Newly Released Kubrick Documentaries on DVD

Here's a snip from a review of the reissue earlier this month of a box set of special editions of five Stanley Kubrick movies on DVD:

It’s been a long, typically Kubrickian wait, but finally a worthy DVD boxset gathers five of his greatest films in scrubbed-up Special Editions (also available separately). And boy, has it been worth it. Each movie comes with its own commentary and (bar Full Metal Jacket) a second disc of gripping, intimate docs and featurettes.

The biggest of the bunch is 2001: A Space Odyssey, the film in which Kubrick went to infinity and beyond – a year before man set foot on the moon. Hours of Making Of material and legacy assessment begin with lengthy new doc The Making Of A Myth, presented by James Cameron, no less. There’s vintage footage of Kubrick on set and past and present interviews with Arthur C Clarke. There’s also fresh chinwags with Kubrick’s producer, tech crew and, well, seemingly everyone else, from William Friedkin and Spider-Man FX guru John Dykstra to Alien screenwriter Dan O’Bannon and doughy US critic Roger Ebert. Effects maestro Douglas Trumbull and Kubrick’s wife Christiane recall the cosmic scale of the director’s demands (“Stanley would walk around saying, ‘Please draw me an image that doesn’t remind me of anything in a colour that doesn’t exist’”). Trumbull spills yet more info on the commentary, although cardboard star Keir Dullea fills the dead air with empty babble.

No danger of that from Malcolm McDowell. The bulging-eyed Brit is a tremendous presence on A Clockwork Orange’s chat-track (he’s joined by doc-maker Nick Redman) and on the terrific 86-minute doc O Lucky Malcolm!, where he rattles off fantastic stories from his entire career and gets saluted by a who’s who of the Brit film industry. Two more smashing docs complete the disc: Still Tickin’ wades through the shit-storm surrounding the film’s release, withdrawal and return, while Great Bolshy Yarblockos! sees another galaxy of filmmakers (hello, Mr Spielberg!), collaborators and critics unload a massively informed, anecdote-rich Making Of.

Nine years after Kubrick’s mesmerising horrorshow of stylised swagger and surgical intellect became the most controversial film in Brit cinema history, the director returned with The Shining. Kubrick’s stay at the Overlook gets the same quality treatment across a superb commentary by steadicam inventor Garrett Brown and biographer John Baxter, plus two utterly comprehensive Making Of docs.

Each runs to less than 30 minutes, but not a second is wasted: the weight of first-hand accounts, insight and pure affection on show here is phenomenal. Vivian Kubrick’s precious mini-doc, shot hand-held during filming, survives from the previous DVD release and there’s a further bonus in an interview with Kubrick’s longtime composer Wendy Carlos.

It was another seven years before Full Metal Jacket’s double-barrelled assault on ‘Nam and a further 12 before Eyes Wide Shut proved that even the world’s biggest movie stars would bow to Kubrick’s might. Gangs Of New York screenwriter Jay Cocks and stars Vincent D’Onofrio, R Lee Ermey and Adam Baldwin lay on Jacket’s cut’n’paste commentary, sharply edited for minimum waffle.

The disc’s Making Of doc doesn’t disappoint either, with much marvel directed at Ermey’s “endless resource for obscenities”, the fact that East London doubled for Vietnam and how Kubrick coaxes a performance (says D’Onofrio: “‘Do it again, do it better.’ He’ll say it right to you”). Just a single-discer mind, but in a boxset packed with great stories, Ermey gets to tell what might be the best…

“We’re driving in Stanley’s wife’s brand new SUV,” explains Full Metal Jacket’s iconic drill sergeant. “We’re looking for a place to do a scene. Stanley’s driving and pointing and talking. And I’m sitting there watching us driving towards a 6ft deep ditch. Stanley, as he talked, drove off into this ditch and the car went over on its side. Stanley reached up, pushed the door open, climbed up... and he’s still talking. ‘We’ll put up the tent over here...’ Then he climbs down from the car and starts walking back to the camp. Can you believe this shit?”

Kubrick’s fin de siècle sign-off Eyes Wide Shut – another masterwerk, not about sex, but about capitalism – gets the smart discussion it deserves in the commentary by Sydney Pollack and historian Peter Loewenberg, while the second disc devotes itself to the method and madness of the legendary shoot (listed as The Guinness Book of World Records’ ‘Longest Constant Movie Shoot’). There’s also a look at Kubrick’s numerous unrealised dream projects in two more stellar docs.

I guess this is material you won't be seeing in our upcoming documentary look at Stanley Kubrick's Napoleon.

Kubrick and Asperger

Are you familiar with the theory that Stanley Kubrick suffered from a highly functional form of autism called Asperger Syndrome? Here's a snip from an autism website:

People with Asperger's Syndrome usually have normal or above normal IQs. Asperger's can be described as an inability to understand how to interact socially.

Frederic Raphael would likely dispute that Stanley Kubrick had an IQ bigger than his IQ, but Kubrick does hold the Guinness Book World Record for the most number of retakes for a movie at 127. Try to judge for yourself if Stanley Kubrick was a highly functional autistic while watching this documentary. Vivian Kubrick offers the commentary track. She was seventeen when she made this behind the scenes look at the making of The Shining, during which her dad broke the record while directing Shelley Duvall.

