Stanley Kubrick

by David Mikics

  Kubrick had trouble with the Hollywood veteran Russell Metty, his cinematographer. Metty wasn’t used to a director looking over his shoulder, insisting on a particular lens or camera angle. While Kubrick gazed through the camera, Metty made fun of the youngster by crouching behind him and pretending to peer through his Zippo lighter as if it were a viewfinder. Notoriously, Metty at one point growled over his coffee cup of Jack Daniel’s, “Get that little Jew-boy from the Bronx off my crane.”25 But Kubrick, just thirty years old and looking even younger, kept his cool, and continued telling Metty what to do. Spartacus’s camerawork is rhythmic and artful, especially in the gladiatorial battles, and this is Kubrick’s achievement more than Metty’s.

  Kubrick may have sidelined Metty, but he relied heavily on Saul Bass, who storyboarded the final battle and designed the gladiatorial school for Spartacus. Bass, known for his title sequences for Hitchcock movies, was a brilliant designer who favored geometric formations for the Roman armies. Bass came up with the inspired idea of having the slave armies roll burning logs at Crassus’s Romans.

  The stolid, wholehearted epic feel of Spartacus mostly rules out Kubrick’s characteristic pessimism and black humor. But at times it does look like a Kubrick movie. When Crassus (Olivier) tries to seduce the slave Antoninus (Curtis) with a double entendre about liking both snails and oysters (a scene that Universal, fearing the censors’ disapproval, cut from the U.S. release), Kubrick shows the two men from a distance. He told Ginna, “The whole thing is shot in a long shot through a kind of filmy curtain which covers his bathtub, and the figures are only about half the height of the screen. And by doing this, I think we achieve the effect of somebody [the viewer] sort of eavesdropping from the next room.”26

  The scene ends in a sharply pointed way. While Crassus gives a speech about the obligation to submit to eternal Rome, we realize that he is talking to himself: Antoninus has left to join the slave revolt. Kubrick’s devastating ironic touch is visible here as in few other places in the movie.

  Kubrick also brought out superb acting in a scene between Douglas and Woody Strode, who played the Ethiopian slave Draba. The two men are waiting to fight to the death in front of Crassus and his entourage. In a silent and excruciatingly tense sequence, the camera alternates close-ups between them, shot-reverse-shot. Draba gives Douglas a cold, threatening smile, but then spares him during their battle. Instead of telling Strode what to do in the scene, Kubrick played Prokofiev for him, and the music helped Strode conjure up the Ethiopian gladiator’s monumental dignity. Kubrick sometimes liked to play music for his actors to guide them into a scene: it was, he said, “a device used, you know, by silent film actors—they all had their own violinists, who would play for them during the takes.”27

  Spartacus was “the only film I wasn’t happy with,” Kubrick told the interviewer Danielle Heymann. “First of all I told Kirk, when he showed me the script, what I felt was not right about it, and he said, ‘Yes, yes, yes, you are so right,’ but nothing ever changed.” Swayed by Trumbo, Douglas didn’t in the end “change any of the things that were dumb.”28 At one point Douglas took Kubrick to see his psychoanalyst so he could better understand the star’s inner life. But that didn’t reduce their sparring over the film.

  Douglas wanted a robust, plainly heroic Spartacus. In a letter to Stan Margulies, then a Bryna production aide, Douglas worried that Spartacus suffered too much in the script as it stood: his “joylessness” was a problem. “I think perhaps we err when we make Spartacus almost too-human with his doubts and fears,” Douglas added. Spartacus was doing too much “counter-punch[ing],” Douglas thought, and he worried that the hero wouldn’t “bring the crowd to its feet with a roar.” Douglas summed up: “Spartacus, I am trying to say, must personally convince the audience that this rebellion is good. . . . Merely to start the ball rolling, and to roll it as far as one man has power to roll it, is resounding, stimulating and joyful.”29

  Douglas didn’t get his way entirely. Kubrick’s own downbeat sense of Spartacus as headed for failure is a key element in the movie. Spartacus is not really a joyful rebel. Though he glows with genial satisfaction when he gazes at the men and women he is leading, he is more often grim than exuberant. The slaves celebrate no victories, instead losing all their battles against Rome, and the revolt is continually shadowed by the defeat we know will happen in the end.30

  Kubrick wanted Spartacus to be plagued by misgivings about the human costs of revolt, as he is in Arthur Koestler’s novel The Gladiators (1939), which he read during production. Ustinov supported Kubrick’s idea of a complex, doubt-stricken Spartacus. In a letter he wrote to Kubrick sometime during the production, Ustinov bluntly disagreed with Douglas’s plan to simplify the movie’s hero. He complained that Spartacus’s “doubts, his bewilderments have been sacrificied [sic] for the sake of activity, of crisp decision. Nothing is more boring theatrically than the man who knows what he wants and gets it.”31 Ustinov’s letter surely reminded the director that in a Kubrick movie the hero is nearly always confused, whereas Spartacus seems unusually clear-minded.

