Watch a New Documentary on Stanley Kubrick’s Early Days

Stanley Kubrick is widely considered one of the greatest directors of all time, with iconic movies like 2001: A Space Odyssey, A Clockwork Orange, Full Metal Jacket, and Eyes Wide Shut to his name. But before he was touted as an auteur of brilliant cinema, he was just another terrible high school student from Brooklyn who was obsessed with photography and filmmaking. A new documentary from filmmaker Jim Casey takes a closer looker at how a young Stanley Kubrick worked his way from obscurity to Hollywood.

Stanley Kubrick: The Lost Tapes is taken from interview sessions with journalist Jeremy Bernstein, who was writing a profile piece on the director for The New Yorker in 1966. The 24-minute documentary traces the director’s rise from a photographer for Look magazine to making his own short documentaries and low-budget movies to eventually directing critically acclaimed films like Paths of Glory and Spartacus.

The short documentary is an interesting look at a young Kubrick maturing into a master filmmaker, while it’s also full of interesting tidbits about his life, such as how he hustled chess players in the park to make money while struggling as a young director in New York City.

[h/t Open Culture]

Banner image Jim Casey/YouTube