Here's more from the InterWebs on AS

Asperger syndrome is one of five Pervasive Developmental Disorders (PDD) and it is increasingly being referred to as an Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). Asperger syndrome is characterized by deficiencies in social and communication skills. It is considered to be part of the autistic spectrum and is differentiated from other Autism Spectrum Disorders in that early development is normal and there is no language delay. It is possible for people with Aspergers syndrome to have learning disabilities concurrently with Asperger syndrome. Asperger's syndrome is often not identified in early childhood, and many individuals do not receive diagnosis until after puberty or when they are adults. In most cases, they are aware of their differences and recognize when they need support to maintain an independent life. There are instances where adults do not realize that they have Asperger syndrome personalities until they are having difficulties with relationships and/or attending relationship counseling. Recognition of the very literal and logical thought processes that are symptomatic of Asperger syndrome can be a tremendous help to both partners in a close/family relationship.

Aspergers syndrome is sometimes viewed as a syndrome with both advantages and disadvantages, and notable adults with Asperger's syndrome or autism have achieved success in their fields. Prominent Aspergers syndrome-diagnosed individuals include Nobel Prize-winning economist Vernon Smith, electropop rocker Gary Numan, Vines frontman Craig Nicholls, and Satoshi Tajiri, the creator of Pokémon. Some Aspergers syndrome researchers speculate that well-known figures, including Albert Einstein, Isaac Newton, Glenn Gould, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Stanley Kubrick, had Asperger syndrome because they showed some Aspergers syndrome-related tendencies or behaviors, such as intense interest in one subject, or social problems. Einstein's brain was investigated after his death. Einstein did not start talking until he was three and he frequently repeated sentences obsessively up to the age of seven. As an adult his lectures were notoriously confusing.

Abnormalities in the Sylvian fissure of Einstein's brain could possibly be associated with autism. I also read a biography of Walt Disney and the descriptions of his mercurial character at work, where he fired animators for minor slights, and his poor ability to judge people contrasted with his vast imagination and brilliant insight and creativity suggest Asperger as well. There is a lively debate going on in the InterWebs around these post-mortem diagnosis of famous people who may have suffered from autism. Names like Emily Dickinson, H. P. Lovecraft, Syd Barret, Andy Warhol, Greta Garbo and Paul Cezzane are mentioned as possible "aspies."

Kubrick Bio - Part the Second

Here is a snip from the Stanley Kubrick entry on the All Movie Guide web site:

In 1940 Stanley Kubrick's father Jack, a physician, sent the twelve year old Stanley to Pasadena, California to stay with his uncle Martin Perveler. Stanley was considered intelligent despite poor grades at school and Jack hoped that a change of scenery would produce better academic performance. Returning to the Bronx in 1941 for his last year of grammar school, there seemed to be little change in his attitude or his results. Hoping to find something to interest his son, Jack introduced Stanley to chess, with the desired result. Kubrick took to the game passionately, and quickly became a skilled player. Chess would become an important device for Kubrick in later years, often as tool for for dealing with recalcitrant actors, but also as an artistic motif in his films.

Jack Kubrick's decision to give his son a camera for his thirteenth birthday would be an even wiser move: Kubrick became an avid photographer, and would often make trips around New York taking photographs which he would develop in a friend's darkroom. After selling an unsolicited photograph to Look Magazine, Kubrick began to associate with their staff photographers, and at the age of seventeen was offered a job as an apprentice photographer.

In the next few years, Kubrick had regular assignments for "Look", and would become a voracious movie-goer. Together with friend Alexander Singer, Kubrick planned a move into film, and in 1950 sank his savings into making the documentary Day of the Fight (1951). This was followed by several short commissioned documentaries (Flying Padre (1951), and The Seafarers (1952)), but by attracting investors and hustling chess games in Central Park, Kubrick was able to make Fear and Desire (1953) in California.

Filming this movie was not a happy experience; Kubrick's marriage to high school sweetheart Toba Metz did not survive the shooting. Despite mixed reviews for the film itself, Kubrick received good notices for his obvious directorial talents.

More Kubrick documentary shorts from his early days: Flying Padre for RKO

The Seafarers produced for the SIU seafarers union, in three parts:

Meet Napoleon Podcast

For the benefit of the Napoleon curious I have posted this sixty-eight minute podcast of a conversation between two history buffs. The podcast introduces us to the genius of Napoleon, whose story captured the imagination of another genius, Stanley Kubrick, immediately after Kubrick had created the most imaginative film of the Sixties, 2001: A Space Odyssey. You can jump to the four minute mark to get to the meat of the discussion. Depending upon web traffic the file may take a while to completely upload before it is ready to play.

The Four Million Year Jump Cut

TimeOut magazine in London recently asked several big name movie directors to pick a favorite Stanley Kubrick picture. Here is a snip from the article.

Shekhar Kapur (‘Elizabeth’) on ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ (1968)(Sci-fi epic loved by stoners and intellectuals alike): ‘Forty years on and we are still trying to comprehend its visual and poetic philosophy – what more can you ask from a film? Just for sheer achievement in the art and technology of cinema, “2001” remains a defining movie for me. It is certainly the film that made me fall in love with cinema and want to become a director. Visually, it was one of the most compelling of its time, setting standards in visual effects that have yet to be bettered. Most people now associate “The Blue Danube” waltz with that amazing cut from the broken bone defying gravity as it sails up in slow motion to the space ship floating in space: a cut that not only leaves the audience to imagine the entire history of human development, but also is one of the best uses of classical music in film that I have ever seen. It still takes my breath away.’

Wonder what Kubrick would make of the YouTubian mashup I posted below? I loved it. I think I found a clip for the Kubrick Napoleon project. While we're on the subject of 2001, check out the new widget in the sidebar. It gives you the "Cliff Notes" to what has been a seemingly imponderable movie to many. I will admit that it takes repeated showings for the story of 2001 to sink in, but it is worth the challenge. It certainly did what Kubrick set out to do, which was to lift the science fiction movie out of a critical genre ghetto. The picture was a masterpiece of film making technique and Kubrick deservedly won his first Oscar for the work of his special effects team.

