Kubrick has been called many things in his 50-year career, not all of them complimentary. He was a director who took his title seriously, overseeing every detail of a production, not excluding the marketing of the finished product.
For 15 months prior to his death, he worked on Eyes Wide Shut, a tale of sexual obsession. It wasn't the first time he had dealt with this particular subject, despite what some worried fans seemed to think. His 1962 version of Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita addressed the same topic from a different angle. It was a measure of Kubrick's talent - and the power that talent conferred - that he was able to tie up as hot a commodity as Tom Cruise for that length of time without repercussions. We will have to wait until mid-July, however, to learn whether it was worth the wait.
In this arena, though, our focus is on Kubrick as the mastermind behind two classic contributions to the field of science fiction cinema: 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and A Clockwork Orange (1971). The extraordinary talents of Ray Harryhausen and George Pal notwithstanding, if you ask most people to name the creator of modern science fiction cinema, that name will be Stanley Kubrick's.
"I was 11 years old when I saw 2001 in 70mm on the huge curved Cinerama screen in Omaha, Nebraska," Attorney Ron Hunter recalled on the alt.movies.kubrick newsgroup the day Kubrick died. "Kubrick created an amazing world of sight and sound. Every detail was perfect."
Hunter grew up with the movies - his father was lawyer for the owners of Omaha's Indian Hills Cinerama Theater - and never missed an opening until 1970. Even then, he braved ejection to sneak into the theater in 1971 to see A Clockwork Orange.
"The amazing thing about Kubrick," he said in an e-mail interview, " was that his films could alter consciousness all on their own. 2001 was the first film that could be enjoyed without actually figuring out what was going on. It was fun arguing about what it all meant.
"I can measure the periods of my life with his films."
If "God is in the details," then Kubrick is the high priest of film. There was no such word as "extraneous" in his cinematic vocabulary, and every set piece, every prop, every line of dialogue was a thread to be woven into the finished tapestry. That kind of focus is bound to sit ill with the less meticulous, and no doubt did a lot to contribute to Kubrick's reputation for being tyrannical, controlling and other descriptions even less flattering. Not everyone who worked with him agreed with those assessments.