  Ustinov also told Kubrick that the film should focus on the corrupt, labyrinthine nature of Roman politics, instead of portraying Rome as “proud . . . majestic and intractable.” (Kubrick, who was reading Sallust and Plutarch during shooting, must have agreed.) The film’s picture of political intrigue wasn’t working, Ustinov argued, because the Roman factions were “plot[ting] in platitudes.” Crassus was a disappointment to Ustinov because “his desire to understand Spartacus seems to have become fretful and constipated rather than mysterious and troubling, as it once was.”

  The corruption that Ustinov attributes to Rome often appears when Kubrick depicts the world of the powerful, as in Paths of Glory, Dr. Strangelove, A Clockwork Orange, Barry Lyndon, and Full Metal Jacket. So Kubrick must have been sympathetic to Ustinov’s point of view. But Spartacus turned out much simpler than Ustinov wanted. The hero is not plagued by doubts, and his chief Roman antagonist, Crassus, instead of being an intriguing and repellent man of power like Broulard in Paths of Glory, merely spouts shallow conservative clichés about Rome’s eternal greatness. In a misplaced topical twist, Trumbo made Crassus at the end into a McCarthy-like figure, hunting “enemies of the state” and crowing, “Lists of the disloyal have been compiled.”

  Kubrick, an adept handler of actors, was put to the test on the Spartacus set. In addition to battling with Douglas, he also had to soothe a very discontented Olivier. In June, Kubrick wrote to Olivier apologizing for not being able to come by for a farewell drink after the end of shooting. “I hope that when you see the finished film,” Kubrick wrote, “you will be less disturbed about certain things than [you] are now. In any case, I should like to thank you for the decent way you behaved about the things with which you were in such disagreement.”32

  Spartacus at times displays a wholesome, populist tinge utterly uncharacteristic of Kubrick. Pauline Kael described Spartacus’s slaves as “a giant kibbutz on the move,” and so they are, with toddlers playing, men roasting meat, women weaving, and all caring for each other, a heartfelt antidote to Roman cruelty and decadence.33 This antihistorical hokum, supplied by Trumbo and Douglas, could not have been pleasing to Kubrick’s gimlet eye.

  Kubrick could not subtly express irony at the hero’s expense in Spartacus as he had done in Paths of Glory. But he did bristle at one key crowd-pleaser. Kubrick disliked the movie’s most famous moment, the “I am Spartacus” scene, when Spartacus’s fellow slaves conceal his identity from the Romans by each declaring himself the man sought.

  The movie’s final scene does look like genuine Kubrick. Spartacus and his rebellious slaves hang from crucifixes as far the eye can see. Varinia (Jean Simmons) shows her husband their baby and tells him, “This is your son. He is free, Spartacus, he is free, he is free.” Now comes what might be the film’s best moment: the tortured Spartacus, nailed to his cross, says nothing. Spartacus refuses the Hollywood ending that Varinia asks f
or. Rather than agreeing that his quest for freedom lives on in his child, he remains locked in the pain of defeat.

  Kubrick had just become a father when he filmed this scene. Anya, Stanley’s first child with Christiane, was born on April 1, 1959 (another daughter, Vivian, arrived the following August, a few months before Spartacus was released). Kubrick remembered standing outside the hospital room wondering, “ ‘What am I doing here?’ and then you go in and look down at the face of your child and—zap!—the most ancient programming takes over and your response is one of wonder and joy and pride.”34 The dying Spartacus, another new father, has a despairing response instead. Kubrick was careful to cordon off his personal feeling about paternity from the finale of his movie.

  While editing Spartacus, Kubrick, relieved that shooting was over, let off steam by making mild mischief. “Stanley used to draw all kinds of porno pictures on my shoes,” said editor Robert Lawrence.35 During breaks he played stickball in the Universal New York Street stage set, and in the editing room he liked to bounce a tennis ball against the wall, like Jack in The Shining.