Kubrick's Archive in the Raw

Here is a snip from an article written by the archivist who prepared material for the current touring exhibition of Stanley Kubrick's archive:

During my time spent on the Stanley Kubrick Estate, I went through more than 1000 boxes, searched former offices and other rooms, cellars, attics, two Portakabins, and the dusty storeroom of a workshop in order to collect memorabilia, photographs, objects, scripts, books and paperwork for the exhibition. I opened boxes that had not been opened for 20 or more years, read letters, scripts, books, magazines, brochures and publicity material, watched all kind of video cassettes and listened to countless audio reels.

Picture of the day. The idea of boxes and boxes stacked all over the place is not how I had imagined Kubrick would have organized his records. I guess he never found a system he was happy with. Apparently, once Kubrick shelved a project he just packed up all the files and put them away and moved on to the next one without looking back. I wonder if he ever did put away the Napoleon project? What treasures are left to be uncovered in the archives?

Documentary Cookbook Preface

In researching the Kubrick Napoleon project I came across this manifesto for a new movement in documentary film making. I believe in it strongly enough to try and stick to its precepts in making the Kubrick Napoleon documentary. The manifesto is in two parts. I have posted the prefatory material below.

Documentary Cookbook

*** DRAFT 02/20/02
The Center for New Documentary
Graduate School Of Journalism
University Of California, Berkeley
Introduction

The Center For New Documentary was established in the fall of 2000 to explore, test, and promote new ways of producing good quality long form television documentaries at very low cost. We opened our doors (one door, actually) in response to a rising chorus of frustration over the skyrocketing cost of mainstream documentary production, and an ever deepening exasperation with fundraising. We sensed that enormous talent and energy were being wasted in stalled production and grant writing. As a way to help break the logjam, we invited several filmmakers to experiment with very inexpensive production, and to tell us what they found.

We are not trying to make all documentaries cheaply. We do see the new little cameras as "ball point pens of television" but we have no interest in abandoning 50 years of hard won documentary craft. We are looking for those few stories and production methods that naturally lend themselves to the very low cost production with high-quality. Without compromising journalistic integrity or style, can some films be done for a fifth, a tenth, or even a hundredth of the prevailing cost? Can some of public television possibly approach the cost of public radio? Can we make a living at it? Will there be any pleasure in it? In an increasingly stagnant, market-constrained TV landscape, can low-cost production boast its own craft and virtuosity? Can it co-exist in tandem with high cost traditional (archive/witness/observational/narrated/series-driven) documentary? What strong, journalistically sound, adventuresome films for prime time television can be made by a grown up with a DVCam and Final Cut Pro? Is the whole idea self-destructive?

In practical terms, we invited three filmmakers, Peter Nicks, Lourdes Portillo, and Albert Maysles, to see what films could be well made for $100,000 per hour---about one-fifth the going rate for prime time documentaries. The obvious question is "Where do you get $100,000?" More on that later, but finding 100K is certainly easier than finding half a million, and we see the 100K target as only a first step in really drastic reductions for some films.

Our main concern is not with beginning filmmakers, students, or neighborhood filmmakers, but with journeyman documentary makers who already know the ropes, and are trying reach a large television audience. (The Center's work is not part of the regular graduate studies curriculum at the School of Journalism. Likewise, we are not skilled at shepherding photojournalists into television magazine work or breaking news; that is being well handled by Dick Halstead and others at the "Platypus" workshops, www.digitaljournalist.com. Likewise, international digital journalism is being well considered by the Pew International Journalism Program www.pewfellowships.org).

By now, virtually everyone working in documentary in this country has brushed up against DV production, and many producers have embraced it exclusively. But despite the emergence of a robust folk culture surrounding digital non-fiction, we still see little evidence of filmmakers aggressively searching out stories, styles, and techniques which naturally fit the new tools. Most of the work seems aimed and squeezing blood from the turnip, by digitally making the same sorts of traditional films with the same methods for less money.

Many cost saving devices are already in play. Most of it is not rocket science, but rather a cagey sort of "preventive production," as described below. It turns out that the technical advantages of DV are not as much of a cost lever as personnel time or rights costs. Story choice seems to make the greatest difference, followed by extreme schedule efficiency, and extreme technical discipline. Then comes a nearly dogmatic avoidance of archive footage, archive music, and travel. Everyone gets paid professional rates, and cost savings are achieved by adjusting methods and schedules, not day rates. We look for generally non-technical "evergreen" devices that will long outlast changes in hardware and software.

The Ford Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, and Gerbode Foundation stepped forward to fund our first round of work. The Rockefeller Foundation supports the development and distribution of a "Documentary Cookbook." Our first project, "The Wolf" by Peter Nicks, was completed for $100,000, and has been acquired by ABC Nightline for broadcast over two nights this spring, where it will probably be seen by 2,000,000 people. It's a good start.

Following is some of what we've learned. Please send your experiences, suggestions, lessons, tips, lists of what to do, etc, to dvtv@berkeley.edu. Please do not send proposals; that will come later.

The Problem

It had become clear by the early 1990s that most available documentary money, especially in pubic television, was going to a shrinking and increasingly risk-free pool of veteran producers making increasingly risk-free documentaries. These were more often than not earnest, predictable, and sometimes brilliant programs about dead people. For reasons involving public policy, the commercialization of public television, corporate consolidation in commercial television, partisan congressional politics, and the rising costs of production, new voices and new forms could emerge only with great difficulty. Even well established documentary makers could seldom explore new ground.

