JAMES FENWICK is a senior lecturer in media and communication at Sheffield Hallam University in the UK. He is the editor of Understanding Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey and author of numerous book chapters and journal articles on the life and work of Stanley Kubrick.
 

Introduction
 
Stanley Kubrick wanted control. Control and information. These were the twin pillars on which he built his career and forged a power base for himself as an independent film producer, director and writer in Hollywood across a fifty-year period. He’d always wanted control and information, even when working as a photographer throughout his late teens and early twenties at Look magazine. To relinquish control meant that Kubrick would have to do things other people’s way, and that just wasn’t his way. The narrative of Kubrick’s life is all about control and was from the very beginning. And while far from suggesting that Kubrick did not collaborate (he certainly did, particularly on set with other artists, often facilitating extreme experimentation), he remained in control, particularly in his role as a producer, over every aspect of his productions, from development through to distribution. By the 1970s onwards, most of Kubrick’s time was spent overseeing distribution and regional marketing campaigns, dubbing, cover designs for VHS releases, and more besides. In fact, Kubrick was far more often working as a producer than as a director, searching for stories, or looking to ensure that his films achieved their full commercial potential. 

This book attempts to understand the narrative of control by looking specifically at the production contexts in which Kubrick operated, largely through his role as a producer. It aims to detail how Kubrick first emerged as a producer, how he obtained control over his productions (both business and creative), and the impact that control ultimately had on his career. What emerges is a portrait of a filmmaker overwhelmed by control to the point that he could no longer move his projects out of development and into production. The aim of the book is not to provide a film-by-film production account or to detail the minutiae of how films like 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) were made, but rather to understand the industrial conditions that allowed Kubrick to accrue the power that he did and the ways in which he wielded that power. If someone expects to read this book as an account of the productions, they will be disappointed, and I would refer them to other books that have already done that.[1] The book also privileges Kubrick’s early years – the decades of the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s – over his later career due to the relative lack of scholarship in this regard. 

What is largely missing from studies of Kubrick is how he came to be the powerful producer that he did by the end of the 1960s, the industrial and production conditions that facilitated his rise to power, and the ways in which the desire for and use of the control he obtained shaped and even, I would argue, contributed to his decline as a filmmaker. By this, I must clarify, I do not mean Kubrick’s quality as an artist declined, but rather his ability to successfully produce a film from development through to distribution. After all, in the final twenty-five years of his career he produced only four films, in contrast to the first twenty-five years of his career, in which he produced or directed nine.

But in examining the narrative of control, we can also begin to understand how, in many ways, it was also a myth partially constructed by Kubrick himself. To obtain the control he needed to make films – in fact, to even be able to enter the Hollywood mainstream – Kubrick had to construct the illusion of a powerful, maverick auteur. It was an image I would suggest that he purposely cultivated (evidence of which Filippo Ulivieri has developed through exhaustive empirical research).[2] From the earliest days of his career, producing and directing Fear and Desire (1953), Kubrick would be in close contact with journalists at newspapers like the New York Times, providing copy and undergoing interviews that positioned him as a controlling producer. It’s an image that Kubrick developed as a means of furthering his status within the industry and of cementing his powerbase. But it’s also a pernicious myth within Kubrick Studies, one that has obstructed a holistic view of Kubrick’s career and how he evolved as a producer in mainstream Hollywood. Therefore, by analyzing the industrial and production contexts in which he worked, we can begin to scratch away at his carefully crafted image to understand the wider structural forces in the American (and, to some extent, British) film industry, including industrial and economic logic, to understand just how Kubrick operated as a producer.

The success of the controlling image of Kubrick was clear in the outpouring of analysis by critics, scholars and fans as to his impact, importance and legacy on cinema and Hollywood following his death on 7 March 1999. In the obituaries and newspaper columns that ensued, a theme emerged that The Guardian’s Derek Malcolm perhaps best encapsulated. Malcolm described how Kubrick had spent half of his career fighting, and beating Hollywood, ‘getting its money to make his expensive films but only on condition that no one interfered with him or them in any way. His power thus became greater than any of his contemporaries and most of the great filmmakers of the past.’[3] The critics were largely effusive in their praise of Kubrick’s artistic prowess and stressed, as Malcolm did, Kubrick’s producing authority and control over every facet of his productions.

