(SK) The “Cult” of Kubrick | Offscreen.com | David Churhc | 5/31/06

Offscreen.com

Title : The “Cult” of Kubrick

Date : 31 May 2006

Author(s) : David Church

Blurb: Using the critical status of Stanley Kubrick, David Church
analyzes how the films of a revered art film auteur can also be held
up examples of cult cinema.



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When director Stanley Kubrick died in March 1999, there was much eulogizing from all corners of the film world. Many critics referred to the deceased by first name, as though “Stanley,” that legendarily reclusive filmmaker, were as familiar and known to them as a kindly old man they might happen to bump into now and then at the corner store. Perhaps it was Kubrick’s long and storied career, a livelihood producinggreat movies poured over by consecutive generations of filmgoers, which occasioned such informality. After all, here was a self-taught kid from the Bronx who broke into the pictures and, through sheer ingenuity and
vision, changed the way the world saw film. In any case, Kubrick’slegacy is undeniable and he has clearly become part of the film canon.The most recent installment of /Sight and Sound/’s famous Top 10 poll (taken in 2002) ranked Kubrick as the #6 top director of all time as chosen by critics, and the #5 top director as chosen by other directors.Likewise, his films 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and Dr. Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964) ranked highly on the polls of Top 10 films of all time, as chosen by critics and directors respectively. In these polls, Kubrick shares a lofty place in the pantheon with such fellow auteurs as Alfred Hitchcock, Jean-Luc Godard, Jean Renoir, and Orson Welles—but unlike most of those other
directors (excluding Hitchcock), Kubrick remains more of a household name. Even in death, he still carries more cultural currency than many of his contemporaries, not only a reputation in the academy and the industry but also in the general public.

Kubrick has become a fast favorite of budding film buffs and aspiring art house patrons. Ask a young (often male) or otherwise somewhat inexperienced film buff for his/her favorite directors and Kubrick is almost assured to make the list at some stage in his/her cinematic education. As a young film buff’s knowledge of cinema gradually widens, auteurism proves a seductive line of thought that enables one to organize one’s developing cinematic tastes around whole bodies of work made by individual filmmakers, instead of simply individual favorite films. With auteur theory’s privileging of the director generally incorporated into popular mainstream thought as a means of reading films as texts (perhaps the first “academic” reading strategy acquired by young film buffs), “Kubrick” as both preeminent auteur and canonical body of work provides a site of ready access for students and film buffs aspiring to upward cultural and academic mobility. Despite its inherent shortcomings and the challenges to it by feminism and poststructuralism, auteurism remains a strong structuring force in film studies, providing varying degrees of readability for “high” art texts; for example, some auteurs’ bodies of work are less readable than others, often by virtue of their “foreignness” or lesser availability to “the masses,” thus helping to establish a cultural hierarchy in which high-brow cineastes foster elitism over cinephiles with supposedly less refined tastes.

Meanwhile, cult movie criticism has emerged in recent years as almost a form of “reverse elitism” celebrating modes and genres of films typically considered untouchable by either a) “the mainstream” or b) “cultural elites”: two hazily defined conceptualizations to which the figure of the cultist is often posited and constructed in an oppositional, subcultural stance. [1] <#fn1> It is in this light that I wish to look at Stanley Kubrick as an example of a filmmaker in whom auteurism and cultism are interrelated. I am not trying to claim him as a “cult auteur” in any sense, for it is certainly difficult to imagine
Kubrick’s art film reputation mingling with the likes of John Waters, Jess Franco, or Ed Wood. Indeed, with the notable exception (and counterexample) of A Clockwork Orange (1971), none of his films are widely regarded as “cult” objects. Rather, Kubrick interests me precisely because, like Hitchcock, he is such a canonical director in the “high” auteur tradition, greatly regarded by cultural elites and casual (even “mainstream”) film buffs alike. However, in Kubrick there are clearer parallels between the phenomenon of cult movie celebration and the “cult” of personality surrounding his role as auteur.

Auteur criticism seems to be the legitimate, academic side of the “cult” appreciation of a given director, taking artfulness for granted in the very term “auteur” (as opposed to the much more recent concept of a “cult auteur,” such as Ed Wood, who might create rather artless exploitation films that still bear a distinct authorial stamp). Cult film scholars have alluded to the connections between cultism and auteurism as different but related reading strategies for films. Sconce (1995) compares the cultist’s film consumption to the cineaste’s film consumption, both sharing a perceived opposition to mainstream Hollywood
productions (p. 381); likewise, the cultist uses sophisticated reading strategies similar to the cineaste’s interpretation of an auteur’s stylistic innovations (p. 386). More recently, Sconce (2003) notes that “What is often dismissed in [cult film’s white, middle-class, male] audience as pointless obsession, however, is a close analogue to the work of legitimate film scholars…. […] If ‘cult’ audiences mimic film scholars, film scholarship is not unlike a cult” (p. 31). [2] <#fn2> Indeed, Hawkins (2000) notes how auteur theory grew out of the cultish celebration by white, middle-class, male critics at /Cahiers du cinéma/
(several of whom famously became the vanguard of the “high art” French New Wave) of various B-movie and genre directors like Samuel Fuller, Howard Hawks, and Nicolas Ray (directors who represented an alternative to commercialized Hollywood productions). She describes how “MacMahonism” informed the /Cahiers/ auteurist debates with “a macho, heroic film aesthetic that drew equally from high and low culture” (p.18). Auteur theory of the 1950’s and 1960’s was in many ways a sort of “fan-boy’s club,” a school of thought at odds with the feminizing effects of “mainstream” Hollywood culture, yet leveling certain high and low films as equals within the same critical plane in the process of cultish adulation. Auteurist and cultist reading strategies both share
the same insistence on reading films for special aspects perhaps not noticeable by the uninitiated (no matter whether that “uninitiated” be construed as mainstream commercial moviegoers or viewers on either side of the supposed “high/low” cultural divide)—and of course, the continuing influence of auteurism has informed the criticism of both art cinema and cult cinema.

Beneath the glossy veneer of artiness (which critics usually emphasize to help elevate, and thus distance, an auteur’s films from that of “common” genre directors), Kubrick’s films generally fall into the classifications of popular genre, especially genres that have traditionally been associated with male-oriented, “low,” or B-movie productions. For future reference, a listing of his 13 films, accompanied by my genre classifications for each, should make this more readily viewable:

Fear and Desire (1953): war
Killer’s Kiss (1955): film noir
The Killing (1956): film noir
Paths of Glory (1957): war
Spartacus (1960): sword & sandal epic, war
Lolita (1962): black comedy, romantic melodrama
Dr. Strangelove (1964): black comedy, war
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968): science-fiction
A Clockwork Orange (1971): science-fiction, black comedy
Barry Lyndon (1975): costume drama
The Shining (1980): horror
Full Metal Jacket (1987): war
Eyes Wide Shut (1999): psychosexual melodrama

The obvious artistry of Kubrick’s films tends to raise their cultural status from being mere genre pictures to being the artful products of an auteur, especially after the time of Kubrick’s formulation as an auteur in the early 1960’s (as I shall elaborate upon shortly). Auteur status automatically confers a certain artistry upon a director, especially one able to raise “low” genres and make them palatable to those with higher cultural tastes. Of course, this is not to say that all of Kubrick’s films were received favorably by either mainstream moviegoers, academics, or elite cineastes; many of his films garnered mixed reviews
from both “low” and “high” audiences. However, Kubrick’s films mixed low/mass and high/art in ways that made his films relatively popular to most viewers. Like many art film auteurs, Kubrick’s films were produced outside of the Hollywood system (not to mention, geographically in England since 1962’s Lolita) and exhibit various artistic traits alternately familiar and challenging to mainstream American audiences accustomed to Hollywood products; however, unlike most art film auteurs (even other American ones like David Lynch), most of Kubrick’s films were financed and widely distributed by major Hollywood studios, as
likely to be shown in mainstream cinemas as to be shown in art houses. Kubrick’s crossover success between both mainstream audiences and art house elites speaks to the fact that many of his films were both strong artistic and financial achievements upon their release, no doubt inspired by Kubrick’s choice of subject matter that roughly falls into popular, traditionally profitable genres. [3] <#fn3> While some subject matter came from popular fiction (e.g., Stephen King, Peter George),
some of Kubrick’s source material descended from “high” literary canons (e.g., Vladimir Nabokov, Anthony Burgess, William Makepeace Thackeray), thus adding a further degree of artistic repute to the resulting filmic adaptations—though the case of A Clockwork Orange shows that material of a “high” literary pedigree can still result in a definitive “cult” work.

Of considerable interest in auteur criticism is the personal life of the director authoring the text, a life informing films with his/her unique sensibility, and Kubrick’s legacy /as it exists today/ provides a notable example. The “cult of personality” formed by auteurism builds legends around filmmakers, especially those whose living and working methods are marked by eccentricity, such as Lars Von Trier, Werner Herzog, and David Lynch. Legends about Kubrick’s meticulous and pain-staking preproduction research, his penchant for repeated takes and sheer perfectionism while filming and editing, and various obsessive
aspects of his personal life (e.g., fear of flying, permanent residency in England, etc.) have sprung up around the man and his work, creating him into a sort of mythic figure. A connection can be drawn here between auteur theory and cultism, for both highly value trivia as a means of providing “a sense of inclusion through shared knowledge” that is also used “to exclude outsiders” (Hunt, 2003, p. 187). Just as cultists use trivia to inform reading strategies and exert a purported sense of
ownership over the revered material, the auteurist critic uses intimate and highly detailed knowledge of the director’s personal life and prior work in order to inform auteurist reading strategies and to assert a film’s academic or high cultural value as an artistic text that rises above “mainstream” tastes or fosters such reading strategies. Likewise, both cultists and auteurist critics use “critical distance” to distinguish themselves as more discerning than mass market viewers, thus privileging some reading strategies over others (Hunt, 2003, p. 197), especially when the cult/auteur object is also widely popular within
“mainstream” consumption (as in Kubrick’s films, for example).

In the case of Kubrick specifically, the figure of him as a hermetic, idiosyncratic auteur bodes well for a sort of cultist/auteurist conflation. By remaining intensely private and secretive on the fringes of an industry built upon public exposure, the notion of Kubrick-as-auteur fostered a “cult of personality” by his very refusal to exploit the limelight occupied more comfortably by other prominent directors (e.g., compare Kubrick to Hitchcock’s rampant showmanship and
self-aggrandizement). This hermeticism encourages auteurist readings that border especially strongly on cult because the auteurist critic must “gain access” to the filmmaker’s private world—a world not unlike the hermetic, border-policed world of the cultist—using the sort of detailed cross-textual knowledge (and/or trivia) of Kubrick’s work necessary for an auteurist reading. Likewise, the infrequency with which Kubrick produced films—only 13 in almost 50 years of filmmaking, with lengthening intervals between films in his late career (e.g., 12 years between 1987’s Full Metal Jacket and 1999’s Eyes Wide Shut)—adds to an
almost cultish critical overinvestment in each release. [4] <#fn4> In a broader sense, this sort of critical (over)investment also leads to repeat consumption of an auteur’s films under the lofty stance of “artworthiness,” a reading/consumption strategy resembling the repeat consumption of cult films by fans similarly attuned to the textual/profilmic practices and eccentricities of their less reputable object choices.

A brief glance at each of Kubrick’s films should hopefully help to draw some parallels between cultist and auteurist object choices. Fear and Desire (1953), Kubrick’s low-budget independently produced first feature, tells an existential tale about soldiers fighting behind enemy lines in an unnamed war that causes them to lose their sanity and humanity. Along with Spartacus (1960), this was Kubrick’s only film on which he received no screenwriting credit, yet for all of its weaknesses
as a rather amateur debut film, it shares thematic resonances with many of his later films—most notably in its evocation of the dehumanizing effects of violence and war. According to biographer Vincent LoBrutto (1999), the film played the art house circuit to mixed reviews before, notably enough, being billed “as a sexploitation picture.” Kubrick soon withdrew all prints of it from public exhibition and it was very rarely seen for decades. As LoBrutto says, “Cultists and Kubrick fanatics saw it as a cinematic equivalent of the Rosetta Stone or the Shroud of Turin,” due to its utter unavailability (p. 90). Although extremely
difficult to find, there are very poor quality bootlegs of the film circulating within the same paracinematic video trade/sales circles that many hard-to-find, semi-legal cult films call home. In this sense, Fear and Desire exists today as a sort of “lost object” invested with great desire by Kubrick cultists, a prize obtainable by only the hardcore few who use the same illicit, underground sources utilized by other cult consumers.

Killer’s Kiss (1955) was Kubrick’s second low-budget independent feature, and his first foray into the film noir style/genre still in its heyday at the time, despite being a “low” B-movie genre. This time out, Kubrick wrote the film, in addition to photographing, editing, and directing it. The story of a boxer dragged into violence as he attempts to protect a dancer from a vengeful nightclub owner, Killer’s Kiss was inspired by Kubrick’s first short documentary film, Day of the Fight (1951). Kubrick’s next project was his first Hollywood studio feature, The Killing (1956), another film noir that is often considered his first “professional” picture. It helped pioneer a radically nonlinear narrative structure by using intersecting flashbacks to show the details of a racetrack robbery gone wrong and a getaway thwarted by cruel chance. According to LoBrutto (1999), this nonlinear structure was rather confusing to audiences at the time and the film was neither a critical nor financial success; instead of showing in art houses (as Kubrick intended), it played as part of a double feature like many other
films noirs and B-movies (p. 123-26). Although this type of nonlinear structure would eventually become a trademark of art cinema, it was apparently not enough to raise a film noir like The Killing to “high” enough cultural status for it to play in the art houses. Nevertheless, Kubrick’s “auteur” methods (e.g., commandeering the film’s cinematography from veteran studio cinematographer Lucien Ballard) and critical status (e.g., press comparisons to Orson Welles) were beginning to mount; from this point on, Kubrick’s control over his films (Spartacus excepted) from the writing stage to the directing was more pronounced, although he was not yet also in charge of the distribution and theatre booking of his films, as he would be in his later career.

Kubrick’s reputation as a skillful perfectionist and talented up-and-coming auteur grew with his next film, Paths of Glory (1957). His first studio film with a major star, it featured Kirk Douglas as a French general who tries unsuccessfully to save three men from execution for cowardice following a blundered attack in the trenches of World War I. Another film about the dehumanizing effects of war, not to mention a harsh condemnation of military corruption and wrongdoing—themes to which
he would return in Dr. Strangelove and Full Metal Jacket—it was a critical success. It was also Kubrick’s first film to be shot outside of the United States (in Germany). Douglas then brought in Kubrick as a last-minute replacement for director Anthony Mann on his sprawling big-budget sword & sandal epic Spartacus several years later. Centering on the failed slave rebellion led by the titular gladiator, the resulting film was a lackluster example of a cycle that was nearing the end of its course in Hollywood. [5] <#fn5> Although it earned several awards and a respectable box-office return (despite controversy about the source novel and screenplay being written by two blacklisted writers), Kubrick was not pleased with the production process as essentially a director-for-hire and in later years semi-disowned the film. As LoBrutto (1999) states, “The supreme lesson that Stanley
Kubrick learned on Spartacus was that he had to have autonomy on the films he directed,” and Kubrick later noted that Spartacus was the only film on which he did not have “absolute control” (p. 193). It seems that this unpleasant transitional experience merely strengthened Kubrick’s resolve to take the next step into auteurdom.

