Stanley Kubrick

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“The Thing He Loved Doing Just As Much [Making Movies] Was The Research”

May 16, 2016 in Excerpts, Film | Permalink

Emilio-plastico-Overlook

Stanley Kubrick was, I think, the greatest filmmaker of them all, more than Lang or Wilder or Godard or anyone. Living a private life in London, he grew into a mythical figure, although he didn’t put on airs, enjoyed American football and was amused by White Men Can’t Jump. But he was an eccentric guy whose film productions often lasted longer than many wars. It’s somehow no surprise that one of his longest-tenured employees was a Formula One race driver who had no previous movie experience before signing on for a stint on A Clockwork Orange. That man, Emilio D’Alessandro, has written a book about his 30-year odyssey with Kubrick.

From a Vice interview conducted by Rod Bastanmehr:

Vice:

What were some of the projects that you would hear him talk about that didn’t end up being filmed?

Emilio D’Alessandro:

Anytime we would be working on one film and we’d go down to a location, he would always be making notes or moves for another project. It was A.I. once, or Napoleon, which he really, really, really wanted to make. But he was always working on other projects while he was filming.

The thing he loved doing just as much [making movies] was the research. He had boxes and boxes of research done, so if one day he was able to finally make, say, this Napoleon movie, he would be ready. And I would keep it safe for him in case [producers] decided to actually do something with it. I would be ready to unearth it all myself. He never stopped researching, ever.

Vice:

Do you remember where you were when you heard he’d passed away? Were you with him?

Emilio D’Alessandro:

I’ll speak briefly because it really hurts me now, still. But yes, I was with him, I left him a note the night before on his desk like I always did. I said, “Everything is OK down in your office, your fax is clear, people got their messages. Please stay and have a rest, you’re very tired. You can come down in the afternoon—I’ll be here in the morning as usual.” Then unfortunately midday I got a phone call telling me that Stanley had died in the night. And I just screamed the biggest swear word, and I never swear. I had to drive to his house before I could believe it. And even when I got there and his wife took me by the hand to tell me, I still wasn’t sure it was real. And I drove back home that night not believing it. Sometimes I still don’t know if I do.•

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“I Think My Favorite Scene Was Where I’m Dismantling HAL’s Brain”

November 26, 2014 in Excerpts, Film, Science/Tech, Videos | Permalink

As long as there are movies, I think we’ll watch Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, which boldly aimed to journey beyond the stars, to second-guess the future, and remarkably pulled it all off. Keir Dullea, the actor who portrayed astronaut Dave Bowman, just did a HAL-centric AMA at Reddit. A few exchanges follow.

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Question:

What is something people misunderstand or misinterpret about Kubrick?

Keir Dullea:

I’m often asked: Was Kubrick a task master? The answer is no; anything but. He never raised his voice, he had a quiet droll sense of humor and was a man with great curiosity.

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Question:

What preparation or research did you do before filming 2001? Did Kubrick give you any insight into how the character should be portrayed, or did he give you freedom to explore that?

Keir Dullea:

Not a lot. Don’t forget, Arthur C. Clarke, who, aside from being the great writer that he was, was a scientist in his own right and was able to portray the future in such a specific way that the script in itself gave us everything we needed.

The only suggestion Kubrick gave overall was that he did not want us to portrayal scientists in the way they had been portrayed in grade B science fiction movies of the past, that is, men with goatees and outlandish clothes, speaking in some kind of pseudo babble.

One of the definitions I think of a great director is that they cast greatly. If you cast very well, and Stanley being the genius that he was did that in all his films, you don’t need to do a lot of direction, just give the actors the relaxation and space that they need and they will come through.

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Question:

What was your favorite scene you participated in?

Keir Dullea:

I think my favorite scene was where I’m dismantling HAL’s brain. It reminded me a bit of a famous movie and also play called Of Mice and Men when Lenny is speaking with George regarding their plans to start a farm. This is a scene that comes at the end of the film after Lenny has indadvertedly caused the death of a young woman. Now there’s a posse that is looking for him intending possibly to string him up. This discussion of their plans to start a farm has been heard throughout the film, and so with some love and compassion, with a hidden pistol behind his back George reviews their plans with Lenny and half-way through their discussion he shoots him behind his back to avoid him being killed by a posse of men. In some way, emotionally, that scene from Of Mice and Men affected the way I played the scene with HAL.

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Question:

Kubrick was a notorious perfectionist. Do you have any interesting anecdotes about that?

Keir Dullea:

On the first day of shooting, Stanley noticed my shoes and felt they weren’t right. We stopped shooting for the rest of the day until they found the right pair. Let’s face it, feet don’t play a huge role in films.

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Question:

What is your favorite sci-fi movie?

Keir Dullea:

2001: A Space Odyssey.

Question:

APART FROM 2001 … what is your favorite sci-fi movie?

Do you enjoy the genre apart from being one of its greatest exponents?