But there was, and continues to be, little contextual understanding as to where this control came from, instead confusing it with Kubrick’s image as the ultimate auteur. Take Jonathan Romney’s assessment of Kubrick’s filmmaking power, comparing it to the supernatural forces that gripped the Overlook Hotel in The Shining (1980): ‘It’s hard not to see Jack’s struggle with the Overlook as an image of Kubrick’s own peculiar relationship with Warner Brothers. With any director, no matter how powerful, it’s always the House, the Studio, that’s ultimately in control but perhaps Kubrick, like Jack, really did have the run of the House. With his unique, still mysterious command of Warner’s goodwill, he must have had either a power verging on the satanic (biographies often wax eerie about his eyes), or perhaps he just knew where the bodies are buried.’[4] Romney equates Kubrick’s power as a filmmaker to forces beyond comprehension, removing him and his work from the industrial realities of Hollywood and elevating Kubrick to the mythical status of the ‘auteur as superstar’, to borrow a phrase from Joseph Gelmis’s 1970 work The Director as Superstar in which Kubrick featured. 
What was lacking from the obituaries of Kubrick was any attempt to understand his work and role as a producer and how he obtained control. Nor was there any real attempt to truly understand Kubrick’s impact on Hollywood, beyond his artistic influences. When it came to the issue of his control, Kubrick’s myth once more came to dominate. Ronald Bergan asserted that Kubrick’s autonomy and power was never ‘absorbed into the system on which he was financially dependent’,[5] while Janet Maslin argued that Kubrick’s filmmaking and his ‘landmark films’ were always delivered ‘at a safe distance from Hollywood whims’.[6] Taking it to the extreme, Jonathan Romney once more highlighted Kubrick’s supposed god like supremacy in Hollywood, saying that no other filmmaker could equal his power: ‘Even [Martin] Scorsese is held back by the fact of being human, with human neuroses.’[7]

What many of the obituaries and summaries of Kubrick’s life and legacy appeared to be doing was to perpetuate the myth of the auteur and, in the process, failing and neglecting to understand the industrial, production, and economic contexts in which he worked. Kubrick was very much a part of the Hollywood system upon which he relied, as this book will demonstrate, and as testified to by his business partner and producer at Harris-Kubrick Pictures Corporation, James B. Harris. In an interview in the wake of Kubrick’s death, Harris asserted that ‘[Kubrick] always knew what was going on in Los Angeles, he would always read the trade press.’[8] While Harris’s comments alone may not be proof of Kubrick’s intimate connection and knowledge of Hollywood and the British and American film industries, it does reveal a voice trying to break through the Kubrick myth that had formed in both the critical and public mind.

What is perhaps necessary in order to move away from this auteur myth is the decentering of Kubrick.[9] By which I mean, scholars and critics need to look beyond Kubrick as an insular case study to those contexts I have already mentioned. These were concerns that were raised by, among others, Peter Krämer and myself at the workshop Life and Legacy, Studying the Work of Stanley Kubrick held at the University of Leiden in July 2019. In a position paper that I delivered at that workshop, titled ‘Kubrick’s Legacy’, I argued that Kubrick was not as important as scholars and critics believed, by which I was suggesting we need to move beyond the auteur myth and begin to understand why Kubrick has come to be viewed as uniquely influential and powerful and to what extent it is a valid claim. For example, if Kubrick was an all-powerful producer by the 1970s, then just how unique was he? Were there other similarly powerful producers? Or, for example, if we continue to claim that Kubrick is somehow influential, just what does this mean? Citing quotes or references to Kubrick in other filmmaker’s work, without an extensive empirical and comparative analysis of other filmmaker’s who are similarly quoted and referenced, does not necessarily tell us anything useful about the reach, extent, or uniqueness of Kubrick’s influence. To decenter Kubrick means to think about, research, and write about Kubrick in a way that considers his position within the American and British film industry. And when we talk about his legacy, for example, we really need to rethink the questions we are asking and instead consider who has constructed that legacy, ranging from the studios he worked with, his family, his fans, the Stanley Kubrick Archive at the University of the Arts London (UAL), and, of course, Kubrick himself. After all, while Kubrick was undoubtedly an artist motivated by intellectual and philosophical curiosity, he was also a business and brand manager working within a profit-orientated industry. 

