Mick Garris (born December 4, 1951) is an American filmmaker and screenwriter born in Santa Monica, California.

Biography

He is best known for his adaptations of Stephen King stories, and is the creator of the Showtime series Masters of Horror. Garris won a 1986 Edgar Award for an episode he wrote for the Steven Spielberg-produced television series Amazing Stories. Garris directed the FEARnet web series Post Mortem. He hosted the double feature re-release of The People Under the Stairs and The Serpent and The Rainbow on 20 February 2010 in the Aero Theatre in Santa Monica. He contributes to the web series Trailers From Hell. Garris is set to direct the film adaption of Stephen King's novel Bag of Bones.

Awards

Garris received the Lifetime Achievement Award at the 2006 New York City Horror Film Festival. He received the award in person after a screening of his Masters of Horror episode "Valerie on the Stairs".

Selected filmography

Fuzz Bucket (1986)

(1988)

(1990)

Sleepwalkers (1992)

The Stand (1994)

The Shining (1997)

Riding the Bullet (2004)

Masters of Horror - "Chocolate" (2005)

Masters of Horror - "Valerie on the Stairs" (2006)

Desperation (2006)

As writer

*batteries not included (1987)

(1988)

The Fly II (1989)

Riding the Bullet (2004)

Masters of Horror - "Haeckel's Tale" (2005)

Masters of Horror - "Chocolate" (2005)

See also

Fear Itself

References

External links

Mick Garris on FEARnet

NYC Horrorfest

Category:1951 births Category:American screenwriters Category:American film directors Category:American television directors Category:American television writers Category:Horror film directors Category:Edgar Award winners Category:Living people Category:People from Santa Monica, California

Caption	Carpenter in 2001
Birthame	John Howard Carpenter
Birth date	January 16, 1948
Birth place	Carthage, New York, U.S.
Occupation	director, screenwriter, producer, composer
Years active	1962 – present
Spouse	Adrienne Barbeau (1979–1984) Sandy King (1990–)

John Howard Carpenter (born January 16, 1948) is an American film director, screenwriter, producer, editor, composer, and occasional actor. Although Carpenter has worked in numerous film genres in his four-decade career, his name is most commonly associated with horror and science fiction.

Early life

Carpenter was born in Carthage, New York, the son of Milton Jean (née Carter) and Howard Ralph Carpenter, a music professor. He and his family moved to Bowling Green, Kentucky in 1953. He was captivated by movies from an early age, particularly the westerns of Howard Hawks and John Ford, as well as 1950s low budget horror and science fiction films, such as Forbidden Planet and The Thing from Another World and began filming horror shorts on 8 mm film even before entering high school. He attended Western Kentucky University where his father chaired the music department, then transferred to the University of Southern California's School of Cinematic Arts in 1968 and graduated in 1971.

Academy Award – Live Action Short Film

At USC Cinema, one of his projects as a co-writer, film editor and music composer, The Resurrection of Broncho Billy (1970), produced by John Longenecker, won an Academy Award for Best Live Action Short Film. The short film was blown-up to 35mm, sixty prints were made, and the film was theatrically released by Universal Studios for two years in the United States and Canada.

1970s: From student films to major theatrical releases

His first major film as director, Dark Star (1974), was a science fiction black comedy that he cowrote with Dan O'Bannon (who later went on to write Alien, borrowing freely from much of Dark Star). The film reportedly cost only $60,000 and was difficult to make as both Carpenter and O'Bannon completed the film by multitasking, with Carpenter doing the musical score as well as the writing, producing and directing, while O'Bannon acted in the film and did the special effects (which caught the attention of George Lucas who hired him to do work on the special effects for ). Carpenter's efforts did not go unnoticed as much of Hollywood marveled at his filmmaking abilities within the confines of a shoestring budget.

Carpenter's next film was Assault on Precinct 13 (1976), a low-budget thriller influenced by the films of Howard Hawks, particularly Rio Bravo. As with Dark Star, Carpenter was responsible for many aspects of the film's creation. He not only wrote, directed and scored it, but also edited the film under the pseudonym "John T. Chance" (the name of John Wayne's character in Rio Bravo). Carpenter has said that he considers Assault on Precinct 13 to have been his first real film because it was the first movie that he shot on a schedule. The film was also significant because it marked the first time Carpenter worked with Debra Hill, who played prominently in the making of some of Carpenter's most important films.

Working within the limitations of a $100,000 budget, Carpenter assembled a main cast that consisted of experienced but relatively obscure actors. The two leads were Austin Stoker, who had appeared previously in science fiction, disaster and blaxploitation films, and Darwin Joston, who had worked primarily in television and had once been Carpenter's next-door neighbor.

The film was originally released in the United States to mixed critical reviews and lackluster box-office earnings, but after it was screened at the 1977 London Film Festival, it became a critical and commercial success in Europe and is often credited with launching Carpenter's career. The film subsequently received a critical reassessment in the United States, where it is now generally regarded as one of the best exploitation films of the 1970s.

Carpenter both wrote and directed the Lauren Hutton thriller Someone's Watching Me! (aka High Rise) in 1978. This TV movie is the tale of a single, working woman who, shortly after arriving in L.A., discovers that she is being stalked. Borrowing heavily from Alfred Hitchcock, Carpenter slowly builds the suspense and intrigue before the final confrontation.

Halloween (1978) was a smash hit on release and helped give birth to the slasher film genre. Originally an idea suggested by producer Irwin Yablans (titled The Babysitter Murders), who envisioned a film about babysitters being menaced by a stalker, Carpenter took the idea and another suggestion from Yablans that it take place during Halloween and developed a story. Carpenter said of the basic concept: "Halloween night. It has never been the theme in a film. My idea was to do an old haunted house movie." The film was written by Carpenter and Debra Hill with Carpenter admitting that the music, not the film, was inspired by both Dario Argento's Suspiria and William Friedkin's The Exorcist.

Carpenter again worked with a relatively small budget, $320,000. The film grossed over $65 million initially, making it one of the most successful independent films of all time.

Carpenter relied upon taut suspense rather than the excessive gore that would define later slasher films in order to make the menacing nature of the main character, Michael Myers, more palpable. At times, Carpenter has described Halloween in terms that appeared to directly contradict the more thoughtful, nuanced approach to horror that he actually used, such as: "True crass exploitation. I decided to make a film I would love to have seen as a kid, full of cheap tricks like a haunted house at a fair where you walk down the corridor and things jump out at you." The film has often been cited as an allegory on the virtue of sexual purity and the danger of casual sex, although Carpenter has explained that this was not his intent: "It has been suggested that I was making some kind of moral statement. Believe me, I'm not. In Halloween, I viewed the characters as simply normal teenagers." Of the later slasher films that largely mimicked Carpenter's work on Halloween, few have met with the same critical success.

In addition to the film's critical and commercial success, Carpenter's self-composed "Halloween Theme" remains a recognizable film music theme to this day.

In 1979, John Carpenter began what was to be the first of several collaborations with actor Kurt Russell when he directed the TV movie Elvis. The made-for-TV movie was a smash hit with viewers and critics, and was also released as a feature film in cinemas outside the U. S. and revived the career of Russell, who was a child actor in the 1960s.

1980s: Continued commercial success

Carpenter followed up the success of Halloween with The Fog (1980), a ghostly revenge tale (co-written by Hill) inspired by horror comics such as Tales from the Crypt and by The Crawling Eye, a 1958 movie about monsters hiding in clouds.

Completing The Fog was an unusually difficult process for Carpenter. After viewing a rough cut of the film, he was dissatisfied with the result. For the only time in his filmmaking career, he had to devise a way to salvage a nearly finished film that did not meet his standards. In order to make the movie more coherent and frightening, Carpenter shot additional footage that included a number of new scenes. Approximately one-third of the finished film is the newer footage.

Despite production problems and mostly negative critical reception, The Fog was another commercial success for Carpenter. The film was made on a budget of $1,000,000, but it grossed over $21,000,000 in the United States alone. Carpenter has said that The Fog is not his favorite film, although he considers it a "minor horror classic". Carpenter's largest up to that point, and distributed by Universal Pictures.

Although Carpenter's film was ostensibly a remake of the 1951 Howard Hawks film, The Thing from Another World, Carpenter's version is more faithful to the John W. Campbell, Jr. novella, Who Goes There?, upon which both films were based. Moreover, unlike the Hawks film, The Thing was part of Carpenter's Apocalypse Trilogy a trio of films with bleak endings for the film's characters, and being a graphic, sinister horror film, it did not appeal to audiences in the summer of 1982, especially when the release of E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial which would have illustrated a much more light-hearted picture of alien visitation, was released two weeks prior. In an interview, Carpenter revealed that E.T.'s release could have been largely responsible for the film's failure. As The Thing did not perform well on a commercial level, it was Carpenter's first financial failure. Later, the movie found new life in the home video and cable markets, and it is now widely regarded as one of the best horror films and remakes ever made.

Carpenter's next film, Christine, was the 1983 adaptation of the Stephen King novel of the same name. The story revolves around a high-school nerd named Arnie Cunningham (Keith Gordon) who buys a junked 1958 Plymouth Fury which turns out to have supernatural powers. As Cunningham restores and rebuilds the car, he becomes unnaturally obsessed with it, with deadly consequences. Christine did respectable business upon its release and was received well by critics; however, Carpenter has been quoted as saying he directed the film because it was the only thing offered to him at the time.

One of the high points in Carpenter's career came in 1984 with the release of Starman, a film that was critically praised but was only a moderate commercial success. Produced by Michael Douglas, the script was well received by Columbia Pictures, which chose it over the script for E.T. and prompted Steven Spielberg to go to Universal Pictures. Douglas chose Carpenter to be the director because of his reputation as an action director who could also convey strong emotion. Starman was favorably reviewed by the Los Angeles Times, New York Times and LA Weekly and described by Carpenter as a film he envisioned as a romantic comedy similar to It Happened One Night only with a space alien. The film received Oscar and Golden Globe nominations for Jeff Bridges' portrayal of Starman and received a Golden Globe nomination for Best Musical Score for Jack Nitzsche.

After seeing footage of Starman, the executive producer of the Superman movie series, Ilya Salkind, offered Carpenter the chance to direct the latest Alexander–Ilya Salkind fantasy epic . Salkind made the offer to Carpenter over lunch at The Ritz, and while he loved the idea of breaking from his normal traditions and directing a children's fantasy movie, he requested 24 hours to think over the offer. The next day he had drawn up a list of requirements should he direct the movie; they were: 100 percent creative control, the right to take over scriptwriting duties, being able to co-compose the movie's musical score, total editorial control, the casting of Brian Dennehey as Santa Claus and a $5 million signing-on fee (the same amount that the movie's star Dudley Moore was receiving). Team Salkind were nonplussed by his demands and withdrew their offer for him to direct. Carpenter told Empire magazine ten years later that he wished he'd been less demanding and made the movie because he liked the idea so much and it would have changed critics' views on his limitations as a director.

Following the box office failure of his big-budget action–comedy Big Trouble in Little China (1986), Carpenter struggled to get films financed. He returned to making lower budget films such as Prince of Darkness (1987), a film influenced by the BBC series Quatermass. Although some of the films from this time, such as They Live (1988) did pick up a considerable cult audience, he never again realized his mass-market potential.

1990s: Criticism and commercial decline

His 1990s career is characterized by a number of notable misfires: Memoirs of an Invisible Man (1992), Village of the Damned (1995) and Escape From L.A. (1996) are examples of films that were critical and box office failures. Also notable from this decade are: In the Mouth of Madness (1995), yet another Lovecraftian homage, which did not do well either at the box-office or with critics.

Vampires (1998) starred James Woods as the leader of a band of vampire hunters in league with the Catholic Church. It was the only film during the 90's which was a financial success for Carpenter.

2000s–present: Remakes and Masters of Horror

2001 saw the release of Ghosts of Mars. 2005 saw remakes of Assault on Precinct 13 and The Fog, the latter being produced by Carpenter himself, though in an interview he defined his involvement as, "I come in and say hello to everybody. Go home."

More recently, Rob Zombie has produced and directed Halloween, a re-imagining of John Carpenter's 1978 film. It was released in 2007, and spawned a sequel two years later.

Carpenter returned to the director's chair in 2005 for an episode of Showtime's Masters of Horror series as one of the thirteen filmmakers involved in the first season. His episode, Cigarette Burns, aired to generally positive reviews, and positive reactions from Carpenter fans, many of whom regard it as on par with his earlier horror classics. He has since contributed another original episode for the show's second season entitled "Pro-Life", about a young girl who is raped and impregnated by a demon and wants to have an abortion, but whose efforts are halted by her religious fanatic, gun-toting father and her three brothers.

A remake of Escape from New York was planned starring Gerard Butler as Snake Plissken but he has since turned the role down.

In February 2009, It was announced that Carpenter had planned for his newest project, called The Ward, starring Amber Heard. It was his first movie since 2001's Ghosts of Mars, and it premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival on September 13, 2010. Carpenter narrated the upcoming video game F.E.A.R. 3. On 10 October 2010 Carpenter received the Lifetime Award from the Freak Show Horror Film Festival.

Techniques

His films are characterized by minimalist lighting and photography, static cameras, use of steadicam, and distinctive synthesized scores (usually self-composed). He describes himself as having been influenced by Howard Hawks, Alfred Hitchcock, Nigel Kneale and The Twilight Zone.

With the exception of The Thing, Starman, and Memoirs of an Invisible Man, he has scored all of his films (though some are collaborations), most famously the themes from Halloween and Assault on Precinct 13. His music is generally synthesized with accompaniment from piano and atmospherics.

Carpenter is an outspoken proponent of widescreen filming, and all of his theatrical movies (with the exception of Dark Star) were filmed anamorphic with a 2.35:1 or greater aspect ratio.

Legacy

With a career that has spanned over thirty years, John Carpenter has attained a reputation as a respected independent filmmaker. Although some of Carpenter's films have not been commercially or critically successful upon initial theatrical release, Carpenter has developed a large cult following through home video releases of his films. Many of his films, most notably The Thing, have been rediscovered on VHS, laserdisc and DVD and have since been embraced by many fans – interesting, as The Thing was initially Carpenter's first big setback. The film was considered excessively dark, and did not do well at the box office and Rob Bottin's effects were considered too grotesque for a mainstream audience. Retrospectively, the film has gained much critical appreciation.

Four years later, Big Trouble in Little China was also poorly received by audiences and critics alike, an eclectic mix of genres that was years ahead of its time. This film, like The Thing, found its audience on VHS and DVD years after its theatrical release.

Many of Carpenter's films have been re-released on DVD as special editions with numerous bonus features. Examples of such are: the collector's editions of Halloween, Escape From New York, Christine, The Thing, Assault on Precinct 13, Big Trouble In Little China and The Fog. Some have been re-issued recently with a new anamorphic widescreen transfer. In the UK, several of Carpenter's films have been released on DVD with audio commentary by Carpenter and his stars (They Live, with actor/wrestler Roddy Piper, Starman with actor Jeff Bridges and Prince of Darkness with actor Peter Jason) that have not been released in the United States.

In recent years, Carpenter has been the subject of the documentary film John Carpenter: The Man and His Movies, and his status as a respected filmmaker has been reinforced by American Cinematheque's 2002 retrospective of his films. Moreover, in 2006, the United States Library of Congress deemed Halloween to be "culturally significant" and selected it for preservation in the National Film Registry.

The action filmmaker Robert Rodriguez credits John Carpenter with having one of the biggest influences on his directing career.

In 2010, writer and actor Mark Gatiss interviewed Carpenter about his career and films for his BBC documentary series A History of Horror. Carpenter appears in all three episodes of the series.

Personal life

Carpenter met his future wife, actress Adrienne Barbeau, on the set of his 1978 television movie, Someone's Watching Me. Carpenter was married to Barbeau from January 1, 1979, to 1984. During their marriage, Barbeau starred in The Fog, and also appeared in Escape from New York. The couple had one son, John Cody Carpenter (born May 7, 1984).

Carpenter has been married to producer Sandy King since 1990. King produced a number of Carpenter's later feature films, including They Live, In the Mouth of Madness, Ghosts of Mars, and Escape from L.A. She also functioned as script supervisor for some of these films as well, such as Starman, Big Trouble in Little China and Prince of Darkness.

Carpenter is a Godzilla fan.

He appeared in an episode of Animal Planet's Animal Icons titled "It Came from Japan."

In an interview Carpenter had said that he has been diagnosed with skin cancer several times and that he believes the reason for this was working on The Thing due to the sun's rays bouncing off the snow and onto his face.

Filmography

:See John Carpenter filmography

Further reading

Conrich, Ian & Woods, David. The Cinema of John Carpenter: The Technique of Terror (Directors' Cuts), Wallflower Press (2004). ISBN 1-904764-14-2.

Muir, John Kenneth. The Films of John Carpenter, McFarland & Company, Inc. (2005). ISBN 0-7864-2269-6.

References

External links

Interview with The Onion A.V. Club

Entertainment Weekly interview

Time Out New York interview

DGA magazine interview

Writers Guild of America interview

Category:1948 births Category:American film directors Category:American film producers Category:American film score composers Category:American screenwriters Category:Horror film directors Category:Living people Category:Electronic musicians Category:People from Bowling Green, Kentucky Category:University of Southern California alumni

Caption	David Cronenberg at Cannes, 2002
Birth name	David Paul Cronenberg
Birth date	March 15, 1943
Birth place	Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Other names	Dave Deprave Baron of Blood
Occupation	Director, producer, screenwriter
Years active	1966 – present
Spouse	Margaret Hindson (1970–1977) Caroline Zeifman (1979–)

David Paul Cronenberg, OC, FRSC (born March 15, 1943) is a Canadian filmmaker and screenwriter. He is one of the principal originators of what is commonly known as the body horror or venereal horror genre. This style of filmmaking explores people's fears of bodily transformation and infection. In his films, the psychological is typically intertwined with the physical. In the first half of his career, he explored these themes mostly through horror and science fiction, although his work has since expanded beyond these genres. He has been called "the most audacious and challenging narrative director in the English-speaking world."

Personal life

Cronenberg was born in Toronto, Ontario, where he currently lives. He is the son of Esther (née Sumberg), a musician, and Milton Cronenberg, a writer and editor. Cronenberg attended Harbord Collegiate Institute, later graduating from University College, University of Toronto with a degree in literature, having switched from science. He has cited William S. Burroughs and Vladimir Nabokov as influences. He remains an atheist and does not believe in an afterlife.

Career

After two short sketch films and two short art-house features (the black and white Stereo and the colour Crimes of the Future) Cronenberg went into partnership with Ivan Reitman. The Canadian government provided financing for his films through the 1970s. He alternated his signature "body horror" films such as Shivers with projects reflecting his interest in car racing and bike gangs. Rabid exploited the unexpected acting talents of pornographic actress Marilyn Chambers (Cronenberg's first choice was a young, then-unknown Sissy Spacek). Rabid was a breakthrough with international distributors and his next two horror features gained stronger support.

Over the arc of his career, Cronenberg's films follow a definite progression, a movement from the social world to the inner life. In his early films, scientists modify human bodies, which results in the breakdown of social order (e.g. Shivers, Rabid). In his middle period, the chaos wrought by the scientist is more personal, (e.g. The Brood, Scanners, Videodrome). In the later period, the scientist himself is altered by his experiment (e.g. his remake of The Fly). This trajectory culminates in Dead Ringers in which a twin pair of gynecologists spiral into codependency and drug addiction. His later films tend more to the psychological, often contrasting subjective and objective realities (eXistenZ, M. Butterfly, Spider).

