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Stanley Kubrick in the late 1990's
Stanley Kubrick (July 26, 1928 - March 7, 1999) was a Jewish-American film director born in The Bronx, New York City who lived most of his life in England. His films are highly acclaimed for their technical perfection and deep symbolism. As a director he was legendary for relentless perfectionism and an attention to detail that could alienate those he worked with. Several of his films were extremely controversial upon release for their supposed thematic repugnance and stark portrayal of sexuality and violence.
Early career
Kubrick started his career as a photographer. He entered the field by selling amateur photos to New York's Look magazine, then was hired by the magazine as a full-time photographer. An avid moviegoer, Kubrick was convinced he could make better films than he saw, and he set to prove his claim right. His first feature films, Fear and Desire and Killer's Kiss, caught the attention of Hollywood, and he won major acclaim for the classic film noir The Killing before making the award-winning Paths of Glory, a World War I drama. Kubrick's unique filmmaking style developed with these pictures, and his trademarks became clear: long takes, extensive tracking shots, and a cold, distant style that some claim drain the tenderness and humanity out of his stories (which were always at least partially adapted from another medium).
The first major films
Kubrick's one attempt to direct a Hollywood "epic" film, Spartacus, is considered a great film itself, but Kubrick was at odds with both the cast (especially its star Kirk Douglas) and the crew. The battles waged over Spartacus convinced Kubrick that he would never work within the Hollywood system again, and he remained an outsider to the end of his life. Financially, however, Kubrick would prove uniquely successful in harnassing Hollywood's resources for his own ends even as he brazenly defied its conventions.
He moved to Britain in the early 1960s to make Lolita, and lived there for the rest of his life. He owned and resided at Childwickbury Manor in the district of St Albans in the south of England. Much of the filming of his later movies involved careful reproduction of foreign locations in England, e.g., scenes in the Vietnam war film Full Metal Jacket were filmed at Beckton Gasworks. He was sometimes described as a recluse, but he frequently socialized with people (though mostly on his own idiosyncratic terms).
Kubrick's 1960 decision to film Lolita would cause Kubrick's first major controversy. He worked with the book's author, Vladimir Nabokov, to produce a screenplay that would allow the book to be filmed without being banned from theaters worldwide. It was with Lolita that he discovered the talent of Peter Sellers. Kubrick asked Sellers to play four roles simultaneously in his next film, Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, and Sellers accepted (though he eventually only played three of those roles).
Kubrick's decision to film a Cold War thriller as a jet-black comedy was a daring risk, one that paid off handsomely for both himself and Columbia Pictures. Kubrick's misanthropic detachment from political poles was clearly both incendiary and resonant. By belittling the sacrosanct norms of the political culture as the squabbling of intellectual children, Strangelove foreshadowed the great cultural upheavals of the late 1960s as well as Kubrick's next project.
Kubrick the auteur
Kubrick's great success with Strangelove persuaded the studios that he was an auteur who could be trusted to deliver popular films despite his unusual ideas. Kubrick thus entered into a fruitful relationship with Warner Brothers, who gave him almost complete artistic freedom on all his ensuing projects.
Kubrick spent five years developing his next film, 1968's 2001: A Space Odyssey(filmed in Cinerama). Kubrick collaborated with Arthur C. Clarke, adapting parts of Clarke's short story 'The Sentinel' (Clarke also wrote a novelization of the screenplay released alongside the film). The film was groundbreaking in its use of visual effects, which Kubrick himself supervised. It was also notable for its use of classical music (including Also Sprach Zarathustra and The Blue Danube). 2001 represented a radical departure from both Kubrick's previous films and the mainstream Hollywood paradigm. While Kubrick would never again push the experimental envelope quite so hard, paradoxically Kubrick would win a uniquely total creative control from Hollywood by succeeding with easily the most "difficult" film ever to win such a wide release. Kubrick and 2001 are sometimes associated with the Hippie Counterculture due to the film's psychonautic themes and especially its final, abstracted chapter.