  Kubrick and his crew spent nine months of postproduction work on the sound for Spartacus. Kubrick was meticulous about the sound effects, demanding that each sound be “panned,” or placed, precisely right. Recording engineer Don Rogers remembered, “Every footstep, every bang, every crash . . . it took hundreds of hours to pan that stuff—it was incredible.”36 The work took place during the wee hours of the night, starting at 7 PM, with Kubrick arriving about 11 PM and the sound team breaking for lunch at 2 AM.

  When Spartacus premiered in October 1960, the gossip columnist Hedda Hopper complained that the movie was “written by a Commie,” but she had little effect on ticket sales. One night President Kennedy even snuck out of the White House in the middle of a snowstorm to see it, as part of a pitch for keeping movie productions in the United States.

  Spartacus was made in Technirama, a widescreen process that involved running 35mm film horizontally through the camera. The panoramic visual splendor of the film, along with its blockbuster-style emotional cheesiness, spelled box office success. The movie trotted out many of the well-worn Hollywood tropes: righteous indignation (a Kirk Douglas specialty), solidarity with the underdog, the tenderness of budding romance.

  Spartacus made a mint for Universal. But Hollywood spectacular would never again be Kubrick’s brand. His next project was by contrast a bold taboo breaker: Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita.

  “How did they ever make a movie of Lolita?” the film’s trailer asked when it came out in June 1962. It was a good question. Nabokov’s shocking novel showcases a louche European, middle-aged Humbert Humbert, who preys on delectable prepubescent girls. Transplanted from Paris to Ramsdale, an American suburb, Humbert boards in the house of a chattering, self-absorbed widow named Charlotte Haze. Twelve-year-old Lolita, Charlotte’s daughter, proves to be the perfect nymphet, and helpless Humbert targets her avidly. Charlotte falls in love with Humbert, marries him, and quickly dies in a freak accident, leaving Humbert free to have his affair with Lolita. After she disappears and leaves him crushed, Humbert tracks down his nemesis Clare Quilty, who stole Lolita from him. The novel ends (and Kubrick’s film begins, in a flashback) when Humbert shoots Quilty.

  Lolita was a succès de scandale in Paris and then in America, where it appeared in 1958. But it seemed far too controversial for Hollywood. It was, after all, a book full of sexual details, narrated by a charming antihero who glories in his affair with a twelve-year-old girl.

  Harris and Kubrick bought the rights to Lolita in the fall of 1958 from Nabokov’s agent, Irving “Swifty” Lazar. It wasn’t cheap: Harris-Kubrick shelled out seventy-five thousand dollars for the first-year option on the book, and promised another seventy-five thousand for screen rights. To finance this purchase, Harris and Kubrick sold the rights to The Killing to United Artists. Meanwhile, Nabokov’s novel had hit the New York Times best-seller list: it was number one by the end of September.

  When Douglas heard that Harris and Kubrick were planning to film Nabokov’s novel, he shrugged off their obligation to Bryna. Douglas was sure that Lolita would never get made because censors would stand in the way, so he let the two men buy out their end of the contract in exchange for Kubrick agreeing to direct Spartacus.

  Nabokov turned down the offer to write the Lolita screenplay, so Kubrick enlisted Calder Willingham, who had first told him about the book. Unhappy with the result, Kubrick wrote cuttingly to his old scriptwriting partner, “I hate to sound like old Marlon but you seem entrenched in your style of having the actors say what the scene is about”: Willingham, Kubrick charged, was “explain[ing] in dialog what should be acted out and left to the audience to discover.”37 Like every great film director, Kubrick wanted to tell stories in pictures rather than words, and he wanted his dialogue spare, even from the florid and eloquent Humbert. Willingham’s response was lacerating. Reminding Kubrick that he had brought Lolita to his attention in the first place, an idea, he said, that would make the director a rich man for life, Willingham called him vengeful and ungrateful.38

  With Willingham gone, Kubrick was relieved to learn that Nabokov had changed his mind and agreed to write the script But the producer Martin Russ was not so sure, asking Kubrick, “Has Nabokov written for films? Does he have a knowledge of films and cinematic construction? . . . Do you intend to teach Nabokov this cinematic outlook yourself? Will he be taught?”39 Russ’s doubts were well-founded: Nabokov’s script reads more like a long, drawn-out riff on his novel than a conventional screenplay.