Keir Dullea:

Yes, I enjoy sci-fi and Blade Runner is my other favorite of the genre.•

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“Out here among the stars lies the destiny of mankind”:

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“I Was Studying The Apes To Develop A Choreography”

April 7, 2014 in Excerpts, Film, Science/Tech | Permalink

From film blogger Justin Bozung’s interview with mime Dan Richter, a passage about how he came to be cast as “Moon-Watcher” in 2001: A Space Odyssey and how he prepared for the role:

“Justin Bozung:

So for those that haven’t read the book, could you tell me how you came to work on the film with Stanley Kubrick?

Dan Richter: 

I had a friend at the time, a book publisher named Mike Wilson and he was working with Arthur C. Clarke on a series of books about diving. Arthur and Stanley had been discussing the ‘Dawn Of Man’ sequence because they had almost finished the live action shooting on 2001, but they still didn’t have an opening. They had tried a few different things but nothing seemed to worked right. They decided that maybe they should talk to a mime about some of their ideas. Arthur mentioned this to Mike Wilson, and because Mike and I had been friends, he said ‘I know a mime. His name is Dan Richter, and he’s great.’

So consequently, I was asked to go and meet with Stanley at Borehamwood Studios MGM outside of London. I figured he’d pick my brain, and I’d offer some suggestions. So I drove up to see him and we started to talk. Stanley started to explain to me some of the ideas they had had for the sequence that didn’t work. Thinking about it, I didn’t see his problems as having to do anything with acting, but rather as something to do with movement.

The ‘Dawn Of Man’ was for the opening of the film. The problem with the opening of a film or a play or a book is that you have to go and get your audience. You have a very short amount of time to get the audience involved, literally seconds of minutes. So it was important that we made the man-apes come to life.

Justin Bozung:

So you didn’t really go into the meeting thinking you were going in for a job interview with Kubrick?

Dan Richter: 

I truthfully thought I was just going in to talk to him. I thought Stanley was just going to pick my brain, and I thought I’d just offer up suggestions to him in regards to how a mime could be of assistance to him in terms of solving his problems for the sequence. I didn’t know I was auditioning for him. I went in there acting cocky. I wasn’t worried about saying anything wrong to Stanley, because I wasn’t looking for a job. I was busy with other work in London at the time. I just thought I was there to give Stanley some pointers or whatever. I thought I was meeting with Stanley to explain mime movement to him.

Stanley and I hit it right off, and I think he liked my approach. After I was done talking Stanley asked me to show him what I was talking about. He wanted to see how to move as I had explained it to him. Then he offered me the job. So I told Stanley I’d have to do all of the choreography. I told him I’d help develop all of the man-apes costumes. The costumes initially were completely unworkable. You couldn’t move in them. Then I told Stanley that I’d cast and then train the people myself. I didn’t think he’d actually agree to my terms, but he said ‘yes’ to everything. So suddenly, I found myself with a immense job, and it was a job creating something that had never been done before. I was given an office, a rehearsal studio, assistants, and my name on a door and I was just this cocky kid. I had to deliver.

I mean, I had no ideas or plans to play ‘Moon-Watcher’ in the film. I thought I was there to just help with the research and the choreography of the actor’s movements. I never had any notions that Stanley would want me to play ‘Moon-Watcher’ in 2001.

Justin Bozung:

Then there was the enormous amount of research you did on apes.

Dan Richter:

I spent a great deal of time researching at the London Museum Of Natural History. I was granted access to their back stacks, and got to examine and study various skeletons and bones in their collection and all the early journals and research work the museum had acquired to that point.. I spent a lot of time talking to scientists with specialization in the Australopithecus era. Which of course, was the era that we were planning on setting the opening of the film in.

I also went to various zoo’s around England. With the zoo research I was studying the apes to develop a choreography. So I studied the apes at the zoo, so I could see how they interacted with each other in a tribe. How they moved, how their bodies reacted. So I began to study Gorillas, Chimpanzees, and Gibbons. Before my first trip Stanley had handed me a 8mm Bolex camera and told me to film everything. So I just went and filmed everything I observed. I was looking for the truth of it, I needed to know how they interacted with each other.

As we got closer to shooting, we were having a difficult time figuring out exactly how the man-apes should move. When I was at the zoo I filmed this Gibbon ape in slow motion coming down a tree and once he got down he began to just walk around. When I went back and watched the film I discovered this specific way in which the Gibbon walked. The Gibbon moves with their legs slightly bent with their knees pointing outward. Then, with the Chimps we decided it would be best to move our hands and arms in the same way that they moved theirs, which was at particular angle as well.”

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“I Had Few Intellectual Interests As A Child”

March 17, 2014 in Excerpts, Film, Science/Tech | Permalink

It’s not at all surprising that Stanley Kubrick was an early adopter of home audio recorders and had scads of them back during the 1960s. Last year, I posted two items from the New Yorker of that era (here and here) in which Jeremy Bernstein visited the director during the long gestation of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Via Open Culture, here’s a 1966 audio recording from those interview sessions that were made not by the journalist, who didn’t even work with a tape machine at that point, but by the auteur.