Perhaps the best example of a film that straddles the line between his works of personal chaos and psychological confusion is Cronenberg's "adaptation" of his literary hero William S. Burroughs' most controversial book, Naked Lunch. The book was considered "unfilmable" and Cronenberg acknowledged that a straight translation into film would "cost 100 million dollars and be banned in every country in the world". Instead—much like in his earlier film, Videodrome—he consistently blurred the lines between what appeared to be reality and what appeared to be hallucinations brought on by the main character's drug addiction. Some of the book's "moments" (as well as incidents loosely based upon Burroughs' life) are presented in this manner within the film. Cronenberg stated that while writing the screenplay for Naked Lunch, he felt a moment of synergy with the writing style of Burroughs. He felt the connection between his screenwriting style and Burroughs' prose style was so strong, that he jokingly remarked that should Burroughs pass on, "I'll just write his next book."

Cronenberg has said that his films should be seen "from the point of view of the disease", and that, for example, he identifies with the characters in Shivers after they become infected with the anarchic parasites. Disease and disaster, in Cronenberg's work, are less problems to be overcome than agents of personal transformation. Similarly, in Crash (1996), people who have been injured in car crashes attempt to view their ordeal as "a fertilizing rather than a destructive event". In 2005, Cronenberg would say that he was upset that Paul Haggis had chosen the same name for his Academy Award winning film Crash, feeling it was "stupid" and "very disrespectful."

Aside from The Dead Zone (1983) and The Fly, Cronenberg has not generally worked within the world of big-budget, mainstream Hollywood filmmaking, although he has had occasional near misses. At one stage he was considered by George Lucas as a possible director for but was passed. Cronenberg also worked for nearly a year on a version of Total Recall but experienced "creative differences" with producers Dino De Laurentiis and Ronald Shusett. A different version of the film was eventually made by Paul Verhoeven. A fan of Philip K. Dick, author of "We Can Remember it For You Wholesale," the short story upon which the film was based, Cronenberg related (in the biography/overview of his work, Cronenberg on Cronenberg) that his dissatisfaction with what he envisioned the film to be and what it ended up being pained him so greatly that for a time, he suffered a migraine just thinking about it, akin to a needle piercing his eye.

In the late 1990s, Cronenberg was announced as director of a sequel to another Verhoeven film, Basic Instinct, but this also fell through. His recent work, the thriller A History of Violence (2005), is one of his highest budgeted and most accessible to date. He has said that the decision to direct it was influenced by his having had to defer some of his salary on the low-budgeted Spider, but it is one of his most critically acclaimed films to date, along with Eastern Promises (2007) a film about the struggle of one man to gain power in the Russian Mafia.

Cronenberg has collaborated with composer Howard Shore on all of his films since The Brood (1979), (see List of noted film director and composer collaborations) with the exception of The Dead Zone (1983), which was scored by Michael Kamen. Other regular collaborators include actor Robert Silverman, art director Carol Spier, sound editor Bryan Day, film editor Ronald Sanders, his sister, costume designer Denise Cronenberg, and, from 1979 until 1988, cinematographer Mark Irwin. In 2008, Cronenberg directed Howard Shore's first opera, The Fly.

Since 1988's Dead Ringers, Cronenberg has worked with cinematographer Peter Suschitzky on each of his films (see List of noted film director and cinematographer collaborations). Suschitzky was the director of photography for , and Cronenberg remarked that Suschitzky's work in that film "was the only one of those movies that actually looked good", which was a motivating factor to work with him on Dead Ringers.

Having worked with many Hollywood stars, Cronenberg says that he did not get to make a film with an actor he wanted to work with for a long time, Burt Reynolds. Cronenberg remains a staunchly Canadian filmmaker, with nearly all of his films (including major studio vehicles The Dead Zone and The Fly) having been filmed in his home province Ontario. Notable exceptions include M. Butterfly and Spider, most of which were shot in China and England, respectively. Rabid and Shivers were shot in and around Montreal. Most of his films have been at least partially financed by Telefilm Canada, and Cronenberg is a vocal supporter of government-backed film projects, saying "Every country needs [a system of government grants] in order to have a national cinema in the face of Hollywood".

Cronenberg has also appeared as an actor in other directors' films. Most of his roles are cameo appearances, as in Into The Night, Jason X, To Die For, and Alias, but on occasion he has played major roles, as in Nightbreed or Last Night. He has not played major roles in any of his own films, but he did put in a brief appearance as a gynecologist in The Fly; he can also be glimpsed among the sex-crazed hordes in Shivers; he can be heard as an unseen car-pound attendant in Crash; his hands can be glimpsed in eXistenZ; and he appeared as a stand-in for James Woods in Videodrome for shots in which Woods' character wore a helmet that covered his head.

In 2008 Cronenberg realized two extra-cinematographic projects: the exhibition Chromosomes at the Rome Film Fest and the opera The Fly at the LaOpera in Los Angeles and Theatre Châtelet in Paris.

Future projects

In July 2010, Cronenberg completed production on A Dangerous Method, an adaptation of Christopher Hampton's play The Talking Cure, starring Keira Knightley, Michael Fassbender, and frequent collaborator Viggo Mortensen. The film was produced by independent British producer Jeremy Thomas.

He also plans to write and direct an adaptation of Don Delillo's Cosmopolis.

There have been reports of Cronenberg's interest in adapting the Jonathan Lethem's novel As She Climbed Across the Table, which would indicate for many fans the director's return to the fantasy science fiction genre. Steven Zaillian would be producing, along with his production company Film Rites.

The status of Cronenberg's spy thriller The Matarese Circle, based on Robert Ludlum's novel and starring Denzel Washington and Tom Cruise, remains rife with intrigue. In April 2009, it was announced that the project is on hold, due to MGM's financial problems.

Awards and recognition

He received the Special Jury Prize at the 1996 Cannes Film Festival for Crash.

In 1999, Cronenberg was inducted onto Canada's Walk of Fame. In 2002, he was made an Officer of the Order of Canada, and in 2006 he was awarded the Cannes Film Festival's lifetime achievement award, the Carrosse d'Or.

Cronenberg has appeared on various "Greatest Director" lists. In 2004, Science Fiction magazine Strange Horizons named him the 2nd greatest director in the history of the genre, ahead of better known directors such as Steven Spielberg, James Cameron, Jean-Luc Godard and Ridley Scott. In the same year, The Guardian listed him 9th on their list of "The world's 40 best directors". In addition, in 2007, Total Film named him as the 17th greatest director of all-time.

In 2006, he was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, the senior national body of distinguished Canadian scientists and scholars.

In 2009 Cronenberg received the Légion d'honneur from the government of France.

In 2010 Cronenberg was named an honorary patron of the University Philosophical Society, Trinity College, Dublin.

Filmography as director

Feature films

Stereo (1969)

Crimes of the Future (1970)

Shivers (1975)

Rabid (1977)

Fast Company (1979)

The Brood (1979)

Scanners (1981)

Videodrome (1983)

The Dead Zone (1983)

The Fly (1986)

Dead Ringers (1988)

Naked Lunch (1991)

M. Butterfly (1993)

Crash (1996)

eXistenZ (1999)

Spider (2002)

A History of Violence (2005)

Eastern Promises (2007)

A Dangerous Method (2011)

Short films

Transfer (1966)

From the Drain (1967)

Camera (2000)

To Each His Own Cinema (Chacun son cinéma) (2007)

* segment: At the Suicide of the Last Jew in the World in the Last Cinema in the World

Television series

Programme X

* episode: *Secret Weapons (1972)

Peep Show

* episodes: The Victim (1975) & The Lie Chair [1975]

Teleplay

* episode: The Italian Machine (1976) watch it here (RealMedia)

* episode: 1.12 Faith Healer (1987)

Scales of Justice

* episodes: Regina vs Horvath (1990) & Regina vs Logan (1990)

Television spots

Jim Ritchie Sculptor (1971)

Letter from Michelangelo (1971)

Tourettes (1971)

Don Valley (1972)

Fort York (1972)

Lakeshore (1972)

Winter Garden (1972)

Scarborough Bluffs (1972)

In the Dirt (1972)

Commercials

Hydro

* Client: Ontario Hydro

* Product: Energy conservation

* Agency: Burghardt Wolowich Crunkhorn

* Production company: The Partners' Film Company Ltd.

* Format: 4 x 30-second commercials

* Titles: Hot Showers, Laundry, Cleaners, Timers

Caramilk

* Client: William Neilson Ltd.

* Product: Cadbury Caramilk

* Agency: Scali McCabe, Sloves (Canada) Ltd.

* Production company: The Partners' Film Company Ltd.

* Format: 2 x 30-second commercials

* Titles: Bistro, Surveillance

Nike

* Client: Nike International

* Product: Nike Air 180

* Agency: Wieden and Kennedy

* Production company: The Partners' Film Company Ltd.

* Format: 1 x 15-second/4 x 30-second commercials

* Title: Transformation

Filmography as producer

Dead Ringers (1988)

Crash (1996)

I'm Losing You (1998)

Drone (2008)

Filmography as actor

Into the Night (1985)

The Fly (1986, cameo)

Nightbreed (1990)

To Die For (1995, cameo)

Blood and Donuts (1995)

The Stupids (1996, cameo)

Extreme Measures (1996, cameo)

Last Night (1998)

Resurrection (1999)

Jason X (2002)

Alias (TV) (2003) (Episodes "Remnants" and "Conscious")

Further reading

Mark Browning (2007): David Cronenberg: Author or Filmmaker? (ISBN 978-1-84150-173-4)

Thomas J. Dreibrodt (2000): Lang lebe das neue Fleisch. Die Filme von David Cronenberg — von 'Shivers' bis 'eXistenZ'. (academic; in German) (ISBN 978-3-932872-05-1)

Serge Grünberg, ed. (2006): David Cronenberg (interviews) (ISBN 978-0-85965-376-3)

Piers Handling (1983): The Shape of Rage: The Films of David Cronenberg (ISBN 978-0-7736-1137-5)

Kim Newman (1989): Nightmare Movies: A Critical History of the Horror Film 1968–1988 (ISBN 978-0-517-57366-2)

Drehli Robnik, Michael Palm, eds. (1992): Und das Wort ist Fleisch geworden. Texte über Filme von David Cronenberg. Vienna, PVS: 1992. ISBN 978-3-901196-02-7

Chris Rodley, ed. (1996): Cronenberg on Cronenberg (ISBN 978-0-571-19137-6)

Bibliographies

David Cronenberg Bibliography (via UC Berkeley)

Red Cars Artist's book David Cronenberg, Volumina (2005)

References

External links

David Cronenberg at Rotten Tomatoes

An interview on Salon.com

An interview, circa 1999

Canadian Film Encyclopedia (A publication of The Film Reference Library/A division of the Toronto International Film Festival Group)

BBC interview with Cronenberg (Video, 2007-10-19)

Interview with Cronenberg by SBIFF at UCSB regarding his life, work and Eastern Promises

Interview with Cronenberg in Venice Magazine

Category:1943 births Category:Canadian atheists Category:Canadian film actors Category:Canadian film directors Category:Horror film directors Category:Canadian Jews Category:Jewish atheists Category:Fellows of the Royal Society of Canada Category:Genie Award winners for Best Achievement in Direction Category:Légion d'honneur recipients Category:Jewish actors Category:Officers of the Order of Canada Category:People from Toronto Category:University of Toronto alumni Category:Living people Category:Genie Award winners for Best Screenplay

Name	Stephen King
Caption	Stephen King, February 2007
Pseudonym	Richard Bachman, John Swithen
Birthdate	September 21, 1947
Birthname	Stephen Edwin King
Birthplace	Portland, Maine, United States
Occupation	Novelist, short story writer, screenwriter, columnist, actor, television producer, film director
Genre	Horror, fantasy, science fiction, drama, gothic, genre fiction, dark fantasy
Net worth	?
Notableworks	Carrie, The Shining, The Stand, It, and Misery
Influences	Burton HatlenEdgar Allan PoeJohn D. MacDonaldDon RobertsonWilliam FaulknerAlexandre Dumas, père
Influenced	Peter DavidJ.J. AbramsDamon Lindelof which have been made into many movies and television films. As of 2011, King has written and published 49 novels, including seven under the pen name Richard Bachman, five non-fiction books, and nine collections of short stories. Most of his stories are set in his homestate of Maine, although some are also set in Colorado and Florida. He has collaborated with author Peter Straub and they both wrote The Talisman and Black House'' .
Name	King, Stephen
Alternative names	King, Stephen Edwin
Short description	American author
Date of birth	September 21, 1947
Place of birth	Portland, Maine, United States

Category:1947 births Category:Living people Category:American horror writers Category:American novelists Category:American short story writers Category:Authors of books about writing fiction Category:Cthulhu Mythos writers Category:Horror writers Category:O. Henry Award winners Category:People from Bangor, Maine Category:People from Portland, Maine Category:People from Sarasota, Florida Category:Maine Democrats Category:American schoolteachers Category:University of Maine alumni Category:Writers from Maine Category:People self-identifying as alcoholics Category:20th-century novelists Category:21st-century novelists Category:Rock Bottom Remainders members

Name	Stanley Kubrick
Caption	1940s self-portrait with a Leica III camera during the time Kubrick worked for Look.From the book Drama and Shadows.
Birth date	July 26, 1928
Birth place	Manhattan, New York,
Influences	Max Ophuls, Fritz Lang, G.W. Pabst, Vsevolod Pudovkin, Jean Renoir, Vittorio De Sica
Influenced	Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, James Cameron, Woody Allen, Terry Gilliam, Ridley Scott, Christopher Nolan, David Fincher, Guillermo del Toro, David Lynch, Lars Von Trier, Michael Mann, George A. Romero, Coen brothers, Quentin Tarantino, Gaspar Noé
Death date	March 07, 1999
Death place	Harpenden, Hertfordshire, England, United Kingdom
Spouse	Toba Metz (1948–1951; divorced) Ruth Sobotka (1954–1957; divorced) Christiane Harlan (1958–1999; his death)
Occupation	Film director, film producer, screenwriter, cinematographer, film editor
Years active	1951–1999

Stanley Kubrick (July 26, 1928 – March 7, 1999) was an American film director, writer, producer, and photographer who lived in England during most of the last four decades of his career. Kubrick was noted for the scrupulous care with which he chose his subjects, his slow method of working, the variety of genres he worked in, his technical perfectionism, and his reclusiveness about his films and personal life. He maintained almost complete artistic control, making movies according to his own whims and time constraints, but with the rare advantage of big-studio financial support for all his endeavors.

Kubrick's films are characterized by a formal visual style and meticulous attention to detail—his later films often have elements of surrealism and expressionism that eschews structured linear narrative. His films are repeatedly described as slow and methodical, and are often perceived as a reflection of his obsessive and perfectionist nature. A recurring theme in his films is man's inhumanity to man. While often viewed as expressing an ironic pessimism, a few critics feel his films contain a cautious optimism when viewed more carefully.

The film that first brought him attention to many critics was Paths of Glory, the first of three films of his about the dehumanizing effects of war. Many of his films at first got a lukewarm reception, only to be years later acclaimed as masterpieces that had a seminal influence on many later generations of film-makers. Considered especially groundbreaking was noted for being both one of the most scientifically realistic and visually innovative science-fiction films ever made while maintaining an enigmatic non-linear storyline. He voluntarily withdrew his film A Clockwork Orange from England, after it was accused of inspiring copycat crimes which in turn resulted in threats against Kubrick's family. His films were largely successful at the box-office, although Barry Lyndon performed poorly in the United States. Living authors Anthony Burgess and Stephen King were both unhappy with Kubrick's adaptations of their novels A Clockwork Orange and The Shining respectively, and both authors were engaged with subsequent adaptations. All of Kubrick's films from the mid-1950s to his death except for The Shining were nominated for Oscars, Golden Globes, or BAFTAs. Although he was nominated for an Academy Award as a screenwriter and director on several occasions, his only personal win was for the special effects in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Even though all of his films, apart from the first two, were adapted from novels or short stories, his works have been described by Jason Ankeny and others as "original and visionary". Although some critics, notably Pauline Kael, frequently detracted Kubrick, Ankeny is largely correct in describing Kubrick as one of the most "universally acclaimed and influential directors of the postwar era" with a "standing unique among the filmmakers of his day."

Early life

Stanley Kubrick was born on July 26, 1928 at the Lying-In Hospital in Manhattan, New York, the first of two children born to Jacques Leonard Kubrick (1901–85) and his wife Gertrude (née Perveler; 1903–85). His sister, Barbara, was born in 1934. Jacques Kubrick, whose parents and paternal grandparents were Jewish of Austrian, Romanian and Polish origin, was a doctor. At Stanley's birth, the Kubricks lived in an apartment at 2160 Clinton Avenue in The Bronx.

Kubrick's father taught him chess at age twelve, and the game remained a lifelong obsession. He graduated from high school in 1945, but his poor grades, combined with the demand for college admissions from soldiers returning from the Second World War, eliminated any hopes of higher education. Later in life, Kubrick spoke disdainfully of his education and of education in general, maintaining that nothing about school interested him. Eventually, he sought jobs as a freelance photographer, and by graduation, he had sold a photographic series to Look magazine. Kubrick supplemented his income by playing chess "for quarters" in Washington Square Park and various Manhattan chess clubs. He became an apprentice photographer for Look in 1946, and later a full-time staff photographer. (Many early [1945–50] photographs by Kubrick have been published in the book Drama and Shadows [2005, Phaidon Press] and also appear as a special feature on the 2007 Special Edition DVD of 2001: A Space Odyssey.)

During his Look magazine years, Kubrick married Toba Metz (b. 1930) on May 29, 1948. They lived in Greenwich Village, eventually divorcing in 1951. During this time, Kubrick began frequenting film screenings at the Museum of Modern Art and the cinemas of New York City. He was particularly inspired by the complex, fluid camerawork of director Max Ophüls, whose films influenced Kubrick's later visual style.

Film career and later life

Early works

In 1951, Kubrick's friend Alex Singer persuaded him to start making short documentaries for The March of Time, a provider of newsreels to movie theatres. Kubrick agreed, and shot the independently financed Day of the Fight in 1951. The film notably employed a reverse tracking shot, which would become one of Kubrick's signature camera movements. Although its distributor went out of business that year, Kubrick has been said to have sold Day of the Fight to RKO Pictures for a profit of $100, although Kubrick himself said he lost $100 in Jeremy Bernstein, Interview With Stanley Kubrick in 1966. Inspired by this early success, Kubrick quit his job at Look magazine and began working on his second short documentary, Flying Padre (1951), funded by RKO. A third short film, The Seafarers (1953) was filmed just after his first feature Fear and Desire (see below) in order to recoup costs. It was a 30-minute promotional film for the Seafarers' International Union and was Kubrick's first color film. These three films constitute Kubrick's only surviving work in the documentary genre. It is believed, however, that he was involved in other shorts, which have been lost—most notably World Assembly of Youth (1952). He also served as second unit director on an episode of the Omnibus television program about the life of Abraham Lincoln. None of these shorts has ever been officially released, though they have been widely bootlegged, and clips are used in the documentary Stanley Kubrick: A Life In Pictures. In addition, Day of the Fight and Flying Padre have been shown on TCM.

1950s: Fear and Desire, Killer's Kiss, The Killing and Paths of Glory

Kubrick moved to narrative feature films with Fear and Desire (1953), the story of a team of soldiers caught behind enemy lines in a fictional war. While wracked with anxiety about how they will escape, they stumble across a woman whom they capture for fear of her reporting them. One of the soldiers begins to fall in love with her, but shoots her when she tries to escape. He then abandons the troop. Another soldier becomes unsatisfied with a simple escape down the river and persuades the remaining soldiers to engage in a scheme to kill a general in a surprise attack at a nearby base.

