(ASO) 2001: Offbeat Director in Outer Space | NY Times | 1/16/66 | H. Alpert

January 16, 1966

2001': Offbeat Director In Outer Space

By HOLLIS ALPERT

Having annihilated mankind two years ago in "Dr. Strangelove: or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb," Stanley Kubrick, who was voted the best director of 1964 by the New York Film Critics, and who, at 37, has been called a slightly aging Wunderkind, is now, with somewhat more optimism, heading for outer space with a forthcoming film to be called "2001: A Space Odyssey." The title alone might lead one to expect another bug-eyed-monster movie, but Kubrick, whose films have included such offbeat pictures as "Paths of Glory" and "Lolita," does not deal in the expected. "One thing is certain," says Robert H. O'Brien, president of MGM, the corporation which is backing "2001," "it won't be a Buck Rogers kind of space epic."

O'Brien is a man who chooses his words with care--and Kubrick is a man in a position to choose his company presidents with equal care. He is, as they say, wanted. Stanley Kauffmann, while still reviewing films for The New Republic, called "Dr. Strangelove" "the best American picture that I can remember since Chaplin's 'Monsieur Verdoux' and Huston's 'The Treasure of the Sierre Madre.'" But Kubrick is led by what intrigues and fascinates him most, and right now he is intrigued and fascinated by projections of scientific knowledge and discovery into the foreseeable future.

"Somewhere along my wandering reading," Kubrick said is his office at Elstree, MGM's English studio, where he is shooting "2001," I came across some Rand Corporation statistics on the probability of life in outer space. The ABC's of these statistics are that our galaxy is made up of about a hundred billion stars, that each of these stars is made of the same chemical stuff as our own sun, and that planetary systems thus number in the billions, too. The latest thought on the probability of life in the universe has it that, given a stable planet somewhere between fire and ice--planets like Jupiter are too cold and those like Mercury are too hot--the likelihood would be that life would arise spontaneously."

Obviously, then, Kubrick's new film is going to embody the idea of contact with outer- space life, although he is chary about revealing too many details of his story. He prefers to talk in terms of the background material that led him to his space odyssey. "The Rand Corporation," he said, "estimated 640,000 earth-type planets in our own galaxy--planets so much like ours that you could step out of a space vehicle, take a deep breath of oxygenated air and look up at a blue sky. Most astronomers and other scientists interested in the whole question are strongly convinced that the universe is crawling with life; much of it, since the numbers are so staggering, equal to us in intelligence, or superior, simply because human intelligence has existed for so relatively short a period."

It has become typical of Kubrick to make his entree into a film subject through reading. The Rand Corporation statistics led him farther afield to such speculative areas as prospects for biological immortality, and the possibility of exceeding the speed-of-light barrier postulated by Einstein's theory of relativity. He then did a quick catch-up on reading in the science-fiction field, and liked the writing of Arthur C. Clarke best, because he felt Clarke was the most scientifically grounded. Clarke did not know it, but he had been selected as Kubrick's collaborator.

"Someone I knew also knew Clarke," Kubrick said, vaguely, "and it so happened he was coming to New York." The two met, they talked, they became enthused, they decided to do a story together about a space venture at some point in the future, and finally fixed on 2001 as the year. "We didn't want to get too far out into space," Kubrick explained, "because the thing that seemed most interesting was man's first awareness of extraterrestrial life and the first contact with extraterrestrial intelligence. Beyond that stage the mind tends to boggle."

They also decided to do the story in novel form first, using as a starting point a short story of Clarke's called "The Sentinel." "We spent the better part of a year on the novel," Kubrick said. "We'd each do chapters and kick them back and forth. It seemed to me a better kind of attack. If you do a screenplay from an original story idea you tend to leave out those ideas you can't find a ready way of dramatizing. But by doing it as a novel first you have a chance to really think everything out, after which you can figure out ways of dramatizing what you now know are valuable points of the story."

After finishing the first draft of the novel with Clarke, Kubrick had his lawyer and agent, Louis Blau, call O'Brien, who took the manuscript to read, as well as a meticulously detailed budget breakdown showing what the project would entail. O'Brien gave quick approval to the production. "There was agreement all along the line," he said. "Stanley had everything worked out, and the budget was remarkably accurate."

Yet it wasn't so long ago that Hollywood--or rather the complex of studio heads and the hierarchy of producers, stars, and wheeling and dealing big-time agents the term encompasses--regarded Kubrick with extreme suspicion, if not total disdain. "Who is Kubrick?" one agent asked curiously, when Harris inquired about the possibility of obtaining a star client for Kubrick to direct in "Paths of Glory," made in 1957. Kubrick was then a stringy, shaggy-haired Greenwich Villager, not long out of the Bronx, where he was born on July 26, 1928.

