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."

Kubrick's Early Aethetic

Stanley Kubrick was a feature photographer for the weekly news journal Look magazine in his sophomore year at Taft High School in the Bronx, New York. His mediocre grades keep him out of college but it did not sidetrack his career at Look. By the time Kubrick was nineteen his work had become such a fixture at the magazine that in 1948 he was profiled in The Camera, a photographic trade magazine. He stated his bias in composition for guerrilla photography over portraiture; he was more interested in spontaneous action rather than in a posed tableau. He even had advice for amateurs trying to break into the business. His self confidence even took the writer aback. Ah, the folly of youth professing to know all the answers. I remember those days.

"I think esthetically recording spontaneous action, rather than carefully posing a picture, is the most valid and expressive use of photography," Stanley Kubrick said. Maybe the statement wasn't earth-shaking, but it startled me. The boy who said that had turned nineteen a week ago, and has been a staff photographer for LOOK magazines since age seventeen.

Mr. Kubrick didn't come by this photographic philosophy overnight. He has been making and selling picture stories for three years. Just three years ago, Stan got his first camera as a present - a Kodak Monitor 620. That was his "how do you do" to the instrument that has served him like the genie served Aladdin.

Kubrick was sixteen years old, and the posessor of a new camera, when he passed a newsstand on April 12, 1945. An old man was sitting at the stand, surrounded by papers with black headlines that read, "ROOSEVELT DEAD." Stanley took the picture, and when it was developed he realized it was salable. From reading camera magazines he knew how to go about selling it, so he took it to LOOK. At that time Mrs. Helen O'Brian was picture editor. She showed the picture to the late managing editor Guenther and they decided to use it.

Mrs. O'Brian shared Kubrick's belief that picture stories were his natural bent and she encouraged him to do more - after school, "He sold LOOK four picture stories," Mrs. O'Brian said, "Stanley had the highest percentage of acceptances of any free-lance photographer I've ever dealt with." About half of Kubrick's off-guard stories were his own ideas. They were before he became LOOK's youngest photographer and they still are. One Kubrick candid began with an ordinary visit to the dentist. Like most of us Stanley hates to go to the dentist. While he was waiting he noticed that the other patients waiting looked as nervous as he felt. The result was a series of off-guard shots, made with natural lighting that show the photographer's appreciation of the humor in our fear of the dentist and something else - the humor is sympathetic. This combination is seldom found, and then usually among extremely mature persons.

Stanley Kubrick showed his capacity for sympathetic humor when he was only sixteen. He had an English teacher at Taft high school who read "Hamlet" aloud to the class. The teacher played every part, using facial expressions and gestures appropriate for the character he was playing. Kubrick brought his camera to class, took off-guard pictures, and LOOK bought them. Because the pictures were funny without being cruel the teacher enjoyed the story as much as any other LOOK reader. There is this same quality in a story called "How people look to the monkeys." Kubrick was assigned to do a picture on how people looked to the caged animals. To find out he made the necessary arrangements with the authorities at the zoo at Prospect park in Brooklyn. In the monkey house there are both indoor and outdoor cages. The monkeys were in the outdoor cage, so Kubrick stationed himself in the indoor cage with his lens poked through the food slit. At first the monkeys were curious but after they were allowed to look in the camera they returned to hamming for their usual audience. The picture ran in LOOK with a full-page picture of a monkey scratching its head, titled, "This is how monkeys look to people." The other page showed Kubrick's picture of the monkey's audience and was captioned "...and this is how people look to the monkeys."

Until he joined LOOK's staff, Stanley used a standard Rolleiflex. Now he uses an automatic Rolleiflex, a 4 by 5 Speed Graphic and a Contax.

Indoors he prefers natural light, but switches to flash when the dim light would restrict the natural movement of the subject. In a subway series he used natural light, with the exception of a picture showing a flight of stairs. "I wanted to retain the mood of the subway, so I used natural light," he said. People who ride the subway late at night are less inhibited than those who ride by day. Couples make love openly, drunks sleep on the floor and other unusual activities take place late at night. To make pictures in the off-guard manner he wanted to, Kubrick rode the subway for two weeks. Half of his riding was done between midnight and six a.m. Regardless of what he saw he couldn't shoot until the car stopped in a station because of the motion and vibration of the moving train. Often, just as he was ready to shoot, someone walked in front of the camera, or his subject left the train.

Kubrick finally did get his pictures, and no one but a subway guard seemed to mind. The guard demanded to know what was going on. Kubrick told him.
"Have you got permission?" the guard asked.
"I'm from LOOK," Kubrick answered.
"Yeah, sonny," was the guard's reply, "and I'm the society editor of the Daily Worker."

For this series Kubrick used a Contax and took the pictures at 1/8 second. The lack of light tripled the time necessary for development.

When Kubrick has a story idea five copies are typed out and one is to be submitted to Dan Mich (executive editor), Henry Ehrlich (managing editor), Merle Armitage (art director), Arthur Rothstein (technical director) and Woodrow Wirsig (assistant managing editor). At a board meeting they decide to give the idea a red, or green light. A green light means a specific assignment. Rarely does Kubrick have a free rein.

Kubrick is maintaining the same high batting average as a staff photographer that he enjoyed as a free lance. He explains it by saying, "The magazine's policy is so well determined that you seldom go out on a wild goose chase. When LOOK sends you out on a story the story is usually published." I asked Stanley for some advice to ambitious amateurs who want to become magazine photographers. "Think up ideas for stories, go out and shoot them, and then send them in to the magazines. I was lucky; I figured that out when I was young," he said. I couldn't help smiling at the word "young" and he continued, "Don't try to shoot big events or people; wou will probably have the most success by shooting things the magazine would never know of."

Stan is also very serious about cinematography, and is about to start filming a sound production written and financed by himself and several friends.

Picture of the day. The above photo of Kubrick commanding his army of extras on the set of Barry Lyndon was not taken in the style of his Look days; too static.

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.

Torture Documentary Wins 2008 Oscar

Snip from IMDB:

"Taxi to the Dark Side"[is a]n in-depth look at the torture practices of the United States in Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantanamo Bay, focusing on an innocent taxi driver in Afghanistan who was tortured and killed in 2002.

You can check out the trailer below:

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.