Kubrick and his then-wife, Toba Metz, were the only crew on the film, which was written by Kubrick's friend Howard Sackler, who later became a successful playwright. Fear and Desire garnered respectable reviews but was a commercial failure. Later in life, Kubrick was embarrassed by the film, which he dismissed as an amateur effort. He refused to allow Fear and Desire to be shown at retrospectives and public screenings and did everything possible to keep it out of circulation. At least one copy remained in the archives of the film printing company, and the film subsequently surfaced in bootleg copies.

Kubrick's marriage to Toba Metz ended during the making of Fear and Desire. He met his second wife, Austrian-born dancer and theatrical designer Ruth Sobotka, in 1952. They lived together in New York's East Village from 1952 until their marriage on January 15, 1955. They moved to Hollywood that summer. Sobotka, who made a cameo appearance in Kubrick's next film, Killer's Kiss (1955), also served as art director on The Killing (1956). Like Fear and Desire, Killer's Kiss is a short feature film, with a running time of slightly more than an hour. It met with limited commercial and critical success. The film is about a young heavyweight boxer at the end of his career who gets involved in a love triangle in which his rival is involved with organized crime. Both Fear and Desire and Killer's Kiss were privately funded by Kubrick's family and friends.

Alex Singer introduced Kubrick to a young producer named James B. Harris, and the two became close friends. Their business partnership, Harris-Kubrick Productions, would finance Kubrick's next three films. The two bought the rights to the Lionel White novel Clean Break, which Kubrick and co-screenwriter Jim Thompson turned into The Killing. The story is about a meticulously planned racetrack robbery gone wrong after the mobsters get away with the money. (The film title may refer either to the robbery or the subsequent murder of a group of mobsters by a jealous boyfriend). Starring Sterling Hayden, The Killing was Kubrick's first full-length feature film shot with a professional cast and crew. As does the novel's narration, the story in the film is told out of sequence in a non-linear narrative as a consequence of retelling the events of the same day (and sometimes the same events) from the perspective of different characters. (This is not the same as using successive multiple in-world flashbacks as Citizen Kane does.) While this technique was highly unusual for contemporary 1950s American cinema, it was imitated nearly 40 years later in Reservoir Dogs by director Quentin Tarantino who has acknowledged Kubrick's film as a major influence, and critics have noticed the similarity in plot structure. In many ways, The Killing followed the conventions of film noir, both in its plotting and cinematography style. That kind of crime caper film had peaked in the 1940s; but today, many regard this film as one of the best of the noir genre. While it was not a financial success, it received good reviews.

The widespread admiration for The Killing brought Harris-Kubrick Productions to the attention of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. The studio offered them its massive collection of copyrighted stories from which to choose their next project. During this time, Kubrick also collaborated with Calder Willingham on an adaptation of the Austrian novel The Burning Secret. Although Kubrick was enthusiastic about the project, it was eventually shelved.

Kubrick's next film Paths of Glory was set during World War I and based on Humphrey Cobb's 1935 antiwar novel of the same name. It follows a French army unit ordered on an impossible mission by their superiors. As a result of the mission's failure, three innocent soldiers are charged with cowardice and sentenced to death, allegedly as an example to the troops, but actually serving as scapegoats for the failings of their commanders. Kirk Douglas was cast as Colonel Dax, a humanitarian officer who tries to prevent the soldiers' execution. Douglas was instrumental in securing financing for the ambitious production. The film was not a significant commercial success, but it was critically acclaimed and widely admired within the industry, establishing Kubrick as a major up-and-coming young filmmaker. Critics over the years have praised the film's unsentimental, spare, and unvarnished combat scenes and its raw, black-and-white cinematography. Steven Spielberg has named this one of his favorite Kubrick films.

During the production of Paths of Glory in Munich, Kubrick met and romanced young German actress Christiane Harlan (credited by her stage name, "Susanne Christian"), who played the only female speaking part in the film. Kubrick divorced his second wife, Ruth Sobotka, in 1957. Christiane Susanne Harlan (b. 1932 in Germany) belonged to a theatrical family and had trained as an actress. She and Kubrick married in 1958 and remained together until his death in 1999. During her marriage to Kubrick, Christiane concentrated on her career as a painter. In addition to raising Christiane's young daughter Katharina (b. 1953) from her first marriage to the late German actor Werner Bruhns (d. 1977), the couple had two daughters, Anya (1959–2009) and Vivian (b. 1960). Christiane's brother Jan Harlan was Kubrick's executive producer from 1975 onward.

1960s: Spartacus, Lolita, Dr. Strangelove and 2001: A Space Odyssey

Upon his return to the United States, Kubrick worked for six months on the Marlon Brando vehicle One-Eyed Jacks (1961). The two clashed over a number of casting decisions, and Brando eventually fired him and decided to direct the picture himself. Kubrick worked on a number of unproduced screenplays, including Lunatic at Large, which Kubrick intended to develop into a movie, until Kirk Douglas asked him to take over Douglas' epic production Spartacus (1960) from Anthony Mann, who had been fired by the studio two weeks into shooting.

Based upon the true story of a doomed uprising of Roman slaves, Spartacus was a difficult production. Creative differences arose between Kubrick and Douglas, and the two reportedly had a stormy working relationship. Frustrated by his lack of creative control, Kubrick later largely disowned the film, which further angered Douglas. The friendship the two men had formed on Paths of Glory was destroyed by the experience of making the film. Years later, Douglas referred to Kubrick as "a talented shit."

Despite the on-set troubles, Spartacus was a critical and commercial success and established Kubrick as a major director. However, its embattled production convinced Kubrick to find ways of working with Hollywood financing while remaining independent of its production system, which he called "film by fiat, film by frenzy."

Spartacus is the only Stanley Kubrick film in which Kubrick had no hand in the screenplay, no final cut, no producing credit, or any say in the casting. It was largely Kirk Douglas' project.

Spartacus would go on to win 4 Oscars with one going to Peter Ustinov, for his turn as the slave dealer Batiatus, the only actor to win one under Kubrick's direction.

In 1962, Kubrick moved to England to film Lolita, and he would live there for the rest of his life. The original motivation was to film Lolita in a country with laxer censorship laws. However, Kubrick had to remain in England to film Dr. Strangelove since Peter Sellers was not permitted to leave England at the time as he was involved in divorce proceedings, and the filming of 2001: A Space Odyssey required the large capacity of the sound stages of Shepperton Studios, which were not available in America. It was after filming the first two of these films in England and in the early planning stages of 2001 that Kubrick decided to settle in England permanently.

Lolita was Kubrick's first film to generate major controversy. The book, by Russian-American novelist Vladimir Nabokov, dealt with an affair between a middle-aged man named Humbert Humbert (James Mason) and his twelve-year-old stepdaughter, and was already notorious as an "obscene" novel and a when Kubrick embarked on the project. The difficult subject matter was mocked in the film's famous tagline, "How did they ever make a film of Lolita?" Kubrick originally engaged Nabokov to adapt his own novel for the screen. The writer first produced a 400-page screenplay, which he then reduced to 200. The final screenplay was written by Kubrick himself, and Nabokov himself estimated that only 20% of his work made it into the film. Nabokov's original draft was later published under the title Lolita: A Screenplay.

Prior to its release, Kubrick realized that to get a Production Code seal, the screenplay would have to downplay the book's provocativeness, treading lightly with its theme. Kubrick tried to make some elements more acceptable by omitting all material referring to Humbert's lifelong infatuation with "nymphets" and possibly ensuring Lolita looked like a teenager. James Harris, Kubrick's co-producer and uncredited co-screenwriter of Lolita decided with Kubrick to raise Lolita's age. Nonetheless, Kubrick had liaised with the censors during production and it was only "slightly edited", in particular removing the eroticism between Lolita and Humbert. As a result, the novel's more sensual aspects were toned down in the final cut, leaving much to the viewer's imagination. Kubrick would later say that had he known the severity of the censorship he would face, he probably would not have made the film.

Lolita was the first of two times Kubrick worked with British comic actor Peter Sellers, the second being Dr. Strangelove (1964). Sellers plays Clare Quilty, a second older man (unknown to Humbert) who is involved with Lolita, serving dramatically as Humbert's darker doppelganger. In the novel, Quilty is behind the scenes for most of the story, but Kubrick brings him to the foreground, which resulted in an expansion of his role (although it is only about thirty minutes of screen time). Kubrick exercises his dramatic license, and has Quilty pretend to be multiple characters in the film, allowing Sellers to employ his gift for mock accents.

Critical reception of the film was mixed; many praised it for its daring subject matter, while others were surprised by the lack of intimacy between Lolita and Humbert. The film received an Academy Award nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay, and Sue Lyon, who played the title role, won a Golden Globe for Best Newcomer.

Film critic Gene Youngblood holds that stylistically Lolita is a transitional film for Kubrick, "marking the turning point from a naturalistic cinema...to the surrealism of the later films." in multiple roles, he was relatively unknown in America where many viewers of Dr. Strangelove did not initially realize that Kubrick had cast him in three roles, all with distinctively different appearances and accents.]] Kubrick's next film, Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964), became a cult film and is now considered a classic. Roger Ebert wrote that it is the best satirical film ever made. The screenplay—based upon the novel Red Alert, by ex-RAF flight lieutenant Peter George (writing as Peter Bryant)—was co-written by Kubrick and George, with contributions by American satirist Terry Southern. Red Alert is a serious, cautionary tale of accidental atomic war. However, Kubrick found the conditions leading to nuclear war so absurd that the story became a sinister macabre comedy. Once re-conceived, Kubrick recruited Terry Southern to polish the final screenplay.

The story centers on an unauthorized American nuclear attack on the Soviet Union, initiated by renegade U.S.A.F. Gen. Jack D. Ripper (Sterling Hayden; the character's name is a reference to Jack the Ripper). When Ripper gives his orders, the bombers are all at fail-safe points, before which passing they cannot arm their warheads, and past which, they cannot proceed without direct orders. Once past this point, the planes will only return with a prearranged recall code. The film intercuts between three locales: Ripper's Air Force Base, where RAF Group Captain Lionel Mandrake (Sellers) tries to stop the mad Gen. Ripper by obtaining the codes; the Pentagon War Room, where the President of the United States (Sellers) and U.S.A.F. Gen. Buck Turgidson (George C. Scott) try to develop a strategy with the Soviets to stop Gen. Ripper's B-52 bombers from dropping nuclear bombs on Russia; and Major Kong's (Slim Pickens) B-52 bomber, where he and his crew of airmen (never knowing their orders are false) doggedly try to complete their mission. It soon becomes clear that the bombers may reach Russia, since only Gen. Ripper knows the recall codes. At this point, the character of Dr. Strangelove (Sellers' third role) is introduced. His Nazi-style plans for ensuring the survival of the fittest of the human race in the aftermath of a nuclear holocaust are the black-comedy highlight of the film.

Peter Sellers, who had played a pivotal part in Lolita, was hired to play four roles in Dr. Strangelove. He eventually played three, due to an injured leg and his difficulty in mastering bomber pilot Major "King" Kong's Texas accent. Kubrick later called Sellers "amazing", but lamented the fact that the actor's manic energy rarely lasted beyond two or three takes. To overcome this problem, Kubrick ran two cameras simultaneously and let Sellers improvise.

The film prefigured the antiwar sentiments which would become explosive only a few years after its release. It was highly irreverent toward war policies of the U.S., which were largely considered sacrosanct up to that time. Eight months after the release of Strangelove, the straight thriller Fail-Safe with a plot remarkably similar to that of Dr. Strangelove was released. Strangelove earned four Academy Award nominations (including Best Picture and Best Director) and the New York Film Critics' Best Director award.

Kubrick spent five years developing his next film, (1968). The film was conceived as a Cinerama spectacle and was photographed in Super Panavision 70. Kubrick co-wrote the screenplay with science fiction writer Sir Arthur C. Clarke, expanding on Clarke's short story "The Sentinel". Kubrick reportedly told Clarke that his intention was to make "the proverbial great science fiction film."

2001 begins four million years ago with an encounter between a group of apes and a mysterious black monolith, which seems to trigger in them the ability to use a bone as both a tool and a weapon. This new knowledge allows them to reclaim a water hole from another group of apes, who have no tool-wielding ability. A victorious ape tosses his bone into the air, at which point the film makes a celebrated match-cut to an orbiting satellite, circa 2000. At this time, a group of Americans at their moon base dig up a monolith similar to that encountered by the apes, which sends a radio signal to Jupiter. Eighteen months later, a group of astronauts aboard the spaceship Discovery are sent to explore Jupiter, their true purpose of investigating the signal is initially concealed from them. During the flight, the ship's sentient HAL 9000 computer, aware of the truth about the mission, malfunctions but resists disconnection. Believing its control of the mission to be crucial, the computer terminates life support for most of the crew before it is shut down by the surviving astronaut, David Bowman (Keir Dullea). Using a space pod, Bowman explores another monolith in orbit around Jupiter, whereupon he is hurled into a portal in space at high speed, witnessing many strange cosmological phenomena. His interstellar journey ends with his transformation into a fetus-like new being enclosed in an orb of light, last seen gazing at Earth from space.

The $10,000,000 (U.S.) film was a massive production for its time. The groundbreaking visual effects were overseen by Kubrick and were engineered by a team that included a young Douglas Trumbull, who would become famous in his own right for his work on the films Silent Running and Blade Runner. Kubrick extensively used traveling matte photography to film space flight, a technique also used nine years later by George Lucas in making , although that film also used motion-control effects that were unavailable to Kubrick at the time. Kubrick made innovative use of slit-scan photography to film the Stargate sequence. The film's striking cinematography was the work of legendary British director of photography Geoffrey Unsworth, who would later photograph classic films such as Cabaret and Superman. Manufacturing companies were consulted as to what the design of both special-purpose and everyday objects would look like in the future. At the time of the movie's release, Arthur C. Clarke predicted that a generation of engineers would design real spacecraft based upon 2001 "…even if it isn't the best way to do it." The film also is a rare instance of portraying space travel realistically, with complete silence in the vacuum of space and a realistic representation of weightlessness.

The film is famous for using classical music in place of an original score. Richard Strauss's Also sprach Zarathustra and Johann Strauss's The Blue Danube waltz became indelibly associated with the film for a while, especially the former, as it was not well-known to the public prior to the film. Kubrick also used music by contemporary avant-garde Hungarian composer György Ligeti, although some of the pieces were altered without Ligeti's consent. The appearance of Atmospheres, Lux Aeterna, and Requiem on the 2001 soundtrack was the first wide commercial exposure of Ligeti's work. This use of "program" music was not originally planned. Kubrick had commissioned composer Alex North to write a full-length score for the film, but Kubrick became so attached to the temporary soundtrack he had constructed during editing that he dropped the idea of an original score entirely.

Although it eventually became an enormous success, the film was not an immediate hit. Initial critical reaction was extremely hostile, with critics attacking the film's lack of dialogue, slow pacing, and seemingly impenetrable storyline. One of the film's few defenders was Penelope Gilliatt, who called it (in The New Yorker) "some kind of a great film". Word of mouth among young audiences—especially the 1960s counterculture audience, who loved the movie's "Star Gate" sequence, a seemingly psychedelic journey to the infinite reaches of the cosmos—made the film a hit. Despite nominations in the directing, writing, and producing categories, the only Academy Award Kubrick ever received was for supervising the special effects of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Today, however, many consider it the greatest sci-fi film ever made, and it is a staple on All Time Top 10 lists.

Artistically, 2001 was a radical departure from Kubrick's previous films. It contains only 45 minutes of spoken dialogue, over a running time of two hours and twenty minutes. The fairly mundane dialogue is mostly superfluous to the images and music. The film's most memorable dialogue belongs to the computer HAL in HAL's exchanges with Dave Bowman. Some argue that Kubrick is portraying a future humanity largely dissociated from a sterile and antiseptic machine-driven environment. The film's ambiguous, perplexing ending continues to fascinate contemporary audiences and critics. After this film, Kubrick would never experiment so radically with special effects or narrative form; however, his subsequent films would still maintain some level of ambiguity.

Interpretations of 2001: A Space Odyssey are numerous and diverse. Despite having been released in 1968, it still prompts debate today. When critic Joseph Gelmis asked Kubrick about the meaning of the film, Kubrick replied:

They are the areas I prefer not to discuss, because they are highly subjective and will differ from viewer to viewer. In this sense, the film becomes anything the viewer sees in it. If the film stirs the emotions and penetrates the subconscious of the viewer, if it stimulates, however inchoately, his mythological and religious yearnings and impulses, then it has succeeded.

2001: A Space Odyssey is perhaps Kubrick's most famous and influential film. Steven Spielberg called it his generation's big bang, focusing attention upon the space race. It was a precursor to the explosion of the science fiction film market nine years later, which began with the release of and Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

1970s: A Clockwork Orange and Barry Lyndon

After 2001, Kubrick initially attempted to make a film about the life of Napoleon Bonaparte. When financing fell through, Kubrick went looking for a project that he could film quickly on a small budget. He eventually settled on A Clockwork Orange (1971). His adaptation of Anthony Burgess' novel is a dark, shocking exploration of violence in human society. The film was initially released with an X rating in the United States and caused considerable controversy. The film's iconic poster imagery was created by legendary designer Bill Gold.

The story takes place in a futuristic version of Great Britain that is both authoritarian and chaotic. The central character is a teenage hooligan named Alex DeLarge (Malcolm McDowell), who, along with his companion "droogs", gleefully torments, beats, robs, tortures, and rapes without conscience or remorse. His brutal beating and murder of an older woman finally lands Alex in prison. Alex undergoes an experimental medical aversion treatment, known as the Ludovico Technique, that inhibits his violent tendencies, though he has no real free moral choice. At the public demonstration of the success of the technique, Alex is treated cruelly but does not fight back; the treatment has made him less than human. He has been conditioned against classical music, his love of which was his one human feature, and apparently all of his sex drive is gone. We further see hints that the promotion of the treatment is politically motivated. After being freed, he is found by his former partners in crime who had betrayed him and who are now policemen, and they beat him mercilessly.

He then comes to the home of a political writer who disdains "the modern age" and is initially sympathetic to Alex's plight until he recognizes Alex as the young man who brutally raped his wife and paralyzed him a few years before. Alex then becomes a pawn in a political game.

The society was sometimes perceived as Communist (as Michel Ciment pointed out in an interview with Kubrick, although he himself didn't feel that way) due to its slight ties to Russian culture. The teenage slang has a heavily Russian vocabulary, which can be attributed to Burgess. There is some evidence to suggest that the society is a socialist one, or perhaps a society moving out of a failed, Leftist socialism and into a Rightist, or fascist, society. In the novel, streets have paintings of working men in the style of Russian socialist art, and in the film, there is a mural of socialist artwork with obscenities drawn on it. As Malcolm McDowell points out on the DVD commentary, Alex's residence was shot on failed Labour Party architecture, and the name "Municipal Flat Block 18A, Linear North" alludes to socialist-style housing. Later in the film, when the new right-wing government takes power, the atmosphere is certainly more authoritarian than the anarchist air of the beginning. Kubrick's response to Ciment's question remained ambiguous as to exactly what kind of society it is. He held that the film held comparisons between both the left and right end of the political spectrum and that there is little difference between the two. Kubrick stated, "The Minister, played by Anthony Sharp, is clearly a figure of the Right. The writer, Patrick Magee, is a lunatic of the Left. ...They differ only in their dogma. Their means and ends are hardly distinguishable."

