Chapter 1The Bronx, 1945

Foreword

I started this book intending to write about the takes, and I was wrong about them, and being wrong about them is what the book turned out to be for.

Like everybody, I knew the number. One hundred and twenty-seven takes of Shelley Duvall backing up a staircase with a bat, listed in the Guinness Book of Records for four decades as the most-retaken scene in cinema history, quoted in every profile of Stanley Kubrick ever written, and functioning as the shorthand for the whole of him — the perfectionist, the tyrant, the man who would not stop.

In July 2020, Guinness quietly changed the entry. The new figure was a hundred and forty-eight, and it was attached to a different scene entirely. Nobody explained the revision.

Then, in 2023, Lee Unkrich counted from the production's own continuity records — paper, held in the Stanley Kubrick Archive at the London College of Communication — and found that the film's true maximum was sixty-six takes, for the long dolly move that carries Jack and Wendy into the Gold Ballroom.

Three numbers, for the same legend, and only the last of them counted from anything.

I want to be exact about what that did and did not do to my subject. It did not exonerate him. Sixty-six takes of a single camera move is still a demand outside the practice of any comparable director, and the correction rehabilitates nothing. What it destroyed was my confidence in the entire literature. The most repeated fact about the most famous production of the most documented director of his generation had been wrong for forty years, and it had survived because it was a good fact — vivid, damning, memorable — and because nobody had opened the file.

So this book is written from the paper where the paper exists, and from named recollection, with the date of the recollection given, where it does not. A thousand containers left Childwickbury Manor in October 2007. The two standard biographies were both published in 1997. Everything I could check I have checked; everything I could not, I have said so.

That is the method. Here is the argument.

Stanley Kubrick's perfectionism was not a temperament. It was a transfer. The method moved the cost of an image off the screen and onto a body, and almost always onto the body with the least power in the room. The number of takes is not the argument; who could survive them is.

Four people carry that argument in these pages and they do not agree with one another.

Malcolm McDowell came out of A Clockwork Orange with cracked ribs, a scratched cornea, a career, and two positions he has held simultaneously for fifty years: that he would do it again, and that Kubrick never called him afterward. R. Lee Ermey, hired as a technical adviser because he had been a Marine drill instructor, was put through a process he had spent years administering to other people, and got the performance of his life out of it. Sue Lyon was fourteen. And Shelley Duvall spent the better part of a year on a foreign set with no ally in the building, said she cried twelve hours a day five or six days a week, and said in 2021 that Kubrick had been very warm and friendly to her.

I hold all four open. I do not average them, and I think anyone who produces a single verdict from those four cases has discarded at least two of them. What they establish together is that the method was constant and the outcomes were not, and that the variable was never the intensity of the demand. It was standing — whether the person in the frame had other work, other people, a country, a language, a way out, and anybody who would take their side.

Five chapters pass before Lolita, which is longer than a book of this kind usually spends on juvenilia, and they are there because the machine has to be built before it can be watched working. A Look staff photographer at seventeen, shooting for the edit, writing the caption last. A chess player in Washington Square Park learning that patience is a weapon. Two features financed by an uncle and a pharmacist, one of which he tried to burn. And then Spartacus: twelve million dollars, ten thousand five hundred people, and no authority over any of it — the one film made on somebody else's terms, and the origin of everything that followed.

There are four things in this book I say plainly that I do not know, and I would rather set them out here than have a reader discover the gaps and wonder whether I noticed. I do not know what Sue Lyon experienced. I do not know whether the released Eyes Wide Shut is Kubrick's film. I do not know why The Aryan Papers really stopped. And I do not know whether Stanley Kubrick ever understood what the method cost the people it cost — no document answers it, and I have not found one that comes close.

A note about the archive, since it is the reason this book exists and it is a mixed blessing.

A thousand boxes is not a windfall. It is a working director's paperwork, kept because he did not throw anything away, and the great majority of it is production administration: call sheets, correspondence with laboratories, lens tests, budget revisions, letters from people who wanted things.

What that material is very good at answering is what happened on a given day. Continuity records say how many takes were exposed. Shipping documents say when a film went out. Memoranda say what a studio asked for and what it was told.

What it is almost useless for is the question everybody actually wants answered, which is what he was like. A man's filing cabinet does not contain his temperament. It contains the residue of his decisions, and a biographer who reads a temperament out of a call sheet is doing exactly what the hundred-and-twenty-seven-takes literature did, only with better sources.

