The Universal Mind of Bill Evans: Advice on Learning to Play Jazz & The Creative Process

in Creativity, Film, Music | April 5th, 2012

Bill Evans was one of the great­est jazz pianists of the sec­ond half of the 20th cen­tu­ry. His play­ing on Miles Davis’s land­mark 1959 record, Kind of Blue, and as leader of the Bill Evans Trio was a major influ­ence on play­ers like Her­bie Han­cock, Kei­th Jar­rett and Chick Corea. “Bil­l’s val­ue can’t be mea­sured in any kind of terms,” Corea once said. “He’s one of the great, great artists of this cen­tu­ry.”

Evan­s’s approach to music was a process of analy­sis fol­lowed by intu­ition. He would study a prob­lem delib­er­ate­ly, work­ing on it over and over until the solu­tion became sec­ond nature. “You use your intel­lect to take apart the mate­ri­als,” Evans said in 1969.

“But, actu­al­ly, it takes years and years of play­ing to devel­op the facil­i­ty so that you can for­get all of that and just relax, and just play.” In the book Jazz Styles: His­to­ry and Analy­sis, music writer Mark C. Gri­d­ley describes his play­ing:

Evans craft­ed his impro­vi­sa­tions with exact­ing delib­er­a­tion. Often he would take a phrase, or just a ker­nel of its char­ac­ter, then devel­op and extend its rhythms, melod­ic ideas, and accom­pa­ny­ing har­monies. Then with­in the same solo he would often return to that ker­nel, trans­form­ing it each time. And while all this was hap­pen­ing, he would pon­der ways of resolv­ing the ten­sion that was build­ing. He would be con­sid­er­ing rhyth­mic ways, melod­ic ways, and har­monies all at the same time, long before the opti­mal moment for resolv­ing the idea.

Evans dis­cuss­es his cre­ative process in a fas­ci­nat­ing 1966 doc­u­men­tary, The Uni­ver­sal Mind of Bill Evans. (You can watch it above, or find it in mul­ti­ple parts on Youtube: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4 and Part 5.) The film is intro­duced by Tonight Show host Steve Allen and fea­tures a reveal­ing talk between Evans and his old­er broth­er Har­ry, a music teacher. They begin with a dis­cus­sion of impro­vi­sa­tion and the nature of jazz, which Evans sees as a process rather than a style. He then moves to the piano to show how he builds up a jazz impro­vi­sa­tion, start­ing with a sim­ple frame­work and then adding lay­ers of rhyth­mic, har­mon­ic and melod­ic vari­a­tion.

“It’s very impor­tant to remem­ber,” Evans says, “that no mat­ter how far I might diverge or find free­dom in this for­mat, it only is free inso­far as it has ref­er­ence to the strict­ness of the orig­i­nal form. And that’s what gives it its strength. In oth­er words, there is no free­dom except in ref­er­ence to some­thing.”

The struc­ture of this process of improvisation–the mas­ter­ing of a thing explic­it­ly pre­scribed in order to burn it into the sub­con­scious for use lat­er in cre­at­ing some­thing new–echoes the pro­gres­sion of Evan­s’s devel­op­ment as a musi­cian. He says it took him 15 years of work from the time he first start­ed impro­vis­ing, at age 13, until he was ready to cre­ate some­thing tru­ly valu­able. The thing is not to get dis­cour­aged, but to enjoy the step-by-step process of learn­ing to make music.

“Most peo­ple just don’t real­ize the immen­si­ty of the prob­lem,” Evans says, “and either because they can’t con­quer imme­di­ate­ly they think they haven’t got the abil­i­ty, or they’re so impa­tient to con­quer it that they nev­er do see it through. But if you do under­stand the prob­lem, then I think you can enjoy your whole trip through.”

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bun­dled in one email, each day.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed con­tent:

1959: The Year that Changed Jazz

Clas­sic Jazz Album Cov­ers Ani­mat­ed, or the Re-Birth of Cool

The His­to­ry of Spir­i­tu­al Jazz: Hear a Tran­scen­dent 12-Hour Mix Fea­tur­ing John Coltrane, Sun Ra, Her­bie Han­cock & More

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Google Gives 360° Tour of the White House

in Google, Politics | April 5th, 2012

Ear­li­er this week, we men­tioned the expan­sion of Google Art Project, which now gives you vir­tu­al access to 30,000 works of art from 151 muse­ums world­wide. What we did­n’t men­tion is that the expand­ed Art Project also includes a 360 degree walk through the White House — the same one vis­i­tors expe­ri­ence when they take a pub­lic tour of the man­sion. The White House tour was made with Google Street View tech­nol­o­gy, which oth­er­wise lets you take a jour­ney to the Ama­zon Basin, the Swiss Alps, and var­i­ous oth­er his­tor­i­cal sites (Pom­peii, Stone­henge and Ver­sailles).

