Stanley Kubrick Produces

James Fenwick

• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781978814899
• Topic: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Subtopic: Artes escénicas

Stanley Kubrick Produces provides the first comprehensive account of Stanley Kubrick's role as a producer, and of the role of the producers he worked with throughout his career. It considers how he first emerged as a producer, how he developed the role, and how he ultimately used it to fashion himself a powerbase by the 1970s. It goes on to consider how Kubrick's centralizing of power became a self-defeating strategy by the 1980s and 1990s, one that led him to struggle to move projects out of development and into active production.Making use of overlooked archival sources and uncovering newly discovered 'lost' Kubrick projects ( The Cop Killer, Shark Safari, and The Perfect Marriage among them), as well as providing the first detailed overview of the World Assembly of Youth film, James Fenwick provides a comprehensive account of Kubrick's life and career and of how he managed to obtain the level of control that he possessed by the 1970s. Along the way, the book traces the rapid changes taking place in the American film industry in the post-studio era, uncovering new perspectives about the rise of young independent producers, the operations of influential companies such as Seven Arts and United Artists, and the whole field of film marketing.

Part 1

The Emergence of a Film Producer, 1928–1955

1

The Beginning, 1928–1951

Kubrick’s early years—the twenty-seven-year period between his birth in 1928 and the incorporation of the Harris-Kubrick Pictures Corporation in 1955—are perhaps the least well known of his biography. But it is a period that is vital to understanding how he emerged as a film producer, why he made the move into the film industry, and the conditions that allowed him to do so. In the process of trying to map these early years, we must think about three interrelated aspects of Kubrick’s personality, both business and personal: ambition, self-promotion, and, once again, control. As this chapter shows, these three pillars of Kubrick’s approach to film producing were manifest from the very beginning.

This chapter, along with the others in this first section of the book, charts these early years. It starts with a brief overview of Kubrick’s childhood in New York City, before exploring his formative teenage and twentysomething years, first working at Look, a biweekly photojournalism magazine, and then, crucially, transitioning to work in film. This is, I would suggest, an overlooked moment in Kubrick’s life: Kubrick quit Look magazine, a secure job with a livable wage envied by his unemployed friends in Greenwich Village, to move into a decade-long period of financial precarity, career uncertainty, and search for autonomy. This chapter focuses on the production of his two short films, Day of the Fight and Flying Padre, both produced in 1950, followed by an attempt to understand his move into feature filmmaking, culminating in the privately financed effort Fear and Desire, filmed in 1951 and discussed in chapter 2. The chapter concludes that Kubrick was learning not so much the art of filmmaking in these years, but rather the art of self-promotion and preservation in order to advance his own career aims and to secure future work, with varying degrees of success.

Formative Interests

Kubrick was born on Thursday, July 26, 1928, at Manhattan’s Society for the Lying-In Hospital, 305 Second Avenue, just north of Stuyvesant Square. His childhood was spent growing up in the Bronx. His parents, Jack Kubrick and Gertrude Kubrick (née Perveler), were both the children of Jewish immigrants. They raised Stanley and his sister, Barbara, born in 1934, in an apartment block on the Bronx’s Clinton Avenue. The Bronx underwent rapid change in the early decades of the twentieth century, and its population grew exponentially from just over 200,000 in the 1900s to over 1.2 million by 1930. Indeed, Kubrick grew up in a borough that was largely well-to-do (contrary to the Bronx’s modern image), with restaurants, shops, and department stores flourishing. It is also where Kubrick learned to play baseball as a teenager under the tutelage of Gerald Fried, a high school friend and future collaborator, who invited Kubrick to join the local team, the Barracudas.¹

