Stanley Kubrick

Stanley Kubrick was born on July 26, 1928, in the Bronx, New York City, the first child of Jacques Kubrick, a physician, and Gertrude Kubrick, both children of Jewish immigrant families from Austria-Hungary ^[1]. The family lived comfortably by the standards of the borough, and Jacques tried to interest his son in chess and photography, two hobbies that took hold with unusual force. The chess playing later paid his bills; the camera changed his life.

School did not suit him. At William Howard Taft High School he compiled poor grades and an attendance record weakened by long absences, and he later said that nothing in the classroom ever engaged him ^[2]. What did engage him was the Graflex camera his father gave him around his thirteenth birthday. He haunted movie theaters across New York, watching everything from double features in the neighborhood houses to foreign films at the Museum of Modern Art.

In April 1945, still a sixteen-year-old student, he photographed a newsstand vendor surrounded by papers announcing the death of President Franklin Roosevelt and sold the picture to Look magazine ^[1]. The sale led to a staff job. By seventeen he was one of the youngest photographers the magazine had ever employed, traveling the country on assignment while his former classmates finished high school.

Photojournalism taught Kubrick composition, lighting, and how to tell a story in frames, but he wanted moving pictures. In 1951 he spent his own savings on Day of the Fight, a short documentary about the boxer Walter Cartier, whom he had earlier profiled for Look ^[2]. RKO bought the film, and two more shorts followed. He then borrowed money from relatives to make his first feature, Fear and Desire (1953), a low-budget war allegory he later disowned and tried to suppress ^[1].

Two modest thrillers, Killer's Kiss (1955) and The Killing (1956), showed rapid growth. The Killing, a racetrack heist told through overlapping timelines, caught the attention of critics and of the young producer James B. Harris, who became his partner ^[3]. Their collaboration produced Paths of Glory (1957), a First World War drama starring Kirk Douglas about French soldiers executed after a failed attack. The film earned strong reviews and was banned for years in France for its portrait of the French military command ^[2].

Douglas brought Kubrick onto Spartacus (1960) after firing the original director, Anthony Mann. The Roman epic won four Academy Awards and became a major commercial success, but Kubrick chafed at working without final authority and resolved never to direct again unless he controlled the production ^[1]. Soon afterward he moved to England to film Lolita (1962), his adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov's novel, partly because British financing arrangements suited the project. He stayed in Britain for the rest of his life.

Anyone asking who was Stanley Kubrick usually starts with the run of films he made between 1964 and 1980. Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964) turned the logic of nuclear deterrence into black comedy, with Peter Sellers playing three roles; it received four Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture and Best Director ^[3]. The film began as a serious adaptation of Peter George's novel Red Alert before Kubrick concluded that the subject's absurdity demanded satire ^[4].

2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), developed with the writer Arthur C. Clarke, took roughly four years to complete and pushed special effects far beyond anything the industry had attempted. Its front-projection landscapes, rotating centrifuge set, and largely wordless final act divided early reviewers but drew enormous audiences, and the film won Kubrick his only personal Academy Award, for special visual effects ^[1]. In 1991 the Library of Congress selected it for the National Film Registry in the registry's third year ^[5].

The films that followed confirmed his range and his appetite for controversy. A Clockwork Orange (1971) drew an X rating in the United States and such heated attention in Britain that Kubrick himself withdrew it from British distribution, where it remained unavailable until after his death ^[2]. Barry Lyndon (1975), an adaptation of Thackeray set in the eighteenth century, used specially adapted Zeiss lenses built for NASA photography to shoot interior scenes by candlelight, and it won four Oscars in craft categories ^[4]. The Shining (1980), from Stephen King's novel, made extensive early use of the newly invented Steadicam and slowly became one of the most analyzed horror films ever released ^[3]. Among Stanley Kubrick achievements, this sustained record of technical invention across unrelated genres has few parallels in the medium.

