Stanley Kubrick Produces

by James Fenwick

Stanley Kubrick Produces provides the first comprehensive account of Stanley Kubrick’s role as a producer, and of the role of the producers he worked with throughout his career. It considers how he first emerged as a producer, how he developed the role, and how he ultimately used it to fashion himself a powerbase by the 1970s. It goes on to consider how Kubrick’s centralising of power became a self-defeating strategy by the 1980s and 1990s, one that led him to struggle to move projects out of development and into active production.
 
Making use of overlooked archival sources and uncovering newly discovered ‘lost’ Kubrick projects (The Cop Killer, Shark Safari, and The Perfect Marriage among them), as well as providing the first detailed overview of the World Assembly of Youth film, James Fenwick provides a comprehensive account of Kubrick’s life and career and of how he managed to obtain the level of control that he possessed by the 1970s. Along the way, the book traces the rapid changes taking place in the American film industry in the post-studio era, uncovering new perspectives about the rise of young independent producers, the operations of influential companies such as Seven Arts and United Artists, and the whole field of film marketing.
 

266 pages, Paperback

Published December 18, 2020

Reviews

[Stefan Bugryn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Extensively researched, incredibly enlightening, and surprisingly easy to read - what else could you ask for?

[Justin Aftab · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent reference for anyone interested in Kubrick or film production in general.

[John · Rating 3 out of 5]

The book is a decent materialist reading of Kubrick’s filmography - the story of how his films got made from the POV of The Money & How It Was Spent. When it sticks to the facts, it’s valuably informative in this respect. However, as half-admitted, Fenwick has a bone to pick with Kubrick, and it’s here where the book fails. The editorial throughout is essentially that Stanley Kubrick was a self-promoting opportunist whose career saw a marked decline in the final third or so of his life. The former point—about him being a shameless self-promoter—is “evidenced” entirely by some fairly tenuous idle speculation that Kubrick may (or may not) have arranged some magazine profiles for himself early in his career. The latter point—about his supposed decline—refers to the slowing-down of his productivity after The Shining. You get the sense that Fenwick-and he indicates as such in the epilogue-is an academic who spent a long-time obsessing over Kubrick, and who then eventually came to resent lay-man narratives around his Uber-Genius Reputation, and that QED he (i.e Fenwick) has basically become desensitised to, well, the films themselves. You’ll blink at the page as Fenwick awkwardly tries to convince you that the latter half of Kubrick’s filmography — i.e Space Odyssey, Clockwork, Barry Lyndon, Full Metal Jacket, The Shining, and Eyes Wide Shut, i.e The Single Most Iconic Streak of Films in Any American Director’s Filmography—represents some sort of major decline. While the book at times insinuates that it’s coming from some sort anti-capitalist framework*, Fenwick’s way of arbitrating success is deeply capitalist-i.e a decline in productivity and profit are signs of a producer in decline. It’s also hard to believe that Fenwick really does view this as much of a decline, seeing as he paints the Early Kubrick also as an opportunistic self-promoter whose films never could fully financially resonate at the box office. Ultimately, like Filippo Ulivieri-Youtube videos of whom are citied within the notes-you get the sense that Kubrick obsessives can find themselves so disappointed by the initial myth of the man that they feel the need to counter-act it with a new, equally artificial anti-myth of their own.

*At the end of the book, Fenwick says whoever writes the next one should focus on Kubrick’s apparent labour exploitation and anti-union attitudes. Obviously, this would have been the book to do so, it being about Kubrick as a producer. Fenwick-and he obviously knows this-doesn’t have thorough evidence to substantiate this claim outside of the couple of quotes he presents in the paragraph. As with Kubrick’s apparent status as a self-promoter, he’s presenting you with very limited evidence, going Seeeee?, and then very quickly moving on, hoping you’ll draw his vague insinuation to a larger conclusion.