Kubrick photographed A Clockwork Orange quickly and almost entirely on location in and around London. Despite the low-tech nature of the film as compared to 2001: A Space Odyssey, Kubrick showed his talent for innovation; at one point, he threw "an old Newman Sinclair clockwork mechanism camera" off a rooftop in order to achieve the effect he wanted. For the score, Kubrick enlisted electronic music composer Wendy Carlos—at the time, known as Walter Carlos (Switched-On Bach)—to adapt famous classical works (such as Beethoven's Ninth Symphony) for the Moog synthesizer.

It is pivotal to the plot that the lead character, Alex, is fond of classical music, and that the brainwashing Ludovico treatment accidentally conditions him against classical music. As such, it was natural for Kubrick to continue the tradition begun in 2001: A Space Odyssey of using a great deal of classical music in the score. However, in this film, classical music accompanies scenes of violent mayhem and coercive sexuality rather than of graceful space flight and mysterious alien presences. Both Pauline Kael (who generally disliked Kubrick) and Roger Ebert (who often praises Kubrick) found Kubrick's use of juxtaposing classical music and violence in this film unpleasant, Ebert calling it a "cute, cheap, dead-end dimension," and Kael, "self-important." Burgess, in his introduction to his own stage adaptation of the novel, held that ultimately, classical music is what will finally redeem Alex.

The film was extremely controversial because of its explicit depiction of teenage gang rape and violence. It was released in the same year as Sam Peckinpah's Straw Dogs and Don Siegel's Dirty Harry, and the three films sparked a ferocious debate in the media about the social effects of cinematic violence. The controversy was exacerbated when copycat crimes were committed in England by criminals wearing the same costumes as characters in A Clockwork Orange. British readers of the novel noted that Kubrick had omitted the final chapter (also omitted from American editions of the book) in which Alex finds redemption and sanity.

After receiving death threats to himself and his family as a result of the controversy, Kubrick took the unusual step of removing the film from circulation in Britain. It was unavailable in the United Kingdom until its re-release in 2000, a year after Kubrick's death, although it could be seen in continental Europe. The Scala cinema in London's Kings Cross showed the film in the early 1990s, and at Kubrick's insistence, the cinema was sued and put out of business, thus depriving London of one of its very few independent cinemas. It is now the Scala club. In early 1973, Kubrick re-released A Clockwork Orange to cinemas in the United States with footage modified so that it could get its rating reduced to an R. This enabled many more newspapers to advertise it, since in 1972 many newspapers had stopped carrying any advertising for X-rated films due to the new association of that rating with pornography.

In the mid-1990s, a documentary entitled Forbidden Fruit, about the censorship controversy, was released in Britain. Kubrick was unable to prevent the documentary makers from including footage from A Clockwork Orange in their film.

Kubrick's next film, released in 1975, was an adaptation of William Makepeace Thackeray's The Luck of Barry Lyndon, also known as Barry Lyndon, a picaresque novel about the adventures and misadventures of an 18th-century Irish gambler and social climber. After serving in the Prussian army, Lyndon slowly insinuates himself into English high society, eventually marrying the Countess of Lyndon. The world of the aristocracy turns out to be a hollow paradise, dull and decaying. Lyndon is ultimately unable to maintain his good standing there and falls from grace after a series of persecutions.

Reviewers such as Pauline Kael, who had been critical of Kubrick's previous work,

As with most of Kubrick's films, Barry Lyndon's reputation has grown through the years, particularly among other filmmakers. Director Martin Scorsese has cited it as his favorite Kubrick film. Steven Spielberg has praised its "impeccable technique", though, when younger, he famously described it "like going through the Prado without lunch."

As in his other films, Kubrick's cinematography and lighting techniques were highly innovative. Most famously, interior scenes were shot with a specially adapted high-speed f/0.7 Zeiss camera lens originally developed for NASA. This allowed many scenes to be lit only with candlelight, creating two-dimensional diffused-light images reminiscent of 18th-century paintings.

Like its two predecessors, the film does not have an original score. Irish traditional songs (performed by The Chieftains) are combined with works such as Antonio Vivaldi's Cello Concerto in B, a Johann Sebastian Bach Double Concerto, George Frideric Handel's Sarabande from the Keyboard Suite in D minor (HWV 448, HG II/ii/4), and Franz Schubert's German Dance No. 1 in C major, Piano Trio No. 2 in E flat, and Impromptu No. 1 in C minor. The music was conducted and adapted by Leonard Rosenman, for which he won an Oscar.

In 1976, production designer Ken Adam, who had worked with Kubrick on Dr. Strangelove and Barry Lyndon, asked Kubrick to visit the recently completed 007 Stage at Pinewood Studios to provide advice on how to light the enormous soundstage, which had been built and prepared for the James Bond movie The Spy Who Loved Me. Kubrick agreed to consult when it was promised that nobody would ever know of his involvement. This was honored until after his death in 1999, when in 2000 the fact was revealed by Adam in the documentary on the making of The Spy Who Loved Me on the special edition DVD release of the movie.

1980s: The Shining and Full Metal Jacket

, which can track motion smoothly without a dolly track.]] The pace of Kubrick's work slowed considerably after Barry Lyndon, and he did not make another film for five years. The Shining, released in 1980, was adapted from the novel of the same name by bestselling horror writer Stephen King. The film starred Jack Nicholson as Jack Torrance, a failed writer who takes a job as an off-season caretaker of the Overlook Hotel, a high-class resort deep in the Colorado mountains. The job requires spending the winter in the isolated hotel with his wife, Wendy (played by Shelley Duvall) and their young son, Danny, who is gifted with a form of telepathy—the "shining" of the film's title.

As winter takes hold, the family's isolation deepens, and the demons and ghosts of the Overlook Hotel's dark past begin to awake, displaying horrible, phantasmagoric images to Danny, and driving his father Jack into a homicidal psychosis.

The film was shot entirely on London soundstages, with the exception of second-unit exterior footage, which was filmed in Colorado, Montana, and Oregon. In order to convey the claustrophobic oppression of the haunted hotel, Kubrick made extensive use of the newly invented Steadicam, a weight-balanced camera support, which allowed for smooth camera movement in enclosed spaces.

More than any of his other films, The Shining gave rise to the legend of Kubrick as a megalomaniac perfectionist. Reportedly, he demanded hundreds of takes of certain scenes (approximately 1.3 million feet of film was shot). This process was particularly difficult for actress Shelley Duvall, who was used to the faster, improvisational style of director Robert Altman.

Stephen King disliked the movie, calling Kubrick "a man who thinks too much and feels too little." In 1997, King collaborated with Mick Garris to create a television miniseries version of the novel that was more faithful to King's original.

The film opened to mixed reviews, but proved a commercial success. As with most Kubrick films, subsequent critical reaction has treated the film more favorably. Among horror movie fans, The Shining is a cult classic, often appearing at the top of best horror film lists alongside Psycho (1960), The Exorcist (1973), and other horror classics. Much of its imagery, such as the elevator shaft disgorging blood and the ghost girls in the hallway are among the most recognizable and widely known images from any Stanley Kubrick film, as are the lines "Redrum" and "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy". The financial success of The Shining renewed Warner Brothers' faith in Kubrick's ability to make artistically satisfying and profitable films after the commercial failure of Barry Lyndon in the United States.

Seven years later, Kubrick made his next film, Full Metal Jacket (1987), an adaptation of Gustav Hasford's Vietnam War novel The Short-Timers, starring Matthew Modine as Joker, Adam Baldwin as Animal Mother, R. Lee Ermey as Gunnery Sergeant Hartman, and Vincent D'Onofrio as Private Leonard "Gomer Pyle" Lawrence. Kubrick said to film critic Steven Hall that his attraction to Gustav Hasford's book was because it was "neither antiwar or prowar", held "no moral or political position", and was primarily concerned with "the way things are."

The film begins at Marine Corps Recruit Depot Parris Island, South Carolina, U.S., where Senior Drill Instructor Gunnery Sergeant Hartman relentlessly pushes his recruits through basic training in order to transform them from worthless "maggots" into motivated and disciplined killing machines. Private Lawrence, an overweight, slow-witted recruit who Hartman has nicknamed "Gomer Pyle", is unable to cope with the program and slowly cracks under the strain. On the eve of graduation, he has a psychotic breakdown and murders Hartman before killing himself.

In characteristic Kubrick style, the second half of the film jumps abruptly to Vietnam, following Joker, since promoted to sergeant. As a reporter for the United States military's newspaper, Stars and Stripes, Joker occupies war's middle ground, using wit and sarcasm to detach himself from the carnage around him. Though a Marine at war, he is also a reporter and is thus compelled to abide by the ethics of his profession. The film then follows an infantry platoon's advance on and through Hue City, decimated by the Tet Offensive. The film climaxes in a battle between Joker's platoon and a sniper hiding in the rubble, who is revealed to be a young girl. She almost kills Joker until his reporter partner shoots and severely injures her. Joker then kills her to put her out of her misery.

Filming a Vietnam War film in England was a considerable challenge for Kubrick and his production team. Much of the filming was done in the Docklands area of London, with the ruined-city set created by production designer Anton Furst. As a result, the film is visually very different from other Vietnam War films such as Platoon and Hamburger Hill, most of which were shot in the Far East. Instead of a tropical, Southeast-Asian jungle, the second half of the story unfolds in a city, illuminating the urban warfare aspect of a war generally portrayed (and thus perceived) as jungle warfare, notwithstanding significant urban skirmishes like the Tet offensive. Reviewers and commentators thought this contributed to the bleakness and seriousness of the film. During the making of the film, Kubrick was also helped by R. Lee Ermey, who acted and worked as technical adviser.

Full Metal Jacket received mixed critical reviews on release but also found a reasonably large audience, despite being overshadowed by Oliver Stone's Platoon and Clint Eastwood's Heartbreak Ridge. Like Kubrick's other films, its critical status has increased immensely since its initial release.

1990s: Eyes Wide Shut

Kubrick's final film was Eyes Wide Shut, starring then-married actors Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman as a wealthy Manhattan couple on a sexual odyssey.

The story of Eyes Wide Shut is based on Arthur Schnitzler's Freudian novella Traumnovelle (Dream Story in English), although the story has been moved from Vienna in the 1920s to New York City in the 1990s. It follows Dr. William Harford's journey into the sexual underworld of New York City, after his wife, Alice, has shattered his faith in her fidelity by confessing to having fantasized about giving him and their daughter up for one night with another man. Until then, Harford had presumed women are more naturally faithful than men. This new revelation generates doubt and despair, and he begins to roam the streets of New York, acting blindly on his jealousy.

After trespassing upon the rituals of a sinister, mysterious sexual cult, Dr. Harford thinks twice before seeking sexual revenge against his wife. Upon returning home, his wife now gives an anguished confession she has had a dream about making love to several men at once. After his own dangerous escapades, Dr. Harford has no high moral ground over her. The couple begin to patch their relationship.

The film was in production for more than two years, and two of the main members of the cast, Harvey Keitel and Jennifer Jason Leigh, were replaced in the course of the filming. Although it is set in New York City, the film was mostly shot on London soundstages, with little location shooting. Shots of Manhattan itself were pickup shots filmed in New York City by a second-unit crew. Because of Kubrick's secrecy about the film, mostly inaccurate rumors abounded about its plot and content. Most especially, the story's sexual content provoked speculation, some journalists writing that it would be "the sexiest film ever made." The casting of then celebrity-actor supercouple Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman as a husband-wife couple in the film increased the pre-release journalistic hyperbole.

Eyes Wide Shut, like Lolita and A Clockwork Orange before it, faced censorship before release. In the United States and Canada, digitally manufactured silhouette figures were strategically placed to mask explicit copulation scenes so as to secure an R rating from the MPAA. In Europe, and the rest of the world, the film has been released uncut, in its original form. The October 2007 DVD reissue contains the uncut version, making it available to North American audiences for the first time.

Death

In 1999—four days after screening a final cut of Eyes Wide Shut for his family, Tom Cruise, Nicole Kidman, and Warner Bros. executives—70-year-old Kubrick died of a heart attack in his sleep. He was buried next to his favorite tree in Childwickbury Manor, Hertfordshire, England, U.K.

Kubrick Academy Awards

Kubrick won his only Academy Award for Best Special Visual Effects for at the 41st Academy Awards and was nominated for Producer, Director and Writer in his various films.

Projects unrealized or completed by others

The Burning Secret and Natural Child

In 1956, after MGM turned down Harris and Kubrick's request to film Paths of Glory, they invited him to look through their other properties. Harris and Kubrick discovered Stefan Zweig's novel The Burning Secret, in which a young baron tries to seduce a young Jewish woman by first befriending her twelve-year-old son, who eventually becomes wise to the situation. Kubrick was very excited about this novel and hired novelist Calder Willingham to produce a screenplay, but Production Code restrictions made the project impossible.

Kubrick had earlier been interested in adapting another Calder Willingham novel (Natural Child), but quickly realized it could not be done within the Production Code.

One-Eyed Jacks

The Hollywood Reporter announced on October 18, 1956 that producer Frank Rosenberg had bought rights to Charles Neider's novel The Authentic Death of Hendry Jones for $40,000. Two years later, Pennebaker Inc., Marlon Brando's independent production company, bought the rights to the novel as well as Sam Peckinpah's first-draft screenplay adaptation for $150,000. Even at this time, it was announced that Brando might direct.

Later that year, Kubrick was announced as director of Gun's Up, the working title for the production. Shortly after this announcement, the name of the film was changed to One-Eyed Jacks and Pina Pellicer was announced as "the unanimous choice of Brando, Rosenberg, and Kubrick" to play the female lead.

On November 20, 1958, Kubrick quit as director of One-Eyed Jacks, stating that he had the utmost respect for Marlon Brando as one of "the world's foremost artists" but had recently acquired the rights to Nabokov's Lolita and wanted to begin production work immediately in light of this wonderful opportunity. The film was completed with directorial credit given to Marlon Brando.

Napoleon

After the success of 2001, Kubrick planned a large-scale biographical film about Napoleon Bonaparte. He conducted research, read books about the French Emperor, and wrote a preliminary screenplay (which has become available on the Internet). With the help of assistants, he meticulously created a card catalog of the places and deeds of Napoleon's inner circle during its operative years. Kubrick scouted locations, planning to film large portions of the film on location in France, and in the UK studios. He was also going to film the battle scenes in Romania, where he enlisted the help of the Romanian army, which gave Kubrick 40,000 army soldiers, and 10,000 cavalry soldiers to film the battle scenes with paper costumes. In a conversation with the British Film Institute, Kubrick's brother-in-law Jan Harlan, stated that at the time the film was about to go into production, David Hemmings was Kubrick's favorite choice to play Napoleon, and Audrey Hepburn was his favorite choice to play Josephine. In notes to his financial backers, preserved in The Kubrick Archives, Kubrick told them he was unsure how his Napoleon film would turn out, but that he expected to create "the best movie ever made." Ultimately, the project was canceled for the prohibitive cost of location filming, the Western release of Sergei Bondarchuk's epic film version of Leo Tolstoy's novel War and Peace (1968), and the commercial failure of Bondarchuk's Napoleon-themed film Waterloo (1970). Much of his historical research would influence Barry Lyndon (1975), the storyline of which ends in 1789, about 15 years before the Napoleonic Wars began. As late as 1987, Kubrick stated that he had not given up on the project, mentioning that he had read almost 500 books on the historical figure and that he was convinced that a film worthy of the subject had not yet appeared.

Aryan Papers

As early as 1976, Kubrick wanted to make a film about the Holocaust, trying to persuade Isaac Bashevis Singer to contribute an original screenplay. Kubrick sought a "dramatic structure that compressed the complex and vast information into the story of an individual who represented the essence of this man-made hell." Singer declined, saying, "I don't know the first thing about the Holocaust." In the early 1990s, Kubrick almost went into production on a film of Louis Begley's Wartime Lies, the story of a boy and his aunt in hiding during The Holocaust. The first-draft screenplay, titled "Aryan Papers", had been penned by Kubrick himself. Full Metal Jacket co-screenwriter Michael Herr reports that Kubrick had considered casting Julia Roberts or Uma Thurman as the aunt. Eventually, Johanna ter Steege was cast as the aunt and Joseph Mazzello as the young boy, with Kubrick even travelling to the Czech city of Brno as a possible location for wartime Warsaw. But Kubrick chose not to make the film due to the release of Steven Spielberg's Holocaust-themed Schindler's List in 1993. In addition, according to Kubrick's wife, Christiane, the subject itself had become too depressing and difficult for the director. Kubrick eventually concluded that an accurate film about the Holocaust was beyond the capacity of cinema and abandoned the project in 1995 and turned his attention back to A.I.

A.I. Artificial Intelligence

Throughout the 1980s and early '90s, Kubrick collaborated with Brian Aldiss on an expansion of his short story "Super-Toys Last All Summer Long" into a three-act film, along with other writers, such as Sara Maitland and Ian Watson, under various names, including "Pinocchio" and "Artificial Intelligence.". It was a futuristic fairy-tale about a robot that resembles and behaves as a child, sold as a temporary surrogate to a family whose real son is in suspended animation with a deadly disease. The story focuses on the efforts of the robot to become a 'real boy' in a manner similar to Pinocchio.

Kubrick reportedly held long telephone discussions with Steven Spielberg regarding the film, and, according to Spielberg, at one point stated that the subject matter was closer to Spielberg's sensibilities than his. In 1999, following Kubrick's death, Spielberg took the various drafts and notes left by Kubrick and his writers and composed a new screenplay and, in association with what remained of Kubrick's production unit, made the movie A.I. Artificial Intelligence, starring Haley Joel Osment, Jude Law, Frances O'Connor, and William Hurt. The film was released in June 2001.

The film contains a posthumous producing credit for Stanley Kubrick at the beginning and the brief dedication "For Stanley Kubrick" at the end. The film contains many recurrent Kubrick motifs, such as an omniscient narrator, an extreme form of the three-act structure, the themes of humanity and inhumanity, and a sardonic view of Freudian psychology. In addition, John Williams' score contains many allusions to pieces heard in other Kubrick films.

Lunatic at Large

On November 1, 2006, Philip Hobbs, Kubrick's son-in-law, announced that he would be shepherding a film treatment of Lunatic at Large, which was commissioned by Kubrick for treatment from noir pulp novelist Jim Thompson in the 1950s, but had been lost until Kubrick's death. This project is currently being developed for future release as of late 2010.

Unreleased screenplays

A number of screenplays remain for which Kubrick was either commissioned or wrote for unsuccessful projects, include The German Lieutenant (co-written with Richard Adams), featuring a group of German soldiers in a mission during the final days of World War II; I Stole 16 Million Dollars, about notorious 1930s bank robber Willie Sutton (the film was to be made by Kirk Douglas' Bryna production company, despite Douglas believing the script was poorly written, and Cary Grant was approached for the lead); and a first draft of a script about the Confederate Mosby Rangers guerilla force in the Civil War.

Kubrick wanted to make a film based on Umberto Eco's 1988 novel Foucault's Pendulum, but Eco declined because of his dissatisfaction with the filming of his earlier novel The Name of the Rose and Kubrick's unwillingness to allow him to write the screenplay himself; after Kubrick died, Eco would admit he regretted his decision.

Before moving onto 2001, Terry Southern suggested that Kubrick should make a high-budget pornographic film called Blue Movie in an attempt to take the genre and reinvent it. He decided not to do it, believing that he did not have the temperament for pornographic cinema and didn't think he could successfully reinvent the genre enough to truly elevate it. At this time, Southern started work on a novel that would not be published until 1970, also entitled Blue Movie, about a highly regarded art film director named Boris Adrian who attempts just such a film (the book is dedicated to Kubrick).