Lolita (1962) was Kubrick’s first production to be surrounded by widespread controversy, due to Nabokov’s notorious seriocomic story of a middle-aged professor who becomes tragically infatuated with a pre-teen “nymphet.” With the announced production mired in scandal from the get-go, Kubrick decided to move shooting to England to help avoid high production costs and censorship restrictions, and he would subsequently shoot the rest of his films in England as well. Many compromises with various censorship boards were necessary to secure the film a seal of approval for distribution, but Lolita was finally okayed, opening to positive reviews and solid box-office returns. Although Lolita is not generally considered a cult movie in any respect (possibly in part
because its risqué subject matter always remains at the level of innuendo and mild suggestion, never explicitly employing “low” or exploitative appeals to the viewer’s body), the very controversy itself shares parallels between cultism and auteurism. In his discussion of David Cronenberg’s Shivers (1975), Mathijs (2003) notes how “topicality and controversy are crucial mechanisms in the creation of cult in critical reception” (p. 122), serving to help form or bolster a director’s auteur status. Controversy and topicality—which often go hand-in-hand when a film calls into question the changing nature of cultural values (e.g., the relaxing of limits as to “permissible” film content)—raise critical discussion about the extra-textual “worth” of a disputed cultural artifact. As some critics attempt to reappraise a scandalous film in this context, auteurist readings may result through
the linking of the film’s controversial aspects to the question of directorial intent, thus helping to critically reinterpret the film as more “worthy” than it might not otherwise seem at first glance (p. 115-16, 122). While there appears to be a world of difference between Kubrick’s “high” literary adaptation (pre-privileged for serious critical consideration) and Cronenberg’s “low” body horror debut (pre-prejudiced for serious critical dismissal), the reception of each film respectively shares a critical tendency toward auteurist readings that help to dispel the threat of potentially “pornographic,” exploitative subject matter in each. Just as Cronenberg’s reputation as a budding auteur sprang from the controversy of his first feature film,
I believe that Kubrick’s growing reputation as an auteur was much aided by his willingness to engage in controversial subject matter (e.g., as in his later films like A Clockwork Orange and Eyes Wide Shut). After Lolita, Kubrick’s renown as an auteur seemed to be firmly established: virtually all of his subsequent films were advertised under the banner of his own name, the title of each film often preceded by the “Stanley Kubrick’s” ownership tag (e.g., “Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange”
or “Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove”), as if act ively using his“absolute control” as auteur as a marketing strategy unto itself.

Dr. Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964) marked another Kubrick incursion into comedic territory, again using a fairly serious novel (Peter George’s /Red Alert/) as inspiration for a satire. The result was one of his most popularly enduring films, a perversely razor-edged black comedy about the very real threat of global nuclear annihilation; in more recent years, Kubrick’s vision of power-mad politicians and military men has been validated as being much closer to the truth than even the filmmakers themselves knew at the time. As Eco (1986) notes, a cult movie must “provide a completely furnished world so that its fans can quote characters and episodes” (qtd. in Mathijs, 2003, p. 109), and Dr. Strangelove seems to fall into this category. It is Kubrick’s first immensely quotable film and its shadowy netherworld of government war rooms, hovering bombers, and besieged military bases denotes a sort of eerily familiar, yet satirically sent-up Cold Warring world. Were the film not so highly celebrated by both cineastes and moviegoers (both at the time of its release and today), its subversively sardonic take on the global nuclear politics of its day would no doubt heighten its status as a cult object due to the sheer perversity of its subject matter. A film’s inclusion in the canons of “high art” often seems to preclude its being taken as a
cult object, and vice-versa; “cult” is automatically associated with “low” objects, even if cult is just as select a culturally imposed categorization as the “high” art revered by cineastes. Dr. Strangelove,like Eco ’s example of the highly regarded Casablanca (Michael Curtiz, 1943), provides a case in which low/cult and high/art appreciations of the same film are not mutually exclusive, even if each categorization is often used in opposition to the other. In this way, auteurism and cultism can share similar cultural self-exclusionary tactics, even if their reading strategies are remarkably alike, finding value in the very
same aspects of a given film (even when those aspects are not necessarily read ironically or subversively, as in cult
consumption)—perhaps even more alike than some cult film theorists are willing to admit.

2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) was Kubrick’s first science-fiction film, and is generally considered a very influential benchmark effort, not only of the genre but of cinema in general. Adapted from a short story by Arthur C. Clarke, one of the most highly esteemed science-fiction writers, the film traced the simian ancestry of man back to the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence during prehistory—then leapt forward in time to the titular year as man-made computer technology
takes over a spaceship amid an exploratory expedition to Jupiter. The film ends with the sole surviving astronaut fleeing the ship in an escape pod, being sucked through a Star Gate, and emerging in an alien environment where he ages rapidly before apparently being reborn as an evolutionarily advanced Starchild orbiting Earth. The open-ended, highly symbolic narrative of the film has much in common with other radical narratological developments in 1960’s art cinema (e.g., Alain Renais’
1961 Last Year at Marienbad), and despite some understandable public confusion and discussion over what the film ultimately meant, it became regarded as the first “serious” science-fiction picture; its most direct cinematic descendant in narrative form and genre is Solaris (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1972). Hailed as an artistic and technological triumph, 2001: A Space Odyssey helped bring an air of respectability to the genre.According to LoBrutto (1999), Kubrick had prepared for the production by
viewing any and all science-fiction films he could acquire, even ones of the lowest quality, in his search for new ideas (p. 270)—though he would not do likewise in his preparation to enter the horror genre with The Shining (1980). Kubrick himself helped to distinguish his film from the “low” associations that science-fiction films had garnered since the youth craze of the 1950’s: “I don’t regard 2001 simply as science fiction,” he told /Newsweek/. “Science fiction is a legitimate field, of
course. But there has been bad execution of the visual effects and too much emphasis on monsters. 2001 is not fantasy, though a portion of it is speculative” (qtd. in LoBrutto, 1999, p. 311). Although Kubrick (and critics supporting the film) seemed all too ready to distance 2001: A Space Odyssey from the fantasy, monsters, and bad visual effects found in the less reputable science-fiction films of the 1950’s and 1960’s which are now consumed primarily by a cult audience, his own film drew a
strong cult audience of its own. Billed as “the ultimate trip,” 2001: A Space Odyssey was very popular with the 1960’s youth generation, frequented by hippies and other counterculture members eager to enhance their drug trips with the hallucinatory trip through the Star Gate depicted in the film. In his pioneering survey of “subversive” films, Vogel (1974) describes 2001 as a “Cult film of the young, this is a manifesto of the new sensibility; a nostalgic elegy to innocence lost to
technology, a vision of truths beyond understanding. It ends with unforgettable images of the new star child in space, facing the earth he must transform to make it human again” (p. 322, caption). Though Kubrick had not made the film specifically for the counterculture, nor intended it to portray or enhance a drug trip (as in a “head film”), it was nevertheless appropriated by a strong countercultural cult audience, the same demographic that helped bridge the “high” art cinema of the 1960’s
and the “low” midnight (cult) movie sensation of the 1970’s.

Part science-fiction, part black comedy, A Clockwork Orange (1971) is the only Kubrick film to be widely regarded not only as an important art film, but also as a prime example of a cult film. With its dark humor, disturbingly graphic imagery, “retro-futuristic” visual style, synth-classical score, and the inventive “nadsat” slang taken from Anthony Burgess’s novel, there is much to suggest the film as a cult object, a special sort of (in Eco’s words) “completely furnished world”
unto itself enabling the quotation of dialogue and situations. The near-futuristic story of a vicious teenage gang leader whose violent free will is stripped from him by an authoritarian society attempting his rehabilitation, A Clockwork Orange proved very popular with young audiences and much of its cult reputation springs from the notorious depictions of sex and violence that allegedly inspired “copycat” crimes (a controversy much like the one later surrounding Walter Hill’s 1979 cult movie The Warriors). As had been the case with Lolita, the gradual easing of censorship restrictions meant that Kubrick could take on more
potentially objectionable subject matter; inaugurated in 1968, the Motion Picture Association of America’s ratings system opened
possibilities for new sexual and violent material to appear on screen, and A Clockwork Orange (rated “X” upon its initial release) was one of the most notorious of these transgressive new films to appear. The elimination of formal censorship restrictions meant that Kubrick could finally have “final cut” on A Clockwork Orange and his subsequent films, a rare privilege stipulated in his contracts with various studios (though some rare cuts had to be made to avoid an “X” or “NC-17” rating
for better distribution and marketing purposes, and A Clockwork Orange was eventually re-rated “R” after several cuts). Ironically, the conservative backlash over the film’s purported ability to incite copycat crimes echoed the film’s own depiction of filmic images being used to forcibly alter human behavior; after receiving death threats over the film, Kubrick pulled it from theatrical release for many years. Regardless, “cult” behavior associated with the film was especially marked in Britain (the film’s setting), where actual teenage gangs emulated the distinctive dress and talk of the film’s dangerous young
“droogs,” this being one of several trends in British youth counterculture (along with teddy boys, skinheads, mods & rockers, etc.) that would eventually culminate in the punk movement of the late-1970’s. When Quentin Tarantino recently quipped that Kubrick made A Clockwork Orange merely for the masturbatory fantasy afforded by the graphic opening scenes of the picture [6] <#fn6>, there is no doubt a grain of truth in his statement, since Hawkins (2000) points out that, according
to cineastes and other elites, “high” cultural objects /supposedly/ (but clearly do not) evoke different pleasures than “low” or exploitative cultural objects, even when both high and low objects engage the viewer’s body in the very same way (p. 6). As Clover (1992) says in her analysis of rape-revenge horror films, “were they less well and expensively made by less famous men,” both Straw Dogs (Sam Peckinpah, 1971) and A Clockwork Orange “would surely classify as sensationalist exploitation” like Meir Zarchi’s infamous 1977 cult film I Spit on Your Grave (p. 116). Just as Watson (1997) notes that censorship regulations
actively created the illicit subjects taken up by classical exploitationcinema (p. 79), the final lifting of these regulations in the 1960’s meant that these illicit subjects could be taken up by dominant culture, with art cinema often leading the way that more mainstream films would soon follow. Indeed, as Hawkins (2000) notes, A Clockwork Orange is one of a group of films that is difficult to categorize because it draws upon both “high” and “low” art traditions, mixing avant-garde stylization, high production values, and European art film cachet with plenty of sex and violence that engage the viewer’s body (p. 22-23).
Financed and distributed by a major American studio, it emerged at a
time in which Hollywood was competing for art film audiences as art
films, pornography, and countercultural films all crossed over into
increased mainstream popularity (p. 22, 189). Even today, A Clockwork
Orange remains a controversial and notorious work, retaining its cult
status among young (predominantly male) viewers; venerated by cultists
but still regarded by cineastes as one of Kubrick’s finest films, it
demonstrates perhaps the strongest meshing of “high” and “low” elements
in the director’s oeuvre.

For his next project, Kubrick would dive into a very different sort of
“completely furnished world,” an 18th-Century costume drama based on a
fictional memoir written by William Makepeace Thackeray about a young
Irish rogue who flees his homeland after a duel, gradually rises to
great wealth and social status (after being a soldier, spy, and card
shark), only to be reduced back to destitution after a series of social
mishaps. Barry Lyndon (1975) is an opulent, exactingly detailed vision
of a time period long gone, recreated using very modern technology
(e.g., special lenses adapted to shoot by candlelight). Although it was
an impressively executed film that was celebrated by critics worldwide
and drew large audiences in Europe, it did not attract large numbers in
the United States (unlike most of Kubrick’s other films). Despite its
obvious artistry and technical achievement, today Barry Lyndon seems to
be one of Kubrick’s least culturally enduring works, perhaps because it
is one of the least likely to potentially foster a cult reading; indeed,
beyond Kubrick’s “cultish” auteur status and his previous film record,
there is remarkably little textual material in Barry Lyndon to encourage
a crossover cult acceptance of it. Another factor in this (as I hinted
in note 3) may well be the “feminine” quality attributed to the costume
drama. Although Barry Lyndon the protagonist is a fighter in duels and
wars, a womanizer, and a rather likable masculine fellow, the costume
drama is commonly associated with the feminine, especially when
melodramatic elements are involved. While most of Kubrick’s other films
are in typically “masculine” genres (e.g., war, science-fiction,
horror), several of his least currently popular works (e.g., Barry
Lyndon, Lolita, Eyes Wide Shut) all contain more melodramatic or
expressly romantic material than the others. Though melodrama (a
traditionally “low” genre) certainly does not preclude auteurist
consideration, as the reputations of Douglas Sirk and Max Ophuls
testify, cult consideration is more likely to reject more manipulative
“feminine” melodramatic elements and lean toward masculine appreciation
of films. Indeed, Hollows (2003) and Read (2003) both show how “cult” is
often strongly associated with masculinity (albeit a masculinity under
threat from the stereotype of the cultist as a “desexualized” fan-boy in
whom femininity and consumerism are conflated). Hollows (2003) in
particular notes how a film like Titanic (James Cameron, 1997) may be a
“cult” film to a certain select (largely feminine) audience, but its
associations with both a mass audience and the feminine qualities of
melodrama ensure that it is unlikely to be accepted by either academic
or popular (male-dominated) cult canons (p. 38). Such may be a similar
case with Barry Lyndon merely due to its high production values and
(feminine) genre status, thus repelling possible “cult” readings while
preserving all of the “high” art distinction of auteurism. With the
counter-cinematic (i.e., low-budget, marginalized, or subversive) stress
placed on so much cult film, perhaps it comes as no surprise that
costume dramas in general—a genre typified by lavish historical
depictions of the aristocratic and bourgeois ruling classes—do not often
have a cult reputation, unless there are some outstanding textual
elements that help to actively encourage a cult reading (e.g., the
eccentric and horror-based imagery of Ken Russell’s 1986 Gothic).

The Shining (1980) was Kubrick’s only real foray into the horror film,
but it remains a rather notable and well-known release within that
genre. Jack Nicholson delivers one of his most campily excessive
performances as a struggling writer who moves his family to a snowbound
hotel where he has been hired as a winter caretaker, only to be driven
murderously insane by ghostly influences. Though most critics panned the
film (perhaps in part due to its status as a horror film), it was still
a box-office success. Although Kubrick’s “high” auteur status somewhat
sets him apart from “low” horror auteurs who are more likely to have a
cult following, the use of the horror genre itself is in some sense
enough to draw some kind of cult audience; for example, even a glossy
“mainstream” horror film like The Exorcist (William Friedkin, 1973) or
The Shining remains celebrated by many cult horror audiences, while
those same cult audiences may denounce other more explicitly commercial,
derivative Hollywood horror output. There are many different “cult”
audiences, “mainstream” audiences, and “high art” audiences—none of them
are a cohesive group with entirely shared tastes—but The Shining tends
to find some acceptance in each rough category of spectatorship, whether
by virtue of its status as a horror film, its status as a Kubrick film,
or its actual artistic merit. More recent critical reappraisals of the
film (see Cramer, 1997) have located it in the domain of postmodernity
(and thus a level of artworthiness supposedly transcending traditional
horror film conventions), seeing Kubrick as knowingly playing with
tropes of the Gothic novel, the haunted house subgenre, and the slasher
subgenre, creating something distinctly different from Stephen King’s
source novel. Another critic even relates the emergent paternal violence
in The Shining back to the Starchild from 2001: A Space Odyssey, as the
father symbolically seeks revenge and the reappropriation of patriarchal
power that he ceded in the face of a new type of bourgeois family reborn
during the turmoil of the 1960’s (see Sobchack, 1996). In any case, the
development of serious scholarly work on the horror film (which has also
partially yielded recent work on cult films) has helped The Shining to
gain some “high” cultural currency with cineastes, not just as the work
of a well-known auteur but also as a major work in the “horror canon” (a
canon that has traditionally been a favorite for cultists, even if
cultists and cineastes would not necessarily include the same films in
their own definition of the that canon). In the realm of “art-horror”
films like The Shining, a crossover between auteurists and cultists
seems quite inevitable.