Tracing Kubrick’s role as a producer and understanding the external forces he was working and negotiating with (studios, distributors, private financiers etc.) is arguably easier to determine than his role as a director, mainly because of the archival material he has left behind. And it is in film archives that we can begin to find the role of the producer (a role discussed in more detail below), through the notes, budgets, business reports, and correspondence left behind. The Stanley Kubrick Archive is a treasure trove to learn how he operated and, more generally, of how Hollywood operated. But the scale of material, over 800 linear meters, speaks to Kubrick’s desire for control and how it was underpinned by information. This was Kubrick’s greatness as an artist, but his fatal flaw as a producer. Realizing that information gave him ever more control, Kubrick requested ever more information until it overwhelmed him and all those that worked with him. In the end, maybe he just had too much control and was unwilling to let go.

The Stanley Kubrick Archive is a unique insight into the totality of Kubrick’s career and surrounding industrial structures. And while it is not the only archive that documents Kubrick’s career (see the Select Bibliography for a list of all the archives that have been consulted for this book), it is the most complete. The archive reveals Kubrick’s interactions with industry figures, the way he produced his films (including developing ideas, securing contracts, and obtaining financing), and perhaps most important, just what he was up to during those increasing gaps between films in his later years. For a man who was determined to remain a private figure during his life, it is remarkable that he left behind an archive that is so revealing. Kubrick’s motivations, if any, in keeping the archive (did he envisage it being curated to serve as an historical record, for example?) will perhaps never be known. Instead, it was probably a further extension of the element of control that he needed, while it was left to others around him to file and organize the documents. Did they ever consult the reams of correspondence from, say, Dr. Strangelove (1964) ever again? Doubtful. But one can learn more about Kubrick’s methods as a producer from consulting a source like the hundreds of boxes of correspondence than from any interview he gave. More important, even if the intention was not for the archive to serve as a historical record, it inevitably has become so, shedding a unique light onto one of the most turbulent and transformative periods of the post-World War Two American film industry, from the late 1940s through to the 1990s. Kubrick kept records not only about his own productions, but also of competing films as well, constantly commissioning research on how other films at studios like MGM or Warner Bros. were being marketed and distributed. There are policy documents from United Artists (UA), Columbia, MGM, and other studios. There are business records that read as a guide on how to produce an independent film in the 1950s. There is correspondence with some of the most noted actors in Hollywood history, from Laurence Olivier to Ingrid Bergman. There are business reports on emerging industrial trends, such as the move to base American productions abroad in the late 1950s, or the increase in Hollywood productions being filmed in the former Soviet Bloc in the early 1990s. There is political and union correspondence, shedding light on a greatly under research component of mainstream film producing and the need to interact with, and even compromise with industrial labour. To that end, it is perhaps time we recognized that the Stanley Kubrick Archive can serve as an archival source not just for the insular study of Stanley Kubrick, but of the wider American and British film industries from the 1940s to the 2000s. In short, the Stanley Kubrick Archive, indeed Kubrick Studies as a whole, doesn’t just have to be about Stanley. 