Kubrick’s neighborhood had numerous movie palaces, many of them architectural delights. Most notable was the Loew’s Paradise Theater on the Grand Concourse, a few blocks from Fordham Road and several blocks west of the Kubrick residence. The Paradise Theater was extravagant, with a capacity of four thousand seats, baroque decor, and “a ceiling painted dark blue to resemble a nighttime sky, with small light bulbs added to resemble stars and simulated clouds blown across the ceiling by a cloud machine”—this was the famed Atmospheric style of architect John Eberson.² The young Stanley would almost certainly have found himself on Fordham Road, being a short ride on the Webster and White Plains Avenues Streetcar Line. Fordham Road and the Grand Concourse was where many of the cinemas were located, from the above-mentioned Loew’s Paradise Theater to the RKO Fordham and the Valentine. In fact, the streetcar lines often acted as a path along which cinemas were built, a yellow brick road for a film fan. The Webster and White Plains Avenues Line was no different, with a movie house at virtually every tram stop, including the Wakefield, Laconia, BB, Burke, and Allerton theaters. We can’t be sure what films he saw or what impact they had on his understanding of film history and filmmaking, but it would have been in the cinemas of the Bronx that he was introduced to the films of Hollywood. However, Kubrick seems to ascribe more influence to the years he spent in the 1940s and 1950s when he says he developed a “fantasy image” of films:³ “I really was in love with movies. I used to see everything at the RKO in Loew’s circuit, but I remember thinking at the time that I didn’t know anything about movies, but I’d seen so many movies that were bad, I thought, ‘Even though I don’t know anything, I can’t believe I can’t make a movie at least as good as this.’ And that’s why I started, why I tried.”⁴ Kubrick’s comments, given in an interview in 1987, align with his notebooks from the 1950s, which reveal his at times utter contempt for the kind of generic, mainstream films being produced by Hollywood. But what is clear is that Kubrick had a developing passion for film by the time he was a teenager.

His early school days were spent at the less than inspiringly named Public School 3 and later Public School 90. He also had a brief period of private home schooling at age eight. Despite his parent’s ambitions that he become a doctor, Kubrick simply did not fit into an academic lifestyle. He disrupted other students by repeatedly talking in class and was often disciplined. His time at the William Howard Taft High School was no different in terms of his performance. Located at Sheridan Avenue and 172nd Street, opposite the Bronx’s Claremont Park, the school opened in the early 1940s and possessed a gray, drab air about it. The academic environment proved unstimulating, with an education program for boys focused on physical education to prepare them for war—the United States had entered World War II by the time of Kubrick’s entry to high school. In many respects, Kubrick’s poor education record reflected that of those around him, with more than half of the population completing no higher than eighth grade by 1940 and eight out of ten boys who graduated high school joining the war effort. By 1945, as few as 51 percent of seventeen-year-old boys were high school graduates. Kubrick says he always felt like a “misfit” in high school. His poor grades were largely due to his absenteeism, and in 1945 he was reported to the attendance bureau for his abysmal record. Seeing that their son was disillusioned with school, Jack and Gertrude sent Kubrick to spend a summer with his uncle from his mother’s side, Martin Perveler, in Burbank, California, a few miles northeast of Hollywood.

Perveler would prove a key figure in the fledgling filmmaking career of Kubrick, providing the necessary financing to allow him to produce his first full feature, Fear and Desire, in 1951 (see chapter 2). Perveler became incredibly wealthy following his founding of Perveler’s Pharmacy in the San Gabriel Valley in the late 1930s, growing into a chain of stores across Los Angeles over the next few years. Whether the city of Burbank stirred the cinematic soul of Kubrick, we’ll probably never know. But it was a place with a rich cinematic heritage and headquarters to many important production companies and studios, including Warner Bros., the company that would fund and distribute Kubrick’s films from the 1970s onward. Surely the visit would have impacted Kubrick’s imagination and his growing “fantasy image” of filmmaking and Hollywood.