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bun­dled in one email, each day.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

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Ray Bradbury Gives 12 Pieces of Writing Advice to Young Authors (2001)

in Books, Writing | April 4th, 2012

Like fel­low genre icon Stephen King, Ray Brad­bury has reached far beyond his estab­lished audi­ence by offer­ing writ­ing advice to any­one who puts pen to paper. (Or keys to key­board; “Use what­ev­er works,” he often says.) In this 2001 keynote address at Point Loma Nazarene Uni­ver­si­ty’s Writer’s Sym­po­sium By the Sea, Brad­bury tells sto­ries from his writ­ing life, all of which offer lessons on how to hone the craft. Most of these have to do with the day-in, day-out prac­tices that make up what he calls “writ­ing hygiene.” Watch this enter­tain­ing­ly digres­sive talk and you might pull out an entire­ly dif­fer­ent set of points, but here, in list form, is how I inter­pret Brad­bury’s pro­gram:

  • Don’t start out writ­ing nov­els. They take too long. Begin your writ­ing life instead by crank­ing out “a hell of a lot of short sto­ries,” as many as one per week. Take a year to do it; he claims that it sim­ply isn’t pos­si­ble to write 52 bad short sto­ries in a row. He wait­ed until the age of 30 to write his first nov­el, Fahren­heit 451. “Worth wait­ing for, huh?”
  • You may love ’em, but you can’t be ’em. Bear that in mind when you inevitably attempt, con­scious­ly or uncon­scious­ly, to imi­tate your favorite writ­ers, just as he imi­tat­ed H.G. Wells, Jules Verne, Arthur Conan Doyle, and L. Frank Baum.
  • Exam­ine “qual­i­ty” short sto­ries. He sug­gests Roald Dahl, Guy de Mau­pas­sant, and the less­er-known Nigel Kneale and John Col­lier. Any­thing in the New York­er today does­n’t make his cut, since he finds that their sto­ries have “no metaphor.”
  • Stuff your head. To accu­mu­late the intel­lec­tu­al build­ing blocks of these metaphors, he sug­gests a course of bed­time read­ing: one short sto­ry, one poem (but Pope, Shake­speare, and Frost, not mod­ern “crap”), and one essay. These essays should come from a diver­si­ty of fields, includ­ing archae­ol­o­gy, zool­o­gy, biol­o­gy, phi­los­o­phy, pol­i­tics, and lit­er­a­ture. “At the end of a thou­sand nights,” so he sums it up, “Jesus God, you’ll be full of stuff!”
  • Get rid of friends who don’t believe in you. Do they make fun of your writer­ly ambi­tions? He sug­gests call­ing them up to “fire them” with­out delay.
  • Live in the library. Don’t live in your “god­damn com­put­ers.” He may not have gone to col­lege, but his insa­tiable read­ing habits allowed him to “grad­u­ate from the library” at age 28.
  • Fall in love with movies. Prefer­ably old ones.
  • Write with joy. In his mind, “writ­ing is not a seri­ous busi­ness.” If a sto­ry starts to feel like work, scrap it and start one that does­n’t. “I want you to envy me my joy,” he tells his audi­ence.
  • Don’t plan on mak­ing mon­ey. He and his wife, who “took a vow of pover­ty” to mar­ry him, hit 37 before they could afford a car (and he still nev­er got around to pick­ing up a license).
  • List ten things you love, and ten things you hate. Then write about the for­mer, and “kill” the lat­er — also by writ­ing about them. Do the same with your fears.
  • Just type any old thing that comes into your head. He rec­om­mends “word asso­ci­a­tion” to break down any cre­ative block­ages, since “you don’t know what’s in you until you test it.”
  • Remem­ber, with writ­ing, what you’re look­ing for is just one per­son to come up and tell you, “I love you for what you do.” Or, fail­ing that, you’re look­ing for some­one to come up and tell you, “You’re not nuts like peo­ple say.”