His next film, A Clockwork Orange (1971), was darker in tone than 2001 (and originally released with an "X" rating in the US). The film was based on Anthony Burgess's novel about a criminal who undergoes treatment to be 'cured' of violent urges; the novels asks questions about how society defines morality. Its depictions of teenage gangs committing acts of rape and violence made the film controversial, and the controversy increased when copycat acts were committed by criminals wearing the costumes of the film's characters. Kubrick was apparently genuinely perplexed by critics who said he was glorifying violence. When he received death threats targeting himself and his family, Kubrick took the unusual step of removing the film from circulation in Britain, with the result that the film was not shown again in Britain until its rerelease in 2000, after Kubrick's death.
Stanley Kubrick during the shooting of the Full Metal Jacket
Kubrick's next project was to be an epic biopic of Napoleon. He did a great deal of research and wrote a preliminary screenplay, but ultimately the project was cancelled due to the release of Waterloo, a movie starring Rod Steiger as Napoleon. Instead, Kubrick decided to adapt Barry Lyndon, an a picaresque novel by William Makepeace Thackeray about an 18th century gambler and fortune hunter. It would be Kubrick's least appreciated post-Strangelove film. Wildly overbudget and two years in filming, Lyndon also effectively nullified the career of then-superstar Ryan O'Neal. Despite a number of passionate defenders, the film was considered by many critics to be cold, slow-moving, and lifeless. More than Kubrick's other films, it has gained acclaim with time.
After Barry Lyndon, Kubrick's filmmaking pace slowed considerably. He made only three more films in the next twenty-five years; but his reputation and his "mystique" were such that the premiere of each new Stanley Kubrick film was an event hailed by audiences worldwide.
The Shining (an adaptation of Stephen King's novel starring Jack Nicholson and Shelley Duvall) and Full Metal Jacket (one of several films in the 1980s which dealt with the Vietnam War) did not reach the heights of Dr. Strangelove and 2001 in the eyes of many critics, though they are still seen as exceptional examples of their genres, and they contain many Kubrickian moments. After Full Metal Jacket, Kubrick spent years planning a film entitled A.I.: Artificial Intelligence, but he abandoned the project due to the limited special effects technology of the time, and eventually chose to film Eyes Wide Shut instead.
Eyes Wide Shut starred then-real-life husband-and-wife actors Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman as a couple caught up in a sexual odyssey. The story is based on the book Traumnovelle by the Austrian novelist Arthur Schnitzler.
Kubrick's death and influence
Days after he had completed the editing of Eyes Wide Shut, Kubrick passed away, and was interred in Childwickbury Manor, Hertfordshire, England. Citing contractual obligations to deliver an R-rating, Warner Bros. digitally altered one scene for the American release of Eyes Wide Shut, blocking out images of explicit sexuality. This alteration had been approved by Kubrick before his death. The American home video release still contains these posthumous alterations, and the unedited version remains unavailable in the United States. However, film scholars believe that if Kubrick had lived to see the film's release, he might have edited the film further; he had edited parts out of both 2001 and The Shining after each of those films had been released to theaters.
In the year 2001, Steven Spielberg filmed A.I., the uncompleted project that Kubrick had worked on before Eyes Wide Shut. Basing his film on a lengthy treatment by Kubrick, Spielberg clearly directed many scenes to evoke Kubrickian moods, although the sentimentality that prevails throughout the film is alien to Kubrick's aesthetic. The film received a lukewarm response from audiences, and gave Spielberg only his second box-office disappointment (after 1979's 1941). It was viewed by many as being more Spielberg's film than Kubrick's.
But Kubrick himself broke the boundaries on which major studio films are made, boundaries that other directors such as Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas, and David Lynch have since followed.
Trivia
One of the many popular myths about Kubrick is that he was also a chess grandmaster. He wasn't, although by all accounts he was a highly skilled player; indeed, it has often been noted that he approached his projects from the point of view of a chess strategist. On occasion, Kubrick himself was known to recall how, as a young director, he would earn enough money to feed himself by hustling chess games for quarters in Manhattan's Washington Square.
Filmography
See also
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