It was during this period that Kubrick developed an interest in visual imagery and photography, arguably influenced by a range of factors, one of which could have been the visit to Burbank. In addition, his father was a keen amateur photographer, while his friends at Taft had similar interests. Marvin Traub had his own darkroom, and Alexander Singer had an interest in painting and, by 1945, an interest in film directing.⁵ Kubrick’s growing interest in photography was expanded by the use of his father’s Graflex camera.⁶ He would, by his own account, fool around with the camera and even took it into William Taft High School, where he reputedly took photographs “of an English teacher, a rara avis, ‘who read hamlet and acted out the play for the class.’ ”⁷

If we return to the three aspects of Kubrick’s personality that were, I believe, central to his evolution as a filmmaker—ambition, self-promotion, and control—it is ambition that was the most prominent during the 1940s and 1950s. In the autumn of 1944, while he was still at Taft High and only sixteen years old, Kubrick submitted a set of photographs he took in Greenwich Village to Look magazine. His submission was rejected by the picture editor, Helen O’Brian, with his photographs being described as “fine” and his ideas as “good.”⁸ Kubrick’s ideas seem to have been a combination of photography and portraiture, with a series of photographs of a young girl accompanied by a final drawing of her. Whether this was a collaboration with Alexander Singer, given his interest in drawing and painting, isn’t clear, but the final idea was deemed to be substandard. Still, O’Brian was impressed and advised Kubrick that he should keep in contact and forward a revised project in due course.⁹

What is important here is not so much the rejection but the fact Kubrick had the ambition and the gall at age sixteen—sixteen—to submit his work to a major American magazine. He was displaying innovation and aspiration and a level of self-confidence that his work was good enough to be published in a professional outlet. It is also the first indication that this was a career path that Kubrick wanted to pursue. A year later, in 1945, he once again submitted a photograph to Look. It was a photograph of a depressed looking newsvendor, with a headline announcing the death of Franklin D. Roosevelt attached to his stall. Kubrick was paid twenty-five dollars for the image and, shortly thereafter, was recruited to work on a permanent basis at the magazine.

Transition

Kubrick spent nearly six years working at Look magazine, though his official dates working as a permanent staff photographer are unclear. Philippe Mather suggests Kubrick commenced working at the magazine sometime in April 1946,¹⁰ initially on a freelance “apprentice” basis.¹¹ He then became a permanent member of staff from January 7, 1947 and published on a regular, monthly basis.¹² Kubrick suggests that he worked there for a period of four years, until the age of twenty-one.¹³ This would correlate with archival documentation, which suggests Kubrick resigned from Look in early July 1950, prior to his twenty-second birthday.¹⁴ The Kubrick estate, however, believes Kubrick was legally employed by Look until September 12, 1950.¹⁵

Kubrick’s time at Look provided him with a degree of creative autonomy—though this was within limits. The organizational structure of the magazine under editor-in-chief Mike Cowles and executive editor Dan Mich was fairly informal; Mather has referred to Mich’s style as being “fluid.”¹⁶ As former staff photojournalists have commented, collaboration throughout the production process was encouraged, including from the photojournalists.¹⁷ Despite the collaborative atmosphere, there was still substantial editorial supervision, and ideas, text, and layout could still be vetoed by the respective editor.¹⁸ Indeed, Kubrick seems to have wanted to push the limits of the creative freedom he was offered at the magazine. His attempts to broaden his autonomy were noted by the editorial team, particularly how he attempted to invest his own personality into his work. This invariably led to conflict with his editors, as was reflected following his decision to leave the magazine: “Believe it or not I enjoyed arguing with you about how to tackle a story. I think our stories were improved that way. I’m inclined to think you have gone as far as you can go at Look. I think that at any other magazine you might have less freedom, but also do better financially.”¹⁹

Kubrick’s decision to leave Look magazine to commence film...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part I: The Emergence of a Film Producer, 1928–1955
• Part II: The Harris-Kubrick Pictures Corporation, 1955–1962
• Part III: Polaris Productions and Hawk Films, 1962–1969
• Part IV: The Decline of a Film Producer, 1970–1999
• Epilogue
• Appendix A: World Assembly of Youth Credits
• Appendix B: Filmography
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Select Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author