From Bernstein’s notes about how he came to know fellow chess enthusiast Kubrick:

“I met Kubrick soon after Dr. Strangelove opened in 1964. I had just started writing for the New Yorker when its editor William Shawn asked me if I would consider a piece about science fiction. I never much liked science fiction but said I would look into it. My friend and colleague Gerald Feinberg, a physics professor at Columbia and a great science fiction fan, recommended Arthur C. Clarke. Clarke was not very well known then, but I set about reading everything he had written and found that I liked it a great deal. I wrote an enthusiastic article, and soon after it appeared I got a note from Clarke saying he was coming to New York from Ceylon (as it then was), where he lived, and would like to have lunch. In the course of lunch I asked him what he was doing. He said he was working with Kubrick on a ‘son of Strangelove.‘ I had no idea what he was talking about, but he said he would introduce me to Kubrick. So we went to Kubrick’s large apartment on Central Park West. I had never met a film director and had no idea what to expect. When I first saw Kubrick and the apartment, I said to myself: ‘He is one of ours.’ What I meant was that he looked and acted like almost every eccentric physicist I had ever known. The apartment was in chaos. Children and dogs were running all over the place. Papers hid most of the furniture. He said that he and Clarke were doing a science fiction film, an odyssey, a space odyssey. It didn’t have a title.

When I looked at my watch and saw that I had to go, Kubrick asked me why. I explained that I had a date to play chess for money in Washington Square Park, with a Haitian chess hustler named Duval who called himself ‘the master.’ I was absolutely floored when Kubrick said: ‘Duval is a potzer.’ It showed a level of real familiarity with the Washington Square Park chess scene. He and I ought to play, he said, and indeed we did – during the entire filming of 2001: A Space Odyssey.”

 

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“Out Here Among The Stars Lies The Destiny Of Mankind”

January 29, 2014 in Film, Science/Tech, Videos | Permalink

Well, this is fun. Introduced by Vernon Myers, the publisher of Look, the 1966 short film, “A Look Behind the Future,” focuses on the magazine’s former photographer Stanley Kubrick, who was in the process of making 2001: A Space Odyssey at London’s MGM studios. It’s a nice companion piece to Jeremy Bernstein’s two great New Yorker articles about the movie during its long gestation (here and here).

Mentioned or seen in this video: Mobile phones, laptop computers, Wernher Von Braun, memory helmets, a 38-ton centrifuge, Arthur C. Clarke at the Long Island warehouse where the NASA L.E.M. (Lunar Excursion Module) was being constructed, Keir Dullea meeting the press, etc. 

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“I Said It Would Be A Disaster To Portray The Extraterrestrials”

October 20, 2013 in Excerpts, Film, Science/Tech | Permalink

Via the excellent Browser site comes this wonderful piece from 2001Italia which recalls how Stanley Kubrick struggled mightily with realizing alien life forms in his masterful sci-fi film. An excerpt:

“According to Arthur Clarke, it was the famous scientist Carl Sagan that, asked for a suggestion on the topic, proposed to hide the aliens altogether from the movie, during a meeting at Kubrick’s house in Manhattan, in 1965. Quoted from Clarke’s biography, here’s Sagan recounting the episode thirty years later:

They had no idea how to end the movie – that’s when they called me in to try to resolve a dispute. The key issue was how to portray extraterrestrials that would surely be encountered at the end when they go through the Star Gate. Kubrick was arguing that the extraterrestrials would look like humans with some slight differences, maybe à la Mr. Spock (Ed. note: like Clindar). And Arthur was arguing, quite properly on general evolutionary grounds, that they would look nothing like us. So I tried to adjudicate as they asked. I said it would be a disaster to portray the extraterrestrials. What ought to be done is to suggest them. I argued that the number of individually unlikely events in the evolutionary history of man was so great that nothing like us is ever likely to evolve anywhere else in the universe. I suggested that any explicit representation of an advanced extraterrestrial being was bound to have at least an element of falseness about it and that the best solution would be to suggest rather than explicitly to display the extraterrestrials. What struck me most is that they were in production (some of the special effects, at least) and still had no idea how the movie would end. Kubrick’s preference had one distinct advantage, an economic one: He could call up Central Casting and ask for twenty extraterrestrials. With a little makeup, he would have his problem solved. The alternative portrayal of extraterrestrials, whatever it was, was bound to be expensive.

… And that’s the quote from Arthur Clarke, commenting Sagan’s words:

A third of century later, I do not recall Stanley’s immediate reaction to this excellent advice, but after abortive efforts during the next couple of years to design convincing aliens, he accepted Carl’s solution.”