The average cost of a prime time documentary television hour had risen to around $500,000, of which a large portion generally had to come from the advertising budgets of ratings-hungry corporate underwriters. As the funding and underwriting stakes rose, idiosyncratic "one-off" programs and unpredictable forms like cinema verite all but vanished from public television, except for work within ITVS and POV. Long form was dead at the networks. HBO soldiered on, and together with MTV has become generally more accepting of idiosyncratic fare.

The cost of traditional production rose, due largely to 16mm film costs (before the wholesale transition to video), skyrocketing archive footage and music costs, travel costs, and long production and post-production schedules often made even longer by delay in executive sign off.

As independent producers, we knew even by the early �90s that a good one-hour prime time idea pretty well condemned us to raising half a million dollars, and that it would take five years of fundraising---work for which we had no talent, no training, and less than no interest. Small, experienced independent production houses and producers of on-offs were particularly hard hit, and the pipeline became increasingly clogged with unfunded and partially funded $500K projects. Henry Hampton took ten years to fully fund Eyes on the Prize. Cadillac Desert required 307 separate funding applications, and for Sing Faster: The Stagehands Ring Cycle, Jon Else prepared and submitted 137 separate grant applications over nine years. Who does not have a seed-funded, embryonic, or half-grown single program or mini-series festering on the shelf?

In a trend that has accelerated ever since the ratings success of The Civil War, public television especially embraced huge, market-friendly series projects while generally consigning single programs to the dustbin. We came to live in a world of exemplary but chillingly expensive series and mini-series like Africans in America, Frontline, The American Experience, and New York. But not every idea was a series idea, and not every one-off fit into an established strand.

We complained that Ken Burns got all the money (not noticing that his passions for serial American history correlate almost exactly with funders' desires). We became a culture of complaint, with journeyman filmmakers frustrated at moving beyond traditional forms, and young professionals frustrated at trying to launch new projects. The important role of television documentary in vigorous civil dialogue, in collective memory, education, entertainment, and public policy formation was not well served. Over the years, a great pool of young documentary talent became increasingly unhinged from prime time television.

The aggregate level of support for long form documentaries at the networks, PBS, cable, foundations, and endowments, has not increased significantly, nor is it likely to. As producers scramble to get anything made---anything---these funding imperatives erode the traditional fire wall between non-fiction television and the marketplace, and journalistic standards begin to erode. Despite rare exceptions like The Farmer's Wife and the heroic efforts at ITVS, POV, HBO, and a few foundations, idiosyncratic one-offs are off the table.

The new Juggernauts

Some production institutions have chosen to attack the problem of escalating cost with brute force, by designing ever-larger documentary projects as "product lines" intended for a market-driven television system. These typically include the films themselves, web sites, interactive enhancement, outreach programs, and curriculum materials, as well as companion books, videos, CD-ROMs, DVDs, and CDs sold via on-air advertising. Many public television venues are, in fact, now demanding that proposals come through the door not as films, but as "projects" with web sites, outreach, and educational materials. Even the cheapest documentary can now easily balloon into an expensive multi-layered project. Cable channels appear more flexible, and somewhat less demanding.

Many producers now find themselves in a surreal vortex where the longer a project takes to fund, the more it costs, and the more it costs, the longer it takes to fund, and the longer it takes, the more it costs� ad infinitum. The more films cost, the less risk the funders can stand; at $1,000,000 per hour, who can dare risk a ratings misfire? Some half-funded Juggernauts have been inching their way through the system for years.

Hamster Wheel

Then, there were those of us who scampered to make as many corporate videos, TV commercials, airline tech reports, depositions and wedding videos as we could, trying desperately to save a few hundred thousand dollars for MY BIG FILM. We should live so long.

A few good, cheap, fast films

We are interested in the exact opposite approach: drastically limiting cost in order to get more documentaries made more quickly. We want to break the queue by lowering the entry fee, not raising it. It is the television equivalent of watercolor instead of oil paint, mimeograph instead of linotype, garage bands instead of stadium rock, guerrillas instead of armies. The aim is to find methods and stories that are so naturally inexpensive that they can slip below the radar of financing. It worked in the �60s.

We were first inspired by public radio, seeing the refreshing power of programs like the early "This American Life," "Lost & Found Sound" and "Soundprint." There were glimmers of real possibility in late 90s with The Cruise, Salt Men Of Tibet, digital work by Ricky Leacock, experiments at Frontline, Nightline, and the National Film Board Of Canada, and the narrative productions of Jon Jost and the Dogma '95 group. And on the un-cool sidelines, a shadow world of very fast very cheap and sometimes very good corporate production had also taken hold.

An old truism in Hollywood is, "Cheap, fast, good� Pick any two." Clearly with the right methods, some small percentage of documentaries can be cheap, fast, and good. In the bargain, as we found with "The Wolf," there is the prospect of retaining true independence by avoiding early funding from any specific broadcaster, and thus being able to offer the finished documentary to all possible broadcasters.

Part 1 will follow in a future post.

Picture of the day. I could make a rude joke about the real reason Napoleon stuck his hand in his clothes but if the current governor of New York had been a French politician instead of a Dick Tracy square-jawed type he could have survived the discovery of his sessions with prostitutes from the Emperor's Club with mere public scorn and cries of hipocracy and not calls for his resignation and impeachment. Or maybe he should have been a US senator from Louisiana. Lagnappe. Click the link below to hear about the Napoleon who fascinated me as a tot in the 1960s.

March 7, 1999

Here is the text of the obituary published in the Washington Post the day after Stanley Kubrick died. Play along with us and spot the inaccuracies. Post below at will.

Stanley Kubrick, Cinema's Unsurpassed Cynic, Dies

Stanley Kubrick, the adventurous moviemaker who took audiences from Spartacus's slave revolt in ancient Rome through Dr. Strangelove's Cold War fantasies and on to distant worlds in the year 2001, died yesterday as he was finishing the final cut of a long-awaited new film.