His father, a doctor and camera hobbyist, let him fool around with a Graflex when he was 13 and Stanley went on to become his class photographer at Taft High School. He was a nondescript student otherwise, and often missed classes because he was prowling around the city taking pictures. One of them, taken in April, 1945, showed the sad face of a newsstand dealer wreathed by papers with headlines announcing the death of President Roosevelt. Stanley sold the picture to Look, after first checking to see if The Daily News would pay more. He continued to sell picture stories to Look, and became a staff photographer at the magazine after his graduation from high school. Because he did not want to look like a tourist, he carried his camera equipment in a paper shopping bag.

Kubrick's interest in motion pictures was fired by a chum at Taft High School, Alex Singer, who has since become a director himself. Singer had a grandiose plan for turning the Iliad into a movie, and had made sketches for practically every shot of the epic. He spouted the film theories of Eisenstein and Pudovkin, and lured Kubrick into reading their works.

In 1950, when he was 21, Kubrick made his first essay into film-making. He took his carefully husbanded savings from his Look salary and put them into a short about a boxer, called "Day of the Fight." RKO thought it good enough to put it into distribution, and when Kubrick sat in New York's cavernous Paramount Theater and watched his handiwork he was so stirred that he at once handed in his resignation at Look and resolved thenceforth to do nothing but make movies. RKO gave him an advance to make another short, called "Flying Padre." It dealt with a Western priest who visited his parishioners in a Piper Cub. Kubrick, not a whit more solvent, came to the conclusion that shorts, no matter how good, were not the path to successful film-making. He had to make a feature.

Thereupon, he prevailed upon a Greenwich Village friend and poet, Howard Sackler, to compose the script for a moody mélange of violence, sex and symbolism called "Fear and Desire." When this failed to dent the box office, Kubrick took a job as second unit director on the "Omnibus" television series, but only until he had corralled sufficient funds (about $50,000) to try another feature, "Killer's Kiss." For this, he outlined several action scenes, including a murder, a near rape, a chase across New York rooftops, a boxing match and a fight to the death in a mannequin factory. He then connected the scenes with what passed for a screenplay. A lot of the production cost went to pay for wrecking a factory full of mannequins.

United Artists took the picture for distribution, but no profit accrued to Kubrick. Since his two features had been made with his savings, his father's savings, a druggist uncle's savings and deferred payments, Kubrick was monumentally in debt. At this point, in 1955, he met James B. Harris, a millionaire's son who was thinking of becoming a producer. It was Singer who brought the two together. He had met Harris in a Signal Corps film unit during the Korean War, and told him about Kubrick's low-budget efforts.

"You need a property," Harris sagely suggested after sitting through "Fear and Desire" and "Killer's Kiss." "What I can do for you," said Harris, whose money came from his interest in his father's TV film distribution company, Flamingo Films, "is buy you a property and hire some actors for you." Kubrick agreed. The new partners were both 26.

Harris came across a paperback thriller by Lionel White called "Clean Break," about a race-track robbery. He purchased the screen rights, and he and Kubrick went to United Artists, which offered to back the picture for $200,000 if they could get a star for it. The star they found, Sterling Hayden, was not then of the highest magnitude, but Harris insisted he was perfect for the part. (He was, and later he repaid the Harris-Kubrick faith in him by corrosively portraying the psychotic Air Force general in "Dr. Strangelove.") Harris added $120,000 of his own funds to the budget for "The Killing" (the film title for "Clean Break"), in order to give Kubrick more shooting time.

"The Killing" failed at the box office, but was good enough to land on the ten-best lists of Time and The Saturday Review, and to catch the eye of Dore Schary, who was then head of production at MGM. He hired Kubrick and Harris to develop film stories from the MGM files of scripts and purchased novels, but they found nothing they liked.

Kubrick meanwhile found, on his own, a novel he did like, written in 1935 by Humphrey Cobb. It was called "Paths of Glory," and was a harshly antiwar story about an incident in the French Army during World War I: Three soldiers, picked at random, are court- martialed for "mutiny" because of a division's failure to take an impossible objective. Neither Schary nor anyone else at MGM could see any possibilities for commercial success in the story, which had already been turned down by every other major studio.

When Schary was swept out of MGM in a major shake-up, Kubrick and Harris left, too. They managed to interest Kirk Douglas in a script version of "Paths of Glory" that Kubrick had done with Calder Willingham, and United Artists agreed to back it with Douglas as the star. The film was made in Germany at a cost of slightly less than $1- million, just about broke even, was banned in France, but won reviews in which the term "masterpiece" was used--not lightly. It contained some of the most bitterly realistic war scenes ever put on film.

