some guy in the village who was going around all by himself making movies." Interested, Harris was introduced to Kubrick by Singer upon their return to the States. Kubrick and Harris hit it off immediately, founding a friendship that would last their lives and a business partnership, Harris-Kubrick Pictures, that would help launch both of their careers. The pair purchased the rights to the Lionel White book, Clean Break, which Stanley and friend Jim Thompson would turn into a screenplay for his next film, 1956's The Killing. The film, staring Sterling Hayden, made impressive use of non-linear chronology and film noir stylistic devices and was Kubrick's biggest success to date, although still not financially successful. Nevertheless, the film was impressive enough to attract the attention of Dore Schary, the then head of production at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM). Schary invited Harris and Kubrick to pick out a story to develop from MGM's massive collection of stories that they owned the rights to. Harris and Kubrick spent 2 weeks simply going through the alphabetical synopsis cards, finally settling on The Burning Secret by Stefan Zweig, which Kubrick and friend Calder Willingham turned into a screenplay. Around the same time, Schary lost her job in a major reshuffling of MGM brass, with Harris and Kubrick leaving shortly thereafter. Having lost the rights to the story, the duo now had to find a new subject to develop. Kubrick remembered the book Paths of Glory from his not-so-distant youth and, after convincing Harris, decided to make it his next film. Kubrick, again with Calder Willingham, developed the story into a complete screenplay, but had little success drawing a major studio. This all changed when Harris managed to interest the actor Kirk Douglas, who was a major star at the time, into doing the film. Now, with Douglas on board, United Artists decided to take up the film, sending Kubrick off to Munich, Germany in 1957 with a $935,000 budget. The film was a significant success for Kubrick, turning a profit, being critically well received, winning awards, and catching the attention of Hollywood. Also, while filming he met and became romantically involved with a young German actress, Suzanne Christiane Harlan, who was working on the film. The two would marry a year later; a marriage that would beget 3 children and last until his death in 1999. After returning to the US, Kubrick worked for 6 months on the Marlon Brando vehicle, One-Eyed Jacks. Kubrick left before the actual production, as Brando wanted to direct the film himself. Also around this time, Kirk Douglas requested Kubrick to take over the director's chair on a film he was currently working on, Spartacus (1960). Kubrick agreed. During the production of the Roman epic, creative differences arose between Kubrick and some of the cast and crew -- namely with Douglas, the film's producer and star. Kubrick was frustrated by his lack of creative and legal control over the film, a result of having been selected as the second director after the films first director, Anthony Mann, dropped out for similar creative differences only one week into production. Although well-received by critics and moviegoers, the battles waged over Spartacus convinced Kubrick that he would never work within the Hollywood system again and he remained an outsider to the end of his life. Financially, however, Kubrick would prove uniquely successful in harnessing Hollywood's resources for his own ends even as he brazenly defied its conventions. Kubrick moved to Britain in the early 1960s to make an adaptation of Lolita, and he lived there for the rest of his life. He owned and resided at Childwickbury Manor in the district of St Albans in the south of England. Much of the filming of his later movies involved careful reproduction of foreign locations in England, eg. scenes in the Vietnam war film Full Metal Jacket were filmed at Beckton Gasworks. Creative freedom Lolita (1962) would cause Kubrick's first major controversy. He worked with the book's author, Vladimir Nabokov, to produce a screenplay that would allow the book to be filmed without being banned from theaters worldwide. It was with Lolita that he discovered the talent of Peter Sellers. Kubrick asked Sellers to play four roles simultaneously in his next film, (1964), and Sellers accepted (though he eventually only played three of those roles). Kubrick's decision to film a Cold War thriller as a jet-black comedy was a daring risk, one that paid off handsomely for both himself and Columbia Pictures. By belittling the sacrosanct norms of the political culture as the squabbling of intellectual children, Strangelove foreshadowed the great cultural upheavals of the late 1960s as well as Kubrick's next project. Kubrick's great success with Strangelove persuaded the studios that he was an auteur who could be trusted to deliver popular films despite his unusual ideas. Kubrick thus entered into a fruitful relationship with Warner Brothers, who gave him almost complete artistic freedom on all his ensuing projects. Kubrick spent five years developing his next film, 1968's (photographed in single-film MGM Camera 65/Super Panavision 70 Cinerama). Kubrick collaborated with Arthur C. Clarke, adapting parts of Clarke's short story "The Sentinel" (Clarke also wrote a novelization of the screenplay, which was released alongside the film). The film was groundbreaking in its use of visual effects, which Kubrick himself supervised. It was also notable for its use of European classical music (including Also Sprach Zarathustra and The Blue Danube). 