Full Metal Jacket (1987) marked Kubrick’s full return to the war film,
and was considered one of the strongest films in a cycle of
Vietnam-related films that appeared during the 1980’s. Opening to strong
reviews and strong box-office, Full Metal Jacket was another bleak look
at the dehumanizing effects of war, first focusing on the
identity-destroying Marine boot camp experience, then on the horrific
violence inflicted and incurred by American troops in Vietnam. The film
also depicts the racism, sexism, and homophobia of the troops in a
negative light, but regardless of these admonitions of insensitive male
bonding behavior, Full Metal Jacket remains a favorite of (male) war
movie enthusiasts, typically for its darkly sadistic sense of humor (as
deftly illustrated in R. Lee Ermey’s much-quoted gunnery sergeant
character). “Serious” war films like Full Metal Jacket, even if
artistically made and offering a critique of military violence,
nevertheless serve a sort of masculine dynamic as shaping a strongly
male-dominated genre. While war films are often created on large
budgets, either as historical recreations or as action vehicles, high
production values (especially in “serious” war films) often translate
into graphically realistic depictions of wartime violence and other
aberrant behavior (e.g., rape, racism, etc.), all in the name of
historical authenticity. Like the extreme (male-oriented) imagery in
horror and other types of cult film, gore and other “authentic”
offensive material in the (male-oriented) war film is often used by
(young) male viewers as a sort of test of “hardness,” as if only the
most hardened sensibilities will be able to withstand the experience of
such imagery (e.g., see Hollows, 2003, p. 45). In this way, war films
and horror/cult films, two traditionally male-dominated varieties of
film, both use extreme imagery as a means of determining a sort of
“masculine” inclusion, almost like a rite of passage. In a time when the
draft has been abolished in America and military service remains merely
optional, the modern war film especially serves this masculine “rite of
passage” by using graphic imagery as an ersatz substitute for actual
lived combat experience (even if this inadvertently celebrates the
sacrificial nature of American troops in unjust wars like Vietnam,
partially undercutting the larger critique of American involvement in
such wars). Also like the horror/cult film, Full Metal Jacket in
particular is infused with a sadistic blend of horror/abuse and gallows
humor, evoking both shock and laughter.

Though he had first become interested in the project in the early
1970’s, Kubrick’s final film would be Eyes Wide Shut (1999), a languid
and dreamlike psychosexual fantasy about a New York doctor who embarks
upon a nighttime journey of gradually increasing deviancy after his wife
reveals her unrequited sexual fantasies for another man. Despite (or
perhaps in part because of) the hype surrounding the film, especially
the infamous orgy scenes and the on-screen sexuality between
then-married stars Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, most critics dismissed
the film as a relative failure, remarking that the reclusive Kubrick was
out of touch with modern marriage—though the film’s marketing and
notoriety did draw audiences. Controversy surrounded the film on several
issues: first, that Kubrick had not finished editing the film at the
time of his death, for he often made cuts after a film’s premiere,
before sending prints into wider distribution; second, that this film
was proof that Kubrick the mythic auteur was an uncontrollable
megalomaniac (as suggested by Eyes Wide Shut screenwriting collaborator
Frederic Raphael in his memoir Eyes Wide Open); and third, that the
American version of the film would be rated NC-17 by the MPAA unless
computer-generated figures were inserted to obscure several of the more
risqué shots in the orgy sequence, thus violating Kubrick’s final
“vision” for the film. [7] <#fn7> As had been the case with several of
his earlier films, Kubrick’s “high” cultural use of transgressive sexual
content was cause for much auteurist consideration, whereas similar
content in a film by a lesser director would surely be construed as a
typically “low” cultural employment of softcore pornography—despite the
fact that many critics seemed genuinely disappointed by the lack of
actual eroticism in Eyes Wide Shut, which as Siegel (1999) suggests, led
to a critical backlash against the more subtle artistic touches in the
film (p. 76-83). Thus, auteurist critics (e.g., Andrew Sarris) built
their expectations upon the failed promise of “low,” potentially
pornographic content that would then be “redeemed” for cineastes through
Kubrick’s “high” culture reputation and artistry as an auteur—but
instead they turned against the film precisely because the more
auteurist strokes in Kubrick’s film were too subtle to outweigh the
much-hyped sexual content. Kubrick’s touted role as auteur is quite
apparent in the outcry that the mild censorship of the orgy sequence
would infringe upon his apparent “auteur privilege” to include whatever
he wished in his final cut, even if that freedom to do so would not be
shared by “lower” directors. The backlash over the sexual content of the
film—combined with Rafael’s diatribe, which seemed to represent the
flip-side of the idiosyncratic auteurist coin that had benefited Kubrick
for so much of his career—added up to a negative critical response to
Eyes Wide Shut which actually used Kubrick’s own auteurdom against him.
With even auteurist critics sided against the film, celebration of the
film today falls more to the same “cultists and Kubrick fanatics” noted
by LoBrutto (1999, p. 90). Despite its mix of “high” art and “low”
softcore sexuality, Eyes Wide Shut remains one of Kubrick’s most
culturally neglected films, but that very neglect (mixed with the film’s
controversial content) leaves it as fodder for Kubrick fans in whom
cultism and auteurism exist symbiotically. [8] <#fn8>

As I have hopefully shown, cult readings and auteur readings share many
similar strategies and objects, especially in films where “high” and
“low” elements commingle. Kubrick’s films ostensibly belong squarely in
the “high” cultural category of “art,” but they clearly share
crosscurrents with “low,” largely male-oriented cult films, on both the
textual level of diegesis and the extra-textual level of consumption.
Auteurist veneration of such films borders strongly upon (if not
outright overlaps into) a sort of cultist celebration of those works
under the respectable veneer of “artworthiness” and “high” cultural
acceptability (and vice-versa in the case of “cult auteurs”); in this
way, auteurism and cultism can be seen to intersect quite often in the
spectatorship of both art films and cult films in general, for the
reading and consumption practices of each commonly blur together upon
closer inspection, falsely separated only by the associations of
high/elite and low/mass taste that “art” and “trash” respectively garner
in an economically stratified society.

With this in mind, I would like to return to my initial question of the
young (male) film buff’s common investment in Kubrick as both auteur and
cult film director. Roughly comprising the same demographic that
primarily consumes both art and cult cinema, the young film
buff—ascending into the academy’s realm of “higher” knowledge and
cultural worth (not to mention greater capital-earning potential)—is
positioned between different economic and cultural strata that seem to
conflict along class divisions; as Hawkins (2000) notes, when bourgeois
and working-class people have the same amount and type of formal arts
schooling, bourgeois people are more likely to side with higher art
preferences due to class interests alone (p. 30). Although many of his
contemporary “high” auteurs have also made films into the late 1990’s,
Kubrick has retained a greater share of cultural currency in both
high/elite and low/mass audiences than perhaps any other art film
director. With a share in both popular and elite culture, the figure of
Kubrick-as-auteur proves an especially “safe” choice of filmmaker for
young film buffs to idolize in cultish ways, helping to bridge the gap
between those differing economic and cultural strata in the film buff’s
move from low/mass tastes to the high/elite tastes associated with a
higher educational and/or economic level and a wider knowledge of world
film. Aside from (and also in connection with) the major studio
distribution of his films in America, Kubrick’s “Americanness” may play
some role in his crossover cultural currency within both high/elite and
low/mass American audiences, for his films (all in the English language)
tend to lack the stigma of “foreignness” typically associated with art
cinema, for art cinema as a mode is most often associated with European
(non-English language) film productions as distinct from common
Hollywood product. The Kubrick oeuvre also consists of a rather
eclectic, almost “exotic” group of quality films produced over a broad
timeline of film history in varying genres, providing an automatic air
of worldly viewing experience to young film buffs that are Kubrick
aficionados/cultists; in addition, these somewhat disparate films tend
to be seen by young film buffs as sharing a similarly dark and
existential worldview (i.e., the opinion of the auteur), a general tone
for all of his films, rather than a set of specific and complicated
themes that might be more difficult for young film buffs to understand
and articulate. Kubrick’s long career of almost 50 total years allows
his films to be held in high regard by successive generations of critics
and audiences, allowing young film buffs an easy point of access into
the “high” film canon, but Kubrick’s “low/mass” genre crosscurrents
ensure that young film buffs do not seemingly (snobbishly) compromise an
earlier (“lower”) economic/cultural stratum that they might seem to
leave behind when entering the academy or bourgeois society.

One of the effects of cult film criticism has been this sort of repeated
traversing of high/elite and low/mass cultural strata, academically
placing cult film within the context of “high” film canons, whether by
positing cult film in political opposition to elite canons or by
incorporating cult film into aesthetic discussions of film form and
cultural consumption (for further discussion, see Read, 2003). As Read
(2003) points out, the male cult film critic is often caught between the
position of A) the politically enlightened academic and B) the
feminized, desexualized figure of the subcultural “fan-boy” who is at
once opposed to the feminine associations of “mass” culture consumption
and the political correctness (e.g., feminism) that would typically
denounce the disreputable (body-affecting) pleasures of many cult films
(p. 56). The cult film critic, much like the young film buff negotiating
high/low distinctions via the cultish celebration of an auteur like
Kubrick, thus cannot escape a position that is either viewed as
feminized and disempowered or as laddishly opposed to the feminism of
political correctness. Although mass culture consumption is generally
coded as “feminine” in a patriarchal society, less remarked upon by cult
film theorists is the strong reverse element of feminization that is
often associated with “high” art; from the perspective of the lower
classes (i.e., when working-class males are traditionally associated
with an aggressive, over-sexualized masculinity), “high” art is often
seen as rather foreign and bourgeois/elite, typically less visceral and
direct, somewhat unmanly and effete (hence the tellingly derogatory
epithet “art fag” occasionally applied to high art elites). Read (2003)
notes how the male cultist’s identification with the male
director-as-auteur allows him to fight the common connotations of
cultists as “nerdish,” desexualized fan-boys and feminized mass market
consumers; by actively and discriminatingly choosing their cult objects
(as opposed to vainly consuming, as is supposedly the case in feminine
mass market consumption) and exercising a degree of supposed control
over the texts through detailed knowledge/trivia of the auteur, male
cultists make a “masculine” claim over their cultdom (p. 65). In the
case of Kubrick-as-auteur, his use of certain genres and subject matter
(often associated with low, male-oriented, and body-affecting material
that is far from feminism’s various definitions of political
correctness) in combination with the major studio (semi- to
fully-mainstream) distribution of his films, means that his work
straddles mass tastes and elite tastes, its continuing cultural currency
in each category of spectatorship allowing the young (male) film buff to
retain ties to a low/mass audience and yet safely stretch his interests
into high/elite circles (since “art” film credentials supposedly raise a
film above “mainstream” consumption) without the risk of snobbery or the
potential guilt of leaving one’s previous economic/cultural level. The
figure of Kubrick-as-auteur thus allows “cultists and Kubrick fanatics,”
including the young (male) film buff, to indulge in (primarily)
male-oriented art films that draw upon both high and low cultural
elements and remain highly regarded by both low and high audiences,
suspending those cultists in a transitional space where the apparently
feminizing aspects of both low/mass and high/elite cultures comfortably
cancel each other out [9] <#fn9>, leaving Kubrick’s cultish auteurdom as
an ostensibly unproblematic and ultimately accessible site of interest
for the aspiring young (male) film buff or academic-in-training. Of
course, this same sort of argument can be equally extended to other
auteurs (both “high” and “low”) beyond Stanley Kubrick, but I have
hopefully pointed toward a source for increased critical work on the
intersection between cultism and auteurism, two overlapping
reading/consumption strategies that have coexisted uneasily for far too
long.

End Notes
When Kubrick died in March 1999, I was but a young high school student familiar with only a handful of his films—but by the time
his final film Eyes Wide Shut was released four short months later, my idolization of all things Kubrick was at a fever-pitch. This idolization continued through high school and on into my first few years of college, when my tastes became more eclectic and drifted toward more obscure filmmakers, partially as a response to my new-found awareness of the flaws of auteur theory and no doubt inspired in some regard by an elitist desire to distance myself from the figure of Kubrick as an “easy favorite” for other aspiring film students. If this personal admission seems unnecessary, I am merely following a common convention of cult
movie criticism by naming my own investment and origins of interest in the subject matter, then widening my scope somewhat. As such, my observations in this article should be taken as rather speculative, being based largely upon my own experience and my conversations with fellow film buffs, most of whom have been young white American males.

Although Sconce’s observations center around what he terms “paracinema,” which he locates around the mode of exploitation film
(Sconce, 1995, p. 372), cult film actually comprises a larger set of films, as Jancovich, Reboll, Stringer, and Willis (2003) point out (p. 1). Thus, “cult” films can even include Hollywood or “high art” productions that are read ironically, subversively, or “for all the wrong reasons.” Hawkins (2000) and Betz (2003) are among the scholars who have noted how art cinema’s consumption in America has often overlapped dramatically, even indistinguishably, with the consumption of exploitation film. It should also be noted that although the low-budget nature of many cult films is often a cause for celebration for cultists
viewing such films as being in opposition to big-budget Hollywood products, budget and production values do not a cult film make: take the glossy, well-made films of Dario Argento, for example, as Hutchings
(2003) shows (p. 135, 137).

To an extent, Kubrick’s post-1950’s films (i.e., the ones in which his auteur identity was fully formed) that seem to be the least enduring in popular cultural currency today tend toward being those which fall furthest outside the popular male-oriented genres in which he traditionally worked. For example, Lolita (black comedy, romantic melodrama), Barry Lyndon (costume drama), and Eyes Wide Shut (psychosexual melodrama) all seem somewhat neglected compared to Kubrick’s other post-1950’s films; while none of them lacks for artistry, all three share considerable melodramatic elements that might mark them as more “feminine” than the rest of Kubrick’s output.

While the number of films produced by a cult director does not necessarily impact that director’s subcultural “worth,” some cult
critics are prone to celebrating directors who have made hundreds of films outside the Hollywood system (e.g., Jess Franco), while other critics focus on directors with a rather scarce output (perhaps scarce due to the films being lost or censored out of existence) that is subsequently inflated with worth, most often in retrospect in the process of “reclaiming” a neglected filmmaker. Though Kubrick was certainly not a neglected filmmaker, nor primarily a cult director, the mix of zealously positive and negative critical responses that attended his films upon their release (often with the same critics, such as Richard Schickel, coming to similar conclusions from one film to the next) points toward a more “cultish” response to the figure and critical reputation of Kubrick-as-auteur than to unbiased opinion. Of course, in this sense “fandom” and “cultdom” are hard to distinguish from one another, as the auteurist critic will often overvalue the more positive or progressive aspects in a lackluster film made by an auteur that he/she celebrates, in order to help bolster the cultural “worth” of a
film that might not otherwise seem particularly important to members of their readership (who are commonly academics, art house patrons, and “high culture” cineastes) who are not “inside” when it comes to knowledge of a particular auteur.