See also:

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“I Have Found A New Kind Of Pencil — The Best I Have Ever Had!”

August 11, 2013 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The opening of Seth Abramovitch’s Hollywood Reporter article about that town’s strange obsession with the Blackwing 602, a pencil that went out of production in 1998 and whose supply continues to dwindle:

“In the spring of 1960, Vladimir Nabokov was living in a rented villa in Los Angeles’ Mandeville Canyon, hard at work adapting his novel Lolita into a screenplay for Stanley Kubrick. He wrote in four-hour stretches, planted in a lawn chair ‘among the roses and mockingbirds,’ he later wrote, ‘using lined index cards and a Blackwing pencil for rubbing out and writing anew the scenes I had imagined in the morning.’ With more than 1,000 cards to work with, the scribe found that his pencil arguably became his most trusted collaborator.

Nabokov isn’t alone in his devotion to the Blackwing 602, without question among the most fetishized writing instruments of all time. It counts among its cultish fan base some of the greatest creative geniuses of the 20th century, from John Steinbeck (‘I have found a new kind of pencil — the best I have ever had!’ he wrote) to Quincy Jones (the Thriller producer says he carries one under his sweater when making ‘continual fixes’ to his music) and Truman Capote (who stocked his nightstands with fresh boxes) to Stephen Sondheim, who has composed exclusively with Blackwings since the early 1960s.

The pencil even made its way onto television’s most object-obsessive series, AMC’s Mad Men, put there by TV director Tim Hunter, who says, ‘I just had always felt that these folks would be using Blackwings.’ Animators, including artists who drew such iconic characters as Bugs Bunny and Mickey Mouse, remain its most die-hard devotees — and earliest hoarders: The Blackwing 602 is becoming increasingly rare as it fast approaches its 80th birthday, with ostensibly only a few thousand in existence among the 13,000 that comprised its last lot in 1998, when the line was phased out.”

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“He’s Supposed To Have Gone To Lloyd’s, Taken An Insurance Against Martians Being Discovered Before The Film Was Released”

August 6, 2013 in Books, Excerpts, Film, Science/Tech | Permalink

In 1995, just as the Internet began entering the public consciousness with a fury, Tod Mesirow interviewed Arthur C. Clarke. Part of that discussion has now been posted at the Los Angeles Review of Books. An excerpt about 2001: A Space Odyssey:

“Tod Mesirow:

The idea of an intelligent computer, an artificial intelligence like HAL, do you think we’ll achieve that?

Arthur C. Clarke: 

Oh, I don’t think there’s any question of that. I think that the people that say we will never develop computer intelligence — they merely prove that some biological systems don’t have much intelligence.

Tod Mesirow:

What was it like to create the scene when HAL is dying in 2001?

Arthur C. Clarke:

Well, Danny Curry deserves most of the credit for that, and by the way, when I switch off my computer you hear HAL say, “My mind is going.” It happens every time I switch it off. [laughs]

Tod Mesirow:

Was 2001 an interesting experience? You’re planning what would happen if —

Arthur C. Clarke:

Well, it was, you know, a fascinating experience, for many reasons. I was moonlighting at Time Life where I was doing a book called Man and Space. This was in 1964 when the Apollo Program, you know, had been announced. But, no one really believed we would go to the moon and, still sort of had a skepticism. And also, Stanley and I had to outguess what would happen, I believe — this may not be true, maybe Stanley’s publicity department — he’s supposed to have gone to Lloyd’s, taken an insurance against Martians being discovered before the film was released. [laughs] Well, I don’t think — I don’t know how Lloyd’s would have carried the odds on that one. [laughs] So, anyway, we were writing the film, before we had any close-ups of the moon’s surface. We had to guess what it might be like, and there are all sorts of problems. I — we — I think we did pretty well. One or two mistakes. For instance, we show the moon as more rugged then in fact it turned out to be. It turned out to be sort of smooth and sort of sandblasted.”

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“It Was The First Time In My Life That I’d Gone Anywhere With A Sense Of Purpose”

July 18, 2013 in Excerpts, Film | Permalink

From a 1967 Paris Review interview conducted by Maggie Paley, Terry Southern discussing his first screenwriting job, on a little film called Dr. Strangelove:

“Terry Southern

It was the first time in my life that I’d gone anywhere with a sense of purpose. I mean, I’d always traveled, I’d made about ten trips back and forth, but just aimless, with no justification except having the G.I. Bill and using it as a means to be there. It was the first time I’d gone anywhere and been paid for it. It was very satisfying, very interesting, and almost unbelievable to be moving about like that.

Stanley himself is a strange kind of genius. I’d always had a notion that people in power positions in movies must be hacks and fools, and it was very impressive to meet someone who wasn’t. He thinks of himself as a ‘filmmaker’—his idol is Chaplin—and so he’s down on the idea of ‘director.’ He would like, and it’s understandable, to have his films just say, ‘A Film by Stanley Kubrick.’ He tries to cover the whole thing from beginning to end. Including the designing of the ads. He’s probably the only American director who works on big-budget pictures who has complete control of his movies.