Kubrick's working habits became almost as famous as the films. He demanded large numbers of takes, sometimes dozens for a brief scene, and expected department heads to answer detailed questions about matters most directors delegated ^[4]. Shelley Duvall described the making of The Shining as the most difficult professional experience of her life, while other collaborators, including the actor Malcolm McDowell and cinematographer John Alcott, spoke of the shoots as demanding but instructive ^[3].

His control extended past the set. He negotiated contracts giving him authority over editing, advertising, foreign dubbing, and even the projection standards of theaters showing his work, an arrangement almost no other director of the era secured ^[1]. He tested prints, checked cinema screens, and corresponded with distributors around the world from his home in England.

The press often portrayed him as a recluse, a label he rejected. He rarely gave interviews and had not flown since the 1950s, but colleagues described a sociable man who spent hours on the telephone, followed American football by having tapes shipped across the Atlantic, and read constantly across science, history, and fiction ^[2].

Kubrick married three times. His first marriage, to his high school sweetheart Toba Metz in 1948, ended in divorce in 1951. A second marriage, to the dancer and theater designer Ruth Sobotka, lasted from 1955 to 1957 ^[1]. In 1958 he married the German actress and painter Christiane Harlan, who had appeared in the final scene of Paths of Glory singing to a room of soldiers. Their marriage lasted until his death, and Christiane Kubrick later opened their home and his archives to scholars ^[6].

He raised three daughters: Katharina, Christiane's daughter from a previous marriage whom he brought up as his own, and Anya and Vivian, born in 1959 and 1960. Vivian shot a documentary on the set of The Shining as a teenager and composed the score for Full Metal Jacket under a pseudonym ^[3].

From 1978 the family lived at Childwickbury Manor, a large house near St Albans in Hertfordshire, where Kubrick consolidated his editing rooms, offices, and famous rows of research boxes ^[6]. He kept dogs and cats in large numbers, played chess seriously all his life, and held dual attachment to his American citizenship and his adopted English home.

The pace of his output slowed sharply after 1980. Full Metal Jacket (1987), a Vietnam War film shot almost entirely in England, recreated the ruined city of Hue in a derelict London gasworks ^[2]. Between projects he developed screenplays that never reached production, including Napoleon, a biographical epic he had researched exhaustively around 1970, and A.I. Artificial Intelligence, which he eventually passed to Steven Spielberg, who completed it in 2001 after Kubrick's death ^[4].

His final film, Eyes Wide Shut, starred Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman and adapted Arthur Schnitzler's 1926 novella Traumnovelle to modern New York, though it was filmed in Britain. The shoot ran roughly fifteen months, which the Guinness organization cited as the longest continuous shoot for a mainstream feature ^[3]. Kubrick screened his cut for the studio and the two stars in early March 1999.

Days later, on March 7, 1999, he died in his sleep of a heart attack at Childwickbury, at age seventy ^[1]. He was buried on the grounds of the estate. Eyes Wide Shut opened that July to intense scrutiny and strong initial box office.

Kubrick's standing has only grown since 1999. Sight and Sound's decennial critics' polls regularly place 2001: A Space Odyssey among the greatest films ever made, and directors from Martin Scorsese to Christopher Nolan cite him as a formative influence ^[5]. Nolan supervised a 70mm restoration of 2001 for its fiftieth anniversary in 2018, presented at the Cannes Film Festival ^[4].

His archive became a legacy in itself. In 2007 his family deposited hundreds of boxes of scripts, research, props, and correspondence with the University of the Arts London, creating the Stanley Kubrick Archive at London College of Communication, one of the most complete records of any filmmaker's working life ^[6]. A touring exhibition of props and documents, first mounted in Frankfurt in 2004, has since traveled to museums on several continents, including the Design Museum in London in 2019 ^[6].

Basic Stanley Kubrick facts, thirteen features in forty-six years, one competitive Oscar, no honorary lifetime award from the Academy, understate the case. He proved that a director could hold near total authority inside the studio system, that special effects could serve ideas rather than spectacle, and that popular genres could carry the weight of serious art. Few filmmakers have been imitated more and matched less.