So this book uses the paper for the mechanics and is deliberately thin on the interior. Where an interpretation of the man is offered it is labeled as one. Where a reader wants to know what he felt about something, the answer, four times out of five, is that the archive does not say and neither will I.

A last word about the fifth thing, which is not unknown but is uncomfortable.

He spent forty-five years making films about closed systems: an army, a command structure, a spacecraft, a clinic, an estate, a hotel, a barracks. Every one of them is about what an institution does to the people at the bottom of it while everybody inside performs their own part correctly and nobody owns the outcome. And he ran, on his own stages, a closed system with himself at the top of it, for three decades, in a house in Hertfordshire that was also a production office.

I have not found evidence that he saw the parallel. I have looked.

Chapter 1 · The Bronx, 1945

Franklin Roosevelt died on the afternoon of April 12, 1945, at Warm Springs in Georgia, and by the evening the news was on every newsstand in the United States. In the Bronx a sixteen-year-old boy took a camera out and photographed a vendor sitting among the papers that carried the headline. He sold the picture to Look. It ran on June 26.

That is the first professional act of Stanley Kubrick's life, and everything about it is characteristic in ways that took another fifty years to become visible.

Begin with the camera, because it was a gift and the giver matters. Jack Kubrick was a physician, and he gave his son two things that turned out to be the whole of the equipment: a Graflex camera and a chess set. Both are instruments for the same activity. A press camera of that period is a device for deciding — where to stand, what to include, when to release the shutter, and, above all, what to leave outside the edge of the picture. Chess is a device for calculating consequences several moves ahead of the position on the board. A boy given both at the same time, by the same person, has been handed a complete method before he has anything to apply it to.

The chess set is worth as much attention as the camera and it gets almost none.

Chess is not, for most people who play it, a metaphor. It is a game with a specific cognitive demand: hold a position in mind, project it forward through branching sequences, evaluate resulting positions against a standard you have internalized, and choose. The skill is not calculation in the arithmetic sense. It is the ability to keep a large structure in your head, accurately, while manipulating it.

That is the ability the later working method requires above all others. A director who plans a picture in the way Kubrick planned pictures — the whole film specified in advance, every shot placed against a design that exists nowhere but in his own judgment — is doing something structurally identical to holding a position and projecting it forward. The card index for the Napoleon film, the location surveys, the years of reading before a camera is ordered: all of it is the assembly of a position complete enough to be evaluated.

He played for money in Washington Square Park in his early twenties, which is the subject of the next chapter and which is where the game stopped being a private aptitude and became a practice with stakes. Here, in the Bronx, it is a gift from a father alongside a camera, and the pairing is the whole equipment: a device for deciding what to include, and a discipline for thinking several moves past the decision.

He applied it to almost nothing else. At William Howard Taft High School he failed nearly everything. That fact appears in every account of this life and it is usually deployed as a charming irony — the great intellect of American cinema could not pass a class — but it deserves a more careful reading than that. A boy who is failing school while simultaneously teaching himself a technical craft to professional standard is not a boy who cannot learn. He is a boy who has already found the thing he intends to learn and has withdrawn his attention from everything else. That is a decision, made at fifteen or sixteen, and it was never revised. The pattern of total concentration on one problem and total indifference to everything adjacent to it is the pattern of the whole career, and its first documented appearance is a school transcript.

A word about the picture magazine as an institution, because Look is going to matter for the next four chapters and a modern reader has no equivalent.

In 1945 a weekly or fortnightly picture magazine was one of the two or three most powerful mass media in the United States. Television did not yet exist as a national medium. Radio carried sound and newspapers carried type, and the only place where most Americans encountered photographs of the world beyond their own street, in quantity and in quality, was a magazine that arrived through the door.

Circulations ran into the millions. The photographs in them were the visual record of the century for the population that saw them, and the people who made those photographs were, without any of the vocabulary we would now use, constructing a nation's picture of itself.

That is the industry a sixteen-year-old from the Bronx sold his first frame into. Not a hobby, not an art scene, and not a training ground — the dominant visual medium of its moment, operating at enormous scale, with editorial standards and deadlines and a market.

Now the photograph itself, which is where the argument of this book begins.

