About: Stanley Kubrick
(Excerpts from Playboy magazine, September 1968)

Stanley Kubrick was born in the Bronx in 1928, the son of a doctor who still practiced at the time 2001 was made. Kubrick's adolescent ambition to become a jazz drummer was sidetracked at the age of 13, when his father gave him his first camera—a Graflex. Habitually quiet and introspective, young Kubrick made few friends, but his photographic talent blossomed rapidly. In 1945, two months before he graduated from Taft High School in the Bronx (with a lukewarm 67 average), he snapped a picture of a weeping news dealer surrounded by papers announcing F.D.R.'s death, submitted the photo to Look magazine, and received $25 for his first published work. Shortly thereafter, Look also gave Kubrick his first job; he became one of the youngest photographers in the magazine's history.
Kubrick stayed with the magazine until 1950, supplementing his modest income by playing chess in Washington Square Park at 25 cents a game (he is still a superior player), but he was becoming increasingly intrigued with cinema. His first film, Day of the Flight, was a short documentary about prizefighter Walter Cartier. It cost all of $3900 to make, but Kubrick soon found he couldn't retrieve even his investment. Finally he sold the work to RKO-Path at a $100 loss. After one more unheralded documentary, Kubrick decided to try his hand—and his luck—at a feature-length film. He quit his job at Look, raised $20,000—mostly from his father and uncle—and began shooting Fear and Desire, the story of four soldiers, isolated behind enemy lines during World War II, who gain insights about themselves in their struggle to rejoin their outfit. Kubrick now regards the film as pretentious and amateurish, but many critics welcomed it as a remarkably sensitive first effort. Though rejected by all major distributors, Fear and Desire toured the art-house circuit and eventually broke even. After a decidedly commercial murder mystery called Killer's Kiss, Kubrick went to work on The Killing, an intricately contrived melodrama involving a racetrack. The film starred Sterling Hayden and won Kubrick his first widespread recognition. As Time magazine breathlessly declared: "At 27, writer-director Stanley Kubrick has shown more audacity with dialog and camera than Hollywood has seen since the obstreperous Orson Welles." Time subsequently called The Killing one of the ten best films of 1956, but the movie proved a box-office dud. Next page