2001 represented a radical departure from both Kubrick's previous films and the mainstream Hollywood paradigm. While Kubrick would never again push the experimental envelope quite so hard, paradoxically Kubrick would win a uniquely total creative control from Hollywood by succeeding with easily the most "difficult" film ever to win such a wide release. Kubrick and 2001 are sometimes associated with the hippie counterculture due to the final, abstracted chapter of the film; the marketing campaign of 2001 certainly exploited this idea by calling the film "the ultimate trip." Critics were initially divided in their response to the film, but it was a huge popular success. As Clarke put it in 1972, "As for those who still don't like it, that's their problem, not ours. Stanley and I are laughing all the way to the bank." His next film, A Clockwork Orange (1971), was darker in tone than 2001 (and originally released with an "X" rating in the US). The film was based on Anthony Burgess' novel about a criminal who undergoes treatment to be 'cured' of violent urges; the novel asks questions about how society defines morality. Its depictions of teenage gangs committing acts of rape and violence made the film controversial, and the controversy increased when copycat acts were committed by criminals wearing the costumes of the film's characters. Kubrick was apparently genuinely perplexed by critics who said he was glorifying violence. When he received death threats targeting himself and his family, Kubrick took the unusual step of removing the film from circulation in Britain, with the result that the film was not shown again in Britain until its rerelease in 2000, after his death. Kubrick's next project was to be an epic biopic of Napoleon. Explaining his interest in Napoleon to interviewer Joseph Gelmis, Kubrick said "he fascinates me. His life has been described as an epic poem of action. His sex life was worthy of Arthur Schnitzler." He did a great deal of research and wrote a preliminary screenplay, but ultimately the project was cancelled due to the box office failure of the Napoleon-themed Waterloo (1970). Instead, Kubrick decided to adapt William Makepeace Thackeray's The Luck of Barry Lyndon, a picaresque novel about an 18th century gambler and fortune hunter. He told an interviewer, "At one time, Vanity Fair interested me as a possible film but, in the end, I decided the story could not be successfully compressed into the relatively short time-span of a feature film... as soon as I read Barry Lyndon I became very excited about it." It would be Kubrick's least appreciated post-Strangelove film. Wildly overbudget and two years in filming, the film also effectively nullified the career of then-superstar Ryan O'Neal. Despite a number of passionate defenders, Barry Lyndon (1975) was considered by many critics to be cold, slow-moving, and lifeless. More than Kubrick's other films, it has gained acclaim with time. Final films Kubrick's filmmaking pace slowed considerably after the release of Barry Lyndon. He made only three more films in the next twenty-five years; but his reputation and his "mystique" were such that the premiere of each new Stanley Kubrick film was an event hailed by audiences worldwide. The Shining (an 1980 adaptation of Stephen King's novel starring Jack Nicholson and Shelley Duvall) and Full Metal Jacket (one of several films in the 1980s which dealt with the Vietnam War) did not reach the heights of Dr. Strangelove and 2001 in the eyes of many critics, though they are still seen as exceptional examples of their genres, and they contain many Kubrickian moments. After Full Metal Jacket, Kubrick spent years planning a project entitled A.I., but due to the limited special effects technology of the time, he postponed the idea and filmed Eyes Wide Shut instead. (In 2001, Steven Spielberg directed A.I.: Artificial Intelligence based on a treatment by Kubrick.) Released in 1999, Eyes Wide Shut starred Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman as a couple caught up in a sexual odyssey (Cruise and Kidman were married at the time). The story is based on Arthur Schnitzler's novella, Traumnovelle (Dream story). Just a few days after completing the editing of Eyes Wide Shut, Kubrick died from a heart attack, and was interred in Childwickbury Manor, Hertfordshire, England. Trivia - One of the many popular myths about Kubrick is that he was a chess grandmaster. He was not, although by all accounts he was a highly skilled player; indeed, it has often been noted that he approached his projects from the point of view of a chess strategist. On occasion, Kubrick himself was known to recall how, as a young director, he would earn enough money to feed himself by hustling chess games for quarters in Manhattan's Washington Square Park.