Interviewer:

Strangelove was originally conceived as a melodrama, not a comedy. Did you work with Kubrick to restructure the whole thing, or were you able to just insert the jokes?

Terry Southern:

I knew what he wanted. It was a question of working together, rewriting each line, and changing the tone.

Interviewer:

When you started the project, you’d never written movie dialogue. You presumably didn’t know anything about how to write a screenplay.

Terry Southern:

Yes, I knew, because I like movies. And writing dialogue has always been easy for me.”

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“He Liked White Men Can’t Jump”

November 14, 2012 in Excerpts, Film | Permalink

Reddit has a new Ask Me Anything with Stanley Kubrick’s daughter Katharina and grandson Joe. If you read the blog regularly, you probably know I’m a little obsessed with Kubrick, whom I rate above all other filmmakers, even Wilder, Buñuel and Godard. A few exchanges with Katharina follow.

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Question:

Katharina, I don’t know how old you are, so I’m not sure if this is relevant or not. But what was your father like during filming as opposed in between films? Did he seem more stressed, or did he ever complain about so and so not being able to nail a take? Or was he pretty much always the same at home?

Also, any cool stories of you being on set with him or anything like that?

Katharina:

I’m nearly 59. Between films he did a lot of reading, caught up with viewing the videos of American football games that his sister used to send him. He was always working on improving print qualities, hiring directors to shoot the voice overs for films that had to be dubbed and checking on how his films were doing in other parts of the world. He never stopped tending his babies even once they were out in the world.

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Question:

What were Stanley’s favorite movies? (Aside from his own) 

Katharina:

He loved films. He admired the work of Bergman, Tarkovsky, Bunuel, Spike Lee, Speilberg, the list is long and varied.

Question:

I love the idea of Stanley Kubrick watching Do the Right Thing or She’s Gotta Have It. 

Katharina:

He liked White Men Can’t Jump. It was on TV and I asked him if I should watch it, and he said, “yeah that’s a good movie, you’ll enjoy it.”

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Question: 

What are your favorite memories of Stanley? What was he like around the house?

Katharina:

He was just a Dad who liked making tuna sandwiches and watching sport on TV. He was always working, and we learned a lot being around him.

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Two recent Kubrick posts:

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“He Is, In A Sense, Trying To Second-Guess The Future”

October 15, 2012 in Excerpts, Film, Science/Tech | Permalink

I posted a brief Jeremy Bernstein New Yorker piece about Stanley Kubrick that was penned in 1965 during the elongated production of 2001: A Space Odyssey. The following year the same writer turned out a much longer profile for the same magazine about the director and his sci-fi masterpiece. Among many other interesting facts, it mentions that MIT AI legend Marvin Minsky, who’s appeared on this blog many times, was a technical consultant for the film. An excerpt from “How About a Little Game?” (subscription required):

By the time the film appears, early next year, Kubrick estimates that he and [Arthur C.] Clarke will have put in an average of four hours a day, six days a week, on the writing of the script. (This works out to about twenty-four hundred hours of writing for two hours and forty minutes of film.) Even during the actual shooting of the film, Kubrick spends every free moment reworking the scenario. He has an extra office set up in a blue trailer that was once Deborah Kerr’s dressing room, and when shooting is going on, he has it wheeled onto the set, to give him a certain amount of privacy for writing. He frequently gets ideas for dialogue from his actors, and when he likes an idea he puts it in. (Peter Sellers, he says, contributed some wonderful bits of humor for Dr. Strangelove.)

In addition to writing and directing, Kubrick supervises every aspect of his films, from selecting costumes to choosing incidental music. In making 2001, he is, in a sense, trying to second-guess the future. Scientists planning long-range space projects can ignore such questions as what sort of hats rocket-ship hostesses will wear when space travel becomes common (in 2001 the hats have padding in them to cushion any collisions with the ceiling that weightlessness might cause), and what sort of voices computers will have if, as many experts feel is certain, they learn to talk and to respond to voice commands (there is a talking computer in 2001 that arranges for the astronauts’ meals, gives them medical treatments, and even plays chess with them during a long space mission to Jupiter–‘Maybe it ought to sound like Jackie Mason,’ Kubrick once said), and what kind of time will be kept aboard a spaceship (Kubrick chose Eastern Standard, for the convenience of communicating with Washington). In the sort of planning that NASA does, such matters can be dealt with as they come up, but in a movie everything is visible and explicit, and questions like this must be answered in detail. To help him find the answers, Kubrick has assembled around him a group of thirty-five artists and designers, more than twenty-five special effects people, and a staff of scientific advisers. By the time this picture is done, Kubrick figures that he will have consulted with people from a generous sampling of the leading aeronautical companies in the United States and Europe, not to mention innumerable scientific and industrial firms. One consultant, for instance, was Professor Marvin Minsky, of M.I.T., who is a leading authority on artificial intelligence and the construction of automata. (He is now building a robot at M.I.T. that can catch a ball.) Kubrick wanted to learn from him whether any of the things he was planning to have his computers do were likely to be realized by the year 2001; he was pleased to find out that they were.•