Police were called Sunday afternoon to the 70-year-old director's rural home in Hertfordshire in London's northern suburbs. Kubrick's family said nothing about the cause of death; Hertfordshire police issued a brief statement saying, "There are no suspicious circumstances." Kubrick's death was utterly unexpected; a friend who spoke with him Saturday night said there was no indication anything was wrong.

His movies were often as controversial as they were unique, and just as often came later to be regarded as cinematic monuments that resonated through American popular culture.

The notoriously reclusive American-born director, who rarely left London, his adopted home, created "2001: A Space Odyssey," "A Clockwork Orange," "Dr. Strangelove," "Lolita" and "Full Metal Jacket," treating themes as diverse as war, pedophilia, the tyranny of technology, the nature of madness and the nuclear age.

For more than three decades, the opening of a Stanley Kubrick film has been an event, and the planned July 16 release of his final effort – "Eyes Wide Shut," starring Hollywood's first couple, Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman – may be the biggest ever. Kubrick had completed enough of the film about sexual obsession to allow an editor to bring a copy last Tuesday to New York, where Warner Bros. chiefs Bob Daly and Terry Semel along with stars Cruise and Kidman were allowed a first glimpse. The film was then immediately returned to London.

"He was on Cloud 98. He was very, very excited. Obviously I'm really happy that he got to see how we all reacted to the movie he made," Semel said. He talked to Kubrick by phone for an hour on Saturday night. "But if you'd have said to me he was either sick or God knows what, that the next morning I would find out he died – I would never have dreamt that."

In the film, Cruise and Kidman play psychologists who are married but cheat on each other with their own patients. Cruise reportedly wears a dress in one scene.

To work with Kubrick, Cruise and Kidman moved to London and enrolled their children in school there. Filming took 15 months – one of the longest shooting schedules in recent movie history – and the meticulous Kubrick then spent months editing and re-editing.

Semel said Kubrick's passing would not delay the film. "Short of one or two minor things, the movie was finished. It would not, nor does it need to be, cut in any way," he said.

Cruise and Kidman issued a statement saying they were "devastated" and "in shock." "He was a genius, a dear friend and we will greatly miss him," they said.

Kubrick's family – he lived with his third wife, Christiane, with whom he had three daughters – said there would be no further comment.

Malcolm McDowell, who starred in "A Clockwork Orange," issued a statement through his publicist saying Kubrick "was the last great director of that era. He was the big daddy."

His work has also been an inspiration to many independent filmmakers. Tony Kaye, director of "American History X," said "Eyes Wide Shut" was the only film he was looking forward to seeing this year, since he knew it would be Kubrick's vision alone. "It was the only thing the meddlers couldn't get their hands on," he said.

In an industry known for its formulaic scripts and heavily marketed concepts, Kubrick was one of the few true renegades. He worked in total secrecy on his projects, often serving as his own producer, screenwriter and cinematographer, and maintained absolute artistic control over his films from start to finish. He refused to travel for his films since the 1960s, and instead re-created elaborate sets in England – notably a war-ravaged Vietnamese city in an abandoned gasworks for "Full Metal Jacket" – rather than shoot on location.

Kubrick "has shown more imagination with dialogue and camera than Hollywood has seen since the obstreperous Orson Welles went riding out of town," wrote Time magazine in 1955. Few critics have differed with this view in the years that followed.

His films have produced a litany of indelible cultural images, whether it was "HAL," the humanlike computer in "Space Odyssey," the mad gesticulations of Peter Sellers in "Dr. Strangelove," or the manic face of Jack Nicholson hissing, "Heeere's Johnny" in "The Shining."

If there were an Oscar for Most Influential Space Film, Kubrick's "Space Odyssey" would probably have won it in a walk. The powerful movie, with minimal dialogue and a plot that trailed off mysteriously into dark corners of space and time, set the mold for space movies ever since – and incidentally restored a forgotten Richard Strauss tone poem, "Also Sprach Zarathustra," to a prominent place in the repertoire of symphony orchestras around the world.

The film brought Kubrick his lone Oscar, which was not for directing but for the film's special effects.

His work often fell into categories between drama and black comedy, so that critic Pauline Kael called "Lolita," Kubrick's adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov's disturbing novel about a pedophile, "black slapstick, and at times it's so far out that you gasp as you laugh."

Born in the Bronx, Kubrick was a largely self-educated man with an insatiable thirst for knowledge. He performed poorly in high school, but by age 17 had landed a job as a photographer with Look magazine. He also took literature courses at Columbia University taught by Lionel Trilling and Mark Van Doren and played chess for money.

In 1951 he made his first film, a 16-minute short for RKO called "Day of the Fight," and quit his job at Look. In 1953 he made a 30-minute union documentary called "The Seafarers," then raised $13,000 to finance his first feature movie, "Fear and Desire."

In 1956 Kubrick went to Hollywood, where he teamed with James B. Harris and made his first real studio film, "The Killing." The next year he made his first critically acclaimed movie, "Paths of Glory," which starred Kirk Douglas. In 1959, Douglas recruited Kubrick to direct "Spartacus," the classic story of a slave revolt in ancient Rome. He vowed it would be the last film he made without full artistic control – and it was.

In 1962, Kubrick made "Lolita," which, because of its controversial story, could not be filmed in this country. Kubrick made it in England, where he settled and made the rest of his movies.

The hilarious and macabre "Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb" followed in 1964. Featuring George C. Scott, Slim Pickens and Peter Sellers in a variety of roles, it became both a cult and commercial hit. For that film, Kubrick received Oscar nominations as co-author, producer and director.

