In 1960, Stanley Kubrick got his Hollywood break with the period epic, Spartacus. Here’s how the painful experience of making it shaped his future career as an auteur.
When you consider the filmography of Stanley Kubrick, Spartacus isn’t perhaps the film that immediately springs to mind. A well known, even classic sword and sandals epic, 1960’s Spartacus doesn’t automatically scream Kubrick.
There’s a good reason for this: Kubrick wasn’t the original director on the Kirk Douglas-starring project when filming began back in 1959. Anthony Mann was initially hired to lens the film for MGM, which was designed to stand alongside many of the well-known historical epics of the 1950s, such as The Ten Commandments or Ben-Hur, released that year.
Mann was a solid director of the Hollywood studio era, having helmed a multitude of films across the 1940s and 1950s, many of them noir thrillers or westerns. In 1951 he famously ‘ghost directed’ Quo Vadis, credited to Mervyn LeRoy; this Robert Taylor and Deborah Kerr-starring epic about the fall of the Emperor Nero was surely a major reason for Mann being considered the perfect fit for Spartacus.
His tenure on Spartacus, however, lasted but a week. Filming had begun on the scenes of an enslaved Spartacus under the Roman heel at a mining quarry, shot in California’s Death Valley. Douglas commented in his autobiography decades later that “He seemed scared of the scope of the picture … He let Peter Ustinov direct his own scenes by taking every suggestion Peter made. The suggestions were good – for Peter, but not necessarily for the film.”
Mann asserted that Douglas favoured a film that enforced the message of the film through what characters said, as he told Cahiers du Cinema in 1967. “I thought the message would go over more easily by showing physically all the horrors of slavery. A film must be visual, too much dialogue kills it.”
Mann either resigned or was fired (probably the latter), leaving the film lacking a guiding hand. Enter, at this stage, one Stanley Kubrick, who Douglas had successfully worked with in his last film, 1958’s Paths Of Glory. “When Kirk offered me the job of Spartacus, I thought that I might be able to make something of it, if the script could be changed,” the director told author Gene D Phillips.
Douglas – at this point one of Hollywood’s biggest A-list stars – saw making Spartacus as his reaction to missing out on the lead role in William Wyler’s Ben-Hur, which went to Charlton Heston – the rest being cinematic history. Douglas was recommended Howard Fast’s 1951 novel, Spartacus, charting the slave rebellion against the last days of the Roman Republic, and saw it as perfect fodder.
Douglas ended up competing against a rival United Artists project about Spartacus set to star Yul Brynner, another masculine idol of the period, with Martin Ritt in the director’s chair. He therefore hired Fast to write the screenplay to his own novel, which on delivery Douglas summarily rejected describing it as an “unusable disaster”. Aware time was against him if he wanted to best Brynner’s effort, Douglas turned to a celebrated writer who just a few years ago had been persona non grata in Hollywood: Dalton Trumbo.
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Trumbo had been one of the ‘Hollywood 10’ blacklisted by the House of Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) at the beginning of the 1950s – a group under the aegis of Senator Joseph McCarthy which prosecuted numerous figures in the artistic community who they believed were active Communists. Trumbo was among those who refused to give names or testify to the committee, which naturally had a detrimental effect on his Hollywood career.
Douglas faced opprobrium for his willingness to hire Trumbo, which even led to demonstrations, though heavyweight political figures such as future President John F Kennedy supported the film. This pushback arguably showed just how little weight the HUAC’s prosecutions carried only a few years later. Nonetheless, Trumbo set about significantly rewriting what he considered to be a ‘Marxist’ view of ancient history from Fast, which Douglas preferred and Fast rejected, the latter stepping away from the project and allowing Trumbo to retain full credit for the finished film.
With a screenplay in place, and Mann gone, Douglas looked to Kubrick following the critical and relative commercial success of Paths Of Glory. At 30 years old, Kubrick was at this point far from being the cinematic auteur history remembers him as, and with largely a set of low budget film noir and war pictures under his belt, was an untested commodity for an epic like Spartacus. It was as much a gamble for Universal as for him.
Kubrick naturally brought to the project his own attention to detail. He sought to film in Rome and use local extras in order to gain a level of authenticity. He used soundstages to craft a concentration in his actors without distractions for key scenes. And he pushed strongly for there to be a climactic battle sequence, missing in the original script, in which Spartacus fought the Roman forces (a battle he, perhaps unconventionally for a Hollywood epic, is destined to lose). Kubrick achieved some but not all of these requests, and in doing so he clashed significantly with Douglas.
Theirs was not the convivial relationship enjoyed on Paths Of Glory, a far cheaper film on which Kubrick retained greater control over all aspects of production. On Spartacus, Douglas was both the star and producer, his ego working to try to ensure his name wasn’t subsumed by anyone else (perhaps as a further reaction to the Ben-Hur slight). Kubrick also faced battles with Trumbo over what he regarded as the empty characterisation of Spartacus, and also Russell Metty, the veteran cinematographer known for films such as Bringing Up Baby (1938) and Touch Of Evil (1958), over the framing of certain shots.
Kubrick was treated on Spartacus with a level of disrespect from those around, perhaps because the cat and crew found the idea of taking direction from a relatively unknown 30 year-old beyond the pale. This extended less to Douglas and also Sir Laurence Olivier (playing rich Roman senator and villain Crassus) and Charles Laughton (as conflicted senator Gracchus), both of whom looked down on Kubrick as production began.
“My experience proved that if it is not explicitly stipulated in the contract that your decisions will be respected, there’s a very good chance that they won’t be,” Kubrick later mused, admitting that the majority of decisions he lost control of to Douglas, Trumbo and Edward Lewis, another producer. Kubrick struggled to direct the vision of the film he wanted, operating more as a ‘hired gun’ for Universal to a degree that directors such as Mann, working in the old school studio system, would have been accustomed to.
It simply didn’t suit Kubrick, who sought absolute control over almost all aspects of production. As he told Charles Kohler in 1968, “It all really just came down to the fact there are thousands of decisions that have to made, and that if you don’t make them yourself, and if you’re not on the same wavelength as the people who are making them, it becomes a very painful experience, which it was.”
Spartacus ended up well received and established itself in the cinematic canon of the period, with a truly iconic scene in the “I’m Spartacus!” moment. (As loudly trumpeted by its trailer, it also won four Academy Awards.) But for Kubrick, it was a frustrating experience he sought to distance himself from in later years. It would be the last film on which he didn’t exact directorial and editorial control, which only burned with greater intensity as the 1960s developed. He never worked with Douglas again, and they never reconciled.
Douglas later said described Kubrick as a ‘talented bastard’, as opposed to some directors who are just bastards, adding, “He’ll be a fine director some day, if he falls on his face just once. It might teach him to compromise.”
Anthony Mann was fine, by the way. A year later he directed the successful El Cid, starring Heston, the man who thwarted Douglas, and later The Fall Of The Roman Empire in 1964, before he passed away suddenly of a heart attack in 1967. It was the same year Kubrick was completing a little movie called 2001: A Space Odyssey, a film that arguably might not have been remembered over 50 years later in the same way had he heeded Douglas’ advice, and deigned to compromise.
You can find A J. on social media, including links to his Patreon and books, via Linktr.ee here. Next year, he releases An Overlook of Madness, a book about Kubrick and the making of The Shining.
