Kubrick

Stanley Kubrick (July 26, 1928 – March 7, 1999) was an influential and acclaimed film director and producer considered among the greatest of the 20th century. He directed a number of highly acclaimed and sometimes controversial films. more...

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Kubrick was noted for the scrupulous care with which he chose his subjects, his slow method of working, the variety of genres in his movies and his reclusive personality about his films and personal life.

Early life

Stanley Kubrick was born on July 26, 1928 at the Lying-In Hospital in Manhattan, the first of two children born to Jacques Leonard Kubrick (1901–1985) and his wife Gertrude (née Perveler; 1903–1985); his sister, Barbara, was born in 1934. Jacques Kubrick, whose parents were of Jewish Austrian origin, was a doctor. At Stanley's birth, the Kubricks lived in an apartment at 2160 Clinton Avenue in The Bronx.

Kubrick's father taught him chess at age twelve; the game remained a life-long obsession. When Stanley was thirteen years old, Jacques Kubrick bought him a Graflex camera, triggering Kubrick's fascination with still photography. He was also interested in jazz, attempting a brief career as a drummer.

Kubrick attended William Howard Taft High School 1941–1945. He was a poor student with a meager 67 grade average. On graduation from high school in 1945, when soldiers returning from the Second World War crowded colleges, his poor grades eliminated hopes of higher education. Later in life, Kubrick spoke disdainfully of his education and of education in general, maintaining that nothing about school interested him.

In high school, he was chosen official school photographer for a year. Eventually, he sought jobs on his own, and by graduation time had sold a photographic series to Look magazine in NYC. Kubrick supplemented his income playing \"chess for quarters\" in Washington Square Park and in various Manhattan chess clubs. He registered for night school at the City College to improve his grade-point average. He worked as a freelance photographer for Look, becoming an apprentice photographer in 1946, and later a full-time staff photographer.

During his Look magazine years, on May 29, 1948, Kubrick married Toba Metz (b. 1930) and they lived in Greenwich Village, divorcing in 1951. It was then that Kubrick began frequenting film screenings at the Museum of Modern Art and in the cinemas of New York City. He was particularly inspired by the complex, fluid camera movement of Max Ophüls, whose films influenced Kubrick's later visual style.

Many early-period (1945–1950) photographs by Kubrick were published in the book \"Drama and Shadows\" (2005, Phaidon Press).

Film career and later life

Early works

In 1951, Kubrick's friend, Alex Singer, persuaded him to start making short documentaries for the March of Time, a provider of newsreels to movie theatres. Kubrick agreed, and independently financed Day of the Fight (1951). Although the distributor went out of business that year, Kubrick sold Day of the Fight to RKO Pictures for a profit of one hundred dollars. Kubrick quit his job at Look magazine and began working on his second short documentary, Flying Padre (1951), funded by RKO. A third film, The Seafarers (1953), Kubrick's first color film, was a 30-minute promotional short film for the Seafarers' International Union. These three films constitute Kubrick's only surviving work in the documentary genre (he was involved in other similar shorts which have been lost, most notably World Assembly of Youth). He also was second unit director on an episode about the life of Abraham Lincoln for the Omnibus television programme. The Seafarers was announced to be released on an official DVD, but never was; none of these shorts has ever been officially released, though they are widely bootlegged, and clips are used in the documentary Stanley Kubrick: A Life In Pictures.

Read more at Wikipedia.org