He was also nominated for screenwriting, direction and Best Picture in 1971 for "A Clockwork Orange," based on the Anthony Burgess novel; the film was panned by many critics because of its violence and sexual content.

On all of his films, Kubrick became renowned for his attention to detail. The Guinness Book of World Records notes that Kubrick has the dubious honor of demanding the most retakes of any scene: 127 takes for Shelley Duvall in "The Shining." The director's demanding style meant that many actors clamored to work with him a first time, but few did so again.

In a rare interview with The Washington Post in 1987, Kubrick disdainfully noted that he expected actors to know their lines cold before acting in a scene. "You cannot think about your lines and act," he said. "Some actors – and those are usually the ones who go back to L.A. and do interviews about what a perfectionist I am – don't go home after shooting, study their lines and go to bed. They go out, stay out late and come in the next morning unprepared."

In the same interview, Kubrick said his love of movies came from seeing early films at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, movies by Erich von Stroheim, D.W. Griffith and Sergei Eisenstein.

"I was star-struck by these fantastic movies," he said. "I was never star-struck in the sense of saying, 'Gee, I'm going to go to Hollywood and make $5,000 a week and live in a great place and have a sports car.' I was really in love with movies. I used to see everything at the RKO in Loew's circuit, but I remember thinking at the time that I didn't know anything about movies. But I'd seen so many movies that were bad, I thought, 'Even though I don't know anything, I can't believe I can't make a movie at least as good as this.' And that's why I started, why I tried."

A Kubrick Documentarian Speaks

Here is a snip from an website offering critical analysis of Stanley Kubrick' body of film work. It is taken from an interview with Paul Joyce, the man behind the British Channel 4 documentary "Stanley Kubrick: The Invisible Man." Joyce had to tread lightly around the subject because Kubrick was still alive and of course many of his associates did not want to speak ill of him, but if you watch the video you will hear some unvarnished opinions nevertheless. Joyce also has a cogent analysis of the fair use of clips from other films without clearances from the copyright owner in a documentary. I wonder if Joyce would be interested in revisiting the cult of Kubrick a generation later? The Kubrick video links in the sidebar of this blog are to the You Tube version of that documentary.

What attracted you on doing a documentary on Kubrick?

Well he's probably one of the greatest living directors, is the first answer to that. I grew up with his work and he shifted shifted from genre to genre with such ease and his films are in a sense (even though can call them genre pieces), really unquantifiable in a certain level. Obviously, The Shining as a horror movie, but its very other things beyond that and I think its that and the extraordinary ability to take on genre pieces, as indeed in the case of 2001, and make something which isn't a science fiction movie. So I think that's a long answer but its a complicated decision in a sense to see who your going to do. There's a limited number of great directors, in the case of Kubrick. Channel 4 at that point were putting together a season of his films, so one was able to match the documentary to the season, so that was a additional reason to do him.

Is there any particular Kubrick film that you like?

I like them all actually, in their own way. The Killing is one of my favorites, given the strictures of budget and time. But its clear that he was a young man who was really pushing the boundary of his own ability in a really exciting way, which went on to the next film, Paths Of Glory, which similarly is a young man's film. When you think about the great war, the subject he was dealing with, there were mainly young men involved in that, and that's a young man's film about young men in war, and I think if he moves on, the work becomes more mature and more considered, as he gets older. But theirs something highly energized all those movies which appeals to me.

So how did you contact Mr. Kubrick for agreeing to do the documentary?

He didn't agree.

He didn't?

I mean he didn't agree and he didn't disagree. He did co-operate. I communicated with him by fax and via his personal assistant.

Leon Vitali?

Yes, and who was a contact. I never received a reply from my faxes or letters to Kubrick, but I know that he saw them, so I kept him informed about the people I was intending or hoping to interview, and he never raised any objection. There was more a fear on the part of the participants, for example, I subsequently did a film on Robert Altman, to which Shelly Duvall contributed. Well she did a big interview at the time on Kubrick, which I never included in my film on Kubrick, because it was too explosive, the material. And she asked me to be very careful about using it. But at some point there is an additional sequence put in, which is Shelly Duvall talking about Stanley.

I remember seeing clips from Vivian Kubrick's documentary which showed Shelly and Kubrick not getting along very well together.

I think they got on quite well personally. I think they respected each other at a certain point. I think in that sequence which we extracted in our documentary (which Kubrick allowed us to do, which was very nice of him) I think he was playing up for the camera at that point frankly. He wanted to make a point and in fact, the worse exchange at the doorway, during the false snowstorm, he switches very cleverly from one point he's making to another, to really wrong foot her. Which is, if you look at it two or three times very clever, but its below the belt. I don't think she deserved that treatment.

Were you anyway hoping to take a fly on the wall approach of Kubrick working on a film in the initial planning stages of the documentary?

He wasn't a making a film then, though he has done one now. Basically, he won't allow anything recorded which doesn't have his full authority. He hasn't been filmed for thirty years. Have you seen the programme I've done on him?

I've seen it around five or six times.

Well, I mean Ken Adam talks about driving him to a press conference on Strangelove and he had to stop by the side of the road so that Kubrick could vomit, out of fear, and that was the last time he's done it. He's terribly, terribly, nervous at public encounters. He won't do it. He's like an actor with stage fright, he's a great actor but he can't go on stage....

I'm sure that would have upset Kubrick that I included [Fear and Desire] because he wanted to suppress the movie. But under the copyright laws of this country, you are able to extract for the purposes of criticism and review, extracts without the copyrights holders permission, and that's the route I took, and the channel have quite a history of that. Off course they fought one action against Warner Brothers on just that.

That was the documentary on ACO?