For one thing, the script approved by United Artists had the three protagonists saved at the last moment, contrary to the ending of the book. But in preparing the script for shooting, Kubrick felt uneasy about the ending. It involved a compromise, he said.

"What do we do about an ending, then?" Douglas asked.

"Hell," Kubrick said, "why don't we shoot them?"

"Sure," Douglas said.

When United Artists' executives saw the finished print, they didn't say a word about the changed ending; they were too impressed by the picture. (Kubrick's ability to show the nature of war on the screen has amazed many military men, especially since he has had no military service himself. "He was turned down for the Army on some oddball thing," says Singer.)

In spite of the acclaim he received for "Paths of Glory," Kubrick, who had temporarily settled in Hollywood, did not immediately find more work. One fear-inspiring studio executive looked at the movie and deemed it "the lousiest picture ever made." Reactions of this kind hardly bothered Kubrick who, although he does not believe in biting any hand that might strangle him--as Lyn Tornabene, a writer-friend of his, puts it--is somewhat inclined toward a resentment of all authority. (Singer says this is because he had a natural gift for drawing the worst teachers at Taft.) Kubrick and Harris continued to look for their own properties to develop, and became enthusiastic about the possibilities for a movie based on Vladimir Nabokov's novel "Lolita." In spite of warnings about the censorship difficulties they would encounter, they purchased the screen rights for $150,000, and hired Nabokov to do a screenplay.

Meanwhile, Kubrick's directorial flair had caught the eye of Marlon Brando, and he was hired to direct Brando's pet project, "One-Eyed Jacks," for a reported fee of $100,000. When Kubrick took a look at the script he knew at once that it "needed work," and pitched in to solve its inherent problems. Five months later, after a series of conferences with Brando and associates--which inevitably degenerated into poker games--his contractual time was up, and he left.

Kirk Douglas, as it happened, had just begun filming "Spartacus," his large-scale production, and had run into differences with his director, Anthony Mann. After a week of shooting, Mann left, and Kubrick came in, his fee by now having gone up to $150,000. He made out of "Spartacus" a better-than-average spectacle, but says about it now that the experience was valuable only because it gave him the opportunity to shoot more film: "Every time you do something, you learn something."

The Kubrick-Harris partnership dissolved after "Lolita." There were no real differences of opinion between them. Although Kubrick felt there was a tinge of compromise in choosing Sue Lyon, a 15-year-old at the time, for the key role, instead of a younger nymphet, the picture had been made well and, released by MGM, was highly profitable. Harris went off on his own because he wanted to direct ("The Bedford Incident") as well as produce, and Kubrick because he wanted to produce as well as direct.

For "Dr. Strangelove," Kubrick hired Peter George, author of "Red Alert," the novel on which the film was based, to work on the screenplay with him. But, whereas "Red Alert" was a straight suspense yarn on the fail-safe theme, it was Kubrick's notion to turn it into a nightmarish comedy.

The screenplay was completed, and Kubrick was about ready to put it into production at Shepperton Studios near London, when he decided a brush-up of it might be helpful. The novelist Terry Southern had been assigned by Esquire to do an article on the filming of the picture; Kubrick knew that Southern was a talented writer and decided to employ him on the script "to see if some more decoration might be added to the icing on the cake."

That brief collaboration on an already completed script led to complications which have bewildered and, to a degree, saddened Kubrick, although he prefers not to speak of the subject any longer. When the film appeared, several critics decided its brilliance was due to Southern's contribution; since then, Southern has been referred to time and again as the coauthor of "Dr. Strangelove"; he has been employed frequently on Hollywood movies, and his fee (he received a mere $2,000 for his contributions to "Dr. Strangelove") has risen into the screenwriter's stratosphere.

Although Kubrick does not in the least begrudge Southern's new affluence, he is bothered by the implied slight to his own and Peter George's screen-writing talents. When Martin Ransohoff took a full-page ad in The New York Times to proclaim that "the writer of 'Dr. Strangelove'" was going to meet with the director of "Tom Jones" on "The Loved One," Kubrick threatened legal action. He fired off a telegram to Ransohoff and released a statement to the press, though with little effect.

Part of the statement read: "Mr. Southern was employed from the period of November 16 to December 28, 1962, during which time I wrote in close collaboration with him. During shooting, which began on January 28, 1963, many substantial changes were made in the script by myself and/or Peter George, and sometimes together with the cast during improvisations. Some of the best dialogue was created by Mr. Sellers himself. Mr. Southern took no part in these activities, nor did he receive any further employment, nor did he serve in any consulting role."