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“For The Greeks The Vast Stretches Of The Sea Must Have Had The Same Sort Of Mystery And Remoteness That Space Has For Our Generation”

October 14, 2012 in Excerpts, Film, Science/Tech | Permalink

Before 2001: A Space Odyssey became screen legend in 1968, Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke struggled forever to complete the project that was originally entitled, Journey Beyond the Stars. From a 1965 “Talk of the Town” piece by Jeremy Bernstein in the New Yorker (subscription required) about the work-in-progress three years before its release:

Our briefing session took place in the living room of Mr. Kubrick’s apartment. When we got there, Mr. Kubrick was talking on a telephone in the next room, Mr. Clarke had not yet arrived, and three lively Kubrick daughters–the eldest is eleven–were running in and out with several young friends. We settled ourselves in a large chair, and a few minuted later the doorbell rang. One of the little girls went to the door and asked, ‘Who is it?’ A pleasantly English-accented voice answered, through the door, “It’s Clarke,” and the girls began jumping up and down and saying, “It’s Clark Kent!”-a reference to another well-known science-fiction personality. They opened the door, and in walked Mr. Clarke, a cheerful-looking man in his forties. He was carrying several manila envelopes, which, it turned out, contained parts of Journey Beyond the Stars. Mr. Kubrick then came into the room carrying a thick pile of diagrams and charts, and looking like the popular conception of a nuclear physicist who has been interrupted in the middle of some difficult calculations. Mr. Kubrick and Mr. Clarke sat down side by side on a sofa, and we asked them about their joint venture.

Mr. Clarke said that one of the basic problems they’ve had to deal with is how to describe what they are trying to do. “Science-fiction films have always meant monsters and sex, so we have tried to find another term for our film,” said Mr. C.

“About the best we’ve been able to come up with is a space Odyssey–comparable in some ways to Homer’s Odyssey,” said Mr. K. ‘It occurred to us that for the Greeks the vast stretches of the sea must have had the same sort of mystery and remoteness that space has for our generation, and that the far-flung islands Homer’s wonderful characters visited were no less remote to them that the planets our spacemen will soon be landing on are to us. Journey also shares with the Odyssey a concern for wandering, and adventure.”•

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“They Give You Answers–Even If They’re Stupid Answers”

November 27, 2011 in Film, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Terry Gilliam, trying to ensure he never works in Hollywood again, explains the difference between Spielberg and Kubrick. (Thanks Open Culture.)

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“The Aliens Would Then Expect Him To Find Their Calling Card”

October 26, 2011 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

The year 2001: A Space Odyssey was released and a year before Apollo 11 landed on the moon, Stanley Kubrick was asked during a Playboy Interview what he thought we would find on the surface of our natural satellite. An excerpt:

“Playboy: What do you think we’ll find on the moon?

Kubrick: I think the most exciting prospect about the Moon is that if alien races have ever visited Earth in the remote past and left artifacts for man to discover in the future, they probably chose the airless lunar vacuum, where no deterioration would take place and an object could exist for millennia. It would be inevitable that as man evolved technologically, he would reach his nearest satellite and the aliens would then expect him to find their calling card–perhaps a message of greeting, a cache of knowledge or simply a cosmic burglar alarm signaling that another race had mastered space flight. This, of course, was the central situation of 2001.”

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“Universe,” Roman Kroitor and Colin Low’s 1960 short which informed 2001:

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“Two Astronauts Are Eating And At The Same Time Using Personal Tablet Computers”

September 19, 2011 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Apple claims that Samsung has ripped off design aspects of its iPad; Samsung has countered by charging Apple with lifting the iPad design from 2001: A Space Odyssey. Odd defense, which I doubt will work. From the legal paperwork, via disinfo:

“Attached hereto as Exhibit D is a true and correct copy of a still image taken from Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey. In a clip from that film lasting about one minute, two astronauts are eating and at the same time using personal tablet computers…As with the design claimed by the D’889 Patent, the tablet disclosed in the clip has an overall rectangular shape with a dominant display screen, narrow borders, a predominately flat front surface, a flat back surface (which is evident because the tablets are lying flat on the table’s surface), and a thin form factor.”

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Eating while using table computers:

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“If One Radiates Doom And Gloom About The Possibilities Of Technology, One Is In Danger Of Creating A Self-Fulfilling Prophecy About Self-Destruction”

June 8, 2011 in Excerpts, Film, Science/Tech, Videos | Permalink

Two excerpts from Arthur C. Clarke’s 1986 Playboy interview.

