Kubrick’s self-produced, self-censored first feature he’s said to have likened to a child’s drawing on a fridge…
on set in Los Angeles 1953…
from STANLEY KUBRICK: THE MASTER FILMMAKER
In 1953 Kubrick raised $13,000 from his relatives to finance his first feature length film “Fear and Desire”, which he shot in the San Gabriel Mountains near Los Angeles with a crew of fewer than 10 people, including himself acting as director, producer, cinematographer, editor, sound man, wardrobe, hairdresser, prop man, unit chauffeur, administrator, etc. Other crew members included two friends and his first wife Toba Metz whom he married when he was 18. The script was written by Howard Sackler, a high school friend. The picture was filmed silently and the sound, including dialogue, was recorded later. This unexpectedly pushed the cost up another $20,000. The 68 minute film never earned back it’s investment (though Kubrick eventually repaid all the money), but independent distributor Joseph Burstyn was able to book the film on the art house circuit, including the Guild Theatre in New York.
Fear and Desire is the only one of Kubrick’s features not available on home video or for theatrical distribution, and Kubrick liked it that way. When the Film Forum, a New York City theatre, presented an errant print for a week’s showing in 1994, Kubrick had his studio send letters to all of New York’s critics and media outlets, castigating his own movie. In the note, Warner’s publicity VP Don Buckley writes: “Kubrick has asked me to let you know that if it had been up to him, the film would not be publicly shown.” He also gives Kubrick’s review of the movie: “nothing more than a bumbling amateur film exercise . . . a completely inept oddity, boring and pretentious.” Since that 1994 screening, Kubrick successfully prevented announced showings of Fear and Desire in Los Angeles, Ohio, and New York.
In the book “Stanley Kubrick Directs” Kubrick is quoted as saying ”the ideas we wanted to put across were good, but we didn’t have the experience to embody them dramatically. It was little more than a thirty-five millimeter version of what a class of film students would do in sixteen millimeter.” However, on a positive note he added “particularly in those days, before the advent of film schools, Nagras and lightweight portable equipment, it was very important to have this experience and to see with what little facilities and personnel one could actually make a film. Today, I think that if someone stood around watching even a smallish film unit, he would get the impression of vast technical and logistical magnitude. He would probably be intimidated by this and assume that something close to this was necessary in order to achieve more or less professional results. This experience and the one that followed with Killer’s Kiss, which was on a slightly more cushy basis, freed me from any concern again about the technical or logistical aspects of filmmaking.”
“FEAR AND DESIRE” 1953 directed by Stanley Kubrick
seek and you will find, bootleg copies abound…