"I guess I was being generous when I gave him the third writer's credit on the picture," Kubrick said recently about Southern, "but I thought it might help him get more work, if he wanted it."

Southern says blandly: "Stan may be long on 'generosity' (ha-ha) but I'm afraid he's a bit short on humor (not to mention memory). And what he neglected to say about his 'completed script' is quite simple: It wasn't funny."

Kubrick's approach to directing is based on self-confidence. "There are very few directors," he said recently, "about whom you'd say you automatically have to see everything they do. I'd put Fellini, Bergman and David Lean at the head of my first list, and Truffaut at the head of the next level."

He thinks it is possible to learn more from film that "deals with other things, like documentaries, a few moments in crazy avant-garde movies, and TV commercials, even if they're things that only happen to work for five seconds. Actually, I think some of the most imaginative film-making, stylistically, is to be found in TV commercials. Because they have to have compression, dramatize and make their point in about 30 seconds, some are made with unusual precision. A feature film made with the same kind of care would have to cost about $50-million."

Kubrick's confidence in himself is of the kind that inspires confidence in his co-workers. According to Kirk Douglas, this confidence and his coolness under stress were there from the beginning. "Somehow," said Douglas, after having given one of his finest performances in "Paths of Glory," "Stanley always knew he was good." Part of Kubrick's assurance comes from his intimate understanding of the nature of the complicated equipment he uses. This began with still photography and his knowledge of the intricacies of lighting. By the time he worked with his first Hollywood crew on "The Killing" he knew enough about cinema photography to instruct studio veterans on the lighting setups he wanted. One awed electrician said: "I've been in this business 30 years, and I'm learning stuff from this kid." Very few film directors have this kind of grasp of the technical end of their craft. And Kubrick is equally at home in the cutting room. "Everything you do can be ruined," he once said, "if you don't stand by and see it's cut the way you want it."

He realized early, too, that the success of a picture depends a great deal on the quality of the acting performances a director can obtain. After "Killer's Kiss," which suffered from spotty performances, he spent a great deal of time running old films and analyzing those effects that came from a director's manipulation of his actors. He also boned up on acting theory. During his brief tenure at MGM, after being put on salary by Dore Schary, he went through the studio's film vaults and made such heavy use of the executive screening room--watching star performances of the past--that he was subjected to an executive reprimand. He also learned how to cope with the actor's ego, and part of his technique is to mask his own.

At the same time, his air of knowledge can, according to Kirk Douglas, infuriate an actor at first. "Then," Douglas adds, "you settle down and admire him."

One critical test of Kubrick's control came during the making of "Paths of Glory." He made the veteran actor Adolphe Menjou do the same scene 17 times. "That was my best reading." Menjou announced. "I think we can break for lunch now." It was well past the usual lunch time but Kubrick said he wanted another take.

Menjou went into an absolute fury. In front of Douglas and the entire crew he blasted off on what he claimed was Kubrick's dubious parentage, and made several other unprintable references to Kubrick's relative greenness in the art of directing actors.

Kubrick merely listened calmly, and, after Menjou had spluttered to an uncomplimentary conclusion, said quietly: "All right, let's try the scene once more." With utter docility, Menjou went back to work. "Stanley instinctively knew what to do," Douglas says.

On the other hand, when Kubrick senses that an actor can add creatively to the picture, he is inclined to give him his head. He allowed Peter Sellers in "Dr. Strangelove" to improvise whole scenes. Neither Laurence Olivier nor Peter Ustinov was wholly satisfied with his lines--provided by Dalton Trumbo--in "Spartacus," and they spent several weekends contriving new ones. Kubrick, aware that some were good and some were not, let them do scenes their way, but always made sure to get the takes he wanted, addition. In the cutting room, he put together a Ustinov performance that won an Academy Award.

"He is most certainly in command," George C. Scott, who worked for Kubrick in "Dr. Strangelove," says, "and he's so self-effacing and apologetic it's impossible to be offended by him."

Crew members have reported that the temperamental Mr. Scott was himself drawn out to give one of his best performances without the least awareness of what was happening. Kubrick had an ace in the hole. He is a whiz at chess, having whiled away many hours at the game at the tables in Washington Square Park. "Stanley," Miss Tornabene said, "simply beat Scott at chess and showed him who was boss.