It should be noted here that “sword and sandal epics” like Spartacus are one of the subgenres of “paracinema” mentioned by Sconce
(1995) as recipients of cult attention (p. 372). Although most of these epics produced by Hollywood during the 1950’s-1960’s were glossy, often award-winning historical films with big budgets, big stars, and high production values (unlike, say, the more myth-inspired Italian /peplum/, a more definitively paracinematic and “exploitation”-based foreign
subgenre), these epics still foster cult reading strategies today through the use of campily excessive spectacle supposedly justified by vaguely historical “facts,” not to mention the pervasive homoeroticism that begs for ironic viewing. Case in point: the long-censored scene from Spartacus (finally restored to the film 30 years later) featuring an attempted seduction between characters played by Lawrence Olivier and Tony Curtis.

According to Tarantino, interviewed in the October 20, 2003 issue of /The New Yorker/: “I always thought Kubrick was a hypocrite
because his party line was ‘I’m not making a movie about violence, I’m making a movie against violence.’ And it’s just like, get the fuck off. I know and you know your dick was hard the entire time you were shooting those first twenty minutes; you couldn’t keep it in your pants the entire time you were editing it and scoring it. You did it for those first twenty minutes. And if you don’t say you did, you’re a fucking liar.”

^7 <#fn7up> Of the controversy over the MPAA’s de facto censorship (to which most filmmakers bend to ensure a much more marketable “R” rating) and Warner Brothers’ eventual addition of computer-generated figures to Kubrick’s orgy scene, it is worth noting briefly that, as Hutchings (2003) points out, “cult” culture sets up an us/them opposition positing cultists as “freedom-seekers demanding the right to see forbidden material” vs. mainstream conformist values or the apparatuses of censorship (p. 131). As the Eyes Wide Shut controversy shows, this cultish “desire to look” at that which is forbidden manifests itself in
the consumption of “high” auteurist work as well, since “high” art (a longtime site of crossover for spectators seeking both “high” and “low” material, especially in explicit sexual content, as the history of foreign art cinema has illustrated) has long been similarly positioned in opposition to both mainstream conformist values (i.e., bland Hollywood product) and the apparatuses of censorship (e.g., the MPAA’s censorship restrictions). Although the notorious orgy scene contains no more sexual content than the sort of softcore simulated sex symptomatic of the very “low” (sometimes even vaguely cultish but almost certainly
campy) erotic movies shown on late-night premium cable TV, the American version of Eyes Wide Shut featured the computer- added obscuring figures as a form of mild censorship, while European cuts of the film did not (suggesting that European art cinema is still more free and potentially transgressive than its American cousin, especially when Hollywood studios like Warner Brothers are helping to fit the latter’s bill).

The screenplay for Kubrick’s unrealized final project (another science-fiction film) would be rewritten and directed by Steven
Spielberg as A.I.: Artificial Intelligence (2001). The resulting film was a messy combination of Kubrick’s dark futuristic vision and Spielberg’s typically schmaltzy Hollywood product. Because of the organic way that Kubrick often re-wrote his scripts during filming and included little specific visual detail in his written screenplays, it is impossible to extract Kubrick’s ideas from Spielberg’s re-conception of the film, just as it would make little sense to fully judge the relative “auteur” status of each director. As such, I am excluding A.I. from my analysis.

Although I have followed other cult film critics in their delineation of masculinity vs. femininity in different types of
consumption practices, it may ultimately be more useful to view the transition from young film buff to academic/elite as akin to the transition from child to adult. Mass tastes (including most cult films) are generally associated more with juvenile tastes, while appreciation of art cinema would seem to demand a greater degree of adult maturity and worldly knowledge. Of course, this is not necessarily a reality, for cult readings are often just as complicated as art film readings, but associating the young film buff with a child (while closer complying with the youth demographic comprising both aspiring students and
cultists) still retains the association of cultism with the desexualization of the aptly named “fan-boy.” Either way of
conceptualizing the anxious transition from mass/low tastes to high/elite tastes (and certainly the ever-continuing fluctuations and lapses between the two categories, for it is very rarely a permanent one-way transition that subsequently eschews all “low” texts) may be used here.

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(2001) Tom Hanks on 2001: The Odyssey and the Ecstasy | Space.com |12/30/2000

SPACE.com -- Tom Hanks on 2001: The Odyssey and the Ecstasy


Tom Hanks on 2001: The Odyssey and the Ecstasy
By
Executive Editor, Space and Science

30 December 2000



In 1968 moviegoers for the first time experienced the cinematic epic 2001: A Space Odyssey. Written by Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke and directed by Kubrick, the film opens with the dawn of the human species on the plains of Africa and continues in the 21st century with the first piloted voyage to Jupiter and humanitys final evolution at the hands of an extraterrestrial intelligence. The cast of characters includes Dr. Heywood Floyd, a scientist who must respond to the discovery of a 4 million-year-old black monolith on the Moon; and astronauts David Bowman and Frank Poole, two members of the crew of the Jupiter-bound spaceship Discovery, which is controlled by an intelligent, talking computer named HAL.

At the films climax Bowman the lone survivor of HALs murderous loss of sanity arrives at Jupiter where he confronts the monolith, is propelled through
intergalactic space in a bizarre and spectacular light show and, finally, is transformed into a luminous fetus that Clarke called the "star child." Upon its release, 2001 was panned by critics, but soon became a cult favorite. In the years since, the film is nothing less than an icon for space fans, who still praise its realistic portrayal of spaceflight.

Is 2001: A Space Odyssey more than just a great space movie? On the brink of the real 2001, SPACE Illustrated editor Andrew Chaikin talked to one of the films most ardent fans actor, writer and director Tom Hanks, star of Apollo 13 and creator of the HBO miniseries From the Earth to the Moon. Thirty-two years after its premiere, Hanks explains why Kubrick and Clarkes masterpiece is still an extraordinary film in any category, and why there is still inspiration to be found in its portrayal of humanitys future in space.

Q: Do you remember the first time you saw 2001?

Hanks: I decided on a Friday night in the summer of 1968 that I was going to see it the next day. I was in junior high school. I had months of anticipatory buildup before figuring out that, Hey, Im old enough; I can save my money over the week to afford the bus ride, the ticket and something to eat at the theater. So I decided to go, and I probably got an hours worth of sleep between that decision and actually being there. I saw it at the
Cinerama Dome Theater in Oakland, California. I went by myself, sat right down in the middle of the theater, and watched the movie.

Q: How did it hit you? Were you overwhelmed?Well, you know, it was kind of like having never gone to the opera, and then at age 13 going to a Wagnerian opera for the first time. How do you take it all in? It was such a riot of imagery and storytelling that it was unlike any motion picture I had ever seen before. Mostly because of Kubricks narrative, which didnt have any spoken words for half an hour. In every other movie prior to that, it had always been (Hanks launches into a melodramatic narrator voice) -- "At the dawn of man, the primitive beast that will soon rise to the heavens." And 2001 didnt have anything like that.And yet I was able to comprehend what was going on somehow. Like the rival ape factions fighting over that water hole. And my God, when that bone gets thrown up in the air and you make that transformation into an orbiting bomb the greatest time-cut in the history of cinema and the "Blue Danube" started up, I mean, I was in heaven. I felt as though the universe were expanding before my very eyes.

Q: To me, the lack of dialog is the power of the film; the story is transmitted into the nervous system by some other means.
Hanks: This is very true. For example, Bowman and Poole [the astronauts aboard Discovery] did not interact the way guys in movies interact. Bowman didnt say, "Hey Frank, any news on the fusion grids?" "Yes, looks like theyre going to be up at full power." There was none of that. They didnt even nod at each other; they just started eating dinner, which I thought was fantastic. It had the absolute total ring of authenticity.

Q: What impact did it make on you in terms of mood? Theres a sense of optimism about the spaceflight scenes like that glorious rendezvous by Orion shuttle with the space station, but thats very different from the subdued feeling aboard Discovery. Im sure youve heard people say that Bowman and Poole seem less human in some ways than HAL.

Hanks: I understood the pressure these guys were under, what a hard job this must have been. I did not think it was miraculous fun that Frank Poole ran around and around that centrifuge for his exercise. I actually thought -- man, thats got to be monotonous. The scene that blew me out of my hut when I saw it was Franks birthday greeting from home -- because he had no joy whatsoever in the experience. This guy just sat there looking at it with a dead expression.

Q: What did that mean to you?

Hanks: That meant isolation and loneliness. And a kind of merciless professionalism that had to keep emotion in constant check, otherwise these guys would, number one, go nuts, and number two, wouldnt even get to make the voyage in the first place. For me, it elevated David Bowman and Frank Poole. If you were going to be 18 months out into space on the way to Jupiter, you had to be one of the most mentally tough and accomplished human beings on the face of the planet.

Q: How about the light show at the end?

Hanks: Everything that happened once Bowman leaves the Discovery, I didnt understand what was going on, but it certainly did look cool. And then when they put in those quick shots of the tortured face of David Bowman as hes screaming inside the helmet, then I was able to figure out -- okay, this is happening to him, and its not just some cool ride.

Q: Did anybody ever sit down and explain the whole thing to you?

Hanks: No. I was able to piece that together by a couple of readings of Arthur C. Clarkes novel, after I had seen the movie two or three times. Because the standard saying was, "Oh, that black thing, thats God." Thats what everybody was saying. The black thing was God and it takes the astronaut on a trip. And I was saying, cmon, no, its not God. Im not sure what it is, but its not God. But reading the novel -- I ended up studying that thing backwards and forwards. I had to go back and do that, because I was driven to distraction by the movie. I was infected with the virus. I mean, on one hand it was such
a pleasure to take in. It was so inspiring to look at. All this stuff about space was just the greatest stuff in the world and the reality of the physics that Kubrick paid attention to, I appreciated so much.

Q: The lack of noise in space.

Hanks: That, and the need for a false gravitational environment [on the Discovery]. And just the reality of it the way people talked to each other. All that stuff was just magnificent.But on the other hand, the way Kubrick was telling the story, and what that story was, this was a mystery I had
to solve. It was this thing I had to go back and piece together and study. And I did it all myself. My friends and I didn't enter into big discussions about the movie, I just wanted to figure out what all this stuff meant. I mean, I'm not that smart a guy and at the age of 13, it took me a couple of passes in order to be able to figure it out.

Q: You've seen the film, projected, something like 41 times.

Hanks: Something like that, yes. And I have it on DVD and laser disc now, so in fact Ive seen it a few more times than that.

A scene from Apollo 13 in which Hanks played astronaut Jim Lovell

Q: What have you gotten out of it over the years by seeing it so many times?

Hanks: Here is something great about the movie: Going back and looking at it again, there is a finite amount of time where the whole thing is explained to you. I had seen the movie 11 times before I was really able to piece together how subtle Haywood Floyd's briefing session [about the monolith] is to all those people in that white room at the Moonbase. The whole movie is explained right there. He gets up there and says, "I don't need to stress to
you what secrecy means here, what the shock to societies and cultures would be if this information got out half-cockedand, by the way, we're going to need signed oaths of secrecy from everybody." And nobody bats an eye. They all just kind of go, "Yeah, yeah, we know about that. How much longer are we going to have to keep this thing up?" "Well, I don't know, we're going to have to see how it goes."Every time I watch that I think it's this miracle of
screen acting on the actor's part because it just comes off as so conversational, but what he's saying there without having to say it is, "You guys have found something that is so big, all of life is going to change once we figure out what it is that we've come across here." You know, "By the way, our roles in the universe are forever diminished by what you guys have dug up here."

Q: Has 2001 influenced you as an artist?

Hanks: It's totally influenced me as an artist because I keep trying to emulate its ability to communicate something without the obvious verbiage. I look for it in almost every movie that I see. I look for those moments where a relationship between two people is communicated and they're not speaking to each other, like Bowman and Poole. Where the narrative of the story is moved forward without it being explained to me by way of dialog or voice-over or a didactic style of directing. I look for it in moments where I think I'm hearing one thing but in fact I'm hearing something totally different, for example, Dr. Floyd's briefing, or his conversation with the Russians aboard the space station. There's even a cadence that I try to replicate sometimes
when I'm in those scenes. I can't help but try to say, like Dr. Floyd says, "Well, as I said, I'm not at liberty to discuss it." It's the second time he's said that and now he's saying he's both embarrassed that he's got to say it again, but he's also a solid rock of impregnability saying I'm not going to give up anything here. That is an absolute primer on a certain type of screen acting, if you can recreate it. I always feel like, Oh, man, there's another one of those Dr. Haywood Floyd moments.

Q: You've had them in your own films?

Hanks: I've tried. You know, sometimes they're in there; sometimes they're not.

Q: When you got to do Apollo 13 or the miniseries, were you able to be a little bit more direct in some kind of an homage to the film? Even in some small way that only you would know about?

Hanks: In small ways, sure, yeah. Every time I'm in a spacesuit, I feel like I'm David Bowman. In Apollo 13, you know, just the way you sit there and scan the instruments, I felt like I was one of the pilots of the Aires [Moon lander].

Q: Then theres that scene in the miniseries, in the episode on Apollo 17, when Jack Schmitt takes his geology hammer and throws it into the sky.
Hanks: That was an absolute, hundred-percent homage to 2001, because I wrote [that episode]. I think it says in the script, "And like that ape in 2001, Schmitt lets fly with the hammer and it passes by the Earth." When I saw that for the first time, I got teary eyed. I thought it was just beautiful.

Q: How important is 2001 as a statement about humanity and its future in space?

Hanks: I think it still is the greatest example of the optimistic perspective that we always had, before somehow it turned [negative]. We may be laying in a fallow time right now because we found out that going up into outer space is really hard to do and it is really expensive to do and it is, in fact, dangerous. And that success is never guaranteed. But in 1968 it captured this concept of manifest destiny, that is, I think, part and parcel to the human condition. That we're never satisfied with just staying here; we always want to go explore the next frontier, and we're done here [on Earth]. There's an infinite amount of work for us to do here, absolutely. But as far as places for us to go, it's all "up and out." And big things have to be figured
out and big discoveries have to be made. And big people have to come back and dream and work in order to make it happen. And I think that's what 2001 still is able to accomplish. It still captures, I think, the concrete realities of what it's going to take in order for us to do it and it doesn't make it look pretty, it doesn't make it look easy, but it still does make it look inevitable for us. And I think that's accurate.Q: So you don't feel wistful at arriving at the real 21st century without seeing that around you, without seeing a 2001 scenario come to life?

