Kubrick: An Odyssey (Preview)
by Robert P. Kolker and Nathan Abrams. New York: Pegasus Books, 2024. 649 pp., illus. Hardcover: $35.00.

Reviewed by Michael Gibson

A monumental new biography of Stanley Kubrick by Robert P. Kolker and Nathan Abrams arrives to herald the twenty-fifth anniversary of Kubrick’s death. As no new genuine biography has appeared since just after the time of the director’s passing in March 1999, it is a welcome and timely updating of the landscape. Even more, it represents a zenith point in the recent renaissance in Kubrick studies, greatly enabled by the establishment of the Stanley Kubrick Archive at the University of the Arts London, a massive repository of Kubrick’s papers, personal and working documents, equipment, and production files, which has resulted in a slew of new studies focused on the developmental and production processes of particular films by Kubrick. The co-authors of the new biography are themselves key contributors to the new Kubrick studies phenomenon. Kolker is a longtime author on Kubrick, having written multiple volumes on the director’s work as a pivotal figure in the New Hollywood era of filmmaking, and Abrams represents a rising scholarly generation, and is one of the central academics connected with archival Kubrick studies. The authors previously co-wrote an in-depth, archival-based examination of the long developmental history and production of Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut (Oxford, 2019), a work that set the stage for, and flows directly into, the new biography. 

Kolker and Abrams, here, capture an epic vista spanning the full range of Kubrick’s life and work, including produced and unproduced projects. Chapters are chronologically arranged across Kubrick’s life and sequenced in clusters largely around periods of development and production, allowing readers and scholars to easily locate cinematic features of choice or to trace the progression of particular works. While unlabeled as such, the volume is governed by a roughly five-part structure following the trajectory of Kubrick’s ascent: his early life and experience as a photojournalist; his foray into documentary filmmaking and fledgling attempts at independent, DIY cinema in the early 1950s; his partnership with James Harris and initial studio career from the mid-Fifties to early-Sixties; his breakthrough in the Sixties as a master director ahead of the zeitgeist; and his long residency as a patronage director with Warner Bros., from the 1970s to the end of his life. The middle sections around his work in the mid-Fifties and his countercultural breakthroughs in the Sixties are significant and informative as seeding the ground for the later part of the book, as we are not only given glimpses into the formation of Kubrick’s autodidactic and research-intensive working methods and style but also offered commentary on the roots of thematic obsessions that Kubrick returned to repeatedly in his late career and that fed into both realized and unrealized productions.

Kubrick aficionados and fans will revel in the copious details and accounts the authors provide of the films’ production histories, and the myriad anecdotes of Kubrick’s domestic and professional life, which were often inseparable. The authors interweave this with a trove of fresh interviews with Kubrick’s family, friends, associates, and collaborators. As well, the firsthand accounts and archival research not only provide a wealth of new insights into Kubrick’s finished screen work but also generate significant access to the developmental histories of projects that for decades Kubrick gestated but aborted for various reasons, such as Aryan Papers, Burning Secret, Napoleon, and Supertoys Last All Summer Long (eventually directed in 2001, at Kubrick’s behest, by Steven Spielberg as AI Artificial Intelligence). Eyes Wide Shut (1999) very nearly fell into that category, as his obsession with adapting Schnitzler’s novel into a film was long stymied from the Sixties, until he finally made it as his last film. The long-winding path to that film was minutely traced by the authors in their previous collaboration, which is successfully adapted and supplemented in this volume. 

What emerges in this biography is a picture of Kubrick as a consummate filmmaker committed to cinema as high art—a unique art, in fact, capable of refined visual expression and emotional resonance while simultaneously being accessible to a mass public. The visual and psychological dimensions of Kubrick’s work, the authors argue, are rooted in the tapestry of influences and contexts of Kubrick’s background, from avant-garde photography and cinema (of which Kubrick was a part), early-to-mid twentieth European literature, philosophy, and film, to postwar New York culture—jazz, the Bohemian and Beat scenes, and Jewish comedy. Music was especially important to Kubrick, as a cultural window, but even more as a constituent component of the emotional grammar in filmmaking that played off and with the visual beats. But the commercial aspect of cinema was also decisively important to Kubrick, the authors note, as demonstrated by his intricate involvement in all aspects of marketing, promotion, and design, as well as his tendency to edit his films even after their release. Kubrick also developed a quasi-obsession with trying to match the box office performance of his (younger) peers, like Spielberg, especially after the disappointment over the tallies for Barry Lyndon (released in 1975, the same year as Jaws).

That Kubrick would be focused on “blockbuster” status is somewhat surprising given his enigmatic and often challenging work; yet, at the same time, Kubrick’s appeal, at least since Lolita (1962), if not before, was often driven by popular reception and not critical opinion, as the latter for much of his career was decidedly mixed, with critical opinion on each of his films shifting only over time. Kubrick did have critical supporters, however, and was honored as Best Director twice by the New York Film Critics Circle, for Dr. Strangelove in 1964 and A Clockwork Orange in 1971 (the latter mistakenly omitted by the authors in asserting that the director would not be honored again post-Strangelove). Another surprising misstatement is the authors’ claim that The Naked City (1948), well-noted for its location shooting in New York City, was “largely shot in Los Angeles.”…

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Michael Gibson, senior commissioning editor for sociology at Routledge, has published film articles in Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, New Review of Film and Television Studies, and Alphaville.

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