Stanley Kubrick: The Cinematic Genius

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Hello and welcome to another episode of Biographics! I’m your interim host, Carl Sore, and today we’re talking about Stanley Kubrick, the cinematic genius. As with all the videos here at Biographics, this one is based on a script submitted to us by a member of our writing team, today being James CJ. You can follow them on social media links below if you are so inclined. My links are also down there—just Google Carl Smallwood.

Just for fun, because I run a trivia channel on the side called Fact Feend, when we get to movies of Kubrick that I have some trivia about, I’ll be dropping that for fun. Also, I may have mispronounced Kubrick’s name as “Cubric,” and that’s because I pronounced it that way for years after having just read it in textbooks and in film class before I ever heard anyone pronounce it out loud. I apologize for that, but with all that out of the way, let’s get to it.

Throughout its history, Hollywood has produced countless legends in film, and one filmmaker took the industry and art form by storm like no other during the 20th century. That man was Stanley Kubrick, known for his meticulous attention to detail, artistic vision, innovative cinematography, and ongoing themes of the breakdown of the human spirit. Kubrick was what many filmmakers hoped to become.

Stanley Kubrick found a passion for photography and film from a very young age, transforming into a desire to be a filmmaker, and in turn, became one of the greatest filmmakers of the entire 20th century. His career was filled with extreme highs and quite a few lows and unrealized passion projects. This is the remarkable story of Stanley Kubrick.

Born into a relatively wealthy Jewish family living in the Bronx, New York City, Stanley Kubrick was born on June 26, 1928, to parents Jacob and Gertrude Kubrick. Stanley was six when his sister Barbara was born on May 21, 1934. Despite having an above-average IQ, Stanley was fairly average as a student throughout his entire learning career. While he showcased his intelligence in things that interested him, school just wasn’t one of those things.

When he was 13, his father bought him his first camera, setting off a fascination in Stanley, and he fell in love with that camera and still photography in general. During Kubrick’s high school years, not much changed regarding his academic prowess; he remained a fairly mediocre student despite his obvious intelligence, often cutting school to go to the cinema to watch double features, with his only real effort being put towards the photography club.

Upon graduation in 1945, Kubrick faced the harsh reality that he’d most likely not attend college. This wasn’t just because of his poor grades, but also due to the influx of soldiers returning home from the war who took preference in college admissions. So what to do now? After high school, Kubrick began working at Look magazine as a staff photographer. From ages 17 to 21, he developed his photographic skills through years of trial and error, experimentation, learning things like composition, lenses, style, exposure, and more.

During his time at the magazine, his interest in movies deepened, and outside of work, his personal life was also going pretty well. On May 28, 1948, he married his high school sweetheart, Toba Metz, and they moved together into a tiny apartment in Greenwich Village. Kubrick became known as a storyteller through his pictures during his tenure, covering a wide range of subjects, including the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus, travel pieces in Portugal, boxing matches, and photographing famous jazz musicians.

Despite the diversity of these projects, it still didn’t satisfy Kubrick creatively, so in the 1950s, he decided to take a risk. It was time for Stanley Kubrick to make a short film. However, his desire to make a short film was hampered by one glaring issue: funding. Kubrick just didn’t have a lot of money lying around, so he took his $1,500 in savings and decided to make his first film with his high school friend, Alexander Singer, on a shoestring budget. The film would be a documentary on a boxer named Walter Cartier, whom he had covered in 1949. They titled the film “Day of the Fight,” and together, they managed to convince some other people to lend their talents to the project for a price.

In total, the film’s budget was about $4,000, which comprised almost every penny Kubrick had to his name, with the rest of the balance being paid by his father, Jacob, as an investment in the future of his career. Ultimately, the film did make its money back when they sold the rights to RKO after it opened on April 26, 1951, as part of a short film series. The film career of Stanley Kubrick had officially begun.

After “Day of the Fight,” RKO gave Kubrick a $1,500 advance on his next short film, and his second short, “Flying Padre,” would go on to break even following its March 1951 release. The moderate success of these shorts was enough to convince Kubrick to leave Look magazine and pursue a career in filmmaking full-time.

During this transition from shorts to features, he held onto a script written by one of his old high school friends called “The Trap.” Stanley managed to get a $9,000 investment from his uncle for an executive producer’s credit, which was a small price to pay. However, Kubrick made several disastrous and almost fatal decisions when filming “The Trap” in 1952, which would later become known as “Fear and Desire.” One nearly fatal choice was creating fog by having a nearby crop duster spray insecticide on the location. His worst decision by far was opting to save time by filming without sound, which ended up costing the movie an additional $50,000 to rectify in post-production.

Fortunately for Kubrick, a producer named Richard DeRosin was impressed by his work and bailed him out, funding all the sound production. Released on March 31, 1953, “Fear and Desire” did not fare well financially but did receive several decent reviews. Kubrick would later describe the film as “a bumbling amateur film exercise.” As a result of its financial failure, Kubrick signed on for another short in 1953 titled “The Seafarers,” which was Kubrick’s first film shot in color.