Hanks: You know, less than I thought. I think sometime in the 1980s I did feel wistful about it, but now as we're actually here at 2001, it's not as bad as I thought it was going to be. I mean, look at the things that have gone down now. These 3-D pictures of Mars we got from robots that are walking around up there. And we're going to have this orbiting science platform [the International Space Station] pretty soon -- for good or for bad. So, we're behind schedule, but we're still up there and we're still going up there in different ways than we had before. I remember [Apollo Moonwalker] Dave Scott told me,
"There's no reason to feel that way because, look, do you know how many years existed between Columbus's voyages and the next time somebody went? It was years and years and years. It took vast amounts of time for people to come back and rethink and rebuild the ships the way they needed to do and lives were lost and people -- and fortunes -- were still squandered in order for it to make it happen, but the exploration was inevitable. Once it happens in a small way, it just takes time, that's all.

(EWS) Behind the scenes of ''Eyes Wide Shut'' | B Svetkey | People Magazine | 7/23/99

Behind the scenes of ''Eyes Wide Shut''
Starring Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, the film was Stanley Kubrick’s last work before his death


BENJAMIN SVETKEY


POSTED ON JULY 23, 1999 AT 4:00AM EDT



”Nicole and I talk about it so much at night. When we’re 70 years old, sitting on the front porch, we’ll be able to look back and say, ‘Wow! We made this movie with Stanley Kubrick!’ We know it may take a long time to finish, but we don’t care. We really don’t.”


That was Tom Cruise in younger, more innocent days, way back in November 1996, just weeks into shooting Eyes Wide Shut. At the time, the poor guy figured it would take six months to finish the film, eight at the most. ”We’ll be done by June,” he cheerily predicted. ”But however long it takes is fine with us.”


Well, he got the month right, anyway: The cameras finally stopped rolling on Eyes in June — of 1998 — ending one of the longest shoots ever bankrolled by a major studio (or at least the longest since Kubrick’s last two-year production).


Also one of the most gossiped about. Like a lot of the late great director’s movies, Eyes was shot in total secrecy, its sets at Pinewood Studios in England locked tighter than that CIA vault Cruise dangled into in Mission: Impossible. Whatever the film’s married costars were up to inside Kubrick’s sealed soundstages — one (false) rumor had Cruise wearing a dress — the world would have to wait to find out. And wait. And wait some more.


Not anymore. This week, Kubrick’s final film — he died at 70 of a heart attack just days after screening a finished cut — will at long last unspool. All the speculation about its plot (”a story of sexual jealousy and obsession” is all Warner Bros. had said about the production) will finally be over. All the questions about how kinky (and naked) Cruise and Kidman would get will finally be answered.




Still, there is one mystery that won’t be revealed on screen this week. And it’s this: Those two years Kubrick took to finish Eyes? How exactly did he spend them? How, precisely, did he make the movie? And — most titillating of all — what was it like inside those closed sets, where the world’s most demanding director held Hollywood’s most powerful couple hostage for so long they almost did end up in rocking chairs on their front porch?


To solve that mystery, all you have to do is keep your ears wide open.


”He was a really normal guy,” Kidman said of Kubrick shortly after his funeral last March. ”A really smart, really great guy. We were even talking about doing another film together.”


Kubrick has been called many things over the years — brilliant, inspiring, abrasive, tyrannical — but ”normal” is a new one. Rumors of his eccentricities ranged from the mildly loopy (never motoring over 35 miles per hour) to the oddly paranoid (he was said to be terrified of America, even though he grew up in the Bronx) to the downright notorious (he supposedly drove actors mad with his relentless perfectionism, insisting on shooting retake after retake). Obsessively private and press shy, he seldom left England and almost never attended public events (recent photographs are almost impossible to find). Which, of course, only made him more fascinating.

(KK) Killers Kiss review | Variety Magazine | 9/27/55

(EWS) Eyes Strain | People Magazine | T Gliatto | 8/16/99

Eyes Strain
BY TOM GLIATTO
POSTED ON AUGUST 16, 1999 AT 12:00PM EDT

At the end of the day, how do Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman wind down? Quietly. Very quietly. All they want to do after they leave their respective movie sets, says Kidman’s friend, actress Naomi Watts, is be with their children, Isabella, 6, and Connor, 4, and sink into their thoughts. “They write things down in little journals—poems and things,” says Watts, who knows Kidman from their early days in Australia. “And they reflect on the day.”
If any couple needs a bit of reflection, it could well be Cruise, 37, and Kidman, 32. In the days before the opening of their controversial, eons-in-the-making movie, Eyes Wide Shut, they swept through the media like a White House scandal. Kidman seemed to hop from one magazine cover to another, peering out from each with a look of calculated naughtiness.

While the eagerly awaited psycho-sexual drama—the final work of revered director Stanley Kubrick (2001: A Space Odyssey, Dr. Strangelove), who died of a heart attack March 7 at age 70—opened July 16 to mixed reviews, word of mouth has been uncommonly vicious. The box office receipts for the film, a 272-hour-plus study of a doctor trolling the sexual underbelly of Manhattan after his wife confesses thoughts of infidelity, plunged more than 70 percent in two weeks. And according to Cinemascore president Edward Mintz, whose company-tracks opening-night responses, Eyes received some of the worst grades in his 21 years of polling: 73 percent of people 25 and over gave it an F. “You start getting Ds and Fs,” says Mintz, “a movie shouldn’t have even been made.”
Presumably, Tom and Nic have their eyes wide open for Mission Impossible II, which Cruise is expected to finish filming this month. If the sequel does anywhere near as well as the first, it should make up for the millions Cruise might have sacrificed in acting fees to work with Kubrick.

In any case, after nearly a decade together the two still have one great consolation: each other. Kidman, who met Cruise on the set of 1990’s Days of Thunder and married him that December, put it presciently in a ’97 interview with Australia’s New Woman magazine: “When you have your husband, your best friend, your lover—everything all in one—standing there holding your hand, you feel secure. It doesn’t matter if everyone walks out.”

And while Cruise has said to London’s Time Out that acting out his intense confrontations with Kidman in Eyes was so wrenching “it could have been something that destroyed our marriage,” their union sounds capable of surviving Howard the Duck. The only place they seem to find fault with each other is on the tennis court. “They’re staunch rivals,” says Kidman’s friend, director John Duigan. Certainly Kidman could have asked for no greater fan than Cruise for her performance onstage last year in the London and New York City productions of The Blue Room, in which a brief nude scene inspired one critic to proclaim her “pure theatrical Viagra.” Cruise, says British theater publicist Joy Sapieka, “was here quite often backstage. He was very proud.”
According to Eyes costar Todd Field, who plays a cynical pianist and the troubled doctor’s friend from med-school days, “Tom and Nic talk about each other like they just met two days ago.” And legal woe to anyone who might imply otherwise. Last October, Cruise won a libel suit against the British tabloid Express on Sunday, which in 1997 suggested that the actor was gay and his marriage a sham. (He donated the approximately $320,000 in spoils to charity.) This spring he and Kidman both launched a suit against the Star for claiming that sex experts had to coach them in the art of lovemaking for Eyes Wide Shut, an allegation the couple’s attorney Bert Fields calls “absolutely false.” Adds the attorney: “Tom is not going to let people defame him or his family. He has the means to wage this war.”

Kidman is fiercely protective too. When Isabella once complained that a classmate had been pinching her, Kidman went straight to the teacher. “The thing I think is really important as a kid to know is that your mum is always on your side,” she told New Woman, “and she’s always going to fight for you.”
She and Cruise both proved good soldiers during the punishing Eyes Wide Shut shoot, at 19 months (November 1996-June 1998) one of the longest in movie history. They spent weeks alone rehearsing with the reclusive Kubrick, a perfectionist known for demanding as many as 60 takes of a scene or replacing cast members well into the course of production. And…they loved it, says producer Jan Harlan. “They and Stanley absolutely got on like a house on fire.” The Cruise-Kidman kids were even treated to a camera show-and-tell by the director.

Still, both parents “want to bring normal things into their [children’s] life,” says Naomi Watts. Cruise insists they will be spared the worst aspects of the Hollywood scene. “All the kids in L.A. get Ferraris when they’re 16,” Cruise, who has homes in L.A. and Down Under, told Australia’s Cleo magazine in 1996, “and there’s just no way in hell that’s ever going to happen with ours.” Isabella, he has said proudly, has a surprisingly good throwing arm, and one friend describes Connor as “Daddy’s boy.” One day on the set, recalls Vinessa Shaw, who plays a prostitute in the movie, “Connor was flexing and doing all these muscle movements, and I was like, ‘Who taught him that?’ ” Cruise laughingly admitted the boy might be imitating his fitness-conscious dad. Watts says she wouldn’t be surprised if the couple, who adopted Isabella and Connor, have more children in mind. “Tom and Nic are very family-spirited,” she adds. “The more the merrier.”

Such togetherness will not, for now, extend to their professional lives. With Cruise set to star in Steven Spielberg’s next movie, the sci-fi thriller Minority Report, and Kidman, who recently finished Birthday Girl, planning to sing and dance in Moulin Rouge, the couple have no plans to work together again soon. “In your life there are certain times when it’s the right time to work together,” Kidman said at Eyes’s L.A. premiere July 13. “Who knows when the next time will be?” No doubt their journals will be the first to hear.
Tom Gliatto


Liz Corcoran and Jane Cornwell in London and Julie Jordan, Kelly Carter and Lyndon Stambler in Los Angeles

(EWS) Nicole Kidman on Life With Tom Cruise Through Stanley Kubrick's Lens | Hollywood Reporter | 10/22/12

Nicole Kidman on Life With Tom Cruise Through Stanley Kubrick's Lens 7:00 AM PDT 10/24/2012 by Merle Ginsberg
Nicole Kidman
The actress writes for THR about working on the master's final film, "Eyes Wide Shut," as LACMA unveils its retrospective Nov. 1: "People thought that making the film was the beginning of the end of my marriage, but I don't really think it was." This story first appeared in the Nov. 2 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine.
I saw my first Stanley Kubrick movie in Sydney when I was 13 or 14: A Clockwork Orange. (I used to "wag school," or play hooky.) It kind of went over my head, but I was deeply disturbed. I saw The Shining when it came out, and I was making out in the back row. I told that to Stanley -- he really loved that! I saw Lolita when Gus Van Sant wanted me to watch it as prep for To Die For. And I delved into 2001: A Space Odyssey with Tom [Cruise, Kidman's husband at that time], who was a Kubrick cinemaphile. He talked me through it, and I was flabbergasted by Kubrick's greatness.
So by the time I went to meet him for Eyes Wide Shut, Kubrick was already a god to me. The strange thing about Stanley was, there's all the mythology -- but when you got to know him, he was practical and logical. Very well-educated. He was incredibly challenging and stimulating. I would throw ideas at him, and he'd break it all down, and I'd change my opinion. We'd fight about the differences between men and women; he loved that stuff. I wasn't scared of him. He could get irritated by people. I was allowed to go in his office and read his books.
On his films, he did everything: fix the sound machine, operate the camera. He even sort of handled the wardrobe -- for all his dressing low-key, Stanley actually loved clothes.
The most important thing to Stanley was time. My approach to the two-year shoot was actually very Zen. Tom and I thought, "We're so lucky, we've gotten to spend two years with the master." Stanley said the film was finished -- but if he had more time, who knows how it would have morphed.
People thought that making the film was the beginning of the end of my marriage, but I don't really think it was. Tom and I were close then, and it was very much the three of us. Onscreen, the husband and wife are at odds, and Stanley wanted to use our marriage as a supposed reality. That was Stanley: He used the movie as provocation, pretending it was our sex life -- which we weren't oblivious to, but obviously it wasn't us. We both decided to dedicate ourselves to a great filmmaker and artist.
Stanley had to coax me into some of the sexuality in the film in the beginning, but we shot things that were a lot more extreme that didn't end up in the movie. I did feel safe -- I never felt it was exploitive or unintelligent. He was very different with women than he was with men. He has daughters, so he was very paternal with me.
There was a lot of interest in Eyes Wide Shut before it was released. But the weekend it came out, July 16, 1999, was the death of JFK Jr., his wife and her sister -- a black, black weekend. And for Stanley to have died [on March 7, 1999, at age 70] before the film opened … well, it all felt so dark and strange. Stanley had sent over the cut he considered done to us, Tom and I watched it in New York -- and then he died. The next morning, I got the phone call. That was one of the worst calls; I just started screaming. I had Isabella and Connor in the kitchen with me. Tom and I immediately got on a plane. The funeral was so traumatic. I truly loved Stanley and felt very connected to him. He was in our lives intensely for about four years.
People have asked me if Stanley ever told us what Eyes Wide Shut was about -- and the answer is no. He didn't believe in interpretation. He always said, "Never say no to an idea -- you never know how that idea will ignite another idea." He also said: "Never put me on a pedestal. When someone's on a pedestal, there's no creativity." That's how I approach every creative person now; it does not help to glorify them.
I see Stanley as a great philosopher of the human condition, like Socrates was in his time. That's what von Trier, Daldry, Campion and Stanley are. We need these kinds of filmmakers. People rarely read now. Philosophical ideas are coming from cinema. I try to be supportive of artists who question everything. It's optimum to work with someone trying to shift things, to give us a greater understanding of why we're here, what we are. When you're working with someone like that, as Stanley was, it's an honor.
-- As told to Merle Ginsberg