Indeed, and it went to a judicial review. And it was a majority decision in favour of the channel and Warner Brothers decided not to press it too the high court. Which was very wise, because they would have lost that.

I know Barraclough Carey got into trouble as well when they inserted scenes from ACO in their programme on censorship. Did you get away the same reason there?

Yes. That wasn't shown in the season for Channel 4, because it wasn't acquired for Television and he doesn't want it shown here. You can get it on laserdisc in the states and its shown in France regularly, so its a bit of a nonsense really. So as it not being a season film, we were covered. The Channel 4 lawyers, thought we were covered. It's how you use the clips. You cannot use them for illustration. You can't say "Kubrick's a great director" and you use a clip of something demonstrating how great he is. You can't do that. If somebody says, the sequence in Spartacus where Kirk Douglas is painted in different colours, to show the most vulnerable spots on the human body to aim for in mortal combat, and makes a point about that, you know that was a particular clever way to express Kirk Douglas' fear or whatever, if you then show that clip having described it in some detail, than that is some permissible use. But it has to be a very, very specific commentary on a specific sequence.

But of course, as one gets older and longer in the tooth on doing these things, it becomes easier to make sure you adhere to the context.

Are there any interviews that had to be cut out from the final film?

Well Shelly Duvall wasn't included for reasons that I've said, although it was really rather that Kubrick was finished by the time I got to Duvall. I would have had to have recut Kubrick, by which time it had been transmitted already. But for the sake of history, it might be worth doing that, if one could get the money. The only person who expressed some concern really, was Malcolm McDowell, who thought that this must have Kubrick's blessing and therefore his editorial control, this programme of mine.

Now, when I convinced him that Kubrick had nothing to do with it, and what I want to include in my film was entirely what I wanted to include --I didn't need to get Kubrick's permission --Malcolm was happy to do it. He'd never done that before, talked about ACO in that detail. So he was rather fearful that Kubrick would censor it or may censor it.

Did you try and obtain interviews with members of Kubrick's families or friends, i.e. Vivian Kubrick or Alex Singer?

I got to James B. Harris, which I thought was pretty close for that. Vivian was in America and untraceable at that point. She seems to have left the Kubrick household now and is traveling somewhere and doesn't seem to have made another film. It would have been interesting to talk to her but I couldn't trace her. We put out some calls, but nothing came back.

Alex Singer is a director I admire, but we felt that we were pretty well covered on that early stuff. Even though it became, or it can be construed that Kubrick feels that its more personal, than professional some of the comments in there. There's certain points where you go into to examine a mans creative genius and if they want talk about what a shit he is, I can't do much about it.

So you haven't heard anything about Kubrick's reaction to the documentary.

The only reaction I've had is from Warner Brothers, who I've talked too about other projects, and they say its still a sensitive matter with Stanley. So I would assume that he was not well pleased.

Picture of the day. Kubrick trained his camera on many misfits in his career and did not shy away from controversial subject matter. He took this picture for Look magazine of German dadaist George Grosz. Grosz rebelled against the anarchy of expressionism, the leading artistic force of the 1950's. How does that impulse square with Kubrick's desire to control and manipulate his public image as he grew as a film artist? Kubrick was content to remain an abstraction as a public figure, but then he seemed to encourage the perception that he was an obsessive eccentric. Food for thought. Here is a short documentary on the early Kubrick films.

Production Diary - Day Twenty

Remember when I wrote that snafus are inevitable when you start making a movie? The party is over for the director. Thomas Bender has left the building. I now have to push back the start of production until I find a new director for the Kubrick Napoleon documentary.

Over the weekend Thomas sent me email saying he did not like how he was portrayed in this blog. He wanted references to him removed from these posts. I asked him to correct the record where he believed I had been untruthful, unfair or had taken a cheap shot at him. I asked him to post in these comments if he felt maligned by anything I had written. I even asked him to prepare a response that I would have posted unedited and without comment. He declined. He had decided instead that he would like to focus on smaller film making projects rather than take on the Kubrick Napoleon documentary. Fortunately, he will use his impending hiatus from Howcast to focusmore attention on completing the new cut of his Hoopeston documentary. Here is a trailer for the film.


I should have an announcement in several days on who will be making the Kubrick Napoleon documentary. I am looking a several strong contenders to direct the project, all of them seasoned professionals who have made feature length documentaries in the USA and the UK. Again, this is no guarantee that the project will be snafu-free in the future. I was just surprised at how quickly the hurdles started popping up given how quickly we got out of the box.

Picture of the day. Stanley Kubrick had to replace an actor in the middle of making his last feature, "Eyes Wide Shut." Sydney Pollack came in at the last minute to replace Harvey Keitel as Tom Cruise's semi-mentor in the demi-monde of posh, after-hours sex clubs at the close of the last millennium. Just like "Barry Lyndon," "Eyes Wide Shut" may prove to be ahead of its time and undergo a critical reappraisal. Kubrick was fascinated with cinema eroticism and in the early 1960's had planned to make an erotic epic written with Terry Southern. Southern worked with Kubrick on the "Dr. Strangelove" script. The novel "Blue Movie" has a character Southern purportedly modeled after Kubrick. Frederick Raphael, who worked with Kubrick on "Eyes Wide Shut," wrote a memoir of his time on the picture; "Eyes Wide Open" does not paint a flattering picture of Kubrick. Michael Ciment's "Kubrick" is still the best book on the subject, and I refer to the first edition from the mid 1980's.

Kubrick in a Nutshell?

Kubrick was not as complicated a cookie as some have made him out to be. At least, that is what his personal assistant thinks. Leon Vitali was hired by Stanley Kubrick to play Lord Bullingdon in "Barry Lyndon" and continued to work for him until Kubrick's death in 1999. An interviewer in 2007 asked Vitali to describe the real Stanley Kubrick.