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“PLAYBOY: You’ve said that the famous opening sequence, in which the bone thrown into the air by the prehistoric man-apes becomes the space vehicle Discovery, came about by accident.

CLARKE: Yes, Stanley and I were trying to figure out that crucial transition. We were walking back to the studio in London and, for some reason, Stanley had a broomstick in his hand. He threw it up into the air, in a playful way, and he kept doing it, and it was at that moment that the idea of making the broomstick into the bone that gets turned into Discovery came about. I was afraid it was going to hit me in the head. [Laughs] So later we filmed it with some sort of bone. That shot was the only one in the movie done on location. It was shot just outside the studio. There was a platform built and, just beneath it, all the London buses were going by.”

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“PLAYBOY: In the postscript to your book Ascent to Orbit, you talk about technology quite a bit. You have a lot of technology in your own home—your John Deere computer “Archie,” your satellite dish, your Kaypro-II computer. Yet you write, “This power over time and space still seems a marvel to me, even though I have been preaching its advent for decades. But the next generation will take it completely for granted and wonder how we ever managed to run the world without it … which we never did. May these new tools help them to succeed where we failed so badly.” Do you still think that way?

CLARKE: [Pauses] Absolutely. That’s why I’m so delighted that kids these days are not using their computers strictly to play games but are using them to process information. Knowledge really is power, and computer technology has increased an individual’s potential for power considerably. I still think it’s one’s duty to be optimistic about the possibilities of that power, without being unrealistic. It’s just that if one radiates doom and gloom about the possibilities of technology, one is in danger of creating a self-fulfilling prophecy about self-destruction.”

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Bone becomes spaceship:

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Stanley Kubrick Photographs Chicago (1949)

March 29, 2011 in Photography, Urban Studies | Permalink

To see photos of the Windy City snapped for Look magazine in 1949 by the future filmmaker, go here.

Chicago-based bodybuilder Gene Jantzen and wife Pat give their 11-month-old a workout. (Image by Stanley Kubrick.)

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In 1966, Kubrick discusses becoming a pro photographer while still a teen:

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Classic DVD: The Killing (1956)

September 29, 2010 in Film | Permalink

Sterling Hayden's final role was in the 1982 Civil War TV miniseries, "The Blue and the Gray."

Stanley Kubrick’s first great film, The Killing is a 1956 horse-track heist caper that the director co-wrote with pulp legend Jim Thompson. While it has all the earmarks of a hard-boiled tale of grifters, there is also a devious sense of humor that would be one of the common threads in the filmmaker’s amazingly rangy, genre-jumping career.

Johnny Clay (Sterling Hayden) has just done five long years in prison for petty theft and the only lesson he has seemingly learned is to steal larger quantities of cash. He organizes a group of track employees, cops and others, all of whom have personal motivations for a bold theft that could net them hundreds of thousands of dollars each. But the elaborate plan has to go off without a hitch or it’ll be jail all around, And the crew may also have to deal with a few gun-toting opportunists who’ve been tipped off about the job.

One of the best performances is turned in by Timothy Carey, a great character actor and one of the oddest people in Hollywood history. Carey plays Nikki Arcane, a whacked-out, menacing sharpshooter recruited by Hayden to off a horse in the middle of a race. Nikki is a talented, off-kilter professional who truly relishes the sinister side of his work–which was also an appropriate description of Kubrick. (Available from Netflix and other outlets.)

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Film: “Kubrick,” Vanity Fair (1999)

April 28, 2010 in Excerpts, Film | Permalink

Kubrick photographed himself in the late 1940s with the help of a mirror, back when he was working for "Look" magazine.

I tend to divide people into two categories: Those who realize what an incredible genius Stanley Kubrick was, and other people I don’t like as much. The great website longform.org linked to Michael Herr’s excellent 1999 Vanity Fair piece (simply titled “Kubrick“) about his friend and collaborator, It was written right after the director’s death. Below are a few excerpts about Kubrick’s childhood and early career.

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Stanley hadn’t really been Bar Mitzvahed. He was barely making it in school; he couldn’t do junior-high English, let alone Hebrew, and besides, Dr. and Mrs. Kubrick weren’t very religious, and anyway, Stanley didn’t want to. He was not what anybody would have called well rounded. From the day he entered grade school in 1934, his attendance record had been a mysterious tissue of serial and sustained absences, his discipline nonexistent or at least nonapparent, his grades shocking. He’d received Unsatisfactory on “Works and Plays Well with Others,” “Respects Rights of Others,” and, inevitably, “Personality.” He did all right in physics, but he graduated from high school with a 70 average, and college was out of the question. At 17 he was already working as a freelance photographer for Look magazine, and he joined the staff, and he played a lot of chess, and read a lot of books, and otherwise arranged for his own higher education, as all smart people do.