(SK) Transcript of Kubrick interview with Jeremy Bernstein 11-27-66

Transcript Subject: Stanley Kubrick Interviewer: Jeremy Bernstein Date: November 27, 1966 Location: Kubrick’s home (Abbot's Mead, Barnet Lane, Elstree) 2 — SK interviewed by Jeremy Bernstein, November 27, 1966 TRACK 1 SK: Testing one two three four. Jeremy Bernstein tape, November 27. Side A. Born July 26, 1928, New York City. My father is a doctor. One sister, Barbara. Married, two children. Lives in New Jersey, six years younger. Her husband is a lawyer. I was taught to play chess at the age of twelve but did not play seriously until about age of seventeen, when I joined the Marshall Chess Club in New York on West 10th Street between 5th and 6th Avenue. JB: Did you have any particular intellectual interests as a child? Do you remember? Were you an avid reader? SK: No… I had few intellectual interests as a child. I was a school misfit and considered, you know, reading a book… school work. And I don’t think I read a book for pleasure until after I graduated high school. JB: What were you doing… if you were a misfit? SK: Well, I had... I had one thing, I think, that perhaps helped me get over being a misfit, a school misfit, and that is that I became interested in photography about the same time, twelve or thirteen. And I think that if you get involved in any kind of problem solving in depth on almost anything, it is surprisingly similar to problem solving of anything, you know. I started out by just getting a camera and learning how to take pictures and learning how to print pictures and learning how to build a darkroom and learning how to do all the technical things and so on and so on. Then finally trying to find out how you could sell pictures and become… you know, would it be possible to be a professional photographer? And it was a case of, over a period of, say, from the age of thirteen to seventeen, you might say, going through step by step by myself without anyone really helping me, the problem solving of becoming a photographer. And I found that, I think, in looking back, that this particular thing about problem solving is something that schools generally don’t teach you and that if you can develop a kind of generalized approach to problem solving, that it’s surprising how it helps you in anything, you know. And that most of the deficiencies that you see around you in people that, say, you don’t think particularly are doing their job right or something, assuming that they care, you know a lot of people that appear to care or may actually care are still not going about things particularly the right way. When you think about it, I generally find that it’s just that they don’t have a good generalized approach to problem solving. They’re not thorough. They don’t consider all the possibilities. They don’t prepare themselves with the right information and so forth. So, I think that photography, though it seemed like a hobby, and ultimately led to a professional job, photography might have been more valuable than doing the proper things in school. JB: Were you, sort of, the despair of your family at that time, because of your school work, or did you…? SK: Well, it wasn’t a real drama, you know. I imagine so, but it was never completely apparent until I graduated from high school that I couldn’t go to college. Because I graduated in 1945 when all the GIs were now pouring back on the GI Bill. And I had a 67 average and it turned out that there wasn’t any college in the United States, even of the lowest caliber,who would take a student with less than a 75 average in that year. So, I couldn’t get—I failed to get—into college. JB: Did you take all the scholastic aptitude tests and so on? SK: They wouldn’t consider you. In other words, they wouldn’t even accept your application if you didn’t have a 75 average in that particular year. JB: Looking back, sort of in retrospect, do you think not going to college was in a certain sense a fortunate thing? SK: Oh, tremendously. Because what happened is that I, well, I had developed myself as a photographer and prior to graduating high school I had sold two picture stories to Look and… JB: What were they about? SK: One was about a teacher in high school, named Mr. Traister, T-R-A-I-S-T-E-R, who taught English and he used to dramatize Shakespeare. He would read the parts and act it out and he made it very interesting, you know. It was one of the few courses that were interesting, you know. Most of the English courses that I had consisted of the teachers saying, “You’re to read five pages of Silas Marner tonight,” and the next day the class was spent sitting at the book like Emil Jannings in The Blue Angel, looking up over the book saying, “Mr. Kubrick” and then you stand up they would say, “When Silas Marner walked out of the door, what did he see?” and if you didn’t know what he saw you got a zero. [Laughs] And that was it. And as a matter of fact, I failed English once and had to make it up in summer school. JB: But did you show aptitude for things like mathematics and so on? SK: The only, actually, the only courses that I got good marks in were science courses. I think I got… I can’t remember now… but I think I got about an 87 in physics and—not in mathematics though—but in science courses I liked and did reasonably well. But anyway, Traister was one and I forget what the other one was now. But they bought these two—oh and I also sold them a picture… I sold them two picture stories and a photograph of a news dealer sitting in 170th Street on the Grand Concourse, right across, two blocks away from Taft High School. JB: Was that where you went, Taft High School? SK: Yeah. With all the headlines saying “Roosevelt Dies” or “FDR Dead.” And he was sitting there looking depressed. And they liked this picture and used it in a whole series about Roosevelt and it was sort of the final picture of the series. JB: Were you interested in extracurricular activities, apart from photography, as a high school student, in sports or stuff like that? SK: Well, I used to play, but I mean, I wasn’t on any of the school teams. [Laughs] JB: …ball? SK: I used to play everything, you know, but…. Basketball on the concrete, you know, outdoor… what do they call them again? JB: Basketball courts? SK: No, no, you know, the playgrounds… the city playground. Stickball, you know, in the street, and the odd softball game in the Taft… dirt, gym yard. They had a very large dirt gym yard… SK: …things like that… touch football in the street. JB: Would you say the fact that you didn’t go to college has given you a certain sense of what one might call “irreverence” for college graduates who don’t meet up to what you would consider to be your, so to speak, intellectual standards? I mean, if you come across a college guy who’s got a lot of degrees but doesn’t seem to radiate competence, does it bug you? SK: No, I don’t think that I… I don’t think I look at it that way. The reason I think it was an advantage for me is that I then backed into this, you know, fantastically good job at the age of seventeen. I was, I went, I took…. I can’t remember what it was but I took some pictures down there. I was now… what had happened was I could not get into college and all sorts of things. My father, who was an alumni at NYU uptown, took me to see the dean and said,“This is my son and I was a student here,” and so forth, and nothing worked. So I started going to City College at night under the hope that if I got a B average for so many credits, I don’t remember now, that I could then get into day school… a day college. But within about, I don’t know, a few weeks of this I was down at Look with some other pictures and there was an extremely nice picture editor there. Her name was Helen O’Brien, and the managing editor at the time was Jack Gunther, who was later killed in the Bryce Canyon, Utah, plane crash, and she asked me what I was doing and I told her, you know, nothing, and I was going to try to… and she said something about, you know, she thought she might be able to get me a job as an apprentice photographer. And, you know, so I went up to see Jack Gunther and so forth and I got a job. JB: And how long were you a photographer actually, on Look? SK: Well, I was apprentice photographer for six months and then I became a staff photographer, and I was there for four years. JB: So you were actually there until age twenty-one? SK: Yeah. And, of course, that would have been, you know, the period I’d spend in college and I think that the things, what I learned and the practical experience, in every respect, including photography, what I learned in that fouryear period exceeded what I could have learned in school. And also, getting out of school, I can’t remember what was the particular turning point, but being out of school I began to read and within a relatively short period of time, I would imagine, caught up with where I probably should have been had I had a modicum of interest in things in high school. Because, I mean, after all, you really only miss, I mean, before you’re twelve or thirteen, how many serious books can you read? So, I only really blew four years of part-time reading. How much time… you go to school all day, you play a certain amount, you’ve got to do your homework. So, in retrospect, I don’t feel that I missed reading that many books and I felt that I caught up pretty quickly when I became interested in, in things in general. JB: What first gave you the idea of actually going into the movies, as opposed to…? SK: Like everybody else, you know, I was always very interested in movies and I used to go to see films and I’d see practically every film. And I used to see all the films at the Museum of Modern Art and the Thalia and…. Actually, at that time, when I was a teenager, there were… the so-called art house didn’t really exist to the extent it does now, you know, it was the postwar Italian, sort of, the Rossellini pictures which brought the art houses into existence. So, there weren’t that many good films that were ever played in the theaters around, except at the museum. Anyway, I used to see all the films and I knew…. I had seen them all a number of times at the museum and a friend of mine, who subsequently has become a film director named Alex Singer, was working as an office boy at The March of Time and one day he told me that it cost forty thousand dollars to make a March of Time and it was a one-reeler. And I said to him,“Gee, that’s a lot of money.” I said, “I can’t believe it costs that much to make, you know, eight or nine minutes of film.” So, I called up Eastman Kodak and checked on the price of film. And then I called up the laboratory to find out how much it cost to develop it. Then I checked on how much it cost to rent 35mm movie cameras. And then I checked the cost of the other facilities, sound and editing and so forth. And I forgot what it added up to but it was something like… that I could do a documentary film, with an original music score and everything, for about thirty-five hundred dollars. So I thought,“Gee, if they’re making these pictures for forty thousand and I can make them for thirtyfive hundred, surely I must be able to sell them and at least get my money back, and probably make a profit,”you know. So, in fact I think we thought we could make a considerable profit because we assumed that if they were making them for forty thousand dollars a piece, that they must be making a profit, you know. And, so I rented a 35mm Eyemo camera, that’s spelled E-Y-E-M-O, which is a spring-wound camera, produces a professional picture. And I did a documentary film about a boxer named Walter Cartier, who I had previously done a picture story for Look about, and I knew him. And it was called Day of the Fight. And I got the whole thing, you know, did everything. Alex helped me, you know, sort of carried lights around and assisted me. And I did the whole thing, just myself and Alex and Walter and his people that he knew. And cut it. And another friend of mine, who subsequently has become a professional movie composer named Gerald Fried, F-R-I-E-D, did a film score and got the whole thing finished for thirtynine hundred dollars. And then when we began to take it around to the various companies to sell it, they all liked it but we were offered things like fifteen hundred dollars and twenty-five hundred dollars and so forth and… JB: This was, by the way, when you were still aged twenty-one, roughly? SK: Well, less than that… JB: Less than that? SK: I did this about, oh, I’d say, maybe nine months before I quit Look, about twenty, plus. And at one point I said to them, you know,“Christ,why are you offering us so little for this? You know, one-reel shorts get more than forty thousand dollars.” And they said,“What are you—you must be crazy!” And I said, “Why do you think that?” So I told them about The March of Time and…. Anyway they, they said, you know, it was ridiculous and shortly after that The March of Time went out of business. [Laughs] For the reason, we later found out, that they were spending approximately, I mean… you know, if The March of Time sues me for this…. Alex somehow found out when he was working there that it was costing forty thousand bucks to make one of their one-reelers and they went out of business. [Lights cigarette] Well, anyway, I finally sold a film to RKO-Pathé, who are no longer in business either, and sold it for about a hundred dollars less than it cost me to make it. I know it was a small loss but I had the pleasure of seeing it shown. And I remember I went to the Paramount Theater, where it was playing with some Ava Gardner, Robert Mitchum picture and, you know, it was very exciting to see it on the screen and it got a nationwide and worldwide distribution. And so I thought, everybody liked it and they thought it was good, and I thought that this would be, I’d get millions of offers of which I got none to do anything. So, I made another documentary, this time about a flying priest. JB: Was this Father Hubbard or something? SK: Father Stadtmueller or something, in New Mexico, who flew a Piper Cub around to Indian parishes, and RKO thought it was a colorful subject. And so I went there and pretty much on my own again made this short and still, you know, nothing was happening. JB: Were they supporting you for this? SK: No. They gave me fifteen hundred dollars and, of which I had to pay for the film, the travel, and everything. I made nothing. I think I lost money on that too. But I had been making a reasonably good salary at Look for four years, so I had a certain amount of money and I was still working. So then I quit Look because I decided that there obviously wasn’t any money in shorts but that…. SK: I then found out how much feature films were being made for… and, you know, millions, and I had calculated I could make a feature film for about ten thousand dollars. And… JB: How did you calculate that? SK: Well, again by, you know, projecting the amount of film I’d shoot, figuring that I’d get actors to work for practically nothing, you know, work with…. I mean at this point I was the whole crew, cameraman, assistant cameraman, you know, director, everything. So I had no costs. So a friend of mine in the Village did a script. JB: Were you living in the Village in those days? SK: I was living on 16th Street, off 6th Avenue. And he did a script, which was terrible, sort of, dull undramatic but very, very serious allegorical story about four soldiers from an unnamed country lost behind enemy lines, trying to find their way home again. And it had lines in it like,“We spend our lives running our fingers down the lists of names and addresses looking for our real….” No, “…running our names…fingers, down the lists of something or other, looking for our real names or our real addresses.” I can’t remember what the line was but it was that kind of a thing, you know. And, of course, I totally failed to recognize what I didn’t know about making films or anything, you know, I just thought, “Well, these other two things have turned out pretty well.” But they were documentaries and… JB: The second thing had turned out pretty well? SK: Yeah…. But I didn’t really know what I didn’t know and I thought, “Well, Christ, there really can’t be very much more to making a feature film and I certainly couldn’t make one worse than the films that I kept seeing every week,” and…. But I wasn’t satisfied to just make an interesting film. I wanted it to be a very poetic and meaningful film and it was a little bit like the Thurber story about the midget who wouldn’t take the base on balls [laughs] and decided to swing, you know. And so I got the film made but it was very, very dull and it got an art house distribution. It was called Fear and Desire, distributed by Joseph Burstyn who was the, at one time, I think he was the distributor who first brought in Rossellini’s pictures. It got a few reasonably good reviews. It got a nice blurb from Mark Van Doren, who was very kind about it. And it had a few, you know, it had a few good moments in it, but with the exception of one or two of the actors they were all terrible actors, and I knew nothing about directing actors. JB: How did you go about directing? Just sort of… SK: Well, I don’t remember, [laughs] you know… it was really just… well actually from some of the so-called professional efforts I have subsequently seen, you know, people doing, I would say I didn’t go about it that much differently than a lot of other people do. But I didn’t really know anything, you know. But there were some good moments in it and, as I say, it even got a few good reviews. But it never, never returned a penny of its investment. JB: Was this your own dough you put up for it? SK: No, I raised the money privately and then, well this picture was… it took a long time to edit the film and get all, you know, the thing done. I spent over a year on it. It opened at the Guild Theater in New York and it was pretty apparent, you know, that it was terrible, you know. While it was still playing I decided, well, I’d better get another script very fast and try to promote some more money on the strength of the, just the fact that the thing was playing, because it wasn’t apparent to me how I was going to earn a living or do anything, you know. Again, not one single offer ever to do anything, you know, from anybody. So I… in about two weeks knocked together another script with somebody, and this time it was sort of a reaction to the other one. This was nothing but action sequences and mechanically constructed, [lights cigarette] sort of action-gangster plot. TRACK 6 JB: Was this the time you were also hustling chess, Stanley? SK: Mmmm… I wasn’t hustling chess but I was playing chess for quarters. I mean, I wasn’t a hustler in that I pretended not to be a good player and beat people. I just was playing in the park, you know, for quarters, a quarter a game. JB: But were you actually doing this for the fun of it or were you also hoping to make a living? SK: No, I was doing it for the fun of it but I did make about two or three dollars a day, which… it really goes a long way if you’re not buying anything except food. JB: Well, do you still retain a lot of acquaintances from that era, guys that you… SK: There’s only one friend who I still see, a boy named David Miller, who is an operations research analyst and who I have remained friendly with. I still know all the people there, you know like Duvall and Feldman and… there is a guy named Edmond Peckover. But the regulars at the park don’t change too much. 9 — SK interviewed by Jeremy Bernstein, November 27, 1966 JB: Were there kind of a paternity of people playing for money? I mean, I don’t know whether, you know… SK: Yeah, there was, well, I mean there were the regulars, you know. Like, the real regulars used to be Arthur Feldman, who was really the best player there. JB: He also played for dough? SK: Oh yeah, I mean all the regulars played for money. There was Arthur Feldman, I’d say, who was the best player. Then there was a guy named Joe Richmond, who was probably the next best player. Then there was a guy named Edmond Peckover, I would have put him, say, third. And another regular was a guy named Amos Kaminski, who was a physicist, he would have been next. Then I would say myself and David Miller, about