Relat­ed con­tent:

Ray Brad­bury: Lit­er­a­ture is the Safe­ty Valve of Civ­i­liza­tion

The Shape of A Sto­ry: Writ­ing Tips from Kurt Von­negut

John Steinbeck’s Six Tips for the Aspir­ing Writer and His Nobel Prize Speech

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

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Art for the One Percent: 60 Minutes on the Excess & Hubris of the International Art Market

in Art, Economics | April 4th, 2012

In 1993, CBS 60 Min­utes jour­nal­ist Mor­ley Safer ruf­fled a few feath­ers in the art world with a piece called “Yes…But is it Art?” The pro­gram fea­tured works made up of things like vac­u­um clean­ers, emp­ty canvases–even a can of human feces, which the artist had labeled “Mer­da d’artista.”

On Sun­day, Safer returned with a report on the excess and hubris of the inter­na­tion­al art mar­ket. The seg­ment (above) was taped in Decem­ber at Art Basel Mia­mi Beach, a gath­er­ing billed as “the most pres­ti­gious art show in the Amer­i­c­as,” where exhibitors pay $150,000 to show their wares to a clien­tele of mil­lion­aires and bil­lion­aires who fly in for the event on pri­vate jets.

Safer­’s report, “Art Mar­ket,” is more an exer­cise in social crit­i­cism than art crit­i­cism. Nat­u­ral­ly some peo­ple took it per­son­al­ly. “Now that Andy Rooney has gone up to that big grumpy­cham­ber in the sky,” wrote Stephanie Murg on the Media Bistro “UnBeige” blog, “Mor­ley Safer has tak­en over the role of iras­ci­ble clean-up hit­ter for the dod­der­ing team of Bad News Bears that is 60 Min­utes.”

In a piece on the “Arts Beat” blog head­lined “Safer Looks at Art but Only Hears the Cash Reg­is­ter,” crit­ic Rober­ta Smith called Safer­’s return vis­it to the art world “a rel­a­tive­ly tooth­less, if still quite clue­less, exer­cise”:

Mov­ing down the aisles he uttered some dis­mis­sive phras­es like “the cute, the kitsch and the clum­sy” while the cam­era passed often incon­se­quen­tial work that was left uniden­ti­fied. Men­tion was made of per­for­mance and video art. Occa­sion­al­ly he mus­tered fee­ble attempts to be recep­tive. There was a respect­ful pause in the asper­sions as the cam­era passed a can­vas by Helen Franken­thaler, although her name was not men­tioned. Kara Walk­er was referred to as a “tru­ly tal­ent­ed artist.” At the Metro Pic­tures booth it was hard to know whether he liked the work of Cindy Sher­man, but he not­ed that her pho­tographs sold for $4 mil­lion (gloss­ing over the fact that only one did).

At one point on Safer­’s stroll there is a chilly encounter with art deal­er Lar­ry Gagosian, who has gal­leries on three con­ti­nents.

“At least say hel­lo,” says Safer.

“Hey Mor­ley,” says Gagosian, with­out get­ting up from his chair or offer­ing the 80-year-old man a seat. “You always look so dap­per. I love that.”

Regard­less of whether you love the art Gagosian sells at his gal­leries in Bev­er­ly Hills, Paris, Gene­va and at least eight oth­er cities around the world, you have won­der at the eco­nom­ic real­i­ty Safer­’s report expos­es. At a time when unem­ploy­ment in Amer­i­ca is still well above 8 per­cent, when more than one in five mort­gage hold­ers have neg­a­tive equi­ty in their homes, when the top one per­cent of the pop­u­la­tion is pock­et­ing 93 per­cent of the gains from a glacial eco­nom­ic recov­ery, Safer­’s piece does what a work of art should: it opens the eyes.

Safer­’s 1993 report:

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Hemingway’s Old Man and the Sea Animated Not Once, But Twice

in Film, Literature | April 4th, 2012

Ernest Hem­ing­way wrote The Old Man and the Sea in an inspired eight weeks in 1951. It was­n’t a long nov­el, run­ning just a lit­tle more than 100 pages. But it car­ried more than its weight. The nov­el, Hem­ing­way’s last major work, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fic­tion in 1953. It con­tributed to Hem­ing­way receiv­ing the Nobel Prize in Lit­er­a­ture in 1954. And it soon entered the Amer­i­can lit­er­ary canon and became a sta­ple in class­rooms across the Unit­ed States and beyond.