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It’s fair only as far as it goes; just as he was multidisciplined, he was variously obsessive, and not fastidious about picking up information, and not afraid of whatever the information might be. Nobody who really thinks he’s smarter than everyone else could ask as many questions as he always did. He was beating the patzers in the park, working for Lookmagazine, sometimes using a series of still photos to tell a story, sometimes taking pictures of people like Dwight Eisenhower and George Grosz, Montgomery Clift, Frank Sinatra and Joe DiMaggio (and, I’m sure, keeping his eyes and ears open), reading 10 or 20 books a week, and trying to see every movie ever made. There was definitely such a thing as a bad movie, but there was no movie not worth seeing. As a kid he’d been part of the neighborhood multitude that poured ritually, communally, in and out of Loew’s Paradise and the RKO Fordham two or three times a week, and now he haunted the Museum of Modern Art and the few foreign-film revival houses, the very underground Cinema 16, and the triple-feature houses along 42nd Street.

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Reportedly he was already careless, even reckless, in his appearance, mixing his plaids in wild shirt, jacket and necktie combinations never seen on the street before, disreputable trousers, way-out accidental hairdos. He started infiltrating what- ever film facilities were in the city in those days, hanging around cutting rooms, labs, equipment stores, asking questions: How do you do that? and What would happen if you did this instead? and How much do you think it would cost if … ? He was jazz-mad, and went to the clubs, and a Yankees fan, so he went to the ball games too, all of this in New York in the late 40s and early 50s, a smart, spacey, wide-awake kid like that, it’s no wonder he was such a hipster, a 40s-bred, 50s-minted, tough-minded, existential, highly evolved classic hipster. His view and his temperament were much closer to Lenny Bruce’s than to any other director’s, and this was not merely a recurring aspect of his. He had lots of modes and aspects, but Stanley was a hipster all the time.

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Look Magazine (1937-1971)

February 20, 2010 in Misc. | Permalink

On an 1949 assignment for "Look" magazine, young Stanley Kubrick photographs showgirl Rosemary Williams. Seems like a good gig.

Look magazine was never quite able to steal the spotlight from its equally photo-rich big-city competitor, Life, but the Iowa-based publication waged a good fight with a keen eye for talent and tons of amazing pictures.

After all, they gave a young photographer named Stanley Kubrick more than 300 assignments. And the inaugural issue in 1937 was no shrinking violet: It contained a feature on a Japanese brothel and a pictorial of hermaphrodites. The magazine was founded by Iowa newspaper publishers and brothers John and Gardner Cowles, Jr. The duo were not exactly prepared for the response to the magazine. An excerpt from a 1937 article in Time:

“When brothers John and  Gardner Cowles Jr., publishers of the Des Moines Register and Des Moines Tribune, started Look ten months ago they had no idea whether they would sell 60,000 or 600,000 copies. First issue of the 10¢ monthly gravure picture magazine was a 705,000 sellout, and the present 1,700,000 circulation came in generous leaps and bounds as the monthly became a fortnightly.”

The sad truth is that when Look went out of business in 1971 and Life the following year (for the first time), they both were still very popular periodicals, with millions of subscribers. But advertising had migrated to TV, so the ambitious photojournalism was no longer economically feasible. It’s all cyclical, huh?

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Gone But Not Forgotten: The Flea House

January 6, 2010 in Books, Film, Urban Studies | Permalink

Just a pawn in the game of life.

Watching the ball drop in Times Square, as many of us recently did, always makes me think of one of my favorite films, Stanley Kubrick’s The Killing. The brilliant 1956 crime story doesn’t have any key scenes that take place on New Year’s Eve, but it has one that’s set right near the New Amsterdam Theatre where the ball drops, in a dingy chess club of yore called the Flea House. For much of its existence (which began during the Great Depression), you could rent a chess board at the dive for 10 cents an hour. Elder chess master Bill Hook recalls the Flea House in Hooked on Chess: A Memoir. Jeremy Silman, an expert on the game, writes about Hook’s book on his site:

“Much of Hook’s twenties and early thirties were spent in abject poverty in New York City. His health precluded steady work and his painting hadn’t taken off but Hook had one good thing that kept him going. Known by different names at different times — The New York Chess and Checker Club, Fischer’s, Fursa’s and finally the Flea House, the game playing establishment on 42nd street near Times Square was  a home away from home for many lost souls. Hooked on Chess has many stories of the characters that passed through this 24-hour New York City institution that ran from the Depression until the early 1970s. Some of the strongest players in the United States like George Treysman and Abe Kupchik were regulars when Hook first started going, but there were also plenty of weak players and odds games for various stakes were always being contested. According to Hooked on Chess, it was the clientele who created the special atmosphere. Certainly it was not the mismatched furniture or smoked stained walls that did. The tables that chess, bridge and various games were played on were frequently covered in a pile of ashes and it was not uncommon to see people sleeping at night in the club. Hook gives a lengthy and moving testimonial to the many people he met daily at the club.”

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