When J. R. R. Tolkien sold the film rights of The Lord of the Rings to United Artists in 1969, the Beatles considered making a film of it, and approached Kubrick as a possible director, but Kubrick told John Lennon he thought the novel was unfilmable due to its immensity. Rings director Peter Jackson states a major factor killing the project was Tolkien's opposition to the Beatles' participation.

Kubrick also toyed with the idea of adapting Perfume by Patrick Süskind, a book he greatly enjoyed, though nothing came of it. It would later be adapted for the screen by Tom Tykwer as .

Frequent collaborators

Unlike directors such as John Ford, Martin Scorsese, and Akira Kurosawa, Kubrick did not generally reuse actors. However, Kubrick did on several occasions work with the same actor more than once. In lead roles, Sterling Hayden appeared in both The Killing and Dr. Strangelove, Peter Sellers in Lolita and Dr. Strangelove, and Kirk Douglas in Paths of Glory and Spartacus. In supporting roles, Joe Turkel appears in The Killing, Paths of Glory, and The Shining, Philip Stone appears in A Clockwork Orange, Barry Lyndon, and The Shining, Leonard Rossiter is featured in 2001: A Space Odyssey and Barry Lyndon, while Timothy Carey is in both The Killing and Paths of Glory. A Clockwork Orange and Barry Lyndon saw the largest crossover, with six actors (including Patrick Magee) having roles of various lengths in each film.

One of Kubrick's longest collaborations was with Leon Vitali, who, after playing the older Lord Bullingdon in Barry Lyndon, became Kubrick's personal assistant, working as the casting director on his following films, and supervising film-to-video transfers for Kubrick. He also appeared in Eyes Wide Shut, playing the ominous Red Cloak, who confronts Tom Cruise during the infamous orgy scene. Since Kubrick's death, Vitali has overseen the restoration of both picture and sound elements for most of Kubrick's films. He has also collaborated frequently with Eyes Wide Shut co-star Todd Field on his pictures.

Family cameos

Stanley Kubrick's daughter Vivian has cameos in 2001: A Space Odyssey (as Heywood Floyd's daughter), Barry Lyndon (as a girl at the birthday party for young Bryan Lyndon), The Shining (as a party ghost), and Full Metal Jacket (as a TV reporter). His stepdaughter Katharina has cameos in A Clockwork Orange and Eyes Wide Shut, and her character's son in the latter is played by her real son. Kubrick's wife Christiane Kubrick appeared prior to her marriage to Kubrick in Paths of Glory, billed as Susanne Christian (her birth name is Christiane Susanne Harlan), and as a cafe guest in Eyes Wide Shut.

Style and trademarks

Stanley Kubrick's films have several trademark characteristics. All but his first two full-length films and 2001 were adapted from existing novels (2001 being based on The Sentinel as well as having its own planned novelization), and he occasionally wrote screenplays in collaboration with writers (usually novelists, but a journalist in the case of Full Metal Jacket) who had limited screenwriting experience. Many of his films had voice-over narration, sometimes taken verbatim from the novel. With or without narration, all of his films contain extensive character's-point-of-view footage. The closing of films with "The End" went out of style with the advent of long closing credits, but Kubrick continued to put it at the end of the credits, long after the rest of the film industry stopped using it. On the other hand, Kubrick occasionally dispensed with opening credits (in Space Odyssey and Clockwork Orange) long before the industry started doing so commonly. His credits are always a slide show. His only rolling credits are the opening credits to The Shining.

Kubrick paid close attention to the releases of his films in other countries. Not only did he have complete control of the dubbing cast, but sometimes alternative material was shot for international releases—in The Shining, the text on the typewriter pages was re-shot for the countries in which the film was released; in Eyes Wide Shut, the newspaper headlines and paper notes were re-shot for different languages. Since Kubrick's death, no new voice translations are allowed to be produced for any of the films he had control of; in countries where no authorized dubs exist, only subtitles are allowed for translation. Kubrick also closely supervised the actual translation of the script into foreign languages.

Beginning with 2001: A Space Odyssey, all of his films except Full Metal Jacket used mostly pre-recorded classical music, in two cases electronically altered by Wendy Carlos. He also often used merry-sounding pop music in an ironic way during scenes depicting devastation and destruction, especially in the closing credits or end sequences of a film.

In his review of Full Metal Jacket, Roger Ebert noted that many Kubrick films have a facial closeup of an unraveling character in which the character's head is tilted down and his eyes are tilted up. Kubrick also extensively employed wide angle shots, character tracking shots, zoom shots, and shots down tall parallel walls.

Many of Kubrick's films have back-references to previous Kubrick films. The best-known examples of this are the appearance of the soundtrack album for 2001: A Space Odyssey appearing in the record store in A Clockwork Orange and Quilty's joke about Spartacus in Lolita. Less obvious is the reference to a painter named Ludovico in Barry Lyndon, Ludovico being the name of the conditioning treatment in A Clockwork Orange.

Almost all Stanley Kubrick movies have a scene in or just outside a bathroom. (Oddly, the most cited example of this in 2001 is Dr. Floyd's becoming stymied by the Zero-Gravity Toilet en route to the moon, but not David Bowman's exploration [while still wearing his spacesuit] of the bathroom adjacent to his celestial bedroom after his journey through the Star Gate.)

CRM-114

Although Dr. Strangelove employs a device called CRM-114, and A Clockwork Orange has a sound-alike medicine called Serum 114, numerous and oft-repeated claims that the numbers 114 appear in other Kubrick films are apocryphal. CRM-114 is also used in the source novel Red Alert, upon which Dr. Strangelove is based, although claims have been made that the acronym appears in Kubrick's earlier film The Killing. Nonetheless, in a remarkable case of a director's influence over popular culture through an exaggerated urban legend, there is in honor of this Kubrick trademark, an e-mail spam filtering system, a progressive rock band, a right-wing website, a sound amplifier in the film Back to the Future, a catalog code in the TV series Heroes, and a weapon in the TV series , all named CRM-114, as well as a short film called Serum 114. The Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode, "", had as guest star actor Steven Berkoff from A Clockwork Orange and Barry Lyndon, and it was directed by regular cast member Alexander Siddig, who is a nephew of Clockwork Orange star Malcolm McDowell.

Aspect ratio

There has been a longstanding debate regarding the DVD releases of Kubrick's films, specifically regarding the aspect ratio of many of the films. The primary point of contention relates to his final five films: A Clockwork Orange, Barry Lyndon, The Shining, Full Metal Jacket, and Eyes Wide Shut.

Kubrick's initial involvement with home video mastering of his films was a result of television screenings of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Because the film was shot in 65 mm, the composition of each shot was compromised by the pan-and-scan method of transferring a wide-screen image to fit a 1.33:1 television set.

Kubrick's final five films were shot "flat"—the full 1.37:1 area is exposed in the camera, but with appropriate markings on the viewfinder, the picture was composed for and cropped to the 1.85:1 aspect ratio in a theater's projector.

The first mastering of these five films was in 2000 as part of the "Stanley Kubrick Collection", consisting of Lolita, Dr. Strangelove (in association with Sony Pictures), 2001: A Space Odyssey, A Clockwork Orange, Barry Lyndon, The Shining, Full Metal Jacket, and Eyes Wide Shut. Kubrick oversaw the video masters in 1989 for Warner Home Video, and approved of 1.33:1 transfers for all of the films except for 2001, which was letterboxed.

Kubrick never approved a 1.85:1 video transfer of any of his films; when he died in 1999, DVDs and the 16:9 format were only beginning to become popular in the US. Most people were accustomed to seeing movies fill their television screen; in July 2007, less than 10% of US households had High-definition television (HDTV) (16:9 ready) sets. Warner Home Video chose to release these films with the transfers that Kubrick had explicitly approved.

In 2007, Warner Home Video remastered 2001: A Space Odyssey, A Clockwork Orange, The Shining, Full Metal Jacket, and Eyes Wide Shut in High-Definition, releasing the titles on DVD, HD DVD, and Blu-ray Disc. All were released in 16:9 anamorphic transfers, preserving the theatrical 1.85:1 aspect ratios for all of the flat films except A Clockwork Orange, which was transferred at the aspect ratio of 1.66:1.

In regards to the Warner Bros. titles, there is little studio documentation that is public about them other than instructions given to projectionists on initial release; however, Kubrick's storyboards for The Shining do prove that he composed the film for wide-screen. In instructions given to photographer John Alcott in one panel, Kubrick writes: THE FRAME IS EXACTLY 1.85-1. Obviously you compose for that but protect the full 1.33-1 area.

More confusion results regarding Kubrick's non-Warner distributed titles. During the days of laserdisc, The Criterion Collection released six Kubrick films. Spartacus and 2001 were both native 70 mm releases (exhibited in their roadshow engagements at a ratio of 2.20:1) at the same ratio as their subsequent DVD releases, and The Killing and Paths of Glory were both transferred at 1.33:1, despite the latter being hard matted extensively. Both pictures were theatrically projected at an aspect ratio of 1.85:1.

Dr. Strangelove and Lolita were also transferred at 1.33:1, although Strangelove exhibits a number of hard mattes at a ratio of 1.66:1 in second-unit footage. This is sometimes falsely attributed to the use of stock footage in Strangelove. Both films were presented theatrically at ratios of 1.85:1.

The DVD versions of The Killing and Paths of Glory released by MGM Home Entertainment retained the same 1.33:1 aspect ratio as the laserdisc versions. The Criterion Collection DVD and Blu-ray editions of Paths of Glory feature a 1.66:1 aspect ratio. The initial DVD releases of Strangelove maintained the 1.33:1, Kubrick-approved transfer, but for the most recent DVD and Blu-ray editions, Sony Pictures Home Entertainment replaced it with a new, digitally remastered anamorphic transfer with an aspect ratio of 1.66:1. All DVD releases of Lolita to date have been at a uniform 1.66:1 aspect ratio, and the expectation is that future releases will retain this aspect ratio.

Laserdisc releases of 2001 were presented in a slightly different aspect ratio than the original film. The film was shot in 65 mm, which has a ratio of 2.20:1, but many theaters could only show it in 35 mm reduction prints, which were presented at a ratio of 2.35:1. Thus, the picture was slightly modified for the 35 mm prints. The laserdisc releases maintained the 2.20:1 ratio, but the source material was an already cropped 35 mm print; thus, the edges were slightly cropped and the top and bottom of the image slightly opened up. This seems to have been corrected with the most recent DVD release, which was newly remastered from a 70 mm print.

Personal life

Character

Kubrick infrequently discussed personal matters in interview, and rarely spoke publicly at all. Over time, the gamut of his public image in the media ranged from a reclusive genius to a megalomaniacal lunatic shut off from the world. Since his death, Kubrick's friends and family have publicly denied both of these stereotypes. It is clear that the director left behind a strong family and a circle of close friends, and many of those who worked for him have spoken in his favor.

Manor in Hertfordshire, England]] Kubrick's famous reclusive nature is largely a myth, and may have resulted from his aversion to air travel. Despite once holding a pilot's license, Kubrick had a fear of flying and refused to take airplane trips. As a result, he rarely left England in the last forty years of his life. In addition, Kubrick shunned the Hollywood system and its publicity machine, resulting in little media coverage of him as a personality. Upon purchasing the Childwickbury Manor in Hertfordshire, England, Kubrick set up his life so that family and business were one. He purchased top-of-the-line film editing equipment and owned a number of cameras, which he sometimes used on his own movies. Children and animals would frequently come in and out of the room as he worked on a script or met with an actor. His appearance was not well-known in his later years, to the extent that a British man named Alan Conway successfully impersonated Kubrick in order to meet several well-known actors and get into fancy clubs. Conway is the subject of the film Colour Me Kubrick (2005), written by Kubrick's assistant Anthony Frewin and directed by Brian Cook, Kubrick's First Assistant Director for 25 years.

Despite his aversion to international travel, Kubrick was in constant contact with family members and business associates, often by telephone, and called his collaborators at all hours of the day and night for conversations that lasted from under a minute to several hours. Many of Kubrick's admirers and friends spoke of these telephone conversations with great affection and nostalgia after his death, especially Michael Herr and Steven Spielberg. In his memoir of Kubrick, Herr stated that dozens of people have claimed to have spoken to Kubrick on the day of his death and remarked that "I believe all of them." Kubrick also frequently invited people to his house, ranging from actors to close friends, admired film directors, writers, and intellectuals.

Since his death, efforts by his friends and family have been made to attempt to reverse the popular image of him as a recluse. However he was known to rarely travel, by car or train, outside his estate. Moreover, his obsessive, perfectionistic style, and specific, intense interests have led some researchers to speculate he may have had Asperger's Syndrome.

It was little-known by the public during Kubrick's life that he was also an animal lover. He owned many dogs and cats, and showed an extraordinary affection for them. He is reported to have owned dogs his whole life and Kubrick's widow, Christiane, in her book version of Stanley Kubrick: A Life In Pictures, wrote that Kubrick brought his cats onto film sets and editing rooms with him in order to spend more time with them. Matthew Modine remembers Kubrick's being deeply upset when a family of rabbits was accidentally killed during the making of Full Metal Jacket. Kubrick was so beside himself that he cancelled shooting for the rest of the day. Philip Kaplan, one of Kubrick's lawyers and friends, told the story that Stanley once cancelled, at the last moment, a meeting with him and another lawyer who had flown to London from the United States because he had sat up all night with a dying cat and was in no shape to participate. Also, according to Kaplan, the huge kitchen table at Kubrick's home in Harpenden (Hertfordshire, United Kingdom) was supported by an undulating base with interior spaces, and housed within each curved space was a dog, most of whom were of no recognizable breed, and some not notably friendly to strangers.

Kubrick had a reputation for being tactless and rude to those he worked with. Some of Kubrick's collaborators complained that his personality was cold and that he lacked sympathy for the feelings of other people. Although Kubrick became close friends with Clockwork Orange star Malcolm McDowell during filming, Kubrick abruptly terminated the friendship soon after the film was complete. McDowell was deeply hurt by this, and the schism between the two men lasted until Kubrick's death. Science fiction writer Brian Aldiss was fired from Kubrick's never-completed project A.I. for vacationing with his family in violation of his contract, even though Kubrick had put the project on hold at the time. James Earl Jones, despite his admiration for Kubrick on an artistic level, spoke negatively of his experience on Dr. Strangelove, saying that Kubrick was disrespectful to actors, using them as instruments in a grand design rather than allowing them to be creative artists in their own right. George C. Scott, who admired Kubrick in retrospect for reportedly being one of the few people who could routinely beat him at chess, famously resented Kubrick's using Scott's most over-the-top performances for the final cut of Dr. Strangelove after being promised by Kubrick that they were warmups and would not actually be in the movie. Kubrick's employees and crew members have stated that he was notorious for not complimenting anyone, and rarely showed admiration for his coworkers for fear it would make them complacent. Kubrick complimented them on their work only after the movie was finished, unless he felt their work was "genius." The only actors that Kubrick called "genius" were Peter Sellers, James Mason, and Malcolm McDowell.

Michael Herr, in his otherwise positive memoir of his friendship with Kubrick, complained that Kubrick was extremely cheap and very greedy about money. He stated that Kubrick was a "terrible man to do business with" and that the director was upset until the day he died that Jack Nicholson made more money from The Shining than he did. Kirk Douglas often commented on Kubrick's unwillingness to compromise, his out-of-control ego, and his ruthless determination to make a film his own distinct work of art instead of a group effort. However, Douglas has acknowledged that a large part of his dislike for Kubrick was caused by the director's consistently negative statements about Spartacus.

Many of those who worked with Kubrick have spoken kindly of him since his death, including coworkers and friends Jack Nicholson, Diane Johnson, Tom Cruise, Joe Turkel, Con Pederson, Carl Solomon, Ryan O'Neal, Anthony Frewin, Andrew Birkin, Ian Watson, John Milius, Jocelyn Pook, Sydney Pollack, R. Lee Ermey, and others. Michael Herr's memoir of Kubrick, and Matthew Modine's book Full Metal Jacket Diary show a much kinder, saner, and warmer version of Kubrick than the conventional view of him as cold, demanding, and impersonal. In a series of interviews found on the DVD of Eyes Wide Shut, a teary-eyed Tom Cruise remembers Kubrick with great affection; Nicole Kidman shares his sentiments. Shelley Winters, when asked what she thought of him, answered: "A gift." Shelley Duvall, who played Wendy in The Shining, had a rocky relationship with Kubrick, but said in retrospect that it was a great experience that made her smarter—though she'd never want to do it again. Malcolm McDowell acknowledged in retrospect that some of his statements about Kubrick were "unfair" and were a "cry out" to Kubrick to reconnect with him.

Kubrick's immediate family felt that the common perception of him as an eccentric reclusive misanthrope were entirely off-the-mark stereotypes. His stepdaughter Katharina recalls that her sister Anya once stated that "the more she reads about daddy the more she thinks that Howard Hughes was probably a perfectly normal person." When his widow, Christiane, was asked which books on Kubrick were not reliable, she singled out Frederic Raphael's Eyes Wide Open: A Memoir of Stanley Kubrick and John Baxter's Stanley Kubrick: A Biography (not to be confused with the identically titled book by Vincent LoBrutto). The posthumous family production of the documentary and book Stanley Kubrick: A Life in Pictures (film documentary directed by Jan Harlan, book tie-in written by Christiane Kubrick née Harlan) was partly intended to offset the negative impressions created by these works.

Politics

In his memoir of Kubrick, Michael Herr, his friend and co-writer of the screenplay for Full Metal Jacket, wrote:

Stanley had views on everything, but I would not exactly call them political... His views on democracy were those of most people I know, neither left or right, not exactly brimming with belief, a noble failed experiment along our evolutionary way, brought low by base instincts, money and self-interest and stupidity... He thought the best system might be under a benign despot, though he had little belief that such a man could be found. He wasn't a cynic, but he could have easily passed for one. He was certainly a capitalist. He believed himself to be a realist.

Herr recalls that Kubrick was sometimes akin to a 19th-century liberal-humanist, that he found Irving Kristol's definition of a neoconservative as a "liberal mugged by reality" to be hysterically funny, that he distrusted almost all authority, and that he was a Social Darwinist.

Herr further wrote that Kubrick owned guns and did not think that war was an entirely bad thing. In the documentary , Herr says "…he also accepted that it was perfectly okay to acknowledge that, of all the things war is, it's also very beautiful." The writer said of initial reactions to Full Metal Jacket that "The political left will call Kubrick a fascist." In a 1987 interview with Gene Siskel, called Candidly Kubrick, Kubrick said, "Full Metal Jacket suggests there is more to say about war than it is just bad." He added that everything serious the drill instructor says, such as "A rifle is only a tool, it is a hard heart that kills", is completely true.

Though some have said Kubrick disliked America, Michael Herr says that America was all he talked about and that he often thought of moving back. Herr wrote that Kubrick was sent VHS tapes from American friends of NFL Football, Seinfeld, The Simpsons, and other television shows that he could not get in the United Kingdom. Kubrick told Siskel that he was not anti-American and thought that America was a good country, though he did not think that Ronald Reagan was a good President. In the interview, he also predicted an economic meltdown worldwide by pointing out to Siskel that most of the major banks in the United States held dubious foreign bonds as collateral and huge third world loans treated as assets. Kubrick likened this to the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale about the "Emperor's New Clothes", and felt even during the Cold War, an economic collapse was more worrisome and imminent than nuclear annihilation was. As far as Kubrick's views on welfare and taxation, according to Ian Watson, Kubrick said of the pre-1997 socialist Labour Party that "If the Labourites ever get in, I’ll leave the country." Watson claims that Kubrick was extremely opposed to taxes on the rich and to welfare in general.