A good 60 years lat­er, the novel­la still cap­tures our imag­i­na­tion. Just this week, a Ger­man artist Mar­cel Schindler released “ein Stop-Motion-Film” inspired by The Old Man and the Sea. The ani­ma­tion bears some sim­i­lar­i­ty to the art­ful videos released by RSA dur­ing the past two years, and per­haps some­what appro­pri­ate­ly it’s all set to the tune “Sail” by AWOLNATION. It works if you’re being lit­er­al about things.

Of course, you can’t talk about ani­mat­ing The Old Man and the Sea with­out refer­ring back to Alek­san­dr Petro­v’s 1999 mas­ter­piece that won the Acad­e­my Award for Short Film. To make the film, Petrov and his son spent two years paint­ing pas­tel oils on a total of 29,000 sheets of glass. Below, you can see how the 20 minute film (added to our Free Movies col­lec­tion) turned out.

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Google Art Project Expands, Bringing 30,000 Works of Art from 151 Museums to the Web

in Art, Google, Museums | April 3rd, 2012

Last Feb­ru­ary, Google launched Art Project, which lets users take a vir­tu­al tour of 1,000 works of art from 17 great muse­ums — from the MoMA and Met in New York City, to the Uffizi Gallery in Flo­rence, to the Van Gogh Muse­um and Rijksmu­se­um in Ams­ter­dam. Now comes news that Art Project has great­ly expand­ed its cov­er­age, giv­ing users access to 30,000 high-res­o­lu­tion art­works appear­ing in 151 muse­ums across 40 coun­tries. The vir­tu­al tour includes paint­ings but also sculp­ture, street art and pho­tographs. And you can now explore col­lec­tions (see all) from the Nation­al Gallery of Mod­ern Art in Del­hi, the Musée d’Or­say in Paris, the Muse­um of Islam­ic Art in Qatar, the Museu De Arte Mod­er­na De São Paulo in Brazil, and the Tokyo Nation­al Muse­um. This is all part of Google’s effort to bring cul­tur­al arti­facts to the broad­est pos­si­ble audi­ence. Just last week, the folks at Google­plex helped launch the Nel­son Man­dela Dig­i­tal Archive and, before that, a high res­o­lu­tion ver­sion of The Dead Sea Scrolls. All we can say is keep it com­ing!

via Google Blog

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Views from Hitchcock’s Rear Window in Timelapse

in Film | April 3rd, 2012


Alfred Hitch­cock shot many great films. (Watch 21 of his films online here.) But, if you ask the crit­ics, they’ll often say Rear Win­dow, his 1954 clas­sic star­ring Jim­my Stew­art and Grace Kel­ly, was his finest. We won’t rehearse the plot, except to say that it’s an incred­i­ble study of voyeurism and it all revolves around a pho­tog­ra­ph­er con­fined to a wheel­chair who spends long days look­ing out of his rear win­dow, sur­veilling the apart­ments around his court­yard. Now film­mak­er Jeff Des­om has tak­en this footage — all the footage look­ing out­side the Rear Win­dow — and stitched it into a great lit­tle time­lapse film. The order of events is the same seen in the movie, and the music, a re-arrrange­ment of Brahms’ Hun­gar­i­an Dance No. 5, is pro­vid­ed by Hugo Win­ter­hal­ter… via metafil­ter

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Alfred Hitch­cock Recalls Work­ing with Sal­vador Dali on Spell­bound

François Truffaut’s Big Inter­view with Alfred Hitch­cock (Free Audio)

Hitch­cock on Hap­pi­ness

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Perpetual Ocean: A Van Gogh-Like Visualization of Our Ocean Currents

in Video - Science | April 3rd, 2012

Hats off to the God­dard Space Flight Cen­ter Sci­en­tif­ic Visu­al­iza­tion Stu­dio, which pro­duced this three minute ani­ma­tion called Per­pet­u­al Ocean. The visu­al­iza­tion shows ocean cur­rents as they swirled around between June 2005 and Decem­ber 2007, and it was all pro­duced with a com­pu­ta­tion­al mod­el called ECCO2. ECCO2 attempts to mod­el the cir­cu­la­tion and cli­mate of the ocean, help­ing sci­en­tists to under­stand how the ocean will con­tribute to future cli­mate change. It’s some heady sci­ence that also yields some visu­al­ly impres­sive ani­ma­tions.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bun­dled in one email, each day.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Glob­al Warm­ing: A Free Course from UChica­go Explains Cli­mate Change

