One year — 1968 — ranks as the most far-out for me. First, that April the film 2001: A Space Odyssey premiered, followed by Yellow Submarine in November. Literally far-out was 2001, which I saw on a huge screen. My mother left the theater griping. Like the black monoliths featured in the story, the phantasmagorical epic defied interpretation. I didn’t care. A fifth-grade hippie of sorts, all I wanted to do was wallow in the beauty of the moment.
It turns out it takes a dictator to create such sublime art. Movie director Stanley Kubrick was not an easy man to work for. “Mind-slave” is how one screenwriter described working for the mastermind behind 2001 and other mesmerizing, dreamlike epics.
Another wordsmith, frustrated by Kubrick’s constant rewrites on his last film, Eyes Wide Shut —released in 1999, four months after the auteur director’s death at age 71 — told a joke about a Jewish tailor and his frustrated customer.
“The good Lord made the world in six days, and you’ve taken six months to make one bloody pair of trousers!” the customer complained.
The tailor, a stand-in for Kubrick, replied, “Ah, but look at the world, and then look at the trousers.”
Imperfection had no place in the cinematic worlds Kubrick created. He routinely demanded dozens of retakes. Shelley Duvall, playing deranged Jack Nicholson’s hapless wife in The Shining, suffered through 127 reshoots of her fending him off with a baseball bat. “She seemed a bit tortured, shook up,” an observer recalled.
Kubrick paid no mind to actors’ feelings. “Film stock is cheap, but remarkable quality will pay dividends forever,” he said.
Love his films or hate them, Kubrick made intellectually chilly movies with painstaking perfectionism, a subject explored in detail by film professors Robert P. Kolker and Nathan Abrams in their new biography Kubrick: An Odyssey.
“Kubrick never rested on a simple visual or narrative formula. Each film is distinctive. Each film is recognizably Kubrickian,” the authors write. “The striking imagery, the Kafkaesque sense of dread [is] more or less evident in each film.”
Alfred Hitchcock unspooled suspense-wracked films in assembly-line fashion. John Ford stampeded the Western genre. Ingmar Bergman studied the soul. But the cerebral and intellectually restless Kubrick hopped across genres, making masterpieces along the way.
He took aim on war’s corrosive effects on the soul and hit bullseyes with Paths of Glory in 1957, the Cold War satire Dr. Strangelove in 1964 and the Vietnam retrospective Full Metal Jacket in 1987. He dissected doomed outsiders in Spartacus, A Clockwork Orange, Lolita and Barry Lyndon, which chronicled the rise and sudden fall of an Irishman in English society.
Moviegoers never knew where Kubrick would go next. The Shining tackled horror in a frenzy, while Barry Lyndon plays like 18th-century paintings come to life. (Mad magazine dubbed the three-hour cavalcade “Borey Lyndon.”)
Despair, defeat and dehumanization were constant themes in Kubrick’s films, according to the authors. Kubrick felt misunderstood in 1971 when critics hammered him for exposing audiences to lurid violence in A Clockwork Orange. In one notorious scene, a futuristic gangbanger played by Malcolm McDowell rains down “ultraviolence” on a husband and wife who thought they were safe in their cozy home — all while crooning “Singing in the Rain.”
In a rare public defense of his work, he wrote that his dystopian movie, “far from advocating that fascism be given a second chance, warns against the new psychedelic fascism — the eye-popping, multimedia quadrasonic, drug-oriented conditioning of human beings by other beings — which many believe will usher in the forfeiture of human citizenship and the beginning of zombiedom.”
One wonders what Kubrick would think of today’s social media, which tranquilizes, brainwashes and agitates its addicts.
The director spent years in preproduction for movies that would delight and baffle audiences and critics. For Eyes Wide Shut, a tale of domestic jealousy amid a sinister, Jeffrey Epstein-type underworld, he had staffers measure the distance between Greenwich Village fire hydrants and mailboxes so the set on a British soundstage would be accurate. For an unmade Napoleon biopic, he read hundreds of books on the dictator. For Paths of Glory, which recounts the unjust execution of three World War I soldiers, he learned how French soldiers trimmed their beards.
Such attention to detail paid off. Churchill praised the accuracy of trench life in Paths of Glory. In 2001, Kubrick’s scientific accuracy wowed visiting space scientists, who dubbed the set “NASA East.”
Born in 1928 in the Bronx, the son of a Jewish doctor, Kubrick was a lonely child who watched every movie he could in local theaters and at the Museum of Modern Art. Possessing a big ego already at an early age, he said, “I knew I could not make films any worse than run-of-the-mill Hollywood movies.”
Instead of a bar mitzvah, he got a camera. He played semiprofessional chess obsessively, often for 12 hours straight, in New York’s Washington Square. Like a real-life Peter Parker, he began freelancing for Look magazine while still in high school. A dismal student, he dabbled at college and dropped out.
His steely confidence showed even during the making of his first Hollywood film, 1956’s The Killing. On the first day of shooting, he told a cinematographer with 20 years of experience, “You will either do as I direct, or you can leave right now.”
Nicknamed “Stanley Hubris” by Tony Curtis, co-star of the Roman slave revolt saga Spartacus, Kubrick began his career by thinking big. For his first movie he wanted to film an adaptation of the Iliad. Such was his chutzpah that he pitched the idea to a Hollywood producer. He ended up making a documentary short about a day in the life of a boxer.
He had a pugilist’s stamina. “There’s no reason to do it my way unless you are . . . obsessed,” said Kubrick. “You must be obsessed.”
2001’s supernova success in 1968 gave him a three-picture deal with Warner Brothers and the “total annihilating control he craved,” the authors write.
This obsession reached into his personal life. He supposedly read 20 newspapers a day hunting for ideas for new movies. He watched six movies every weekend. He installed in his home in the early 1970s a computer terminal linked to a mainframe in London. It helped him index the thousands of bits of information about Napoleon he had amassed. And he installed radio phones in his cars decades before cellphones.
In Kubrick’s later years, his trim physique gave way to slouchy obesity, a shabbiness oddly mirrored by Nicholson’s unshaven, lupine look in The Shining. But he remained a feline presence on the set, always in control.
“I was amazed at how fast he moved, how light he was, darting around the crew and cameras like one of the Sugar Rays, grace and purpose in motion,” wrote Full Metal Jacket screenwriter Michael Herr.
Yet despite the precision and obsessive control, Kubrick’s films could still mystify — even their maker himself. Not even Kubrick could fully explain 2001’s ending in which a colossal, luminous, fetal “Star Child” hovers beside the Earth. “I wanted to make a non-verbal statement, one that would affect people on the visceral, emotional and psychological levels,” he said of the movie as a whole.
The truth, write Kolker and Abrams, is that the all-controlling Kubrick had trouble conjuring up an ending for his stellar extravaganza, a problem that also dogged him with Dr. Strangelove, Eyes Wide Shut and Full Metal Jacket.
No matter. “Always choose the strong visuals, even if it defies explanation,” he said.
Perhaps the Star Child gave a rare glimpse of Kubrick, the optimist. “The miracle of man is not how far he has sunk but how magnificently he has risen,” he once wrote. “We are known among the stars by our poems, not our corpses.”
George Spencer is a freelance writer who lives in Hillsborough, North Carolina.