It’s useful at this point to briefly consider what we mean by the role of the producer. It’s a role that remains equivocal by nature, even in spite of the growing research in Producer Studies.[10] It’s quite possible that, because of how the role has changed over the decades, each study of individual producers will lead to differing results as to how they should be defined. Jon Lewis’s recent edited collection, Producing (2016), attempts to provide a comprehensive history of the role, but even here it is a muddied account as to who or what a producer is, with the role transforming from era to era. As Lewis sums up in the introduction to the collection, 
 
Of all the job titles listed in the opening and closing screen credits, “producer” is certainly the most amorphous. There are businessmen producers (and businesswomen producers), writer-director and movie-star producers; producers who work for the studio or work as a liaison between a production company and the studio; executive producers whose reputation and industry clout alone gets a project financed (though their day-to-day participation in the project may be negligible); and independent producers whose independence is at once a matter of industry structure (as the studios no longer produce much of anything anymore).[11]
 
What Lewis constructs is an argument of how intrinsically the role of the producer, arguably more so than any other film role, is linked to the industrial conditions of Hollywood and is shaped by its changing economic structures. Therefore, when we think of Kubrick’s role as a producer it inevitably leads to a discussion of the industrial factors that shaped him and impacted on his work.

For Kubrick, the role is further muddied by how his roles as a director and writer were often blurred with that of a producer. But when we turn to the archive, and when we consider his career as a whole, he predominantly did not work as a director. Instead, between 1950 and 1999, a forty-nine-year period, Kubrick more often was a producer; he was seldom on a film set during that time frame, or writing film scripts, but instead developing ideas, seeking out new collaborations, negotiating contracts, devising marketing strategies, or supervising distribution campaigns. More than anything, Kubrick was a producer first and foremost always looking to protect his business and creative interests and to fight to ensure the maximum commercial return for his films.

This book attempts to uncover Kubrick’s role as a producer, and the producers that he worked with, and considers the ways in which industrial contexts shaped his creative processes. It is a career survey, but also a history of the industrial transformations in producing, marketing, and distribution that took place in Hollywood from the 1950s onwards. With a chronological structure, the book provides a narrative across four parts: 1) Kubrick’s emergence as a producer in the early 1950s and the conditions that facilitated his transition from a photography at Look magazine to independent filmmaker; 2) his business and creative partnership with James B. Harris and their collaborations with Kirk Douglas; 3) Kubrick’s establishment of a producing powerbase in the 1960s following the incorporation of Polaris Productions and Hawk Films and his move to the United Kingdom; and 4) Kubrick’s final years at Warner Bros. and his decline as a producer able to move projects out of development and into production. What emerges is almost a tragic narrative, Kubrick’s rise and fall as it were. Even though he eventually obtained full producing control of his productions, it ultimately led to debilitating levels of control that left him unable to successfully function as a producer. Indeed, by the end of his career, Kubrick repeatedly considered abdicating his responsibilities as a director, and in effect decentralizing elements of his control to other filmmakers.

Along the way, the book charts previously unexplored aspects of Kubrick’s life and work. This includes his ‘unknown’ early years in the 1950s when he worked closely with producers like Richard de Rochemont on documentaries and television series such as World Assembly of Youth (1952) and Mr. Lincoln (1952). The book also examines many of Kubrick’s ‘lost’ projects and raises questions as to the cultural and industrial logic behind these unmade films. By utilizing archival research and interviews with those who worked with Kubrick, the book works towards answering why Kubrick became the producer that he did, why he worked in the way that he did, and what the industrial forces were that shaped his career. It is hoped that by the end that you, the reader, will begin to see Kubrick from a new perspective: as a producer fully entrenched within the structures of the American and British film industries.

Contents
 
            Introduction
            Part I   The Emergence of a Film Producer 1928-1955
1          The Beginning, 1928-1951
2          The Unknown Early Years, 1951-1953
3          The New York ‘Film School’, 1953-1955
Part II  The Harris-Kubrick Pictures Corporation 1955-1962
4          The New UA Team, 1955-1956
5          New Modes of Producing, 1957-1959
6          Swords, Sandals, Sex and Soviets, 1959-1962
Part III Polaris Productions and Hawk Films 1962-1969
7          The Establishment of a Producing Powerhouse, 1962-1964
8          Kubrick versus MGM, 1964-1969
            Part IV The Decline of a Film Producer 1970-1999
9          Kubrick and Warner Bros., 1970-1980
10        The End, 1980-1999
            Epilogue
Appendix I: World Assembly of Youth credits
Appendix II: Filmography    
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Notes
Index