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Andy Warhol Digitally Paints Debbie Harry with the Amiga 1000 Computer (1985)

in Art, Technology, Television | April 3rd, 2012

Say what you will about mid-eight­ies Amer­i­can cul­ture, but how many his­tor­i­cal moments could bring togeth­er a world-famous visu­al artist and rock star over a gen­uine­ly inno­v­a­tive con­sumer prod­uct? Maybe Apple could orches­trate some­thing sim­i­lar today; after all, we endure no drought of celebri­ty enthu­si­asm for iPods, iPads, iMacs, and iPhones. But could they come up with par­tic­i­pants to match the icon­ic grav­i­ty of Andy Warhol and Deb­bie Har­ry? In the clip above, both of them arrive at the 1985 launch of the Com­modore Ami­ga, and the sil­ver-wigged one sits down to demon­strate the per­son­al com­put­er’s then-unpar­al­leled graph­i­cal pow­er by “paint­ing” the Blondie front­wom­an’s por­trait. He tints it blue, clicks some red paint buck­et here, clicks some yel­low paint buck­et there, and before we know it, we’re gaz­ing upon a Warho­lian image ready for admi­ra­tion, one we too could wield the dig­i­tal pow­er to cre­ate for a mere $1295 — in 1985 dol­lars.

To watch Warhol at the Ami­ga is to watch a man encounter a machine whose func­tions dove­tail uncan­ni­ly well with his own. The way he uses the com­put­er casts a light on what peo­ple seem to find most bril­liant and most infu­ri­at­ing about his work. “All he does is select fill and click on her hair and it turns yel­low and its done?” types one YouTube com­menter. “Her face is fuck­ing blue.” Depart­ing from the stan­dard tone of YouTube dis­course, anoth­er com­menter tries to break it down: “As an artist myself, I find Andy Warhol a genius in mak­ing him­self famous for art that any­one can do. I could take the same pic­ture of Debra [sic] Har­ry and do the same thing in Pho­to­shop. Andy Warhol was great at being Andy Warhol. His art was sim­ply an exten­sion of him­self — sim­ple and col­or­ful.” Indeed, Warhol and Har­ry alike seem to under­stand that their work con­sists as much in the mate­r­i­al they pro­duce as in who they are, leav­ing no dis­cernible bound­ary between the iden­ti­ty and val­ue of the cre­ator and the iden­ti­ty and val­ue of the cre­at­ed.

Ded­i­cat­ed enthu­si­asts of Andy Warhol and/or the Com­modore Ami­ga might also give his 1986 inter­view in Ami­ga World a look, despite its sketchy scan qual­i­ty. It took place dur­ing the pro­duc­tion of the MTV music- and talk-show Andy Warhol’s Fif­teen Min­utes, whose Ami­ga-enhanced pro­mo spot (which fea­tures Deb­bie Har­ry) you can watch above. “Do you think [the Ami­ga] will push the artists?” Ami­ga World asks. “Do you think that peo­ple will be inclined to use all the dif­fer­ent com­po­nents of the art, music, video, etc.?” “That’s the best part about it,” Warhol replies. “An artist can real­ly do the whole thing. Actu­al­ly, he can make a film with every­thing on it, music and sound and art… every­thing.” “How do you feel about the fact that every­one’s work will now look like your own?” Ami­ga World asks. “But it does­n’t,” Warhol replies. Alas, Andy Warhol would not live to take advan­tage of the unprece­dent­ed­ly rapid devel­op­ment of com­put­er tech­nol­o­gy the nineties would bring, but that par­tic­u­lar rev­o­lu­tion has offered us all, in some sense, the chance to get Warho­lian.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bun­dled in one email, each day.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Warhol’s Screen Tests: Lou Reed, Den­nis Hop­per, Nico, and More

Three “Anti-Films” by Andy Warhol: Sleep, Eat & Kiss

Steven Spiel­berg Admits Swal­low­ing a Tran­sis­tor to Andy Warhol and Bian­ca Jag­ger

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

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David Lynch’s New ‘Crazy Clown Time’ Video: Intense Psychotic Backyard Craziness (NSFW)

in Film, Music | April 3rd, 2012

What could be more whole­some and all-Amer­i­can than a back­yard bar­be­cue? Unless, of course, the back­yard in ques­tion belongs to David Lynch.