equal. And then there was descending… I mean, I was only interested in people who were better than I was, you know. So those are the ones that I particularly remember because they were enjoyable to play with. Then there was a whole lot of potzers, you know! JB: From whom you earned your living. SK: And semi-potzers, you know, and people who put up fierce struggles, you know, but who invariably lost, you know. JB: How many hours a day were you putting in down there? SK: Well, when I was waiting for things to happen, you know, waiting to get an answer on something, which went on for months, you know, sometimes I would go there about twelve o’clock and stay there until, you know, midnight. I’d say a good twelve hours a day, with breaks for food. JB: You were sort of playing under the lights? SK: Oh yeah, in the summer it was marvelous, you know… JB: …outdoors where those concrete tables are? SK: In the daytime you’d get a table in the shade and at night you’d get a table by the light [laughs] and if you made the switch the right way you’d get a good table all the time.You know there are those two end tables where the light is by the fountain, that have the best light at night and those were always the tables at night you would try to get. JB: Did you have a sort of regular clientele of guys who would, just sort of out of misguided pride, would come back and… SK: Well, I used to play of course a lot with the better players because they’d give me odds and because, you know, they couldn’t get a game really. For instance, Feldman used to give me a pawn and move, and with a pawn and 10 — SK interviewed by Jeremy Bernstein, November 27, 1966 move, I never really kept track, but it was pretty even. I mean Feldman didn’t make his living off me, you know, but when there was no sort of real potzers around then the better players would play each other, and would give, you know, fair odds so it would be a pretty good game. Like there were some players that would just give you always white, which was a small advantage but it was an advantage. Pawn and move of course is… well, the smallest advantage would be white, then the next advantage would be two moves and the next one would be pawn and move, you know. JB: How did you stack up in the Marshall Chess Club? SK: I won the B tournament and I played in one A tournament and finished around in the middle. JB: Do you think…? SK: I would like to point out to you that the A tournament, though, was not the top tournament. The top tournament was the club championship, so you know… you can figure out where I stood. JB: But, you think that you could give Duvall a pawn and move, roughly? Is that a serious appraisal? SK: Oh, absolutely, yeah. JB: That’s rather depressing. TRACK 7 JB: When did you get launched after this point into the movies again? SK: As I say, when Fear and Desire was still playing at the Guild Theater, I spent about two weeks lashing together this all-action script and… let’s see, now what is he in relation to the family? Well, the guy’s name was Mo Bousel, B-O-U-S-E-L, and he has two drug stores in the Bronx. Mo Bousel co-produced and put up the money to make Killer’s Kiss. His name is Morris Bousel. M-O-R-R-I-S B-O-U-S-E-L. [Laughs] That was not a great financial success. It was at that time that I was playing chess for quarters in the park. [break in tape] JB: … told him that there was a… SK: Speaking of Jimmy Harris… 11 — SK interviewed by Jeremy Bernstein, November 27, 1966 JB: …there was a guy in the Village who was making films by himself and just doing everything together and that he thought that you and he should get together, and introduced you, and then Jimmy suggested that—this is the impression I got, which may be wrong—Jimmy suggested that he could take the producing burden of the films, is that right? Finance the films? SK: Yeah,well, I had made Killer’s Kiss, the second feature film, and substantially, that’s what happened.Well, first, you mean, I made The Killing. JB: I mean, you made that by yourselves? SK: No, well we formed the company, which was called Harris-Kubrick Pictures Corporation, and after looking for a story, we bought a book called Clean Break by Lionel White, and this was the story that we made into The Killing for United Artists. United Artists had bought Killer’s Kiss. Well, first of all United Artists’ function was only to finance and distribute the film, so it was up to us to hire the people and make the film. And I presume that United Artists thought that if Killer’s Kiss could be made, you know, on the semiprofessional basis that it was, that with an adequate amount of money, which was fairly minimum anyway, that we could make a film. Jimmy had to guarantee completion of the movie,which means that if the movie ran over the budget, he had to put up all the extra money, which is a great safeguard, and especially since, financially, he was responsible to make this kind of a guarantee, it wasn’t that much of a risk on the part of United Artists. But we had a very good cast but none of the people were big stars in the sense that they were extremely choosy about what they were in. And I would say that all of them had probably been in worse films than they might have, even at the beginning, thought this one might turn out to be. JB: Wasn’t Marilyn Monroe… SK: The principle cast was Sterling Hayden, Coleen Gray, Marie Windsor, Elisha Cook, Jr., Joe Sawyer, Ted de Corsia,Vince Edwards… JB: I saw that film… SK: …who, you know, later became Dr. Kildare… JB: … so long ago that I am just trying to remember how, how… was it the one Sterling Hayden dies at the end, isn’t that right? SK: No, he gives up. The money blows away at the airport and then he gives up. JB: I’m very confused. SK: You probably haven’t seen the picture. 12 — SK interviewed by Jeremy Bernstein, November 27, 1966 JB: No, I remember Sterling Hayden very clearly but I can’t… SK: You’re thinking of The Asphalt Jungle. That’s why you thought Marilyn Monroe was in it. He dies at the end of The Asphalt Jungle in a field with a horse. JB: Ah, that’s right. SK: You’re thinking of the wrong picture. You never saw The Killing. JB: Maybe that’s… SK: If you want to see it, there’s a print at the Museum of Modern Art…. United Artists can give you a print. So anyway, we made The Killing and somehow Dore Schary saw it and he liked it and he was the first one who really showed any interest in us, you know, to the extent of offering us any sort of a deal to make another picture. And so we went to MGM and looked through, the deal was that we could look through all their backlog of story properties and, you know, if we found one that they liked, we could do it, and I think I told you this, we came up with this Burning Secret by Stefan Zweig and I did the screenplay with Calder Willingham, at about which time Dore Schary was, you know, taken out of, you know, his job and the project came to an end, sort of before, just about the time the script was finished. JB: And it was at that point that you ran across the old war story? SK: Well, it was really sort of concurrent with this that I remembered reading Paths of Glory, as one of the few books that I did read. JB: Is it a fair description of Jimmy to say that he is independently wealthy? SK: Yes. [break in tape] TRACK 8 SK: You have to have patience because if you don’t, your own frustrations prove to be too much of a distraction. It is a slow, you know, it’s like those games where you jiggle all the balls into place. Sometimes there’s more balls you’re jiggling than others but it’s largely that. And if you allow yourself to become irritated, then it’s just another distraction. 13 — SK interviewed by Jeremy Bernstein, November 27, 1966 JB: Well, how do you keep yourself, so to speak, amused when there are all kinds of minor delays? Something breaks and you have to go and sit down… SK: Because I keep thinking about the next things that I’m doing, you know. I just, I try and use all the time. That’s why I found, for instance, when all these people were there, I found myself in a slightly up-in-the-air feeling. Luckily the stuff was quite simple but I usually, I would imagine to anyone sort of looking at me, I have a sort of vague, withdrawn look on my face because what I’m just doing is thinking about what I’m about to do, or what other scenes…. I just use the time to think, that’s all. It’s like sitting in the park playing chess. [Laughs] JB: Do you think about, about how to manipulate the actors and that sort of thing? SK: Well, I think about whatever problems are problems. I mean, sometimes, manipulating the actors aren’t the problem. Sometimes the problem is the story or the schedule or a set that isn’t completely designed, or something. But whatever it is, I always have plenty to think about. JB: Well, how close do you permit yourself to get to the actors as friends? I mean, is it bad to be too friendly with the guys who are working for you? SK: No. I mean, if you can… in other words, it’s bad if you don’t like somebody to have a bad social situation occur, like an attempt at friendliness which turns out to be sour or, you know, his wife goes away saying how terrible you are or something like that. But, I mean, if you like the people it helps to know them and it’s enjoyable to be with them. JB: It’s not awkward to apply discipline or anything? I suppose it isn’t very disciplined. SK: Well, it isn’t disciplined anyway because unless the actor… it’s so rare that you would ever get to the point where you’d say to the actor, “Look, this is my picture and you’re working for me and you do it the way I want or go home,” because what you really want him to do is to feel confident and enjoy what he’s doing, otherwise he’s not going to be able to do it very well. So somehow you have to be clever enough to, or persuasive enough to—although persuasive isn’t even the right word because I tend to believe that if you’re right, people realize it. [Both laugh] JB: Are you usually right, Stanley? SK: Well, I try to be. No, but I have found that when I am right, you know, when in retrospect it turned out to be I was right and in doing it, it was, it seemed right and so forth, you do not usually find difficulties arising if you’re right unless the 14 — SK interviewed by Jeremy Bernstein, November 27, 1966 actor is incapable of doing what you’re asking him to do, for limitations of his talent or his emotional range or something and he gets insecure and thinks of a lot of reasons why you’re wrong, but really what, what he’s trying to do is avoid failing, you know. But then really you should figure out what the limitations of the actors are and never put them in a spot like that. [break in tape] TRACK 9 SK: After leaving MGM and the Burning Secret, prior to this Jimmy and I had bought Paths of Glory. I did a screenplay with Jim Thompson and Calder Willingham and nobody wanted to do it. It was turned down by every company until our agent, Ronnie Lubin, L-U-B-I-N, interested Kirk Douglas in the project, and through Kirk’s interest United Artists put up the money on the basis of it being done for a very low budget in Europe. The picture was a moderate success but it was nothing to create opportunities for us because of big grosses or profits. The reviews on it were very good. Many reviews were superlative and from that point of view it was an enormous success. The greatest virtue of the film was that I met my wife, Christiane, who was an actress. I was watching a television broadcast looking for an actress, actually watching someone else and saw her and got in touch with her agent. She came out to the studio and we met. I began dating her and we subsequently got married a year later. She is a marvelous actress. She had done a lot of work in Germany. I would like her to act but she has no interest in doing dull routine acting things and is more interested in painting. If I ever have a part, a decent part for a woman, which for some reason I never seem to write into my films, she would certainly do it. This was followed by about six months spent working on a script for Kirk Douglas, which he didn’t like and was abandoned. And some more months working on something which Gregory Peck was supposed to do for us, which was also abandoned because it wasn’t liked, and followed by the offer from Marlon Brando to direct his Western, which resulted in six months of work. Again, abandoned as far as I was concerned because I left the project two weeks before it started. This was followed by a script called The German Lieutenant, which, again, no one liked and followed by Kirk Douglas’s offer to take over Spartacus after a week of shooting, which I did and… 15 — SK interviewed by Jeremy Bernstein, November 27, 1966 JB: And you find yourself… [break in tape] SK: Yes, my narrative criticisms, which were at first so enthusiastically received, began to grow pale as time went on due to the counter pressures of the writer Dalton Trumbo and Kirk’s producer, Eddie Lewis, L-E-W-I-S, who did not see eye to eye to me, with me, on the story. Between the shooting and editing of Spartacus, two children were born to me… to Christiane: Anya and Vivian. I was on the picture almost two years. Children’s names: Vivian Vanessa, age five. Anya Renata, age six. Katharine Susanna, Katharine spelled K with an E at the end, aged eleven. Only about 8 weeks were spent in Spain doing the battles and the big march-bys. The whole picture was done on a back lot at Universal. JB: Did you get any sense of intellectual satisfaction out of Spartacus at all? SK: No, but it was, you know, again an opportunity to work and…. It was interesting to, from a purely, as an exercise, you know, to try to do scenes that you thought weren’t very good and to try to make them interesting. I thought the first forty-five minutes of the film, of the life in the gladiatorial school,which was simple, turned out quite well, as far as I’m concerned, but then the rest of the story, from the slave rebellion on to the end, I thought seemed a bit silly. TRACK 10 JB: And then what happened? SK: Well, during the making of Spartacus we bought Lolita, Jimmy and I, and… now, nobody wanted to make Lolita. Actually, the history of all the films, practically, that I’ve done is no one ever wanted to particularly make them, and we… just sort of running out the clock managed to put the picture together someplace, you know. Well, nobody particularly wanted to make Lolita and finally Seven Arts, a company named Seven Arts, put up the money and we made it. It was made in England. JB: Did you yourself do a good deal of rewriting of the book? SK: Yes, well, Nabokov and I, I believe, got along very well. JB: And is it… SK: I know he liked the film very much when he saw it. 16 — SK interviewed by Jeremy Bernstein, November 27, 1966 JB: Is there anything that’s particularly striking about the making of that film that you remember? SK: Well, no. You mean anecdotes? Not really. I think the only thing that is regrettable about the film is that due to the incredible pressure against making the film, put on the carload by all sorts of groups…. Although I think the film was faithful psychologically to all the characters and captured, I think, the sense of them, I think that the total lack of eroticism in the story, in this film presentation of it, spoils some of the pleasure of it. You know, you can imply all the eroticism you want but there’s nothing like delivering some to help understand a little more the enslavement that Humbert Humbert was under. I think that I would consider that a criticism of the film but when it was… you know, if you…. The film could not have been made, nobody would have made it at all and it would never have been distributed. There was some criticism by some people that said that she looked too old, but I never thought that was a valid criticism because the… it was one of those books where nobody bothered to really read the description that Humbert Humbert gave of Lolita and they got this, that somehow, it was a rather interesting example of sort of mass delusion because inevitably people imagined her as being about nine years old and looking about nine or ten years old, and yet there’s a very clear description in the book of Annabel, his childhood sweetheart. And he says in the narrative that were it not for Annabel there would never have been Lolita. And then when he sees Lolita he says she was a perfect reincarnation of Annabel. And Annabel is described as, you know, a pretty sexy twelve-and-a-half… I forget, actually I don’t exactly remember Annabel’s age but I know Lolita was something like twelve years and three months when he meets her and then the story progresses through quite a few years. Well, Sue Lyon was actually just thirteen when we made the picture and I thought this criticism was not valid. Many of the people who wrote it, I think, well I know didn’t bother to really read how old he said she was and what she looked like. And there was this peculiar example of a lot of people imagining her as being about ten years old. TRACK 11 JB: Strangelove is the first film you made where you preceded really from an intellectual premise rather than from a story, or from an intellectual situation, rather than from a specific story… curiosity about possible outcomes of nuclear strategy. How did that come about? After Lolita was made? SK: Well, I was interested in whether or not I was going to get blown up by an H-bomb, prior to Lolita. But my interest intensified itself sort of concurrently with that. I believe that the Berlin crisis took place during Lolita and about that time I 17 — SK interviewed by Jeremy Bernstein, November 27, 1966 became keenly interested and started reading up on all the literature of which there is a terrific extent, you know, a tremendous a lot…. Boy am I getting fucked up on the… a tremendous a lot! [Laughs] And, you know, I read, I would say I pretty much read the spectrum, you know. I began finding after a while that I wasn’t reading anything new and I decided I knew the whole thing, you know. And… it was then that I began to… the thing that struck me most of all about it was that at first, when you read the brilliant analyses and the games theories, and Herman Khan, you’re very reassured because you start off by thinking, “Gee, you know, God, there are these bombs,” and you get an image vaguely of sort of a World War II mentality. And then, when you read the literature in the field, your first reaction, superficially, is you are very encouraged because you suddenly realize that there’s this whole body of thought that’s gone into the whole thing and you think, “Ah, yes, well now I…” and then as you read on and on and become more involved, then you begin to realize that all these things lead to very paradoxical outcomes and in reviewing the whole thing, every line in it leads to a paradoxical point. And I suppose this was the most thematically obvious thing about Dr. Strangelove, was the paradoxical outcome of any particular line of thought. JB: Well, if it really is true in a real world that every line does lead to a paradoxical outcome, what hope is there for any of us? SK: Well, personally, I think that the hope is basically just luck. The situation is simply, for just luck reasons, is never really put to any particularly great strain. A lot, of course, a lot has been done, a lot keeps being done about trying to improve the situation against accidental war, and better command and control, and a more sophisticated threat technique of trying to graduate threats into as many steps as you can to leave as many alternatives and back-away points. But the depressing thing is that at every period of history, the people always thought that they had, I mean the power structure and the leaders, always looked back on the previous period of history and thought that they had learned something and I think that, you know, the old thing about “the only thing you can learn about history is that you can’t learn from history” is probably true. And that this illusion that you get that you’re much more sophisticated and that it can never happen that way again may be true, but the thing you don’t realize is that it’ll happen a different way, you know. I mean, now that everybody is very convinced that they’ll never have another 1914-type situation, you