  By the first day of March 1960 the novelist was already in Hollywood and at work on the screenplay, hunting butterflies in the morning and scribbling on his notecards in the afternoons. Meanwhile, Swifty Lazar introduced Nabokov and his wife, Vera, to some shining stars, including Marilyn Monroe and John Wayne. When Nabokov innocently asked Wayne, “And what do you do?” he answered humbly, “I’m in pictures.”40

  “You couldn’t make it. You couldn’t lift it,” Jimmy Harris said years later about the four hundred–page screenplay that Nabokov completed in June.41 Kubrick warned the novelist that his script would make a seven-hour movie, so Nabokov delivered a shortened version in September.

  In the end Kubrick so heavily revised Nabokov’s script that it was hardly recognizable. This was a good thing. Nabokov’s screenplay for Lolita begins with Humbert’s dead mother (“picnic, lightning”) rising into the clouds like Mary Poppins, holding a parasol. This kind of sardonic whimsy did not appeal to Kubrick. But he preferred not to tussle with the eminent author, so he kept his distance during Nabokov’s stint in LA. In the end Kubrick gave Nabokov sole screenwriting credit for the picture, reasoning that reviewers would be less likely to accuse him of mutilating a modern classic if they thought that Nabokov himself was responsible for the gaps between novel and film.

  When Nabokov saw Lolita a few days before its official release at the end of May 1962, he “discovered that Kubrick was a great director, that his Lolita was a first-rate film with magnificent actors, and that only ragged odds and ends of my script had been used.” Still, Nabokov was delighted by some of the movie’s inspirations, like the ping-pong match between Humbert and Quilty. But he watched the film with only “reluctant pleasure,” annoyed by Kubrick’s considerable departures from his screenplay.42

  Casting Lolita took some time. David Niven wanted to play Humbert, but his agent vetoed the idea as too risqué. Another candidate was Laurence Olivier, who wrote to Kubrick in December 1959 that he couldn’t see how Nabokov’s “brilliant, original and witty descriptive powers” could be transferred to the screen.43 But he still asked for a first look at any script. Then Olivier’s agent, like Niven’s, said no: playing Humbert would hurt his client’s image. Finally, James Mason, who admired Nabokov’s novel, agreed to take the part. Mason had a few years earlier given a heartbreaking performance in A Star Is Born, as a fading middle-aged man who ends up playing second fiddle to the young s
tarlet he loves—not unlike the Lolita story as Kubrick tells it.

  With Mason cast, Harris and Kubrick had no trouble finding a distributor: Associated Artists, headed by an old school pal, Kenneth Hyman, and Hyman’s father, Eliot. (Warner Bros had wanted the film, but the studio demanded final say on creative decisions, which was too much for Kubrick to swallow.)

  Harris and Kubrick decided to make the movie in England, where they could write off a substantial amount of the cost if 80 percent of the workers on Lolita were U.K. subjects. This was the start of Kubrick’s artistic exile to Britain, where it was so much cheaper to make movies than LA or New York.

  Now Kubrick had to find his Lolita. Harris had told Kubrick they might be able to get Brigitte Bardot for the role, but her over-the-top sexiness was not what the director ordered. Kubrick presented Tuesday Weld to Nabokov, who nixed her (he had enlisted Nabokov’s help in casting the film). Then, in June 1960, Kubrick noticed a fourteen-year-old actress named Sue Lyon, who had appeared on TV and in commercials. “She was cool and non-giggly. . . . She was enigmatic without being dull,” Kubrick remembered about Lyon’s screen test. As for Nabokov, he was instantly convinced when he saw Lyon’s picture: “No doubt about it; she is the one,” he said.44 Nabokov also gave the nod to Shelley Winters, Kubrick’s choice for Charlotte Haze.

  Lyon, who was accompanied by her mother to Elstree Studios, had a snappy wit both on and off the set. The Kubrick archives contain a funny letter from Lyon, who called herself “Head Pupil” and offered Jimmy Harris the job of “superintendent of Elstree School for Girls”: “Your salary will be ten (10) pieces of gum per week so you can cope with our excellent student body.”45

  Kubrick molded Lyon’s performance. In some early notes he wrote, “Lolita—moods of naivete and deception, charm and vulgarity, blue sulks and rosy mirth, disorganized boredom, intense, sprawling, droopy, dopey-eyed, goofing off—diffused dreaming in a boyish hoodlum way.” Later on he added that she should have “a certain quality of hardness,” “sulky, tentative and cagey.” She was to be “a willowy, angular, ballet school type,” “enigmatic, intriguing, indifferent and American.”46 Under Kubrick’s guidance, Lyon came to embody the multifaceted, sour-sweet American Lolita that the director envisioned in his notes.