"Everybody pretty much acknowledges he's the man," Jack Nicholson says of director Stanley Kubrick, "and I still feel that underrates him."
That's pretty much the tenor of "Stanley Kubrick: A Life in Pictures," a 2 1/2 -hour documentary on the legendarily spotlight-shunning filmmaker, made with the cooperation of his family and premiering at 7:30 tonight on Cinemax. Produced and directed by Kubrick's longtime assistant Jan Harlan (who was also his brother-in-law), the film includes interviews with family members, co-workers and a host of actors from his films, including Nicholson, Shelley Duvall, Matthew Modine, Malcolm McDowell, Keir Dullea, Nicole Kidman and Tom Cruise (who also narrates).
But the most telling interviews, the ones that shed real light on how Kubrick came to be so revered, are those with his fellow directors. These guys - including Woody Allen, Sydney Pollack, Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese and Alan Parker - worship Kubrick: He could do anything he wanted, and his studio (Warner Bros.) never tried to rein him in.
Such absolute creative independence is the dream of every director, and from 1962 ("Lolita") on, that's pretty much what Kubrick had. The results included classics ("Dr. Strangelove," "2001: A Space Odyssey," "A Clockwork Orange") and some endlessly intriguing efforts that fell short of the mark, but not for want of trying ("Barry Lyndon," "The Shining," "Eyes Wide Shut").
Such an undiluted vision is rare, and his peers loved him for it. "He never gave an inch on anything," says Pollack. "He re-invented himself [for] every single motion picture he directed," says Spielberg. Rhapsodizing about "2001," Allen admits, "It was one of the first times where I realized that the artist was way ahead of me."
Of course, few people would want to watch this documentary if Kubrick hadn't made some truly remarkable, and remarkably entertaining, films. And even though the number of movies he directed is surprisingly small - 13 in all, only four from 1975 to his death in 1999 - the list included some absolute triumphs, both critical and box-office favorites.
"Paths of Glory" (1957), one of the great anti-war films of all time, established Kubrick's reputation as a master technician whose stories delighted in flirting with mankind's dark side. "Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb" (1960) may be the blackest comedy ever filmed; it's also, at once, one of the funniest and most frightening.