know, well they might have a 1985- type situation that they’re not prepared for. JB: It’s like what they say about the French army always being perfectly prepared for the last… SK: Yeah, well, most armies are. You know, you find the occasional exception like Nazi Germany, but inevitably I think that as time goes on, the danger increases 18 — SK interviewed by Jeremy Bernstein, November 27, 1966 because the thing becomes more and more remote. I mean, the problem to begin with is that people do not react to abstractions, you know, they only react to direct experience. Very few people are even interested in abstractions and even fewer people can become emotionally involved or emotionally react to an abstract thing. The only reality that nuclear weapons have are a few movie shots of mushroom clouds and a few documentaries that occasionally show in art houses about the effects of Hiroshima. But that the atomic bomb is as much of an abstraction as you could possibly have. I mean, it’s as abstract as the fact that you know that some day you’ll die. It’s something that you know but you really do a very good job… JB: You can’t think about it… SK: No, and you do an excellent job of denying it psychologically. So, to begin with, because of the very effective denial and the lack of any evidence, there’s almost no interest in the problem. I mean, most, I would say, in the minds of most people it’s less interesting even than city government, you know. [Laughs] And the longer time goes on without the thing happening, this illusion is created that somehow it’s like money in the bank, or you’re building up security. In fact, I think, you’re just becoming more accustomed to it and more liable to think that at some point that you’ve been taking these wonderful precautions and that the chances are minimized and so forth, and then finally you will get confronted with a situation that you couldn’t anticipate. For instance, even now, I think, it surprises me that the Russia and the United States could do a lot to almost completely eliminate the possibility of accidental nuclear war, without any real loss of security. Both of them could allow observers in key places to instantly authenticate whether or not a nuclear war was in progress, you know, or it seemed to be in the process of happening. And then if there were some nuclear accident or a screwball, you know, a psychotic, you know the mad major, or the missile that gets away, you could instantly authenticate that this might be true. I know that the United States seems anyway geared not to respond to, say, a single nuclear explosion any place, at least that’s what they say, that they now have, they feel invulnerable, retaliatory capabilities and that the single city taken out would not start the nuclear war. But, you know, again you never know that panic that happens when suddenly all the lights go out, like you described in New York City.You know that indefinable something that might just make the senior decision maker abandon all his previously beautifully worked out graduated steps of response, you never know. And it depends on who he is and what his personal state of mind is, what information is available to him and so forth. The fact that a lot of effort has been gone to, to try to work out possible accidents, and I suspect that great precautions have been taken to protect against these accidents, but whether the human imagination is capable of really devising the subtle permutations and psychological variants to 19 — SK interviewed by Jeremy Bernstein, November 27, 1966 all those things, I doubt. The people who make up these war scenarios are not really as inventive, say, as a great writer or as reality. I think Herman Khan is a genius and I think that he can envisage certain situations but when you read the, many of the war scenario possibilities, they don’t strike you as being the work of a master novelist. They don’t really seem real, you know. They’re political possibilities, but they don’t have the real trappings of reality that might, you know, confuse and panic the decision maker in the real circumstance. JB: Were you surprised at the reaction to Strangelove? The fact that it was so widely discussed and so widely reviewed? Did you have any feeling of what the response would be to it? SK: Well, I mean, all films are reviewed. The discussion went beyond reviews. But… no, I mean it was quite obviously something that might become a controversial issue. JB: Well, when you got finished with it, did you have a sense that, in some sense, it was a winner? I mean, was it a thing that you really… SK: Well, I was very pleased with it. I mean, when you say “a winner”… I mean, I thought it was… I was very pleased with the film. It happened to also be a very successful film commercially. JB: How did Terry Southern get into the act? SK: Well… Terry came to interview me for Show magazine shortly before I was leaving for London to make the picture and I became… JB: To make Strangelove? SK: Yeah, I became friendly with him. I had read The Magic Christian and Flash and Filigree and thought he was a terrific writer and I came to London and started… JB: Did you have the script pretty well…? SK: Oh, the script was done, and it was done in its black comedy form, a fact which a certain amount of confusion has been created about in certain areas. The script was done, Peter Sellers was cast, and I was coming over here to prepare the film and I, you know, thought Terry was very talented. I never stop working on a script. I like to work with somebody else because under the time pressures that you’re under, you can’t afford the sort of lapse of intensity that if you work by yourself you might suffer. And Terry seemed like an ideal person because the style of the script was similar, you know, to his sense of humor. And so about six weeks before the picture started, I asked him if he wanted to come over here and work on it with me and do some more dialogue and revision. And he came over. He 20 — SK interviewed by Jeremy Bernstein, November 27, 1966 worked for six weeks and that was it. I started the picture and he went off and did some other things. TRACK 12 JB: Have any of the pictures been as intellectually complicated as the present one, I mean, 2001? Caused as many intellectual problems? I mean, it’s a terrific undertaking trying to create the future. SK: Well, I don’t know what… “intellectually complicated” isn’t really the right description for it, I don’t think. I mean, Strangelove was a more intellectually complicated picture, you know, it involved complex arguments, and quite a few, you know, abstract ideas, you know, clearly or comically stated. This is not as complex a picture, it’s not as complicated a picture in terms of, you know, ideas represented, ideas actually spoken, you know. [break in tape] SK: In praise of Arthur C. Clarke… it is true that he is, I think, the most poetic science-fiction writer. JB: He’s also nearly the best informed, I think. SK: Right, he’s scientifically the best informed. His narrative ideas, I think, are, for my tastes, the most appealing and he has this rather unique poetic sense of the… a sort of nostalgia for the, you know, the mountains that have eroded away over millions of years and the millions of years in the future and people looking back and forward—you’ll have to fix this up because it sounds like real crap—but it’s very hard to define it nicely, but it is true that he… JB: I find every time I finish reading some story like that of Arthur’s I always feel sad. SK: Right. JB: There’s some element of sadness. SK: Right. JB: Either we’ve made… SK: Right. 21 — SK interviewed by Jeremy Bernstein, November 27, 1966 JB: …contaminated Venus… or he has a vision of something in the future which you know you’ll never see. SK: Or something in the past that you can never know about.Well… but I think that’s marvelous, you know, I think that somehow, without making it sound too pompous or precious, that he captures the hopeless but admirable human desire to know, you know, these things that they never will, you know, can never really know, to reach for things they can never, you know, really reach, or reach back…. It’s very hard to say it exactly but this sense of sadness and this poetic sense of time passing and this sort of loneliness of… worlds. I mean, he manages… I’ll tell you what he also manages to do: he can take a star, a sun, say, in that one story, I forget the name of it, where the… these sort of sun creatures come towards Mercury. He can take an inanimate object, like a star, or a world, or even a galaxy and somehow make it into a very poignant thing which almost seems alive. He has a way of writing about, you know, mountains and planets and worlds with the same poignancy that people write about children or love affairs. [break in tape] SK: Also, although you have read the script and you shouldn’t really try to refer to the story, there is, without underlining it, there is a contrast in the story between giant orbiting bombs, which you might say is the negative use of nuclear energy and this particular spaceship, which leads to great, fantastic accomplishments, which is also another, the good use of nuclear energy. JB: Yeah. TRACK 13 JB: But I think one can talk about the Orion, which is something I wanted to do for a long time, in fact I have… SK: It’s a way of pounding that, yeah. JB: I have a set of notes somewhere at home which I once took down, for just writing a piece on the Orion, showing, sort of logically speaking, why it is the only propulsion system that’s worth considering, if you talk really about interplanetary missions. There is nothing else which makes any sense. SK: Right. 22 — SK interviewed by Jeremy Bernstein, November 27, 1966 JB: Fundamentally because its operating temperature is at the escape velocity, that’s really the crucial element in it. And, so that would be very nice actually to talk about the Orion and these absolutely magnificent paintings which the guys have been doing over there. And of course, the other thing that strikes, if you compare making such a fictional space mission with the real thing, the thing that amazes one is how fast everything is done in the sense that if you make a decision, whether it’s on a costume or on a lettering, or on a… you get the satisfaction of seeing it created in some form almost immediately. I mean, isn’t that so? SK: Well, it doesn’t seem almost immediately to me but if I was used to another timescale… JB: Compared to scientific timescale… SK: Yeah, it must seem very quick, yeah. JB: I mean, in a scientific project you make any suggestion like that and maybe it’s six months, or…. I mean, you take a typical experiment in physics: a guy has a good idea for an experiment, by the time you get any answer out, these days, typically it’s a year and a half. SK: Wow. JB: So it’s a completely different order of… SK: It’s interesting that you would feel that way because to the average person, the timescale of a movie seems like time has stopped. Most people are so bored and so astonished when they see the pace of things. Somehow they have an image in their mind that it’s all done in a week, or something like that. Most people, I’ve found, who don’t come from your side of the fence, think that everything works incredibly slowly. Which is interesting, you know. It just depends what you’re used to. JB: The thing, you know, when you shipped me over to watch that television thing… SK: Oh, that’s right… you thought so too. JB: But that’s a different side of it. That’s a side of making these sort of quantal sequences, on which you work for three hours to extract thirty seconds on the thing, that would drive me off of my head. But the thing which… the technological side of it, where you get an idea, say, for a propulsion system or Christ knows what, and within three days, well, you’ve got a drawing there, you’ve got some guy making a model, and you have a lot of thought on the different sides. I mean, what timescale these guys are using—Eastern 23 — SK interviewed by Jeremy Bernstein, November 27, 1966 Standard Time and all this sort of stuff—well, all this goes fantastically fast. I mean, the number of problems that you deal with and solve in a half an hour is more than you would deal with in a comparable scientific project in six months, in my opinion. Because of course, you’re just working in a different media, in the sense that you don’t really have to worry, say in the case of a spaceship, about the structural stability of these things, you know. I mean, you might spend six months or a year computing something out on machines.Well, you know, you know it’s going to work and it can be designed. So you take that as a premise and then you put something there which in principle is going to work, and then you can stop at that point. That’s what really constitutes the difference in…. It’s very interesting, I find it extremely remarkable. SK: If these things do work that quickly, the thing that does take all the time is to extract, say, two hours and fifteen minutes of the story and really keep distilling and distilling and distilling and distilling and distilling. I would say that if you count the time that’s spent during the shooting day, also working on the story, in rehearsal and rewriting and so on, I would say that an average of at least four hours a day has been spent on the story, much more than that… because in the real solid writing period it was like eight hours a day. But let’s just say, at average, four hours a day for two years, say an average of six days a week, that’s twenty-four hours a week times maybe a hundred weeks. I’d say that’s a good twenty-four hundred hours spent on, call it two hours and forty minutes of story. So that’s about a thousand to one, isn’t it… JB: Yeah. SK: …on the story. Now that’s where the real crunch is put. [break in tape] TRACK 14 JB: One doesn’t get the impression that film directors do think a great deal… [both laugh] SK: You say that…. They’re supposed to, you know. It helps. 24 — SK interviewed by Jeremy Bernstein, November 27, 1966 JB: That great sort of… SK: Let’s get this quote, I think we ran out. The analogy of using the frustrating wasted time periods on the set for thinking on your opponent’s move in chess. [break in tape] JB: You were telling me the thing about the daily working, with or without cutters, which I didn’t completely understand. You said when he directs, that he has a cutter who works every day and that you do not have a cutter who works every day and that is somehow a good thing. SK: With the exception of a few directors, like David Lean and, well let’s not say who, but with the exception of a few directors, most people have their film edited by film editors as they go along. And then, when the film is done, they look at the film and dictate some notes about it and the film editor tries to do what they say and then maybe they look at it again and they do it again. But basically it’s like trying to, say, redesign a city by driving through it in a car, you know. You can notice a few things and say, you know, “put that traffic light in the middle of the street” or “those buildings over there look kind of shabby” or something, but if you really want to do it right, you must do it yourself, you know, piece by piece. So, I think by now I have enough, sort of, ability to imagine the way a scene will come out so that I can tell without editing the material if I have enough film coverage and, you know, what I can do with it, and then I edit the film with the editor myself when the film is… when I’m all finished. JB: You haven’t done any editing up to now? SK: None, no. Just the thing, just slinging together that thing you saw. JB: Because I don’t see how, I mean, you have a couple of these few minute sequences of this and that… I don’t see how you could edit that really. How would you edit that? SK: Well, you haven’t seen… that’s only a fraction of the material. In other words, what you’ve seen is only the comings and goings of other scenes, to just show you what the set looks like. I mean, we’ve shot about eighty thousand feet of film already. JB: What is eighty thousand feet in time? SK: It’s about, well, it’s fifty-four hundred feet an hour. [Laughs] JB: Fifty-four hundred feet an hour! SK: Yeah, it’s six times nine, yeah, fifty-four hundred feet an hour. 25 — SK interviewed by Jeremy Bernstein, November 27, 1966 JB: How much film will you shoot before the whole picture is done, would you think? SK: By the way, that isn’t a lot of film. People have shot a million feet of film, actually. [Laughs] JB: You mean in their lives? SK: No, I mean in a film. So say a picture is three hours long, it would be sixteen thousand two hundred feet. So what ratio is that? That’s about fifty to one or something. JB: More. SK: More… fifty something to one. JB: That’s almost like a thousand to one, isn’t it? SK: No, it isn’t. Ninety percent to one. [break in tape] TRACK 15 SK: Film directing, I think, is a misnomer for anybody that seriously wants to make films because directing the film is only, you might say, one third of the process. You know, writing the film, directing the film, and then editing the film is, you might say, the whole job and it was really, it’s only the old major studio sort of image of how a film was made that the producer held in his hand on the palette, you know, the various people, the artist, the cameraman, the actors, the film editor, the director and so forth. And the director was just sort of, like, a senior member of the crew. [Laughs] And that, you know, he had no real integrating status in what happened. I mean, there were the few exceptional characters, even in the great days of the Hollywood studios, who somehow exerted their authority over what went on but… I mean, even today, you talk about directors who have the right of what they call the “first cut,” which means they must approve the first cut but after then the producer can do whatever he wants. JB: So it’s a meaningless right, in other words? SK: Virtually, and it’s a right to try to persuade someone. Because, I mean, if you don’t even have the right of the first cut, you can’t even explain what you want. But I have… you know, I do the cutting myself. 26 — SK interviewed by Jeremy Bernstein, November 27, 1966 JB: You have… a picture of yours, at this stage, is your picture, completely? SK: Yeah. JB: Has it always been like that or is that a…? SK: Well, let’s see. It was like that on Dr. Strangelove and Lolita and I think Paths of Glory, I don’t remember, subject to delivering the minimum censorship requirements to playing it. And the way you make deals, the way you make that arrangement, is that you say, “The picture will not be longer than a certain period of time,” and that you will deliver the minimum required censorship, so the picture can be played. I mean, in other words, if they just say “give it to us any way you want” and you deliver a picture that is legally unplayable, they have to protect themselves against that, you see. JB: What do you feel about your pictures being shown on television? SK: Well, I wish that they didn’t put the commercials in. The worst thing that they sometimes do is cut the films, but… JB: You don’t retain any rights over that? SK: Well, on some of the films I do, but then, you know, it’s terribly difficult to police it, because unless you see the film yourself there are very few people who are qualified to tell you what was cut, or in fact, I mean, even if a friend calls up and says, “I saw such and such a film and it looked cut,” you know, and you say, “well, what was cut out?” and they say “I don’t know but I think it was cut.”Well, it’s almost impossible to find out what was done. It’s a peculiar problem. JB: Preminger just lost a court case over that. SK: Well, I believe his case was against interruption of commercials. JB: Well, I think, and… SK: I don’t think he was the cutting issue…. I don’t know, perhaps you’re right. JB: Commercials were certainly the key thing, but in that…. Lillian Ross wrote a piece about that case in The New Yorker and there she described the reason why he lost, which is basically that he knew what he was doing when he signed the agreement. SK: Well, that’s it. I mean, they either have the right to do it or they don’t.