Reddit reviews Stanley Kubrick: A Biography

Vincent LoBrutto's biography does a good job of that. In terms of... peeking-into-the-early-mind thing for visionary directors, you should look into getting the two-disc "Alien" (Ridley Scott), the director's cut of "The Frighteners" (Peter Jackson), the two-disc "Seven" (David Fincher), the complete series boxset of "Spaced" (Edgar Wright), the book "Lynch on Lynch" (David Lynch), the two-disc "THX-1138" (George Lucas), "Pi" (Darren Aronofsky), the Criterion editions of "Cronos" (Guillermo del Toro) and "Videodrome" (David Cronenberg) and "Following" (Christopher Nolan), the 10th anniversary Blu-ray of "The Matrix" (The Wachowskis [if you're wondering why I singled this out as a Blu-ray, it's because it contains the commentary tracks of the original DVD release as well as the 10-disc boxset release, and the "Matrix Revisited" documentary that talks in-depth about the making of the film]), the three-disc "Oldboy" (Chan-wook Park), and the Blu-ray of "Taxi Driver" (Martin Scorsese [the Blu-ray because it has a phenomenal commentary track by Scorsese from an out-of-print Laserdisc]).

You may be wondering why there's a lack of David Lynch. "Eraserhead" has a great documentary/interview with him... but it's hard to find an affordable copy. Criterion is saving the day, however, and will be releasing their version in either November or December.

Have fun.

>This is a sincere question.

Thank you for posing it.

>If Kubrick was such a box office mojo as your comment above suggested.

I wish I could expand on and support the statement you believe I suggested. Unfortunately, the information in my post above (how Kubrick planned his limited releases) is all I have to go on right now. (There are a ton of technical-related distribution decisions I could get into though like his choice to use mono sound).

I've read Stanley Kubrick: A Biography, The Making of Kubrick's 2001, and most of the interviews he's done, but very little is said about the numbers. Just before your comment, I ordered a copy of The Stanley Kubrick Archives, because I wanted to learn more. Wikipedia cites this book as a source for some of its budget / box office numbers, so I'm hopeful it will shed some light on this topic.

I don't think The Shining was a disaster. I don't believe the facts support calling it a disaster. I don't know enough about Full Metal Jacket to make the same argument.

>How is it that it only made 46 million?

I don't know.

>Isn't that pretty bad considering the budget was 30 million?

It looks better put into perspective, but it's certainly not great. $46 million puts it at rank #23 out of 238 theatrically released films in 1987. The numbers don't suggest to me that it was marketed poorly. Maybe it was, but maybe the film simply cost too much. I don't really know.

>And that's not factoring in what they (or Kubrick, as your comment suggests) spent on market. Or knew how to spend on marketing, so to speak.

There is a Kubrick interview where he goes into hollywood's tendency to overspend, stating that some films needed to gross 5x their production budget just to make a profit (his tone seemed to indicate he rejected this practice). I assume the limited release strategy was a way of reducing the P&A costs. Reducing the number of theaters a film plays in reduces the costs of both prints and advertising (less markets to advertise in). If the film is good enough, and plays long enough, word of mouth can take a small P&A budget very far. Unfortunately, it looks like FMJ had a sharp decline in theatre average and didn't play for very long so it must not have worked out. I don't know what the P&A budget was on FMJ, but wish I did.

I think overall this one by Vincent LoBrutto is your best bet

Stanley Kubrick - LoBrutto

The Stanley Kubrick Archives - TASCHEN

KUBRICK - Ciment

Kubrick - Baxter

A Life In Pictures

Kubrick: Herr

I read this one in film school and really liked it.