- The only female character in Paths of Glory, the beautiful singer in the final scene, became Christiane Kubrick a year or two after starring in the film.
- Kubrick often had an antagonistic relationship with the writers with whom he collaborated. Arthur C. Clarke was upset that Kubrick's actions caused the delay of the publication of his novel 2001: A Space Odyssey so that it appeared the book was a novelization of the film rather that the film an adaptation of the book as the pair had agreed. Anthony Burgess was appalled that he was called on to defend A Clockwork Orange when Kubrick refused to as the film contradicted the message of his novel.
- The last occasion on which Kubrick was seen in public was at a performance of The Blue Room at the Donmar Warehouse then starring Nicole Kidman.
- Unrealized projects: Over the years, Kubrick worked on a number of projects which did not evolve beyond the script stage. Some of the more well-developed film ideas that were never realized include Napoleon (1969-1971), which was canceled upon the release of Waterloo; Aryan Papers (1988-1991), a Holocaust story postponed because of Schindler's List; and Blue Movie (late 1960s, early 1970s), about a director so highly regarded he is allowed to direct a pornographic movie starring major Hollywood stars. This project was proposed by Terry Southern following their collaboration on Dr. Strangelove and was the basis of his novel Blue Movie. For a short time in 1997, it was believed that Kubrick was making his own "blue movie" with Nicole Kidman and Tom Cruise (this later turned out to be Eyes Wide Shut).
Tabloid rumors Kubrick was interviewed numerous times during the course of his career, but these conversations dealt almost exclusively with his views on the filmmaking process. Kubrick’s unwillingness to discuss personal matters publicly, coupled with the controversies created by some of films, led to a situation where newspaper articles started to repeat a set of unfounded rumors as reported facts. These articles ultimately gave rise to a myth of Kubrick as a kind of highly eccentric hermit genius akin to Howard Hughes in his later years. After his death in 1999, Kubrick’s family and close associates began to take steps to debunk the myth in earnest. Jan Harlan directed the documentary Stanley Kubrick: A Life in Pictures (2001), while Michael Herr published a short book simply entitled Kubrick (2001). The memoir was based on his 1999 Vanity Fair article written to coincide with the release of Eyes Wide Shut. Some of the more widely circulated rumors include the following: - A popular rumor, started in the mid-1980s, was that Kubrick had not only shot a fan who intruded on his property, but delivered a coup de grce gunshot to the intruder's face because he had bled on the grass. This was untrue and was intended to irritate Kubrick into giving an interview; he didn't, though he was deeply upset.
Filmography As a writer/director who was also his own producer, Kubrick was thoroughly involved in all aspects of the production process, and he closely supervised the cinematography, editing, and sound design of each of his films. Early documentary short films - Day of the Fight (1951)
- Flying Padre (1951)
- The Seafarers (1952)
Feature films References -
- Stanley Kubrick: A Life in Pictures. Documentary film. Dir. Jan Harlan. Warner Home Video, 2001. 142 min.
- (Excerpted from the book Kubrick by Ciment.)
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External links Kubrick, Stanley Kubrick, Stanley Kubrick, Stanley Kubrick, Stanley
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