Stanley Kubrick
Stanley Kubrick created masterpieces on film. Born in New York in 1928, Kubrick's first break came when Look magazine printed his photograph of a news vendor, distraught and surrounded by headlines, announcing President Roosevelt’s death; Kubrick was then sixteen. By the age of seventeen, he had a steady freelance job taking photos for Look. After shooting a photo essay on boxing, Kubrick used his salary, together with cash earned playing competitive chess in Greenwich Village, to make a documentary film, Day of the Fight in 1950. The following year, RKO bought the film and showed it as part of the This is America series at New York’s Paramount Theatre. Two more documentary films followed, Flying Padre for another RKO series, and The Seafarers, a half-hour industrial for the Seafarers International Union. Kubrick raised thirteen thousand dollars from family and friends to create a short feature film about war, Fear and Desire. The film did not make back its money, and Kubrick suppressed later showings of his first feature. However, he had carved out a niche, that of the independent filmmaker. His next film, Killer’s Kiss (1955), was sold to United Artists. The following year he made The Killing (1956) featuring a young Sterling Hayden, which led to his major film Paths of Glory (1957) with Kirk Douglas. After two years of unrealized projects, a situation Kubrick would experience throughout his career, he replaced Anthony Mann as the director on Spartacus (1960), a job offered by Douglas who was the star and producer on the film. Each film to follow has become a classic: Lolita (1962), from Nabokov’s novel which was shot in England where Kubrick would stay and work for the rest of his life; Dr. Strangelove or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964) with Peter Sellers in three different roles; 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), co-written with Arthur C. Clarke, from his short story The Sentinel, which has only forty minutes of dialogue in a three hour film; A Clockwork Orange (1971); Barry Lyndon (1975); Full Metal Jacket (1987); The Shining (1980) from Stephen King’s novel, although King bought back the story's rights to make a television movie that King felt was a better representation of his book; and Eyes Wide Shut (1999). Although Kubrick was nominated for best director, best screenplay, and best picture Oscars a total of twelve times, amazingly he only won one - for special effects in 2001. Kubrick did receive the D.W. Griffith Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Directors Guild of America and the Golden Lion Award from the Venice International Film Festival. Kubrick died in 1999 after turning in his final cut on Eyes Wide Shut.
