Listening to Stanley Kubrick Read Free Page B

becomes more solemn, entering into a minor key to accompany the footage of the simple funeral procession. As Father Stadtmueller returns to his main parish in Mosquero for evening devotions, the score brightens up. The accompanying music for his actions on the altar includes heavenly chords on a harp. When a young girl visits the priest after breakfast the next morning, Shilkret features a playful melody with accents on a solo guitar, suggesting folk music. As Father Stadtmueller rushes to fly to a woman fifty miles away with a sick child, the music becomes quick and apprehensive. As he arrives, landing in a field, the music becomes grand, nearly triumphant. He prepares to take mother and child to Tucumcari where an ambulance waits. Kubrick and Shilkret build tension here, but once the plane lands in Tucumcari, we breathe a sigh of relief that Father Stadtmueller has saved the day. The final shot is taken from the ambulance as it drives away, leaving Father Stadtmueller and his plane to recede into the distance.
    Unlike Douglas Edwards’s narration in Day of the Fight , Bob Hite’s narration is less stylized and more pleasant. There is no noir poetry here, and there is no darkness in either the shots or Shilkret’s music. It is a businesslike affair that gets the job done, although there is little to suggest elements of Kubrick’s style that we have come to expect. The music is a bit clichéd at times, even mimicking the actions on-screen with musical gestures (for example, an ascending melody accompanying the rising airplane), a practice that has come to be called, “mickey-mousing.”
    Kubrick’s third short, The Seafarers , was a documentary for the Seafarers International Union, Atlantic and Gulf Coast District AFL. Because the work was produced on such a small budget, the music for the film is stock. It is an innocuous background score with the main purpose of filling in sound in between sections of narration. The film explains the benefits of joining the union, including medical benefits, insurance, and a place to socialize with other seafaring men when ashore. Will Chasan wrote the copy and Don Hollenbeck narrated the film. This short was often omitted from filmographies of Kubrick until the mid-1970s, when Gene Phillips mentioned it in a monograph about Stanley Kubrick. Phillips learned of it from Frank Tomasulo, the audio-visual director of the Seafarers International Union. When Tomasulo began the job, he asked to see all of the previous AV materials for the union and was shocked to see that “the” Stanley Kubrick was responsible for the film. 16 The film remained lost to the general public until recently, when Alexander Pietrzak bought the rights to the film from the Seafarers Union and released the short on DVD.
    First Features
    Kubrick’s first feature was Fear and Desire . Intending to produce the film without the financial support of a studio, Kubrick raised about $10,000 from family and friends. Before shooting began, Kubrick told an interviewer at the New York Journal-American , “I’m very certain we can do it for $50,000. The answer is careful planning. We have worked out every scene, every shot. There will be no writers, producers, directors or art directors to contend with. There won’t be any time lost in argument or discussion. There will be only one boss—me.” 17 The production ended up costing about $53,000 in the final tally. Shooting the film without synched sound—a decision Kubrick thought would save money—actually added a great deal to the cost of the film. Kubrick said of the decision, “The dubbing was a big mistake on my part; the actual shooting cost of the film was nine thousand dollars but because I didn’t know what I was doing with the soundtrack it cost me another thirty thousand.” 18 Investor Richard de Rochemont (whose older brother created The March of Time newsreel series) helped Kubrick deal with the costs of post-production, including paying part of the fees