Kubrick's earlier work is seen by Pauline Kael as more socially liberal than his later work. The early films embody liberal ideals, and the satire of government and military in Dr. Strangelove seems to point to a liberal political perspective. Similarly, film analyst Glenn Perusek thinks Kubrick's earlier Paths of Glory reflects a Rousseauist vision of man with natural human sympathy crushed by the artifice of society; later Kubrick films abandon that perspective. While Kael viewed Dr. Strangelove as a liberal film, Kagan disagrees, holding that film to be written from the point of view of a detached realist, lacking the overt liberalism of similar anti-war films of the era such as On the Beach or Fail-Safe. Kubrick's more mature works are more pessimistic and suspicious of the so-called innate goodness of mankind, and are critical of stances based on that positive assessment. For example, in A Clockwork Orange, the police are as violent and vulgar as the droogs, and Kubrick depicts both the subversive Leftist writer Mr. Alexander and the authoritarian status quo Minister of the Interior as manipulative and sinister. Kubrick commented regarding A Clockwork Orange:

Man isn't a noble savage, he's an ignoble savage. He is irrational, brutal, weak, silly, unable to be objective about anything where his own interests are involved—that about sums it up. I'm interested in the brutal and violent nature of man because it's a true picture of him. And any attempt to create social institutions on a false view of the nature of man is probably doomed to failure.

He went on to say:

The idea that social restraints are all bad is based on a utopian and unrealistic vision of man. But in this movie, you have an example of social institutions gone a bit berserk. Obviously, social institutions faced with the law-and-order problem might choose to become grotesquely oppressive. The movie poses two extremes: it shows Alex in his precivilized state, and society committing a worse evil in attempting to cure him."

When New York Times writer Fred M. Hechinger wrote a piece that declared A Clockwork Orange "fascist", Kubrick responded:

It is quite true that my film's view of man is less flattering than the one Rousseau entertained in a similarly allegorical narrative—but, in order to avoid fascism, does one have to view man as a noble savage rather than an ignoble one? Being a pessimist is not yet enough to qualify one to be regarded as a tyrant (I hope)... The age of the alibi, in which we find ourselves, began with the opening sentence of Rousseau's : 'Nature made me happy and good, and if I am otherwise, it is society's fault.' It is based on two misconceptions: that man in his natural state was happy and good, and that primal man had no society... Rousseau's romantic fallacy that it is society which corrupts man, not man who corrupts society, places a flattering gauze between ourselves and reality. This view, to use Mr. Hechinger's frame of reference, is solid box office but, in the end, such a self-inflating illusion leads to despair.

Kubrick quoted extensively from Robert Ardrey, author of African Genesis and The Social Contract—not to be confused with Rousseau's—and author Arthur Koestler, who is famous for writing The Ghost in the Machine. Both authors (Koestler through psychology and Ardrey through anthropology) searched for the cause of humanity's capacity for death and destruction, and both, like Kubrick, were suspicious of the liberal belief in the innate goodness of mankind. Ardrey and Kubrick both attribute this to Rousseau, who, in Ardrey's words, "Fathered the romantic fallacy" and Behaviourism, especially what they consider "radical Behaviourism", which they blame primarily on B. F. Skinner. In his interview with The New York Times, Kubrick stated that his view of man was closer to those of Christianity than to humanism or Jewish theology, saying, "I mean, it's essentially Christian theology anyway, that view of man."

Kubrick appeared to believe that freedom is still worth pursuing even if mankind is ultimately ignoble, and that evil on the part of the individual—however undesirable—is still preferable in contrast to the evil of a totalitarian society. Kubrick said in an interview with Gene Siskel:

To restrain man is not to redeem him... I think the danger is not that authority will collapse, but that, finally, in order to preserve itself, it will become very repressive... Law and order is not a phony issue, not just an excuse for the Right to go further right.

Religion

Stanley Kubrick was of Jewish descent, but his family did not practice religion at all. Indeed though his father's real name was Jacob, he went by Jacques or Jack as a move towards American assimilation.

Kubrick is often said to have been an atheist. This may or may not be true. In Kubrick's interview with Craig McGregor, he said:

I will say that the God concept is at the heart of 2001 but not any traditional, anthropomorphic image of God. I don't believe in any of Earth's monotheistic religions, but I do believe that one can construct an intriguing scientific definition of God, once you accept the fact that there are approximately 100 billion stars in our galaxy alone, that each star is a life-giving sun and that there are approximately 100 billion galaxies in just the visible universe. Given a planet in a stable orbit, not too hot and not too cold, and given a few billion years of chance chemical reactions created by the interaction of a sun's energy on the planet's chemicals, it's fairly certain that life in one form or another will eventually emerge. It's reasonable to assume that there must be, in fact, countless billions of such planets where biological life has arisen, and the odds of some proportion of such life developing intelligence are high. Now, the sun is by no means an old star, and its planets are mere children in cosmic age, so it seems likely that there are billions of planets in the universe not only where intelligent life is on a lower scale than man but other billions where it is approximately equal and others still where it is hundreds of thousands of millions of years in advance of us. When you think of the giant technological strides that man has made in a few millennia—less than a microsecond in the chronology of the universe—can you imagine the evolutionary development that much older life forms have taken? They may have progressed from biological species, which are fragile shells for the mind at best, into immortal machine entities—and then, over innumerable eons, they could emerge from the chrysalis of matter transformed into beings of pure energy and spirit. Their potentialities would be limitless and their intelligence ungraspable by humans.

In the same interview, he also blames the poor critical reaction to 2001 as follows:

Hmm, tricky. I think he believed in something, if you understand my meaning. He was a bit of a fatalist actually, but he was also very superstitious. Truly a mixture of nature and nurture. I don't know exactly what he believed, he probably would have said that no-one can really ever know for sure, and that it would be rather arrogant to assume that one could know. I asked him once after The Shining, if he believed in ghosts. He said that it would be nice if there "were" ghosts, as that would imply that there is something after death. In fact, I think he said, "Gee I hope so."...He did not have a religious funeral service. He's not buried in consecrated ground. We always celebrated Christmas and had huge Christmas trees.

In Stanley Kubrick: A Life in Pictures, Jack Nicholson recalls that Kubrick said The Shining is an overall optimistic story because "anything that says there's anything after death is ultimately an optimistic story."

Alternative adaptations

Three of Stanley Kubrick's films have had their source material re-adapted in some fashion: Anthony Burgess's subsequent stage adaptation of A Clockwork Orange in 1990, which he hoped would be considered a more definitive adaptation than Kubrick's film; the Stephen King written and produced television miniseries of The Shining, which he hoped would stand as the authorized adaptation; and Adrian Lyne's adaptation of Lolita, which had the blessing of Vladimir Nabokov's son, Dmitri (who echoed his father's moderate misgivings about Kubrick's version). Both Burgess and King overtly stated that they were annoyed by Kubrick's denying their lead characters (Alex DeLarge and Jack Torrance, respectively) a final redemption that was present in the source material, but absent from Kubrick's adaptation.

Legacy

Kubrick made only thirteen feature films in his life. His oeuvre was comparatively low in number (compared to contemporaries such as Ingmar Bergman or Federico Fellini) due to his methodical and meticulous dedication to every aspect of film production. A number of his films are recognized as seminal classics within their genre.

;Awards and recognition Five of Stanley Kubrick's films were nominated for Academy Awards in various categories, including Best Picture for Dr. Strangelove, A Clockwork Orange, and Barry Lyndon, and Best Director for 2001: A Space Odyssey, Dr. Strangelove, A Clockwork Orange, and Barry Lyndon. 2001: A Space Odyssey received numerous technical awards, including a BAFTA award for cinematographer Geoffrey Unsworth and an Academy Award for best visual effects, which Kubrick (as director of special effects on the film) received.

Most awards for which Kubrick's films were nominated tended to be in the areas of cinematography, art design, screenwriting, and music. However, only four of his films were nominated for their acting performances, notably Lolita, getting three acting nominations from the Golden Globes, and Peter Sellers getting nominated for both an Oscar and a BAFTA for his triple roles in Dr. Strangelove. Of all his movies, only Spartacus rewarded a cast member with an acting award.

All Kubrick films from Paths of Glory to the end of his career were nominated for at least one Golden Globe or Oscar (along with several BAFTA nominations) with the notable exception of The Shining which was actually nominated for the infamous Razzie award. (This was the first year of the Raspberry awards which at the time were voted on only by a few friends of Raspberry founder, John Wilson, not the international committee of several hundred that includes professional critics and industry professionals that it does today.) Ironically, at least two published books, The Wolf at the Door by Jay Cocks and Kubrick, inside a film artist's maze by Thomas Nelson, consider The Shining to be a kind of master key to Kubrick's whole body of work in which all of Kubrick's philosophical preoccupations merge into a grand synthesis.

In 1997, three of Kubrick's films were selected by the American Film Institute for their list of the 100 Greatest Movies in America: at #22, Dr. Strangelove at #26 and A Clockwork Orange at #46. In 2007, the AFI updated their list with 2001 ranked at #15, Dr. Strangelove ranked at #39 and Clockwork Orange ranked at #70; Spartacus was one of the new selections, ranking at #81.

;Reviews from critics Many of Kubrick's films initially received lukewarm reviews, only to be hailed as major and seminal classics decades later. Film critics Andrew Sarris and Pauline Kael were consistently highly dismissive of Kubrick, often considering him as impersonal and misanthropic. Writer Mark Browning has noted that critics seem divided between those that consider him "immensely profound" or "just plain pretentious." Likewise, Tony Mills in the Sunday Times Book review said he is "depending on who you ask either the greatest film director since Orson Welles or...a hypnotically pretentious fake". Initially, Roger Ebert gave a poor review of The Shining which now Ebert has canonized in his series of reviews of great films. It has been argued that this frequent shift in opinion is due to the consistently idiosyncratic and unconventional character of his film-making style, and this also accounts for his enormous influence on the film community. (See the section on "Tributes from filmmakers" below.) Ronnie Lankford notes "It is fascinating, when reflecting upon Kubrick, how many times he made a seminal film." which approached subjects in a new way. In the same essay he writes,

..critical opinion has always lagged behind when it came to Kubrick. Look up 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) in the average movie guide. Most call it an innovative masterpiece and forget to mention that a number of critics hated the film when it was released. Kubrick’s films have often been groundbreaking, controversial, and misunderstood. But critics who dare to question his artistry usually have to eat their review.

;Style For Kubrick, written dialogue is one element to be put in balance with mise en scène (set arrangements), music, and especially, editing. Inspired by Pudovkin's treatise on film acting, Kubrick realized that one could create a performance in the editing room and often re-direct a film.

As he explained to a journalist,

Everything else [in film] comes from something else. Writing, of course, is writing; acting comes from the theatre; and cinematography comes from photography. Editing is unique to film. You can see something from different points of view almost simultaneously, and it creates a new experience.

Kubrick's method of operating thus became a quest for an emergent vision in the editing room, when all the elements of a film could be assembled. The price of this method, beginning as early as Spartacus (when he first had an ample budget for film stock), was endless exploratory re-shooting of scenes that was an exhaustive investigation of all possible variations of a scene.This enabled him to walk into the editing room with copious options. John Baxter has written:

Instead of finding the intellectual spine of a film in the script before starting work, Kubrick felt his way towards the final version of a film by shooting each scene from many angles and demanding scores of takes on each line. Then over months... he arranged and rearranged the tens of thousands of scraps of film to fit a vision that really only began to emerge during editing.

;Tributes from filmmakers, critics and imitators Leading directors, including Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, James Cameron, Woody Allen, Terry Gilliam and Ridley Scott, have cited Kubrick as a source of inspiration, and in the case of Spielberg, collaboration. On the DVD of Eyes Wide Shut, Steven Spielberg, in an interview, comments on Kubrick that "nobody could shoot a picture better in history" but the way that Kubrick "tells a story is antithetical to the way we are accustomed to receiving stories". Writing in the introduction to a recent edition of Michel Ciment's Kubrick, film director Martin Scorsese has noted that most of Kubrick's films were misunderstood and under-appreciated when first released. Then came a dawning recognition that they were masterful works unlike any other films.

Even today, Kubrick continues to be cited as a major influence by many directors, including Christopher Nolan, David Fincher, Guillermo del Toro, David Lynch, Lars Von Trier, Michael Mann, George A. Romero and Gaspar Noé. Many filmmakers imitate Kubrick's inventive and unique use of camera movement and framing. For example, several of Jonathan Glazer's music videos contain visual references to Kubrick. The Coen Brother's Barton Fink, in which the hotel itself seems malevolent, contains a hotel hallway Steadicam shot as an homage to The Shining. The story telling style of their Hudsucker Proxy was influenced by Doctor Strangelove.

Many more directors have simply cited Kubrick as having made one of their favorite films such as Richard Linklater, Sam Mendes, Joel Schumacher, Taylor Hackford.

On the other hand, others, such as the filmmakers of the remodernist film movement, have been critical of Kubrick's work, described by Jesse Richards as "boring and dishonest". Peter Rinaldi, in his essay on the Remodernist Film Manifesto for Mungbeing, The Shore as Seen from the Deep Sea, defends the manifesto, writing:

I certainly don't share in my friend's opinion of this man's work, but I actually think this is a hugely important part of the manifesto. A lot of us came to be filmmakers because a particular director's (or a number of directors) work inspired us. A friend of mine calls these inspirational figures his "Giants", which I think is a great word for them because sometimes they are built up so much in our minds that we don't think we, or our work, can ever really reach them and theirs. I think, for the most part, the generation that I grew up in had Kubrick as their Giant. His work has a mystical "perfectionism" that is awe-inspiring at times. This perfectionism is anathema to the Remodernist mentality and for many healthy reasons, this giant (or whatever giant towers over your work) must fall in our minds. We must become the giant.

Kubrick was both a great fan of The Simpsons and in friendly contact with the show's producers. Analysts of the show argue that The Simpsons contains more references to many films of Stanley Kubrick than any other pop culture phenomenon. References abound not only to 2001, A Clockwork Orange, and The Shining but also to Spartacus, Dr. Strangelove, Lolita, and Full Metal Jacket. It has been noted that while references to "fantastic fiction" in The Simpsons are copious, "there are two masters of the genre whose impact on The Simpsons supersedes that of all others: Stanley Kubrick and Edgar Allan Poe." Similarly, it has been observed that

...the show's almost obsessive references to the films of Stanley Kubrick...[make it] as if the show's admittance of these films into the show's pantheon of intertextual allusions finally marked their entry into the deepest subconscious level of the global pop cultural mind.

;Studies of Kubrick At least two full-length books on Stanley Kubrick are devoted to frame-by-frame analysis of his visual style: Stanley Kubrick, Director: A Visual Analysis by Alexander Walker, and Stanley Kubrick: Visual Poet 1928–1999 (Basic Film) by Paul Duncan. History professor Geoffrey Cocks notes that Kubrick has what he calls an "open narrative" style that "requires the audience to derive meaning actively rather than being passively instructed, entertained, and manipulated." On the other hand, Cocks believes that Kubrick's preoccupation with sweeping overarching historical themes causes him to frequently sacrifice character development. "His films consistently display a basic taxonomy of violence, systems of control, and inherent human evil. This idée fixe freezes the people in his films into types rather than fully developed characters."

;Social commentary and vision Kubrick has been noted both for his social commentary and for his distinctive visual style. Regarding social commentary, Kubrick has been noted for the recurring theme of concern with the over-mechanization of society which, in its attempt to create a safe environment, creates an artificial sterility that breeds the very evils it tries to exclude. Multiple critics have noted that Kubrick's earlier films have more straightforward linear narrative while the later films are moderately and subtly surreal reflecting a sense of social dislocation and confusion The emotional distance Kubrick maintains from many of his characters have caused critics to see Kubrick as a cold and detached rationalist, while the recurrence of strongly psychopathic characters from Alex DeLarge to Jack Torrance in his films have caused many to view Kubrick's outlook as deeply pessimistic. A frequently recurring observation on the Kubrick film that Steven Spielberg completed A.I is that it uneasily meshes Spielberg's rosy optimistic outlook with Kubrick's pessimistic one, although one reviewer wrote “Spielberg, has done a remarkable job in balancing Kubrick's pessimism with his optimism without having one overcrowd the other”

In spite of Kubrick's own denial that he is a pessimist, the charge is frequently repeated. Newspaper obituaries of Kubrick notably the one in The New York Times by Stephen Holden (as well as that in the San Jose Mercury), the entry on Kubrick in the online edition of Encyclopædia Britannica, and Vincent LoBrutto's full-length biography of Kubrick (which was spoken of approvingly by Kubrick's wife) all characterize Kubrick broadly as pessimistic. (Holden wrote “if Mr. Kubrick's misanthropy prompted some critics to accuse him of coldness and inhumanity, others saw his pessimism as an uncompromisingly Swiftian vision of human absurdity.”) So also did Kubrick's most severe critic, Pauline Kael. The charge was repeated in reviews of the multi-film DVD boxed set of his films in 2007, a New Jersey film critic writing “And yet preserved too -- like an ugly insect trapped in amber -- are some of the artist's most problematic qualities, including a bitter pessimism, a cruel humor and an almost godlike superiority that often viewed other people -- and particularly women -- as little more than impediments." A pessimistic streak was found in essays collected in The Philosophy of Stanley Kubrick, one of which characterizes Eyes Wide Shut as “a kind of Sartrean pessimism about our inevitable dissatisfaction with romantic love.”

Not all critics agree with this assessment. Other essays in the same anthology find Eyes to be very optimistic. James Naremore in On Kubrick characterizes Kubrick as a modernist in the tradition of James Joyce and Franz Kafka with their distrust of mass society. As such, Naremore notes that Kubrick's detachment from his subjects does not make him a dour pessimist, although Kubrick does often dwell on “the failure of scientific reasoning, and the fascistic impulses in masculine sexuality”. Peter Kramer's study of 2001 argues it is meant to counterweight the pessimism of Kubrick's previous Doctor Strangelove.

Some view Kubrick's pessimism as either at least overstated by others or even more apparent than real, an impression created by Kubrick's refusal of any bland or cheap optimism, refusal to make films that conform to conventional ideas of a spectacle, and a desire to employ films as a wake-up call to humanity to understand its capacity for evil. The editors of The Kubrick Site note that Kubrick avoids cinematically conventional ways of structuring stories. This does indeed create for many viewers a sense of emotionless detachment from the human subjects as noted above. For example, Kubrick often prefers lengthy dialogue scenes shot from one camera angle with no cutting. But the editors of TKS believe this is done in order to establish a life of characters beyond dialogue which "helps to reveal, in the spaces and silences, some of the emotional nature permeating the film's world" as well as a realistic sense of the characters' situatedness in time and society. Kubrick's focus is not just on individual characters but on the larger society around them and how it affects their motivation, often in negative ways. The authors also stress that however bleak Kubrick's outlook (intermittently) is, he is not a misanthrope.

A recent outspoken dissenter from pessimistic readings of Kubrick is author Julian Rice, a scholar of Native American literature. His book Kubrick's Hope argues that although there is a powerful vision of evil in Kubrick, there is vision of redemption and goodness in Kubrick's films stronger than often initially recognized, a vision focused both on family feeling and access to the sublime depths of the subconscious beyond superficial socialization. However, Rice has been alleged to misrepresent the work of prior Kubrick film scholars, particularly with reference to just how pessimistic or misanthropic they actually think Kubrick's films are.

Steven Spielberg, himself a noted cinematic optimist and close personal friend of Kubrick, expressed a similar view of Kubrick. Going against the grain of the view that Kubrick's films are misanthropic and pessimistic, Spielberg in a tribute to Kubrick at the 71st Academy awards said that

He dared us to have the courage of his convictions, and when we take that dare, we're transported directly to his world, and we're inside his vision. And in the whole history of movies, there has been nothing like that vision ever. It was a vision of hope and wonder, of grace and of mystery. It was a gift to us, and now it's a legacy.

