Stanley Kubrick: A Clockwork Utopia
London — “I think,” says Stanley Kubrick, eyeing the red warning light blinking on the control panel, “that I’d better report back to ground control.” He picks up the radio telephone handset and switches himself into the network. “This is 285 calling. Hello, this is 285. Please connect me with 783 … Andros? This is Stanley … I have a problem.”
In Kubrick’s world problems are things to be relished as they are chewed over before being decisively digested. The malfunction indicated by the light is an irritating intrusion in Kubrick’s schedule for today. A Clockwork Orange, his latest film, is due to open in a week’s time. Yesterday he heard that a few frames on the master negative had been scratched. Also, there are problems with the color quality of the print that has to be rushed out for press screenings. Most people would curse or at least bang the steering wheel in frustration. But Kubrick just settles his solid frame back into the driving seat of his four-year-old Mercedes, tweaks his safety belt a little tighter and glances at the speedometer in a fair imitation of Robert Mitchum, ice-cool and inscrutable.
“Andros, listen carefully. I’m going to describe the situation to you. OK, now I’m accelerating … the warning light is on. I’m leveling off at 50 and it’s gone off. Dropping down … I’m at 30 and I’m going to put the brakes on. OK, now the light is back on.
“I tell you what I want you to do. Call up the service department at the Mercedes headquarters and check with an engineer. Tell him the symptoms and get a diagnosis. Call me back as soon as possible.”
As Kubrick cruises the car along the main shopping street of North London’s Golder’s Green area, looking for a parking space, Andros, ten miles away at Kubrick’s headquarters in the suburban countryside, starts the ball rolling. Later, Andros — one of Kubrick’s personal staff of eight — will pick up a memo pad and say, “You see this piece of paper. It measures six inches by four because Stanley thinks that six by four is the best size for a memo. The thing is that he’s right. Sure, it can be frustrating working for Stanley, not because he cuts out personal initiative but because he’s always right. Actually, it’s very rewarding working for him. I reckon on devoting some of my life to Stanley. I know it’ll be worth it.”
Stanley Kubrick pays attention to detail, he does. Alexei Leonov, the Russian cosmonaut, remarked after seeing 2001: A Space Odyssey, “Now I feel I’ve been in space twice.” Arthur C. Clarke, co-author of 2001, wryly observed, “2001 didn’t win the Academy Award for makeup because the judges may not have realized that the apes were actors.” One scene in Paths of Glory, Kubrick’s second major film, was a problem for the stickler. “Timothy Carey,” recalls Kubrick, “who played some sort of bearded lunatic, just couldn’t do the same thing twice, either deliberately or unconsciously. He had to eat this meal in a prison cell and every take required an untouched duck. I think we used up 68 or so ducks before we got it right.”
A scene in Clockwork Orange called for Alex (Malcolm McDowell) to have his eyelids propped open. “We used a piece of standard surgical equipment called a lidlock,” says Kubrick. “It took courage and a local anaesthetic for him to wear them. I can assure you he didn’t like it at all and we never really got it finished the first time. He had to go back and face it again at the end. He had to do it. The scene wouldn’t have been credible otherwise. One of the worst fantasies you can imagine is being in a straightjacket, strapped to a chair, and unable to even blink your eyes.”
* * *
For the first time in over a year Kubrick has found time to buy a pair of shoes. He inspects a couple of shops from the outside and doesn’t see anything he fancies. Ideally he’d like a pair of work boots, but his wife Christianne has him under instructions to get something snappier. She’s said in the past that he’d be happiest with “one pair of pants and eight tape recorders.” She has a point. In all the photos of Kubrick taken on the locations of Clockwork Orange he is wearing the same gear — crumpled gray trousers, a blue single-breasted blazer going shiny at the elbows and a bulky, olive-drab anorak. He’s a continuity girl’s dream.
As Kubrick walks into the third shoe shop a remarkable thing happens. A sales assistant wanders up to him and asks if he’s from America. Apparently somebody is on the phone saying that any minute now a bearded American may walk in, and if so he can come to the phone. It’s Andros, of course, reporting back about the Mercedes. He’d calculated which shop Kubrick was most likely to go into. Possibly a leak in the brake fluid system, they said. Kubrick decides to return home at half-pace and pick up a Landrover before going on to the labs where he’ll be shown the first print of the titles for Clockwork Orange.
A Clockwork Orange is Kubrick’s ninth film, not counting two shorts he made for RKO when he was 22. He made his first non-documentary film while still working as a photographer for Look magazine, a job he’d landed at the age of 17. He’d tried to get into college, but a combination of low grades and the shortage of places during the rush of degree-hungry GIs put paid to his chances. For four years he roamed America sharpening his visual taste and being just plain curious.
Kubrick had picked up his interest in photography from his father, a doctor in the Bronx. Chess, another of Kubrick’s passions, was also passed along from his father. Kubrick is fond of drawing the parallels between filmmaking and chess. He told his biographer Alex Walker that chess “helps you develop patience and discipline at a time when an impulsive decision seems very attractive. Otherwise it’s very necessary to have perfect intuition — and that’s something very dangerous for an artist to rely on.”
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