The Bronx Kid

The Plot Thickens

This episode explores the formative years of Stanley Kubrick, tracing his journey from a child in the Bronx to a professional photographer.

Key takeaways

• Kubrick's interest in photography was sparked at age 13 when his father gifted him a Graflex camera.
• A defining moment in his career was capturing a photograph of a newsstand worker following FDR's death in 1945.

Main topics

• Stanley Kubrick's early life
• The Bronx in the 1940s

Notable quotes

A great story is really like a miracle.

Conclusion

The episode provides a profound look at how Kubrick's observational tr

Transcript preview

Speaker 3 (0:00) An unexpected adventure. An unseen world. A universal truth. Great movies take you there. Explore them on Criterion. Learn more at CriterionChannel.com. Speaker 7 (0:15) What would you ask if you were, say, were a reasonable, intelligent human Speaker 1 (0:19) being? Speaker 7 (0:19) Yeah, I've often thought about that. What would you ask you now, in this situation, somebody who basically likes you, in terms of coming through with the film? Speaker 1 (0:28) That's film critic Joe Gelmas interviewing the filmmaker Stanley Kubrick. Speaker 7 (0:32) Do you feel like you're tightening up? Speaker 1 (0:33) No. Or at least Speaker 7 (0:34) trying to interview him. If I ask a simple question, you'd kill it right away. by your cautious, conservative, not wanting to put yourself on a record. So it's very difficult. I am inhibited by the fact that I feel that to discuss something that has come out, you know, that works, brings it down somehow. Gelma's recorded Speaker 1 (0:54) this interview in 1972 at Stanley's home in England. This interview has never been heard by the public. Speaker 7 (1:01) Okay, well, then just keep, I mean... I'll keep asking simple questions, but the point is I run out of them. Okay. I'm not trying to be difficult. I'm not either. Okay. Speaker 1 (1:11) I believe Stanley when he says he wasn't trying to be difficult. Because the truth is, Stanley Kubrick didn't like talking about his movies. When this interview was recorded, Stanley was on his way to legendary status. He'd made the killing. Speaker 3 (1:26) You like money. You got a great big dollar sign there where most women have a heart. Speaker 1 (1:31) Paths of glory. If Speaker 3 (1:32) a commanding officer lacks confidence, what can we expect of his men? We'll take the anthill. Speaker 1 (1:37) Spartacus, Speaker 3 (1:38) Lolita, and Speaker 1 (1:42) Doctor Strangelove. Speaker 1 (1:47) He'd changed the landscape of movies with 2001 A Space Odyssey. Open the pod Speaker 3 (1:52) bay doors, please. I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that. Speaker 1 (1:56) He was getting ready for the worldwide release of his next film, A Clockwork Orange. Speaker 3 (2:01) This is some new form of torture. Speaker 1 (2:04) In his future were movies like The Shining, Speaker 3 (2:06) Here's Johnny. You've got a war face! Speaker 1 (2:09) Full Metal Jacket, and Eyes Wide Shut. Speaker 6 (2:12) If you men only knew. Speaker 7 (2:17) I knew you were going to do this. You were going to start asking me questions. That's why I should not have ever mentioned it. You can't blame Speaker 1 (2:22) Joe Gelmas for trying to figure out Stanley's secret sauce. The two of them, film critic and filmmaker, kept hashing it out during the interview. At one point, Stanley's daughter interrupts with a crisis involving one of Stanley's lifelong obsessions, his pets. Come in. We have a problem. We have a problem with two. Speaker 7 (2:45) Male cats are fighting. Well, they've both been doctored, and we're waiting for the effect to happen. We lock one up every other day in the room, and the other one is free. Speaker 6 (2:55) They Speaker 7 (2:55) don't take it in mind if they just sleep. Speaker 1 (2:59) They eventually get back to the interview. After rephrasing the question many times, Yelmus simply asked Stanley to lay out the steps of making a great movie. I mean, it's Speaker 7 (3:10) a little bit like saying, you know, the way you score a touchdown is you have to get through the line, get past the secondary, get past the safety, make sure nobody catches everything, make sure you don't fall down. I mean, it has about that much relevance. It's true. I feel for Speaker 1 (3:25) Joe Gelmas. He wants to know how Stanley makes his art. It's what we all want to know, but it's a lost cause. Speaker 7 (3:32) How you do it is hard to really, you know. How does somebody write a story like that? I mean, a great story is really like a miracle. I mean, a story that has narrative power, ideas, characters, doesn't give up, is satisfying finally in the end. I don't know how anybody writes a story like that. And I think, you know, in a more modest sense, I would say the same thing is true of making a film. It gets into much more like the problem of how do you get through the line, how do you fake out the secondary. How do you get powers together? The safety and how do you make sure nobody catches up? Speaker 1 (4:08) This answer makes perfect sense to me, and not just because Stanley's using football as an example, though I do love that. It makes sense because in my 