Kubrick's attention to detail is overwhelming. While filming "Dr. Strangelove," he was at the studios at 7 every morning, and seemed to be doing everything except painting the mock H-bombs suspended from scaffolding. He had never seen the interior of a Strategic Air Command bomber but he supervised a design that was chilling in its seeming authenticity. He seemed to be everywhere at once, and Miss Tornabene, who was on the set for a time, reported that "the overwhelming omnipresence of the director had a strange effect on the crew. Awestruck and respectful, they appeared to feel there was no need for their own perfection; the director had more than enough for everyone. They would frequently stand off and watch him rechecking details of their work not with hostility, but with incredulity."

The same sort of awestruck respect of his coworkers was already apparent at Elstree before the actual start of filming on "2001: A Space Odyssey." Tony Masters, an English art director hand-picked by Kubrick, headed a staff of 30 artists slaving over designs for space ships, space stations, hibernaculums for those who would be in suspended animation during periods of a space voyage, and a strange crater on the moon in the middle of which is an odd sort of extraterrestrial artifact. (It would seem to be an alarm that would alert extraterrestrial beings to the fact that human intelligence has evolved to a certain critical point.) As each design was born and drawn it would be brought to Kubrick for approval. If the boss did not like the design, back it went to the drawing board. There was never the slightest objection on the part of anyone to a Kubrick objection: If the boss said it wasn't right, it wasn't. Three special-effects teams slaved to work out the trick effects demanded by Kubrick. These were handpicked men too. So were the two rocket experts, once colleagues of Wernher von Braun whom Kubrick kept around for full-time consultation.

To top off his attention to detail (or chutzpah if you prefer) Kubrick has enlisted the aid (for free) of some of the world's largest corporations on "2001". Firms such as IBM, du Pont, Bausch & Lomb, Eastman Kodak; Minneapolis-Honeywell and General Mills were asked to help him guess what various items would look like 35 years from now. Their research scientists bent to his will and helped him design everything from future computers to what a chair, an item of clothing, or the lounge of a space station would be like in "2001". NASA contributed rocket-ship designs and the like. Vickers- Armstrong of Britain helped him build a huge centrifuge to create artificial gravity on a space station.

"What I'm after," Kubrick says, "is a majestic visual experience," and, in the hope of achieving this, he is filming for the Cinerama screen. "Besides," he says, "Cinerama has the best projection system and the nicest theaters."

If his past history is any guide, Kubrick's trip through space will have its nightmarish elements, too. His imagination has always had a mordant quality, and his style of direction often mingles stark realism with wild touches of fantasy. As early as "Killer's Kiss," he filmed a scene in which a prize fighter wearing boxing gloves and a green dressing gown crossed Fifth Avenue at 42d Street at a sunny, crowded noon hour. In "Dr. Strangelove," American soldiers fought a grimly realistic battle with other American soldiers defending an air-base closed off by an insane general. No doubt what attracted him most to "Lolita" was the nightmare quality of a love affair between a mature man and an immature girl.

His humor, when it asserts itself, tends toward the black and the grisly, and his satire can be savage, as when the Texan pilot of the SAC bomber in "Dr. Strangelove" rides his own hydrogen bomb, waving his hat in patriotic joy at the success of what he thinks is his mission. A scene he shot for the same film involved a pie-throwing battle between Russian and American officials in the War Room, as the moment of doom approached, but Kubrick decided it was too far out, and cut it from the final print.

He toyed for a while with a notion for a film to be called "Blue Movie." This was to be a story about a film director who becomes so great and famous that he gets the financing to make the ultimate pornographic film starring two well-known screen lovers. It is doubtful that Kubrick ever seriously considered making such a movie but Terry Southern liked the notion so much that he got Kubrick's permission to write the story as a novel. Kubrick also confessed to a friend once that he would like to make the world's scariest movie, involving a series of episodes that would play upon the nightmare fears of the audience.

"I sometimes get the feeling," one of his friends said, "that Stanley has never quite grown up--that he has remained an immensely gifted child, needing and demanding attention, but suspicious of those who pay it to him."

Private Life

Along with his early professional vicissitudes, Stanley Kubrick, the director, has run into some marital ones. At 19, already glamorous because of his job as a Look photographer, he married Toba Metz, the prettiest girl in his class at Taft High School. The marriage lasted five years. Soon after, he married Ruth Sobotka, a ballet dancer with George Balanchine's City Center group; that union lasted long enough for her to appear briefly in a ballet sequence in "Killer's Kiss." His third marriage was to Suzanne Christiane Harlan, a German actress who appeared (under the name of Suzanne Christian) in an affecting final scene in "Paths of Glory." That marriage has endured, and the Kubricks have three children from it.--H.A.

Hollis Alpert writes regularly on movies for The Saturday Review. He is the author of a book of essays about films, "The Dreams and the Dreamers," and of "The Barrymores."