Following “Fear and Desire,” Kubrick struggled to find work and also struggled to find time for his wife because he started having an affair with a dancer named Ruth Saka. This affair led to the end of his marriage, and he married Ruth in 1955. Around this time, Kubrick was working on his next feature with “Fear and Desire” writer Howard Sackler. The film was initially titled “Kiss Me, Kill Me” before simply becoming “Killer’s Kiss.” Kubrick had a harder time getting the production off the ground, but thankfully, a Bronx pharmacist named Morris Busel came to Stanley’s rescue, providing the principal budget of $440,000 in exchange for a shared producer’s credit.

The movie began production in 1954 in New York City, and Kubrick didn’t really have permission to film on the streets, so he employed guerrilla filmmaking techniques. This made the process of making the movie far more difficult, but in the end, they succeeded, and Kubrick sold “Killer’s Kiss” for $75,000 to United Artists.

Kubrick’s biggest issue in his early career was financing and not having a producer, which meant he was handling pretty much every aspect of making a movie. This changed when Alex Singer introduced Kubrick to James B. Harris, who had recently sold a film distribution company and wanted to become a producer. In 1955, they formed Harris-Kubrick Pictures Corporation and set about purchasing the rights to a story called “Clean Break” by Lionel White for about $10,000.

United Artists initially agreed to partially fund the movie they titled “The Killing” if they secured a big name attached. They managed to secure a guy named Sterling Hayden for about $40,000, but United Artists didn’t deem him to be a big enough name. They only put $200,000 towards production, and Harris added an additional $80,000 to complete the financing. Kubrick, Harris, and Singer moved to LA for filming.

“The Killing” was released on May 19, 1956, but was a financial failure largely because United Artists failed to secure a proper release date and barely marketed the film. However, it opened a door for Harris and Kubrick to MGM, who gave them $75,000 to write, direct, and produce a film for them, which they settled on being “Paths of Glory.” Ultimately, this didn’t work out because MGM didn’t want to make that particular movie, as they had already done an anti-war film.

The pair were eventually fired when they continued working on it. They went back to United Artists, but this time it was different. They had a star attached to their picture with real star power, Kirk Douglas, who threatened to walk away from their guaranteed successful project unless they got the film greenlit for a proper budget of $900,000. It worked, and they filmed in January 1957 in Munich, Germany, where Stanley would meet his third and final wife, Christian Suzanne Harland, who played a minor role in the film.

Kubrick’s marriage to Ruth had fallen apart before filming commenced, and they officially divorced in 1957. In 1958, Kubrick and Christian Harland married. “Paths of Glory” opened in December 1957 and was critically successful but somewhat controversial, especially in Europe, for its portrayal of the French army. Financially, the movie broke even, which made getting another movie funded relatively challenging because, at this point, Kubrick hadn’t managed to turn any significant profits with any of his films despite the decent reviews.

Kubrick wouldn’t find his next film; his next film would find him. After “Paths of Glory,” Kubrick and Harris acquired the rights for “Lolita” in 1958 after initially reading the book by Vladimir Nabokov. They stopped working on the project when Kirk Douglas called Kubrick on February 13, 1959, asking him to direct a movie the following Monday. Kubrick had just a single week to get up to speed on his next project, the epic “Spartacus.”

“Spartacus” was Kubrick’s first big-budget production with a budget of about $6 million. Douglas had fired the previous director and turned to Kubrick instead, even though it wasn’t initially his idea. At first, he even denounced the idea of Kubrick directing the movie due to Kubrick not being the type of director to just let a big-name actor call the shots. Regardless, Kubrick did agree, allowing him to make his first feature-length film in color and his first epic.

“Spartacus” was by no means an easy movie to make for many reasons, including constant clashes between Kubrick and Douglas. Stanley’s changes to the story sometimes cut Douglas’s dialogue, which infuriated the actor. Additionally, Kubrick lacked the kind of control he craved on a film set, which he would later become famous for. Despite all these issues, the film made it through its 167 days of filming and its months of post-production before being released in October 1960, becoming a massive success and putting Kubrick on the map.

“Spartacus” was nominated for six Academy Awards at the 1961 Oscars, predominantly in technical and design categories, ultimately winning four awards. During the entire production of “Spartacus,” Kubrick became a father to two daughters, marking a great time for him as he was a happily married man and establishing a big name in Hollywood.

With the success of “Spartacus,” Kubrick was able to take more risks, and his next film was exactly that. With more sway in Hollywood, Kubrick and Harris decided to take another crack at “Lolita.” After Warner Bros. wouldn’t give Kubrick autonomy over making the movie, he instead went to Associated Artists, who agreed not to touch a single frame of the movie. They took the production to England and used tax breaks, filming “Lolita” for 88 days at a cost of about $2 million.

The final product was admittedly edited ever so slightly to comply with some censoring body suggestions, with whom Kubrick remained in touch throughout production. Ultimately, the film was Kubrick’s vision. When “Lolita” was initially released on June 13, 1962, it received mixed reviews, but during its first run, it made $3.7 million. It would take decades for “Lolita” to achieve the critical success and acceptance it now enjoys, but it remains a controversial film due to its subject matter.

