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The Written Word and the Very Visual Stanley Kubrick  v i n c e n t l o b r u t t o 31 Film director Stanley Kubrick (1928–99) was a consummate visualist. Although he will be remembered for the astonishing cinematic images he created, his pictorial obsessions did not begin with the camera—they emerged from the word. Kubrick was a man who lived only for family and the movies, but his passion for Wlmmaking was nurtured and fueled by literature . Kubrick inXuenced generations of Wlmmakers raised on moving image narratives, yet Stanley Kubrick’s personal cinematic journey began with his head buried in books in the Bronx, New York. Kubrick’s father Jacques, a physician, maintained a large library where Stanley spent hours reading and dreaming. In addition to reading, Stanley ’s father also introduced Stanley to his two other lifelong passions: chess and photography. Kubrick was a poor student, distracted from his studies by the wonders of still photography. A photo sale to Look magazine began his career as a wunderkind still photographer. The picture captured a forlorn New York newsstand operator and featured bold tabloid headlines announcing the death of the beloved American president Franklin Delano Roosevelt. After graduating from William Howard Taft High School, Kubrick and his friend Alexander Singer walked the streets of New York City’s Wlm district in Times Square in search of inspiration and contacts. Singer had a detailed notebook Wlled with ideas for a Wlm adaptation of Homer’s Iliad under his arm and tucked under Kubrick’s was a volume of abbreviated novels of classic literature. Animated Wlm creator Faith Hubley remembers seeing the young men on their quest. “Stanley would stop people at 1600 Broadway and say, ‘Dostoyevsky, what do you think?’ He couldn’t pronounce the names.”1 Another member of the New York Wlm community from the Wfties remembers Kubrick with a treasured tome that contained every possible variation of dramatic narrative. As a Look photojournalist, Kubrick rendered stories with his camera. With a series of images, the young photographer created a visual narrative —he was in fact searching for the movies. Kubrick’s Wrst encounter with a professional writer was a pairing with Look staV writer G. Warren Scholat Jr. They did not collaborate on the process of connecting words with images, but when Kubrick learned that Scholat had worked for the Walt Disney Studio, the quiet photographer talked to him about his plan to become a Wlmmaker. Kubrick and Singer decided to make a short Wlm together. Alex had written a short story to adapt and direct, Stanley was to be the director of photography. Singer described the story this way: “It’s about some teenagers at the beach and a wistful love, a chance encounter that doesn’t materialize. Very much a teenage experience.” The two young men met on the top of a Fifth Avenue double-decker bus to discuss the project. Singer handed Kubrick the script and continuity sketches, and speciWed every camera setup for the short. “This is beautiful, Alex, you should make it yourself,” Kubrick responded. “You’ve just taken away all of the choices from me and what’s left is to sort of Wll the frame—and while that takes some photographic knowledge and some doing, the real creativity and the real choices have already been made.”2 Kubrick made it clear early on that as a cinematic storyteller he had to have complete control of the story, script, and visualization. Stanley Kubrick proceeded to create his own short, Day of the Fight (1951), his Wrst Wlm. The documentary was based on a photostory he shot for Look. “PrizeWghter” was a study of twenty-four-year-old middle-weight boxer Walter Cartier. The title of the short came from a Look headline, “THE DAY OF A FIGHT.” The concept of following a Wghter’s day hour by hour evolved from Kubrick’s photos documenting the process of Cartier preparing for battle in the ring. The Wlm has no synchronous dialogue. Kubrick developed the narrative working closely with Cartier, constantly asking him questions about the details of his life.3 Day of the Fight was sold to RKO-Pathe for their This Is America Series and released in 1951. The script is credited to Robert Rein, but the narration spoken by Douglas Edwards, the veteran CBS newsman, reveals the voice of a young Wlm director who was already grappling with serious themes. Heavily inXuenced by the...

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