#Stanley Kubrick Hated His First Film So Much, He Tried to Burn the Negatives

Stanley Kubrick is a juggernaut in the annals of cinema history. A true auteur and notorious perfectionist. Whether you love him or loathe him, Stanley Kubrick has assured himself a place in Hollywood legend for his directorial work. Apart from one of his films that is. This particular film was so detested by Kubrick that he even attempted to burn the negatives.

Ask any self-professed film buff to name any Stanley Kubrick film and you’re sure to get back in response the usual suspects. Not the movie of the same name, obviously – we can thank Brian Singer for that little gem. No; you’ll likely hear titles like The Shining, A Clockwork Orange, Dr. Strangelove, Full Metal Jacket or perhaps even 1957’s Paths of Glory. All of these films hold their very own special places of regard – so how could a director as thorough as Kubrick be so disappointed with one of his own films?

We’ll have to take a trip even further back in time, to the mid-1940’s, a good decade before Kubrick would throw his cap into the cinema ring, to find Kubrick’s most self loathed work. Leading up to this time, Kubrick had been plying his trade, among other things, selling photography to Look magazine for a substantial number of years. His next step would be the move from still photography to the release of two documentaries in 1951: Day of the Fight and Flying Padre. Both of these efforts (short films focused on a middleweight boxer and a Catholic priest in New Mexico respectively) financially paved the way for Kubrick to fund his first feature-length project, Fear and Desire in 1953.

So far so good, you’d think. Photographer moves into short films to fund his first major picture. Fear and Desire is a movie that clocks in at just over an hour’s runtime. The staunchly antiwar film (opened with a delicious voiceover from David Allen) concerns itself with a war between two nameless countries and is based upon the premise of four soldiers in an aircraft that has crashed six miles behind enemy lines. The soldiers in the film encounter a local peasant girl, infiltrate an enemy base and assassinate a general, with two returning home safely to ruminate how no man is truly made for war. A fairly basic premise with a timely meditation on war in an America still caught in the dying embers of the Korean War. So why Did Kubrick hold the finished product in such low esteem?

Director Paul Mazursky (Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice and Down and Out in Beverly Hills) co-starred in Fear and Desire and recalled that “Stanley tried to have the negative burned. He hated the movie. Hated it.” A shame, considering that Kubrick was so possessed with the need to finish the film that he allegedly wasn’t above hustling chess matches in Central Park, or demanding the remainder of the required budget from his pharmacist Uncle. Of the film, Kubrick would later describe it as “a bumbling amateur film exercise” and a “completely inept oddity”.

As mentioned at the top of the article, Kubrick was a renowned perfectionist. His well known and much-publicized mistreatment of Shelley Duval on the set of 1980’s The Shining is an uncomfortable reminder of this. It is however of certain interest that even a Hollywood giant like Kubrick is capable of feeling embarrassment rather than pride at his early work. Ever the perfectionist, come what may. This news originated at Far Out Magazine.