Stanley Kubrick: American Filmmaker
By David Mikics
Illustrated. 233 pages. Yale University Press. $26.
It does look like a book worth reading some time in the not too distant future. Here is an excerpt from Dwight Garner's review:
This book’s subtitle notwithstanding, Kubrick was in many ways the least American of American directors. He spent much of his adult life in the English countryside, an hour outside of London. He found it was cheaper to make movies there, and he hated to fly.
He stayed in touch with America. He liked gossip — “character analysis,” Elizabeth Hardwick called it — and was always on the telephone to Los Angeles. He had videotapes of pro football games sent to him. (He admired the editing of Michelob commercials.) He read The New York Times every morning. When bored during a movie, he was known to open a newspaper in a theater.
This book captures his control-freak side. It also captures why people wanted to work with him. He had a feel for every aspect of what made a film work.
His voracious reading served him well. “I literally go into bookstores, close my eyes and take things off the shelf,” he told one interviewer. “If I don’t like the book after a bit, I don’t finish it. But I like to be surprised.”
His movies may lower the temperature in a room, but Mikics pushes back against the notion that frosty is all they are. Kubrick created some of the most indelible images in cinema. Mikics quotes the music critic Alex Ross, who wrote about Kubrick’s movies: “They make me happy, they make me laugh,” Ross said. “If this was cold, then so was Fred Astaire.”
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