You know, it's not as complicated as you might think. The best way I can put it is this: If you make it in more of a personal context and you think about yourself as being someone who can sometimes be angry, sometimes be generous, sometimes be jealous, sometimes be resentful, sometimes be extremely kind -- all those basic human qualities. Everybody's got them. And the thing is, for many people, there's one part of them that drives them more than another. Some people are continually feeling guilty about life. He could feel guilty about some of the things he had to do. Or they could be extremely ambitious. Something drives them more than all the others. They have all those other qualities inside them. But somebody like Stanley, who had all those like you or I, but to about the power of a gazillion, all right? Because from minute to minute it could change. One of those, the ambitious, would suddenly give way to something quite mean. And then equally give way to something almost over-generous. Everything he did was almost overpowering.

It seems that how a person may come across depends upon what emotion is in the driver's seat at the time. Things may not always be what they seem, which makes finding the truth a hit or miss pursuit at best. How does the old Marvin Gaye song go, only believe half of what you see, some or none of what you hear?

Picture of the day. Pakistan asked Google over the weekend to cut off access to You Tube from within the country. That explains why You Tube was inaccessible everywhere last Sunday. But information wants to be free, so the news story spread the that the request was prompted by the posting on You Tube of footage of several Danish editorial cartoons. These were cartoons from 2005 satirizing Mohammed and led to deadly riots world wide. The cartoons were recirculated by the Danes once a secret plot to kill the cartoonist was discovered. For the benefit of you InterWebs gear heads out there, here is why You Tube had to pull the plug everywhere to shut out Pakistan.

Production Diary - Day Fifteen

This is from an email I just sent to Thomas Bender. He is back on board and is asking for time to wrap up his current gig with the Howcast website before signing on to the Kubrick Napoleon documentary.

Kubrick's work as a magazine photographer in New York has great potential for story ideas. He was like this prodigy at sixteen who was working for one of the biggest photo journals of the time. He was living in the boom times after the end of World War II, when big cars and big furniture with stereos and television built-in were spreading into newly developed suburbs. Kubrick lives this bohemian life, playing chess for spending money so that he could buy the latest camera gear. He was a real gear head when it came to cameras and would never lose that as he grew older. There's a lot of fodder there. It was actually one of his photo assignments that gave birth to his first picture, a short subject looking at boxing and a day in the life of a boxer.

We've been exploring Kubrick's early life on this blog before he ever dreamed of making a sweeping epic portraying Napoleon's life. It sometime feels like we are spending more time exploring Kubrick's youth than Kubrick did studying Napoleon. Kubrick hired Felix Markham to pick the Oxford don's brain on Napoleon and his world. They met one morning during the in-between time after the release of 2001 and before "A Clockwork Orange." Kubrick had the conversation taped and I found a transcript of that interview in the Kubrick archive. I took the tube to Elephant and Castle and found myself in a maze of subways built under the busy street above. One tunnel led directly from the tube stop to the University of Arts. I did not find it until after I followed another tunnel that took me the long way.

Kubrick spoke to Markham about a wide range of subjects, from the political economy of post revolutionary France to Napoleon's love affairs. He actually started by quizing Markham about a cognate for Napoleon's Corsican accent in English. Markham suggested that Napoleon would sound like a highlander from Scotland. Later, Kubrick confessed that he was sympathetic to Napoleon's form of "enlightened despotism." Markham understood Napoleon to have created his own aristocracy, one that was only preserved by Napoleon's military grip on the leading houses of Europe. Kubrick supported Napoleon's actions in clamping down on the press during the early days of his rule: France was still unstable and agitation from the media would have promoted continued chaos. Surprisingly, Kubrick spent little time discussing the battles other than complimenting Markham on the clarity of the word pictures he used to describe Napoleon's key battles in his biography of the man. Kubrick understood that in war victory was a matter of making fewer mistakes than your opponent.

What Kubrick admired how as an emperor Napoleon made battle so efficient he turned war into a "going concern" for France. Markham reminded Kubrick that in order to keep making a profit he had to keep winning all his battles. Ultimately, it was chess is what helped Kubrick nail down Napoleon's personality. To Kubrick, Napoleon's achilles heel was his inability to play the "in-between" moves of battle. "Un-swish-en-sug" is how Kubrick spelled it out for the benefit of the transcription. It is a chess term for moves played in the limbo between attack and defense, when there is nothing to attack or defend. Kubrick put it this way: "The situation between attacking and retreating [Napoleon] finds unbearable. He will take it either way. Whatever circumstance dictated, he can accept it and function well. But he can't function in that in-between spot. He doesn't like it. It makes him anxious." Markham added that the ruling families of Europe had the conventional aristocracy behind them. Napoleon only had the prestige of battlefield victories over the armies of these families; he did not share in their bloodline. It was only in blue blood spilt did Napoleon have any claim on legitimacy. Napoleon as the ultimate class warrior.

There is much more material in the Markham transcripts from the Kubrick archive. Too much for one post, but this one is a real nugget of gold.

Picture of the day. Reasons to be cheerful, part three. The New York Times published an article suggesting John McCain had an affair in the Nineties. Now the conservatives who were shunning him are coming to his side. The New York Times is making the reporters available on the InterWebs to prop up the legitimacy of the story. This is an in-between time for McCain because he had no one to attack yet on the Democratic side in the election. Hilary Clinton hinted at the prospect of losing the nomination in a Texas debate last night on CNN. Barack Obama is closing the gap down to single digits in Ohio and is even in Texas with Clinton. Obama Edwards anyone? Here's a shout out to John Malkovich, inventor of the Jell-o diet and a festival of style.