Lynch has long-since estab­lished him­self as a sort of anti-Nor­man Rock­well. This week, with the release of a new video to go with his debut music album, Crazy Clown Time, Lynch stays true to form. As he explained to Enter­tain­ment Week­ly when the video was still in pro­duc­tion, “A ‘Crazy Clown Time’ should have an intense psy­chot­ic back­yard crazi­ness, fueled by beer.” Yes­ter­day Lynch offered fur­ther expla­na­tion when he sent a mes­sage on Twit­ter announc­ing the release: “Be the 1st on your block to see the Advance­ment of the Race which Con­way Twit­ty spoke so clear­ly.”

The video lasts sev­en min­utes and might be con­sid­ered NSFW, depend­ing on your office’s pol­i­cy on nudi­ty, demon­ic wail­ing and depic­tions of peo­ple pour­ing lighter flu­id on their spiked mohawk hair­do and set­ting it afire.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

David Lynch’s Sur­re­al Com­mer­cials

David Lynch’s Eraser­head Remade in Clay

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Stanley Kubrick’s Very First Films: Three Short Documentaries

in Film | April 2nd, 2012

In ear­ly 1950, Stan­ley Kubrick was a 21-year-old staff pho­tog­ra­ph­er for Look mag­a­zine. At night he haunt­ed the movie the­aters, watch­ing clas­sics at the Muse­um of Mod­ern Art and cur­rent releas­es else­where. He made a point of see­ing just about every movie that came out, no mat­ter how bad it was.

“I’d had my job with Look since I was sev­en­teen, and I’d always been inter­est­ed in films,” Kubrick told writer Joseph Gelmis in 1969, “but it nev­er actu­al­ly occurred to me to make a film on my own until I had a talk with a friend from high school, Alex Singer, who want­ed to be a direc­tor him­self.”

Singer worked as an office boy at The March of Time, a com­pa­ny that pro­duced news­reels. He told Kubrick that he heard the com­pa­ny spent $40,000 to make a one-reel doc­u­men­tary. Kubrick was deeply impressed. “I said to him, ‘Gee, that’s a lot of mon­ey,’ ” Kubrick told Jere­my Bern­stein of The New York­er in 1966. “I said ‘I can’t believe it costs that much to make eight or nine min­utes of film.’ ” Kubrick got on the phone to film sup­pli­ers, lab­o­ra­to­ries and equip­ment rental hous­es and crunched the num­bers. He cal­cu­lat­ed that he could make a nine-minute film for about $3,500. “We thought we could make a con­sid­er­able prof­it,” he told Bern­stein.

Kubrick decid­ed to make a film about mid­dleweight box­er Wal­ter Carti­er, who he had done a pho­to sto­ry on for Look the pre­vi­ous year. He rent­ed a spring-loaded 35mm Bell & How­ell Eye­mo cam­era and dived into the project. “I was cam­era­man, direc­tor, edi­tor, assis­tant edi­tor, sound effects man–you name it, I did it,” Kubrick told Gelmis. “It was invalu­able expe­ri­ence, because being forced to do every­thing myself I gained a sound and com­pre­hen­sive grasp of all the tech­ni­cal aspects of film­mak­ing.”

The result­ing film, Day of the Fight, brings the look and feel of film noir to the news­reel form. (Watch the com­plete 16-minute film above.) It fol­lows Carti­er and his twin broth­er, Vin­cent, in the hours lead­ing up to his fight with a for­mi­da­ble oppo­nent named Bob­by James. The scenes were all care­ful­ly planned, except for the big fight at the end, which was filmed live on April 17, 1950 at Lau­rel Gar­dens in Newark, New Jer­sey.

Kubrick rent­ed two Eye­mos that night, one for him­self and the oth­er for Singer. Kubrick hand-held his cam­era and moved around–at one point even hold­ing the cam­era under­neath the box­ers and shoot­ing straight upward–while Singer pro­vid­ed basic cov­er­age with his cam­era on a tri­pod. The Eye­mos took 100-foot rolls of film, which meant Kubrick and Singer were con­stant­ly chang­ing film. They tried to time it so that one was shoot­ing while the oth­er was reload­ing. “It was pret­ty busy and pret­ty hec­tic,” Singer told Vin­cent LoBrut­to for Stan­ley Kubrick: A Bio­graphy. “We had to get it. It had to be down on film–there was no pic­ture with­out get­ting this fight.”