The story as it is generally told has an additional element. It is said that Kubrick, arriving at the newsstand, asked the vendor to look mournful — that the image of national grief which Look published was, at least in part, arranged by the sixteen-year-old who sold it to them. This book has not established whether that detail is documented or whether it is an improvement acquired in the retelling, and it declines to print it as fact. Its provenance matters more than most such details, because if it is true it is the most economical possible statement of everything Kubrick would spend forty years doing, and a story that convenient acquires momentum on charm alone. The Look photographic material is held in institutional collections and the question of what the original assignment paperwork says is answerable; nobody in the literature appears to have answered it.

What can be said without the disputed detail is still substantial. A photograph of a grieving newsstand vendor on the day Roosevelt died is not a record of an event. It is an image of an emotion, made by somebody who understood that a national feeling has to be given a face before a magazine can print it. Whether or not he asked the man to arrange his own face, Kubrick chose that face, framed it, and sold it as the thing itself. The picture is completely honest and completely constructed, and those two properties are not in tension in photojournalism; they are the trade.

The lesson available in it is the one this book takes as its subject: a real thing can be arranged, and nobody looking at the result will know.

It is worth pausing on what that means in 1945 in the Bronx, because Kubrick did not invent it and the milieu that taught it to him is part of the story. The picture magazines of the 1930s and 1940s had constructed an enormous popular vocabulary of authenticity — the candid photograph, the unposed moment, the face caught unaware — and had done it with staged setups, cooperative subjects and heavy editorial selection as a matter of routine. Everybody inside the business knew. Nobody outside it did, and the entire commercial value of the form depended on the outside not knowing. A boy who broke into that business at sixteen learned, as his first professional knowledge, that the appearance of the unmediated is a manufactured product.

Set that beside what he became. The reputation Kubrick has is of a director obsessed with authenticity — real candlelight, real lenses built for NASA, a real drill instructor, a real gasworks demolished into a real Vietnamese city, take after take after take until something true arrives. And that reputation is accurate as a description of his methods. But the purpose was never documentary. It was the manufacture of conviction. He spent immense sums and immense quantities of other people's time in order to produce images that could not be doubted, and the intolerance of anything that looked arranged was the intolerance of a man who had known since he was sixteen exactly how arranging works and how invisible it can be made.

There is a second inheritance from Jack Kubrick that is less often noticed and is probably larger than the camera.

A physician's household in the Bronx in the 1930s was a household organized around a specific relationship to evidence. Diagnosis is the practice of gathering signs, weighing them against a body of established knowledge, and arriving at a conclusion that can be wrong and must be checked. It is not an artistic disposition and it is not a scientific one in the laboratory sense; it is a working habit, and it is conducted under time pressure, on incomplete information, with consequences.

Whether the boy absorbed it consciously is unknowable. What is observable is that the adult worked exactly that way, and that the working method is one of the strangest things about him as a filmmaker. Kubrick approached each film as a research problem. He acquired, read and filed enormous quantities of material before shooting anything: for the Napoleon film that was never made, an index of the Emperor's life organized day by day; for the eighteenth-century picture, a photographic survey; for the nuclear film, the strategic literature. This is not how directors generally prepare. It is how a scholar prepares, or a diagnostician, and the temperament behind it is a refusal to act until the evidence has been assembled.

It also explains something about the perfectionism that the standard psychological account misses. A man who has assembled the complete evidence before shooting has, by definition, a fully specified target. He knows precisely what the image is supposed to be, because he has spent two years establishing it. Everything on the set is then measured against that specification, and the specification does not bend. Whether that is admirable or intolerable depends entirely on whether you are the person holding it or the person being measured against it, which is the question this whole book is about.

The other thing to establish about the Bronx of 1945 is the century the boy was standing in.

He was born in 1928 into a Jewish family in New York. He was eleven when the war in Europe began and sixteen when it ended, and the specific weeks in which he sold his first photograph — April to June of 1945 — are the weeks in which the camps were being reached and the photographs from them were arriving in the American picture magazines. A teenager selling his first work to Look in the spring of 1945 was selling into a publication whose pages that season carried the visual record of the Holocaust.

A biographer can do one of two things with a fact like that. The first is to construct the interior life the evidence does not supply — to write the paragraph about what the boy must have felt, in the confident third person, and let the reader take it for knowledge. It is the standard move in this literature and it produces a satisfying chapter.

The second is to record that the fact exists, that it has no documented consequence anywhere in fifty-four subsequent years of public conduct, and that the only visible trace of it appears in 1976 and again in 1991, in the form of a film that was not made.

This book takes the second route, here and throughout, and a reader who finds the early chapters cooler than the genre usually runs should know that the coolness is a policy rather than an absence of interest.