Perhaps the last word in this debate might be Kubrick's own from a 1968 interview in Playboy

The most terrifying fact about the universe is not that it is hostile but that it is indifferent, but if we can come to terms with the indifference, then our existence as a species can have genuine meaning. However vast the darkness, we must supply our own light.

Filmography

;Documentary short films

Day of the Fight (1951)

Flying Padre (1951)

The Seafarers (1953)

;Feature films

This list includes a list of awards for which Kubrick was personally nominated or won in the area of Oscars, Golden Globes, BAFTA, and the notorious Raspberry. Many of Kubrick's films were nominated and won awards from these institutions in areas such as musical score, art direction, and so forth in which the nominee was not Kubrick. For these, see articles on the individual films. Kubrick's only personal win from these institutions was for the special effects in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

For many individual films Kubrick was nominated for and won awards from various societies of film critics, film festivals, and both the Writers Guild of America and the Directors Guild of America.

Kubrick's lifetime achievement awards were the D.W. Griffith award from the Directors Guild of America, and another from the Director's Guild of Great Britain, and the Career Golden Lion from the Venice Film Festival. Posthumously, the Sitges - Catalonian International Film Festival awarded him the "Honorary Grand Prize" in 2008.

In the science fiction world, Kubrick has thrice won the especially coveted Hugo Award, a prized mainly for print writing and only secondarily for drama production. He also received four nominations (with one win) of the science-fiction-film-oriented Saturn awards from the Academy of Science Fiction for The Shining, an award that did not exist when Kubrick won his three Hugos.

Kubrick received two awards from major film festivals: "Best Director" from the Locarno International Film Festival in 1959 for Killer's Kiss and "Filmcritica Bastone Bianco Award" at the Venice Film Festival in 1999 for "Eyes Wide Shut". He also was nominated for the "Golden Lion" of the Venice Film Festival in 1962 for Lolita. The Venice Film Festival awarded him the "Career Golden Lion" in 1997 and the Sitges - Catalonian International Film Festival awarded him the "Honorary Grand Prize" in 2008.

The least honored of Kubrick's films since 1956's The Killing is The Shining, which garnered only the above-mentioned four nominations (with one win) for Saturn awards. In addition, The Shining is the only Stanley Kubrick film ever to be nominated for any of the notorious Razzies. It was nominated for two, Worst Actress (Shelley Duvall) and Worst Director. This was the first year of the Razzies which at that time was run out of one person's home and was voted on by less than 10 people, rather than the large international committee that votes on it today.

See also

Stanley Kubrick Archive

Notes

References

(Storyboard for The Shining, Castle, Alison (editor) and Kubrick, Stanley (photographs)) Reprinted in: Philips 2001; extract in The ALT.MOVIES.KUBRICK FAQ

Further reading

Lyons, V and Fitzgerald, M. (2005) ‘’Asperger syndrome : a gift or a curse?’’ New York : Nova Science Publishers. ISBN 1-59454-387-9

Deutsches Filmmuseum (Ed.): Stanley Kubrick ; Kinematograph Nr. 14, Frankfurt/Main, 2004. ISBN 3-88799-069-2 (English edition)

;Documentary

. Documentary film. Dir. Jan Harlan. Warner Home Video, 2001. 142 min.

External links

Senses of Cinema: Great Directors Critical Database

Stanley Kubrick Archive at the London College of Communication

The Authorized Stanley Kubrick Web Site by Warner Bros.

The Kubrick Site

Kubrick Multimedia Film Guide

Kubrick on Senses of Cinema (In Depth Biography)

Multi-media Kubrick archive

The Guardian: Citizen Kubrick

List of interviews and Look photographs

List of all the published Look photographs

The Hechinger Debacle

Stanley Kubrick Interviews, by Stanley Kubrick, Gene D. Phillips

Category:1928 births Category:1999 deaths Category:Academy Award winners Category:American chess players Category:American cinematographers Category:American expatriates in the United Kingdom Category:American film directors Category:American film editors Category:American film producers Category:People from Manhattan Category:American people of Austrian descent Category:American people of Romanian descent Category:American people of Polish descent Category:American immigrants to the United Kingdom Category:American Jews Category:American screenwriters Category:BAFTA winners (people) Category:Best Visual Effects Academy Award winners Category:Censorship in the arts Category:City College of New York alumni Category:Deaths from myocardial infarction Category:People from the Bronx Category:Special effects people Category:People from New York City Category:Jewish American writers

Name	John Skipp
Pseudonym	Gina McQueen
Occupation	author, screenwriter
Nationality	American
Period	1985–
Genre	Horror fiction, Fantasy, Romance
Website	http://www.johnskipp.com/

John Skipp is a bestselling author and screenwriter whose eleven books have sold millions of copies and are reprinted in nine languages. His early works (co-written with Craig Spector) were considered seminal to the "splatterpunk" style of modern horror fiction; Skipp split with Spector in 1993 to begin his successful solo career. Skipp is currently involved in several film projects, functioning as writer, director, and producer. In September 2007, Leisure Press released his novel The Long Last Call, together with his novella, Conscience. This marked Skipp's return to horror fiction, after many years devoted to musical and other endeavors.

He edited the 2006 anthology Mondo Zombie (published by Cemetery Dance Publications) which won the Bram Stoker Award for Best Anthology. The collection included his short story "God Save The Queen" which was co-written by Marc Levinthal.

In December, 2008, John Skipp released the e-novel and audiobook download, Opposite Sex, under the pen name "Gina McQueen," through new publisher Ravenous Romance. Skipp also released a new novel, "Jake's Wake," co-authored by Cody Goodfellow, from Dorchester Publishing's Leisure Books.

Novels

The Light at the End (1986, Bantam Books) (with Craig Spector)

The Cleanup (1987, Bantam Books) (with Craig Spector)

The Scream (1988, Bantam Books) (with Craig Spector)

Dead Lines (1989, Bantam Books) (with Craig Spector)

The Bridge (1991, Bantam Books) (with Craig Spector)

Animals (1992, Bantam Books) (with Craig Spector)

The Emerald Burrito of Oz (2000) (with Marc Levinthal)

Conscience (Friendly Firewalk Press, novella, 2004)

The Long Last Call (Cemetery Dance Pubns; Limited edition, 2006/ Leisure Books, 2007)

Opposite Sex (writing as Gina McQueen) (Ravenous Romance, e-book and audiobook only, 2008) (Ravenous Romance, paperback, 2009)

Jake's Wake (2008, Dorchester Publishing) (with Cody Goodfellow)

Spore (Coming November 2010, Dorchester Publishing) (with Cody Goodfellow)

Novelizations

Fright Night New York: Tor, 1985. (with Craig Spector, based upon the screenplay by Tom Holland)

Anthologies

Book of the Dead (with Spector) (1989, Bantam Books),

Still Dead: Book of the Dead 2 (with Spector) (1992, Bantam Falcon Books)

Mondo Zombie (2006, Cemetery Dance Publications). Includes the short story "God Save The Queen" co-written by Marc Levinthal.

Non-fiction

Stupography (2004)

Films

Death Collector (1988) - Actor, "Splatterpunk #1"

(1989) - Story

Class of 1999 (1990) - Co-Writer (uncredited)

Nightbreed (1990) - Actor, "Hotel Room Corpse" (uncredited)

Animals (2008) - Based on his 1992 novel, now in post-production

Jake's Wake (in development)

Music

When The Bridge was published in 1991, John Skipp and Craig Spector released a soundtrack, with all music written and performed by them and Brian Emrich, to go along with the book called "Music From The Bridge: Soundtrack for the Movie in Your Mind"

Interviews

The Long Last Call

External links

John Skipp's Official Website

Internet Movie Database section for John Skipp

Gina McQueen's About the Author page on Ravenous Romance's website

Opposite Sex e-novel on Ravenous Romance's website

See also

List of horror fiction authors

Category:Year of birth missing (living people) Category:Living people Category:Splatterpunk Category:American horror writers Category:American novelists

Name	John Landis
Caption	John Landis at The Blues Brothers 25th Anniversary
Birth date	August 03, 1950
Birth place	Chicago, Illinois, U.S.
Birth name	John David Landis
Occupation	Film director
Spouse	Deborah Nadoolman Landis}}

John David Landis (born August 3, 1950) is an American film director, screenwriter, actor, and producer. He is known for his comedies, his horror films, and his music videos with singer Michael Jackson.

Early life and career

Landis was born to a Jewish family in Chicago, Illinois, the son of Shirley Levine (née Magaziner) and Marshall David Landis, an interior decorator. His family relocated to Los Angeles when he was four months old.

He began working as a mailboy at 20th Century Fox. His first noteworthy job in Hollywood was working as an assistant director during filming MGM's Kelly's Heroes in Yugoslavia in 1969; he replaced the film's original assistant director, who suffered from a nervous breakdown and was sent home by the producers. While filming, he met actors Don Rickles and Donald Sutherland, both of whom he would later cast in his own films. Following this, Landis worked on many films made in Europe (especially in Italy and England), most notably, Once Upon a Time in the West, El Condor and A Town Called Bastard.

Landis was later reprimanded for circumventing the State of California's child labor laws in hiring the two children killed in the accident. This tragedy resulted in stricter safety measures and enforcement of child labor laws, in the State of California.

Next, Landis directed Into The Night, starring Jeff Goldblum, Michelle Pfeiffer and David Bowie (a film was inspired by Hitchcock productions; Landis played in this film a mute member of the quartet of Iranian hitmen). To promote this movie, he collaborated with Jeff Okun to direct a documentary film called B.B. King "Into the Night". Landis directed music videos for three of King's songs as part of the film:"Lucille", "Into the Night" (specially composed by Ira Newborn for movie Into the Night) and In the Midnight Hour.

His next film, Spies Like Us, (starring co-writer Dan Aykroyd and Chevy Chase) was an homage to the Road to... films, starring Bob Hope and Bing Crosby. Hope made a cameo in the film as himself. The movie also pays homage to spy movies such as the James Bond series; the crew included special effects makers Ray Harryhausen and Derek Meddings, both of whom had worked on Bond movies. Landis also directed a video for Paul McCartney as part of the promotion for Spies Like Us. He also co-wrote the comedy film Clue.

In 1986, Landis directed ¡Three Amigos! for HBO. The film starred Chevy Chase, Martin Short and Steve Martin. Landis was the second choice to direct; Steven Spielberg had refused. The film was a tribute to old Mexican style westerns and musical movies. Randy Newman wrote three original songs for the film, and the film was shot in Technicolor to make it look like older Westerns.

Landis next directed the Eddie Murphy film, Coming to America, which was a huge commercial success. It was also the subject of Buchwald v. Paramount, a civil suit filed by Art Buchwald in 1990 against the film's producers. Buchwald claimed that the concept for the film had been stolen from a 1982 script that Paramount optioned from Buchwald. Buchwald won the breach of contract action.

In 1991, Landis collaborated again with Michael Jackson on the music video for the song "Black or White". In the same year, he directed Sylvester Stallone in the title role in Oscar. It's not a remake of the 1967 film of the same name, but instead is based on a Claude Magnier stage play. Oscar recreates a 1930 era film, including the gestures along with bit acts and with some slapstick, as a homage to old Hollywood films. In 1992, he directed Innocent Blood, a horror-crime film.

In 1994, Landis directed Eddie Murphy in Beverly Hills Cop III. They had previously worked together on Trading Places and Coming to America. In 1996, he directed The Stupids. Landis returned to Universal to direct Blues Brothers 2000 in 1998, the same year he directed Susan's Plan.

Burke and Hare was released in 2010, Landis's first theatrical release for over a decade.

Upcoming projects

Some Guy Who Kills People

Landis is set to produce the crime thriller Some Guy Who Kills People, written by Ryan Levin and directed by Jack Perez. Filming is expected to begin in January 2010 and stars Kevin Corrigan in a lead role.

Television

Landis directed Kentucky Fried Movie, which is a tribute to television. Later he co-directed Amazon Women on the Moon in the same vein. Landis has been active in television as the executive producer (and often director) of the series Dream On (1990), Weird Science (1994), Sliders (1995), (1997), Campus Cops (1995), Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World (1998), and Masters of Horror. He made also commercials for DirecTV, Taco Bell, Coca Cola, Pepsi, Kellogg's, and Disney.

Documentaries

His first documentary, Coming Soon from 1982, was released only on VHS. Next, he co-directed B.B. King "Into the Night" (1985) and in 2002 directed , which can be seen as a part of the Animal House DVD extras. Initially, his documentaries were only made to promote his feature films. However, later in his career, he became more serious about the oeuvre and made Slasher (2004), (2007) and the upcoming Starz Inside: Ladies or Gentlemen (2009). All of these documentaries were filmed for television; Landis won a 2008 Emmy Award for Mr. Warmth. He worked currently on the Making of Thriller which will shot in 3-D. Landis stars in the Spanish documentary The Man Who Saw Frankenstein Cry, which centers the life and career of Paul Naschy.

Personal life

Landis is married to Deborah Nadoolman Landis, an Oscar-nominated costume designer (who is President of the Costume Designers Guild), with whom he has two children: Max (with whom Landis co-wrote Deer Woman screenplay) and Rachel.

Style and techniques

Recurring motifs

See You Next Wednesday

.]] One of Landis' trademarks is to insert references to a fictional film called See You Next Wednesday in movies that he directs. The line is from Stanley Kubrick's ; this is how Frank Poole's parents end their video to him. The line is also mentioned in the opening scene of Michael Jackson's "Thriller", when the police decode a message from Jackson's werecat character.

When in Hollywood, Visit Universal Studios. Ask for Babs

This is an advertisement for the tour at Universal Studios, from John Landis movies made for Universal. This is also referring (shown at the end of the credits) to the character Babs from the movie National Lampoon's Animal House. When in Hollywood... is showing at the end of the credits, and it consists of three blue cards, the first saying "Universal Studios—the Entertainment Center of the World," the second saying "When in Hollywood Visit Universal Studios," and the last adding "Ask for Babs". The new version of this advertisement, which appeared in Blues Brothers 2000 (the first film directed by Landis for Universal since Amazon Women on the Moon) includes only one card: "Universal Studios—Hollywood and Florida. See the stars and ride the movies! (Ask for Babs)." Patrons who asked for Babs were once given a certain degree of reward; any promo was long since discontinued, save a simple smile or acknowledgment from a park staffer. In one DVD release of Animal House, there was a mockumentary that featured, among others, Martha Smith (who played Babs) indeed working the rounds as a tour guide at Universal Studios in Hollywood.

List of films with When in Hollywood, Visit Universal Studios. Ask for Babs:

National Lampoon's Animal House (1978)

The Blues Brothers (1980)

An American Werewolf in London (1981)

Coming Soon (1982)

Into the Night (1985)

Amazon Women on the Moon (1987)

Blues Brothers 2000 (1998)

(2003)

In non-Landis works:

Charley Varrick (1973)

Smokey and the Bandit (1977)

Galactica III: Conquest of the Earth (1980)

(1982)

The Last Starfighter (1984)

The Great Outdoors (1988)

Uncle Buck (1989)

Sneakers (1992)

The Flintstones (1994)

The Flintstones in Viva Rock Vegas (2000)

Drag Me to Hell (2009)

Closing credits

Landis's films often feature a montage either before or during the end credits, which shows clips or outtakes from the movie, with the names of the featured actors at the bottom of the screen. This device was first used in Animal House, but does not feature in Schlock, The Kentucky Fried Movie, An American Werewolf in London, Three Amigos or Beverly Hills Cop III. The montages for Spies like Us and Innocent Blood also contain jokes.

Directors' cameos

Landis casts famous film directors in cameo appearances in almost all of his movies (Spies Like Us has several in one memorable scene). He frequently invited director Frank Oz to play small parts in his movies, and others such as Roger Vadim, Paul Mazursky, Jim Henson, Jonathan Demme, and David Cronenberg in Into the Night; Terry Gilliam, Joel Coen, Michael Apted in Spies Like Us; Sam Raimi in Spies Like Us and Innocent Blood; George Lucas in Beverly Hills Cop III; Steven Spielberg in Blues Brothers; and Dario Argento in Innocent Blood.

Break the fourth wall

Several of Landis' films break the fourth wall. in his films (including Schlock – the title hero; in Kentucky Fried Movie – animal showing during TV's show; in An American Werewolf in London in ZOO; in Trading Places in the train during New Year's Eve) or inserted images of gorillas in his films as part of production designs: in Blues Brothers on promotional poster of fictional movie called See You Next Wednesday (the same situation in The Stupids) and on the poster in Three Amigos (shows as one of advertisement of Goldsmith Studios), in Innocent Blood we may see a monkey from the movie playing on television; in Blues Brothers 2000 it appears as a huge gorilla's figure in Queen Mousette's House.

Awards

According to the Internet Movie Database, John Landis has won or been nominated for the following awards:

;Nominations

Schlock for Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy & Horror Films

Twilight Zone: The Movie for Best Film at Fantasporto

"Dream On" was nominated four times in the Comedy Series category at the CableACE Awards

;Awards won:

Schlock won the Best Film award during Fantafestival

Into the Night won the Special Jury Prize at the Cognac Festival du Film Policier

"Dream On" won a CableACE Award in the Comedy Series in 1992

Mr. Warmth: The Don Rickles Project won in the "Outstanding Variety, Music or Comedy Special" category at the Emmy Awards

;Landis was honoured by:

French government in 1985 (Chevalier dans l'ordre des Arts et des Lettres)

Rimini Cinema Festival in Italy (Federico Fellini Prize)

The Eastman House in Rochester, New York (named a George Eastman Scholar)

Sitges Film Festival in Spain (Time Machine Career Achievement Award'')

Significant collaborations

Cast

;With Dan Aykroyd Aykroyd wrote the original script for the movie The Blues Brothers, which at 324 pages was three times longer than a standard screenplay. Landis was given the task of editing the script into a usable screenplay, and the film was realised in 1980 as a musical comedy. Aykroyd then starred (along with Murphy) in Trading Places. In the same year (1983) he appeared in Twilight Zone: The Movie. Two years later, he made a cameo in Into the Night and B.B. King "Into the Night" (as one of B.B. King's band members) and starred in (as well as co-wrote) Spies Like Us. This would be Aykroyd's last role in a Landis film until 1998.

;With Eddie Murphy Eddie Murphy first collaborated with Landis during Trading Places. Murphy frequently collaborated with Landis, and appeared also in Coming to America and Beverly Hills Cop III. Murphy made a cameo in Landis's two videos for B.B. King: In the Midnight Hour and My Lucille in which he played band's member as drummer.

;With Michael Jackson When Landis and his family were living in London, he was approached by Michael Jackson to make a video for his song, "Thriller". "Thriller" forever changed MTV and the concept of music videos; it has won many awards. In 2009, Landis sued Jackson in a dispute over royalties for the video; he claims to be owed four years worth of royalties. In 1992 Landis directed a second video for Jackson, "Black or White", in which Landis appeared as himself.

