Stanley Kubrick^†

A chess hustler in Central Park who sold photographs to Look magazine at 16 isn't the usual filmmaking origin story. Kubrick's visual instincts were formed behind a camera on assignment, not in film school. He self-financed his early shorts and features, directing, shooting, and editing them himself. The Killing (1956) got MGM's attention; Paths of Glory (1957) got him Kirk Douglas. Dr. Strangelove (1964) was the real arrival: a nuclear comedy that earned his first Oscar nomination for directing and made clear he had no interest in playing it safe.

His reputation was built on a pattern: critics hated his films first, then spent decades reversing course. The Shining earned him a Razzie nomination for Worst Director in 1981 and is now considered one of the greatest horror films ever made. Barry Lyndon was written off as a misfire and is now celebrated for its cinematography. Eyes Wide Shut was widely dismissed, and in 2022 IndieWire named it the best film of the 1990s. He made 13 feature films in 47 years, and the argument hasn't settled on any of them.

After A Clockwork Orange opened, he pulled it from UK distribution himself, not because of government censorship, but because his family received death threats. The ban lasted until after his death. He refused to fly from the mid-1970s onward, which is why Full Metal Jacket's entire Vietnam was staged at an abandoned East London gasworks. For Barry Lyndon, he borrowed Zeiss lenses NASA had developed for the Apollo program to film by candlelight. The results look like Dutch master paintings, which was apparently the point.

Warner Bros. approved the cut after a March 2, 1999 screening with Tom Cruise. He died at his Hertfordshire estate days later, before the film was released. Eyes Wide Shut opened on July 16, 1999, its debut weekend overshadowed by the deaths of JFK Jr. and his wife. The A.I. project he'd spent years developing passed to Steven Spielberg, who completed it in 2001.