They got it. When Carti­er deliv­ered the knock-out punch, Kubrick was reload­ing but Singer cap­tured the moment. To com­plete the project, Kubrick hired his child­hood friend Ger­ald Fried to com­pose music, and CBS news­man Dou­glas Edwards to pro­vide nar­ra­tion. Day of the Fight was gen­er­al­ly well-received. As LoBrut­to writes, “Kubrick­’s innate pho­to­graph­ic sense and the pas­sion he brought to the project result­ed in a film devoid of the com­mon pit­falls of novice film­mak­ers.”

But when Kubrick set out to mar­ket the film, he found he had already stum­bled into a pit­fall of the novice busi­ness­man. The movie had cost about $3,900 to make. “When we began to take it around to the var­i­ous com­pa­nies to sell it,” he told Bern­stein, “they all liked it, but we were offered things like $1,500 and $2,500. At one point I said to them, ‘Why are you offer­ing us so lit­tle for this? One-reel shorts get $40,000!’ They said, ‘You must be crazy.’ ”

Kubrick even­tu­al­ly sold it to RKO-Pathé for about $100 less than it cost him to make, he told Bern­stein. He did have the sat­is­fac­tion of see­ing the Day of the Fight at New York’s Para­mount The­atre at an April 26, 1951 screen­ing of My For­bid­den Past, star­ring Robert Mitchum and Ava Gard­ner. “It was very excit­ing to see it on the screen, and it got a nation-wide and world-wide dis­tri­b­u­tion,” Kubrick told Bern­stein. “Every­body liked it and they said it was good. I thought that I’d get mil­lions of offers–of which I got none, to do any­thing.”

Fly­ing Padre:

Actu­al­ly Kubrick did get one offer after the suc­cess of Day of the Fight. RKO-Pathé paid him $1,500 to make a news­reel about a priest in New Mex­i­co who got around his vast parish in a Piper Cub air­plane. Fly­ing Padre (above) tells the sto­ry of two days in the life of Rev. Fred Stadt­mueller.

“Unlike Day of the Fight,” writes LoBrut­to, “Fly­ing Padre is a rather typ­i­cal human-inter­est news­reel doc­u­men­tary. Kubrick­’s film­mak­ing skills are assured but reveal less of the cin­e­mat­ic tal­ent that lies with­in. The pho­tog­ra­phy is even­ly lit. Shots are com­posed in clas­sic pho­to­jour­nal­ist style, pleas­ing and art­ful to the eye.”

All of Kubrick­’s expenses–travel, film, equip­ment rental–came out of his $1,500 fee, so again he made do with­out a crew. Even after restrict­ing the run­ning time to nine min­utes, he bare­ly broke even. Kubrick would lat­er describe the film, released in 1951, as “sil­ly.”

The Sea­far­ers:

After break­ing even on Fly­ing Padre, Kubrick could read the writ­ing on the wall. Short doc­u­men­taries did­n’t pay. Sur­pris­ing­ly, it was at pre­cise­ly this point that he decid­ed to for­mal­ly quit his job at Look and devote him­self to film­mak­ing. As he explained to Bern­stein, “I found out how much fea­ture films were being made for–you know, millions–and had cal­cu­lat­ed that I could make a fea­ture film for about ten thou­sand dol­lars.”

So once again Kubrick was off to the races. While rais­ing mon­ey for his first fea­ture film, Fear and Desire (find it in our col­lec­tion of Free Movies Online), he accept­ed a pay­ing job direct­ing a 30-minute film for the Sea­far­ers Inter­na­tion­al Union. The Sea­far­ers (above), released in 1953, is of lit­tle note aside from being Kubrick­’s first col­or film. He nev­er men­tioned it in inter­views.

Look­ing back on his ear­ly doc­u­men­tary work in a 1968 inter­view for Eye mag­a­zine, Kubrick put things into per­spec­tive: “Even though the first cou­ple of films were bad, they were well pho­tographed, and they had a good look about them, which did impress peo­ple.”

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