During an interview with Giulia D'Agnolo Vallan Landis said:

;With Frank Oz Landis has cast Oz in small roles in several of his movies. Oz played a corrections officer in Blues Brothers and Blues Brothers 2000. He also had roles in An American Werewolf in London, Trading Places, Spies Like Us, and Innocent Blood. Even if he's not appeared in a Landis movie, his name is often spoken in the background. During airport scenes in Into the Night and Coming to America, there are announcements on the PA system requesting a 'Mr. Frank Oznowicz' to pick up the white courtesy phone. Oznowicz is Oz's given name. During interview with Giulia D'Agnolo Vallan, Frank Oz said:

Crew

;With Deborah Nadoolman Landis Throughout his career, Landis has utilized his wife, Deborah Nadoolman Landis, as a costume designer. She created such costumes as Bluto's toga in Animal House; black suits, hats and glasses for the Blues Brothers; Michael Jackson's red jacket in Thriller; sheepskin jackets for Spies Like Us; the protagonists' costumes in ¡Three Amigos!; and Prince Akeem's coronation outfit in Coming to America. Deborah Nadoolman was nominated for an Academy Award in 1988 for Coming to America.

;With Rick Baker Richard Baker is an Academy Award-winning special makeup effects artist known for his realistic creature effects. Baker worked with Landis for the first time during Schlock. Baker also created special makeup effects for Landis' An American Werewolf in London (for which he won the Academy Award), Twilight Zone: The Movie, Thriller, and Coming to America (which garnered him an Academy Award nomination). Baker also appeared in Into the Night as a drug dealer.

;With George Folsey Jr. George Folsey is a producer and editor. He edited or co-edited six Landis' films, from Schlock (1973) to The Blues Brothers (1980), Thriller and Coming to America. Folsey produced eleven films directed or co-directed by Landis (Schlock, The Blues Brothers, all films from An American Werewolf in London to Coming to America). He was also second unit director collaborated with Landis during his Trading Places, Into the Night and ¡Three Amigos!.

;With Leslie Belzberg Leslie Belzberg is a film and television producer. She produced ten films directed by Landis, from Into the Night to Susans Plan) and four TV series in which Landis participated, including The Lost World and Honey, I Shrunk the Kids: The TV Show. Belzberg was George Folsey's assistant during filming Trading Places, and also was Blues Brothers 2000 executive music producer. She won – along with Landis – CableACE Awards for Dream on series and appeared in The Making of "Blues Brothers 2000" as herself.

;With Elmer Bernstein Bernstein composed music for eight of Landis' movies: National Lampoon's Animal House ("Faber College Theme"), Blues Brothers ("God's Music"), An American Werewolf in London (about 7-minutes of score), Trading Places (most of score is variations on Mozart's "Marriage of Figaro"), Thriller ("Scary Music"), Spies Like Us, ¡Three Amigos! and Oscar (score is adaption of "The Barber of Seville" by Rossini). Bernstein was nominated for Academy Award for Trading Places score in 1984.

;With Ira Newborn Newborn composed music for three of Landis' movies: the smoky jazz score for Into the Night, for which he wrote music for B.B. King (included two songs especially wrote for the film soundtrack: My Lucille and Into the Night); 'wallpaper' music for "Mondo Condo" novel from Amazon Women on the Moon and urban jazzy big-band score for Innocent Blood. He supervised and conducted music for Blues Brothers movie. Newborn's music was also used by Landis in a 1985 documentary film directed by Jeff Okun called B.B. King "Into the Night". This film contains three music videos directed by Landis to two songs written by Newborn and one arranged by the composer. Two songs co-written by Newborn were also added to "Into the Night" LP soundtrack edition, but neither of them were used in the film.

;With Robert Paynter Landis worked with cinematographer Robert Paynter on five films: An American Werewolf in London, Trading Places, Thriller, Into the Night and Spies Like Us. Paynter helped to create a "pop" comic book-style of American Werewolf, Thriller and Into the Night. He also made a cameo in Into the Night (as Security Guard) and Spies like Us (as Dr. Gill).

;With Mac Ahlberg Landis worked with a Swedish cinematographer Mac Ahlberg on three feature films in early 90s : Oscar, Innocent Blood and Beverly Hills Cop III. Ahlberg was also director of photography of two television episodes from Dream on series: The First Episode and The Second Greatest Story Ever Told - both directed by Landis. Ahlberg and Landis also collaborated on Michael Jackson's Black or White music video.

Filmography

Feature

Directed by Landis:

Schlock (1973)

The Kentucky Fried Movie (1977)

National Lampoon's Animal House (1978)

The Blues Brothers (1980)

An American Werewolf in London (1981)

Trading Places (1983)

Into the Night (1985)

Spies Like Us (1985)

Three Amigos (1986)

Coming to America (1988)

Oscar (1991)

Innocent Blood (1992)

Beverly Hills Cop III (1994)

The Stupids (1996)

Blues Brothers 2000 (1998)

Susan's Plan (1998)

Burke and Hare (2010)

Co-directed by Landis:

(1983)

Amazon Women on the Moon (1987)

Documentary films

For Video/DVD:

Coming Soon (1982)

(2002)

For Television:

Slasher (2004)

(2006)

Co-directed by Landis:

B.B. King "Into the Night" (video segments, 1985)

Music videos

Shorts films for Michael Jackson:

Thriller (1983)

Black or White (1991)

For B.B. King (from film B.B. King "Into the Night"):

My Lucille

Into the Night

In the Midnight Hour

For Paul McCartney:

Spies Like Us (1986)

Television episodes

Disneyland's 30th Anniversary Celebration (1 episode, 1985)

Georg Burns Disaster at Buzz Creek (1 episode, 1985)

Disneyland's 35th Anniversary Celebration (1 episode, 1990)

Dream On (9 episodes, 1990–1995)

(1 episode, 1999)

Masters of Horror

: "Deer Woman" (2005) : "Family" (2006)

The Great Sketch Experiment (segments, 2006)

Psych (3 episodes, 2007, 2008)

Fear Itself

: "In Sickness and in Health" (2008)

Other works

(2006)

Books about John Landis

Alberto Farina (1995). "John Landis". Il Castoro. ISBN 978-88-8033-030-1

Giulia D'Agnolo Vallan (2008). "John Landis". M Press. ISBN 1-59582-041-8

References

External links

80's Movie Rewind Profile about Director

Daily Variety, May 24, 1994: Spotlight on John Landis — Billion Dollar Director

;Interviews

Interview with John Landis

;About Twillight Zone accident

Site of incident at www.findadeath.com

All about The Twilight Zone tragedy

NTSB Accident Investigation Report

Category:1950 births Category:Horror film directors Category:American film producers Category:American Jews Category:American music video directors Category:American screenwriters Category:Living people Category:People from Chicago, Illinois

Name	Enya
Alias	Enya Brennan
Background	solo_singer
Birth name	Eithne Patricia Ní Bhraonáin
Born	May 17, 1961
Occupation	vocalist, instrumentalist, composer, producer
Instruments	vocals, piano
Genre	New Age, Celtic, World
Years active	1982 - present
Label	WEA, Warner Music UK, Warner Bros. Records UK, Reprise, Geffen
Associated acts	Clannad, Moya Brennan, Brídín Brennan
Url	www.enya.com
Notable instruments	Piano, Synthesizer

Enya, (born Eithne Patricia Ní Bhraonáin, , 17 May 1961), is an Irish singer, instrumentalist and composer. The media sometimes refer to her by the Anglicized name, Enya Brennan; Enya is an approximate transliteration of how Eithne is pronounced in the Gaoth Dobhair dialect of the Irish language, her native tongue.

She began her musical career in 1980, when she briefly joined her family band Clannad, before leaving to perform solo. She gained wider recognition for her music in the 1986 BBC series The Celts. Shortly afterwards, her 1988 album Watermark propelled her to further international fame and she became known for her unique sound, characterised by voice-layering, folk melodies, synthesised backdrops and ethereal reverberations.

She continued to enjoy steady success during the 1990s and 2000s; her 2000 album A Day Without Rain sold 15 million copies and she was named the world's best selling female artist of 2001. She is Ireland's best-selling solo musician and is officially the country's second-largest musical export after the band U2. Her album sales stand at 70 million as of 2009, with over 26 million in album sales in the US. Her work has earned her four Grammy awards and an Academy Award nomination and she has performed works in 10 languages.

Life and career

1961-1983: Musical upbringing and Clannad

Enya was born and brought up in Gweedore (known in Irish as Gaoth Dobhair), County Donegal. She is part of an Irish-speaking and musical family, the sixth of nine children.

In 1982, shortly before Clannad became famous for "Theme From Harry's Game", producer and manager Nicky Ryan left the group and Enya joined him to start her own solo career. Enya then formed her own recording studio, named "Aigle", which is French for "Eagle".

1984-1987: Career beginnings, The Frog Prince, and The Celts

Enya recorded two solo instrumental pieces called "An Ghaoth Ón Ghrian" (Irish for "The Solar Wind") and "Miss Clare Remembers" that were released on the 1984 album Touch Travel. She was first credited as Enya (as opposed to Eithne) for writing some of the music for the 1984 movie The Frog Prince, which was released on a soundtrack album of the same title. Another early appearance on record followed in 1987, where Enya provided spoken (not sung) vocals on Sinéad O'Connor's debut album, The Lion and the Cobra. The title of the album is a partial English translation of Enya's Irish reading of Psalms 91:13 (KJV: "Thou shalt tread on the lion and the adder...") in the song "Never Get Old".

Enya was contracted to provide music for the soundtrack of the 1986 BBC television documentary The Celts. The music she produced was featured on her first solo album, Enya (1987), but it attracted little attention at the time. The B-Side single "Eclipse" is actually a reversed and modified version of Enya's song "Deireadh An Tuath", from this 1987 album Enya. The song "Boadicea", also from this album, would later be sampled by The Fugees on their single "Ready or Not" (1996), causing a brief stir because the group neither sought permission from Enya nor gave her credit initially, and by Mario Winans, who did give her credit (the Winans track, "I Don't Wanna Know" which features a rap by P. Diddy and is officially credited to all three artists, became Enya's highest charting single in the U.S., when it peaked at #2 on the Hot 100 in 2004). "Book Of Days" was featured prominently in the movie Far and Away, with an English-lyric version created for the film then replacing the old Gaelic-language version on all pressings of the Shepherd Moons album from 1993 onwards. In 1993, her recording of "Marble Halls" from Shepherd Moons was featured in the Martin Scorsese film, The Age of Innocence.

In 1992, a re-mastered version of the Enya album was released as The Celts including a longer, modified version of "Portrait", which was re-named as "Portrait (Out of the Blue)". Four years after Shepherd Moons, she released The Memory of Trees (1995), another Top Five success in both the UK and Germany, as well as her first Top 10 album in the U.S. Singles released from the album were "Anywhere Is" and "On My Way Home".

In 1997, Enya released her greatest hits collection, Paint The Sky With Stars: The Best of Enya, again a Top Five smash in the UK and Germany, which featured two new songs: "Paint the Sky With Stars" and "Only If..."; "Only If..." later became a single. ("Only If You Want To", is an early version of "Only If...". It appears on a promotional Japanese CD called, The Best of Enya, and does not include the French lyrics.) She was offered the chance to compose the score for James Cameron's 1997 film Titanic, but declined. A 1989 recording of Enya singing an Irish language version of "Silent Night" ("Oíche Chiúin") has been reissued over the years, including The Christmas EP (which otherwise contained several non-holiday related previously issued recordings by Enya) and the 1997 edition of the charity album A Very Special Christmas.

Ansett Australia extensively used "Storms in Africa" for promotional purposes when the airline re-branded itself in the 1990s. The 1992 film Sleepwalkers features "Boadicea" as the film's signature tune.

2000-2004: A Day Without Rain and The Lord of The Rings

Following a five-year break, Enya released the album A Day Without Rain in 2000, featuring 37 minutes of new material (34 minutes on the U.S. version). The album is Enya's most successful to date, peaking at number two on the U.S. Billboard 200 chart. The first single, "Only Time", was used in the film Sweet November and received U.S. radio airplay in late 2000. In May 2001, NBC began using "Only Time" to accompany commercials for their television series Friends, which helped the song get airplay on top-40 radio.

After the September 11, 2001 attacks, "Only Time" was used as a soundtrack in many radio and television reports about the attacks. Enya released a special edition of the song, and a maxi single was issued on 20 November 2001 featuring a pop mix, with proceeds donated to the families of victims. "Only Time" peaked at number 10 on the U.S. Hot 100, number 12 on the Pop Chart and hit number one on the Adult Contemporary and Hot Adult Contemporary charts. In Germany, "Only Time" re-entered the German single charts at number 1 and the album A Day Without Rain reached number one some weeks later.

Enya won the Echo Award for best selling international single in Germany of 2001, and received a nomination for best selling album.

In 2001, Enya recorded "May It Be", which was featured in the first installment of The Lord of the Rings film trilogy, , and was her second consecutive single to enter the German charts at number one. The video features scenes from the Peter Jackson film.

Enya, self-admittedly, composes music slowly. A new song called "" ("Wild Violet") was based on a Japanese poem by Roma Ryan. In September 2004, the song was used in Japan as part of an advertising campaign for Panasonic. Warner Music Japan stated that Enya's next album was scheduled for release in Japan in mid-November. Enya issued a press release on her official Web site on 19 September stating that this was a mistake and no new album was immediately forthcoming.

2005-present: Amarantine, And Winter Came and The Very Best of Enya

In November 2005, a new album, entitled Amarantine, was released. It reached the Top 10 in both the UK and the U.S., and peaked at number 3 in Germany. The album won the Grammy Award for Best New Age Album for 2007, Enya's fourth.

In 2006, Enya released several Christmas-themed CDs with newly recorded material. On 10 October 2006, was released containing six songs: the previously released "Oíche Chiúin" (a.k.a. "Silent Night") and "Amid the Falling Snow", new recordings of the standards "Adeste Fideles" (a.k.a. "Oh Come All Ye Faithful") and "We Wish You a Merry Christmas" as well as two original songs, "Christmas Secrets" and "The Magic of the Night". This CD was released only in the United States in an exclusive partnership with the NBC television network and the Target department store chain. Enya was awarded the World's Best-Selling Irish Act award at the World Music Awards in London on 19 November 2006.

In late November, two new editions of Amarantine were released. In the UK it was reissued as Christmas Edit: Amarantine with a second disc containing the four new Christmas songs previously issued on Sounds of the Season (the original album already had "Amid the Falling Snow" while "Oíche Chiúin" is a recording dating back to 1988, which had already been featured on numerous collections). The U.S. received a special version of this release (Amarantine - Deluxe Collector's Edition), which also included three postcards and a copy of Roma Ryan's book Water Shows the Hidden Heart, which is referenced on the original album. Canadian fans could choose from the Special Christmas Edition of Amarantine or an EP entitled Christmas Secrets, which contained only the four new songs.

By mid-2007, Enya claimed to have sold 80 million albums. An American businessperson has coined the phrase "enyanomics" to explain Enya's ability to sell millions of records without giving any live performances.

On 29 June 2007, Enya received an honorary doctorate from the National University of Ireland, Galway. Shortly after, on 10 July 2007, Enya received a second honorary doctorate from the University of Ulster.

In March 2009, Warner Music Japan released Enya's first 4 albums in a new format, called SHM-CD. On 23 November 2009, Enya released a new album called The Very Best of Enya. It includes most of her hits from 1988 to 2008. In 2010, American singer Rihanna sampled Enya's song "One By One" on a song from her new album Loud.

Musical style and other projects

As a musical group, Enya represents a partnership between three people: Enya herself, who composes and performs the music; Nicky Ryan, who produces the albums; and Roma Ryan, who writes the lyrics in various languages, except Gaelic, in which Enya will render the lyrics herself. Enya performs all percussion, instruments, and vocals in her pieces unless specified.

Her signature sound uses simple arrangements with extensive multi-tracking vocals. The vocals are each performed individually, and are layered together to form a virtual choir, although all the voices are Enya herself. In "Cursum Perficio" of the album Watermark, Enya reaches a C an octave below middle C. Later in the piece, she sings a high A-flat above the treble clef. Enya's vocal range is mezzo-soprano.

On the album Amarantine, Enya sings in Japanese and Loxian, a language invented by Roma Ryan. They are known to be unable to speak or understand Loxian fluently. The vocabulary is formed by Enya singing the notes to which Roma provides the phonetic writing. There is no official syntax for Loxian. As a result, Enya spent an estimated €250,000 on security measures for her home, Manderley Castle in Killiney, County Dublin (named after Maxim de Winter's house in her favourite book and black and white movie, Rebecca).

While some critics have labeled her music as a fusion of "Celtic new age" and "world music," Enya believes this is because they are not familiar with her background. "My influences are with Irish music, church music and classical music," she says in a 1997 interview. "When I was growing up, I was listening to quite a lot of diverse music, and I was lucky that it wasn't just one particular type of music." Enya was raised Catholic and her faith continues to inspire her music. "It's difficult when you've been brought up Catholic," Enya says, "to turn completely away from it. What I found in my twenties was I got more involved with the spiritual side of it. I've been known to go to church when there's nobody else there. It's very therapeutic when it's quite empty. It's so hard in a moment of despair not to say a prayer. Instead of abandoning (Catholicism), which is impossible to do, I kind of tried to turn it around and make it work for me. There is this calmness that is absolutely wonderful." In 2000, she further explains how she makes Catholicism work for her: "I consider myself to be a spiritual person, not necessarily a religious one, although I have to say that one of the highlights of my career was when I performed at the Vatican for the Pope and had an audience with him. My core beliefs would revolve around the idea that we should live to the best of our abilities -- we should live and let live."

In addition to performing for the Pope, the singer participated in a live broadcast on British television for Christmas Eve in 1997, before she flew home to County Donegal to join her family at midnight Mass. She still sings in her mother's choir every Christmas at midnight Mass, at St. Mary's Church.

Enya loves cats. In an interview published in 1988, when asked about pets, she replied: "I've got a cat. I love cats; at one stage I had twelve. It was just bliss. They'd all lie around in the sun and then come up and climb around my neck." Her favourite classical composer is Sergei Rachmaninoff. Her hobbies include watching romantic black and white films, collecting artwork, reading, and watercolour painting.

Music videos

The following is a list of music videos that were released by Enya by year order:

Trains And Winter Rains (2008)

It's In The Rain (2006)

Amarantine (2005)

Wild Child (2002)

May It Be (2001)

Only Time (2000)

Only If (1997)

On My Way Home (1996)

Anywhere Is (1996)

Book Of Days (1994)

The Celts (1992)

Caribbean Blue (1991)

How Can I Keep From Singing? (1991)

Exile (1990)

Evening Falls (1989)

Storms In Africa (1989)

Orinoco Flow (1988)

I Want Tomorrow (1987)

Aldebaran (1987)

Notable awards

Enya has won four Grammy Awards for Best New Age Album to date:

#Grammy Awards of 1993, Best New Age Album for Shepherd Moons #Grammy Awards of 1997, Best New Age Album for The Memory of Trees #Grammy Awards of 2002, Best New Age Album for A Day Without Rain #Grammy Awards of 2007, Best New Age Album for Amarantine

  Also, "May It Be" was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Song at the 2002 ceremonies, but it lost to Randy Newman's "If I Didn't Have You" from ''Monsters, Inc.

See also

Mononymous persons

List of best-selling music artists

References

External links

Enya.com — Enya official website

[ Enya] at Allmusic

Enya at Billboard

Enya at Blender

Category:1961 births Category:1980s singers Category:1990s singers Category:2000s singers Category:2010s singers Category:Celtic fusion musicians Category:Clannad members Category:Enya Category:Grammy Award winners Category:Gweedore Category:Irish female singers Category:Irish folk singers Category:Irish mezzo-sopranos Category:Irish pop singers Category:Irish singer-songwriters Category:Irish-language singers Category:English-language singers Category:Latin-language singers Category:Living people Category:New Age musicians Category:People associated with Dalkey Category:People from County Donegal Category:Warner Music Group artists Category:Women composers Category:World Music Awards winners Category:Irish Roman Catholics