24-year career at TCM, watching movies and talking about movies, not to mention seven seasons of this podcast, it seems to me that a good movie involves a little bit of magic, a sprinkling of luck. If you're fancy, you might call it alchemy. Whatever. It's something beyond the hundreds of creative and business decisions that go into making a movie. It's inexplicable. Like Stanley says. I Speaker 7 (4:46) mean, a great story is really like a miracle. Speaker 1 (4:52) I'm basically Joe Gelmas here. We're chasing the story of how Stanley made miracles. But I'm also after something more. I'm just as interested in what it was like to go through life as Stanley Kubrick. Not the genius director stuff, but the parts more of us can relate to. Like, was Stanley really a sports fan? And what happened to his fighting cats? There are, of course, much bigger questions to ask. We know Stanley was completely devoted to making movies. I wonder if that devotion was worth it to him in the end. What did it cost him chasing those miracles? Speaker 6 (5:31) He was very vulnerable. He hurt easily. I Speaker 3 (5:34) don't Speaker 1 (5:34) think Speaker 3 (5:35) we ever really saw the real Kubrick. Kind of the Wizard of Oz. He was driven by this ferocious curiosity about everything. If there ever was a control freak, it was Stanley Kubrick. People were fired because they called him Stan. He came from a Jewish family and he married a German. Good Lord. He never made the same picture twice. Every single picture is a different genre, a different... A different period, a different story, a different risk. Stanley was always careful about money. He could spend it, though. The only day we got off was Christmas Day. People made stuff up about him because they Speaker 8 (6:07) could. He had total faith in himself, absolute faith in his own ideas. I Speaker 3 (6:11) think he's the most important filmmaker that we've ever had. Everybody pretty much acknowledges he's the man. And I still feel that underrates him. Speaker 1 (6:23) This season on The Plot Thickens, Stanley. Speaker 7 (6:27) I don't know what led me to make any of the films that I've made. Speaker 1 (6:40) I'm your host, Ben Mankiewicz. This is Season 7 of The Plot Thickens, a podcast from Turner Classic Movies. Each season, we bring you an in-depth story about the movies and the people who make them. This time, we have partnered with Criterion for a look at the life and work of Stanley Kubrick. This is Episode 1, The Bronx Kid. Speaker 1 (7:13) I always knew there was a great deal of mystery around Stanley Kubrick. He didn't travel much, never went to award shows, definitely didn't go to Hollywood parties. Speaker 1 (7:25) Because Stanley was so rarely interviewed, most people didn't know what he looked like. His daughter, Catherine, told me this story. Speaker 3 (7:33) It was a Sunday in summer, and two girls came to the front door. And Daddy answered it, and they said, oh, yeah, hello, can we sort of meet Mr. Kubrick? And he said, I'm really sorry he's not here. And shut the door. So, I don't know. I don't know what they were expecting. Maybe some kind of, you know, Basil Rothbone chap with, you know, a tweed suit and a felt hat or something. I don't know what they were expecting to see. But Speaker 1 (8:00) people who did know Stanley loved to describe him. Speaker 6 (8:05) He was a kind of an odd character. You know, he wore these clodhopper shoes and these khakis, very studious and quiet. Speaker 3 (8:13) This shabby, chic man in an army coat with lots of pockets and a scraggly beard, messy hair. I remember thinking, well, he's sort of scruffy. Speaker 1 (8:26) Never changed his clothes, you know. Wore the same clothes every day. As people described Stanley, they would always get around to his eyes. And then you see the images of him, and it's always that kind of Jack Nicholson death Speaker 3 (8:40) stare. Speaker 3 (8:42) and looked at me with those black pirate eyes. He had no pupils, Stanley, in his eyes. It was laser-beaming. He had the most extraordinary eyes you've ever seen on a human being. They look at you and they have this quite mischievous quality. He had beautiful eyes, very piercing eyes, and they didn't miss a trick, those eyes. Speaker 1 (9:07) It wasn't merely the appearance of Stanley's eyes. It was what they conveyed. They probed. They told everyone in his orbit that he was observing, strategizing, thinking. This may sound weird, but I think Stanley trained himself to see. Like, really see. And I believe that started when he was a kid. Well, Speaker 5 (9:47) we're headed to Stanley's old neighborhood. Which is fascinating because that's 89 year Speaker 1 (9:54) old Avery Corman. Speaker 5 (9:56) I grew up in the Bronx It's not far from where Stanley Kubrick lived Speaker 1 (9:59) Avery wrote the novel Kramer vs Kramer Which was adapted into a popular movie with Dustin Hoffman and Meryl Streep if you were a child of divorce in the 1980s Kramer vs Kramer was a gut punch Speaker 5 (10:13) synagogues and churches all over the place and schools related to those Avery Speaker 1 (10:17) is seven years younger than Stanley They did not know each other. But Avery can take us back in time to the 1940s