This book will not claim that the sixteen-year-old drew a conclusion from that, because there is no evidence and the claim would be manufactured. What it will record is the coincidence of dates, and one fact that comes very much later: of all the projects Kubrick prepared and did not make, the one he worked on longest and abandoned last was a film about the Holocaust. He asked Isaac Bashevis Singer for a screenplay in 1976 and was refused; he bought Louis Begley's Wartime Lies in 1991; Warner Bros. approved it in 1993; and he stopped. Chapter 17 is about why, and it does not reach a conclusion, and the question of what the century he was born into meant to him is one of the four things this book will say it does not know.

A word, at the outset, about how this book will handle the sources, because the Kubrick literature has a specific and unusual problem and a reader should know about it before Chapter 2.

For most of the period after his death the standard accounts were two biographies published in 1997, by Vincent LoBrutto and by John Baxter, both written while he was alive, both built substantially from interviews with people who had worked with him. They are useful books. They are also, structurally, oral history: their evidence is what participants remembered, told to a writer, sometimes decades after the event, about a director who gave almost no interviews and left no memoir and could not therefore be checked against.

That situation changed in October 2007, when roughly a thousand containers of material left Childwickbury Manor and opened as the Stanley Kubrick Archive at the London College of Communication. What is in those boxes is the paper of the productions: call sheets, continuity records, correspondence, the card index for the Napoleon film that was never made, research files, and — this is the part that matters most for the argument of this book — documentation from which take counts can in some cases be reconstructed.

The consequence is that the Kubrick literature is now split into two eras, and the second one keeps overturning the first. The most spectacular instance is in Chapter 15 of this book, where a number that was in the Guinness Book of Records for forty years, and in every account of The Shining ever written, turns out on the archive's own paper to be wrong by a factor of two. Rinzler and Unkrich's 2023 study of that film, and Kolker and Abrams's Kubrick: An Odyssey in 2024, are the first works of their kind to be written with the boxes open, and this book stands on them.

Where a claim in these pages comes from an interview recollection rather than from paper, it will say so. Where the archive has corrected an interview-derived claim, this book will name the correction rather than quietly print the new figure, because how the legend was built is part of the subject.

One correction to the record before the chapter closes, because it affects how the whole early period is usually read.

Kubrick is routinely described as an autodidact who taught himself everything, and the description is used to explain the later career: no formal training, therefore no inherited assumptions, therefore the freedom to reinvent the medium. It is an attractive story and it is half true.

He was self-taught in the sense that he had no institutional education past sixteen. He was not self-taught in the sense the phrase usually implies, which is somebody working alone at a distance from professional practice. From seventeen he was inside a national magazine, working to professional standards, with editors, deadlines and colleagues, in one of the most technically demanding visual trades of the period. That is an apprenticeship. It simply was not the apprenticeship anybody in film recognized, which is why the industry treated him as an outsider and why he behaved like one.

The distinction matters because it changes what the achievement was. He did not invent a way of working out of nothing. He imported a fully formed professional method from an adjacent medium into one that had never seen it.

He left school with a transcript that qualified him for nothing, and he had already been published in a national magazine. In 1946 Look took him on staff. He was seventeen.

One more thing about the Bronx, and it is the thing a cultural biography is for.

The New York of Stanley Kubrick's childhood was a city of institutions that sorted people. The school system sorted them by examination. The garment trade, the docks, the civil service and the police sorted them by neighborhood, religion and family. The Catholic parishes and the Jewish congregations and the Italian blocks each ran their own internal arrangements, and a boy growing up in that city learned early that there were structures which decided things about you and which you did not join, argue with, or see the inside of.

He failed out of one of those structures at sixteen and never entered another. No university, no studio apprenticeship, no union ladder, no military service, no membership of anything. From the day Look hired him to the day he died at Childwickbury he was outside every institution in his industry, which is a rare position and an expensive one, and he arranged the whole of his working life to maintain it.

That is where the subject of the films comes from, and it is a better explanation than the psychological ones on offer. A man who spent forty-five years making pictures about closed systems and the people they process was not working out a private neurosis. He was describing, accurately and repeatedly, the thing he had spent his adolescence being sorted by and his adulthood staying outside of.

The one time he went inside — for six months in 1959, on somebody else's picture, with ten thousand five hundred people in the cast and no authority over any of it — he came out and spent the next four decades ensuring it could not happen again.