Following the film’s end, Kubrick and Harris parted ways, with Harris wanting to direct and the pair having outgrown their partnership. The basis for Kubrick’s next film began when he contemplated thermonuclear war during the Cold War era, which terrified him. However, the more he researched the subject, the more he realized that the whole situation was absurd and mostly panic. Kubrick bought the rights to “Red Alert” by Peter George, and with writer Terry Southern, they created a satirical black comedy called “Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.”

This film is famously in black and white. For one of the most iconic shots in the film, Kubrick instructed the set dressers to make the table that all the world leaders were talking on be covered in green baize, similar to a poker table. In his head, the idea was that it looked like the world leaders were playing a game with humanity’s future. When it was pointed out to Kubrick that the film would be in black and white and that it wouldn’t matter what color the table was because no one at home would see it, Kubrick responded, “The actors will know.”

Kubrick reunited with “Lolita” star Peter Sellers, who played multiple roles in “Dr. Strangelove,” which finished filming in April 1963 after 15 weeks of production. After eight months of edits, it was released on January 30, 1964, and ultimately made $5 million against its $2 million budget. The film earned Kubrick his first Oscar nominations for Best Picture, Director, and Adapted Screenplay, but he ultimately walked home empty-handed.

Kubrick was on a roll, but just not critically. In February 1964, not long after “Dr. Strangelove” was released, Kubrick began itching to make a sci-fi movie connected to Arthur C. Clarke. Together, they crafted a screenplay for “2001: A Space Odyssey” between May and December of that same year. The movie began production in New York in 1965 before moving to MGM North London studios in June of that same year.

Throughout the creation of “2001: A Space Odyssey,” Stanley worked with NASA and companies responsible for making the spacecraft used during the Apollo missions to ensure the film was as accurate as possible. Filming officially began on December 29, 1965, and the film wouldn’t officially be finished until the end of 1967 when the special effects team wrapped up their work on the movie.

While “Dr. Strangelove” was a dialogue-heavy film, “2001: A Space Odyssey” was the complete opposite. Initially, that wasn’t by design, but as a result of Kubrick’s constant cutting of lines of dialogue throughout filming and editing. He created the film in the edit, basically. When the film opened on April 3, 1968, audiences and critics didn’t really understand what they were watching, but thanks to word of mouth, the film was a hit, grossing $31 million by 1972.

Once again, Kubrick received numerous Academy Award nominations, including Best Director, Screenplay, and Visual Effects, and he only won the award for Visual Effects, making that the only Oscar Kubrick would ever win in his career. In the decades following its release, the film has become more popular and respected, and likely better understood.

The financial success of “2001: A Space Odyssey” meant that MGM was just about ready to give Kubrick the world. This meant fulfilling a dream project he had basically since he started his career—a movie detailing the life of Napoleon. Kubrick wrote the script, developed the idea, sent researchers to find locations across Europe, and devised detailed plans for the required battle scenes that would require hiring a literal army of extras numbering some 30,000 people in total.

Unfortunately, the movie never really came to fruition, meaning “Spartacus” was Kubrick’s first and only epic. The Napoleon movie would have blown it out of the water, no doubt, but unfortunately, it just wasn’t meant to be. Despite having a script, a solid plan, and a committed lead in Jack Nicholson, MGM changed ownership, resulting in the filming being shelved due to the extraordinary nature of production being just too much for the studio to commit to. No other studio jumped at the opportunity either, leaving Napoleon the dream Kubrick never got to fulfill.

If you were to pick Kubrick’s strangest movie, you’d likely choose “A Clockwork Orange,” based on a 1962 novel by Anthony Burgess. Kubrick, who actually first read the book while filming “Dr. Strangelove,” initially rejected the idea of making it into a movie. However, six years later, he decided to adapt the book himself for his first solo screenwriting credit. One of Kubrick’s main reasons for filming “A Clockwork Orange” was the new nature of Hollywood, which was more open to films showcasing sex and violence.

The film was made over the winter of 1970 to 1971, which was the same time that Kubrick and his family moved to the UK permanently. “A Clockwork Orange” cost around $2 million to make but was released worldwide in January 1972. It was eventually pulled from the UK after the press put the blame for recent copycat crimes on Kubrick and the film’s shoulders. This dovetailed with something in the UK known as the video nasty era, a strange moral panic where many ultra-violent slasher movies and low-budget horror films were being released on VHS and were purported to be real.

Thanks to his contract with Warner Bros., which heavily favored him, Kubrick was entitled to 40% of the profits the movie made. He decided to capitalize upon this by creating a cinema database. Not only did this make Kubrick rich, but it also gave him even more free reign on pretty much anything he made going forward.

Kubrick may have had a long shot with Napoleon, but that didn’t stop him from revisiting it periodically throughout the remainder of his career. However, the movie “Barry Lyndon” would be Kubrick’s next film and his best shot at making the historical film he desired. When it came to making the movie, Kubrick made artistic choices that had never been done before, relying