I never said i was deep...

Festival poster for ANDREY TARKOVSKY. A CINEMA PRAYER (Andrey A. Tarkovsky, Italy/Russia/Sweden, 2019)

Designer: TBD

Poster source: CinemaTrailerClub

Toni Morrison  | February 18, 1931- August 5, 2019

From a Commencement Address delivered at Sarah Lawrence College on May 27, 1988

Cittern, ca. 1685

Though 102-year-old Kirk Douglas earned Best Actor nominations for 1949’s CHAMPION, 1952’s THE BAD AND THE BEAUTIFUL and 1956’s LUST FOR LIFE, it is his performance as the brave slave who leads a revolt against the Roman Empire in 1960’s SPARTACUS that has become his career-defining role. And little wonder.

Not only is he chiseled to the max, Michael Douglas’ dad is brave, fierce and intensely romantic in the classic epic that won four Academy Awards, including supporting actor for Peter Ustinov and for Russell Metty’s cinematography. Serving as also executive producer, SPARTACUS marked Kirk Douglas’ second collaboration with director Stanley Kubrick. The two had previously worked together on the gut-wrenching 1957 anti-war film PATHS OF GLORY.

Douglas, whom I have interviewed eight times between 1986-2017, told me in a 2011 L.A. Times chat that Universal had originally hired Anthony Mann to direct the epic. The acclaimed Mann had cut his directing teeth in low-budget but atmospheric films noir in the 1940s and worked with Jimmy Stewart in the 1950s in a series of gritty Westerns, including 1953’s THE NAKED SPUR.

“I never wanted Anthony Mann,” he said. “The studio wanted him because he had made so many successful pictures.”

Douglas noted that Mann was “intimidated” by the all-star cast including Ustinov, Laurence Olivier, Jean Simmons and Tony Curtis. “Ustinov captivated him,” he explained. “He saw Ustinov as a genius, so he let him do whatever he wanted. After three weeks, the studio said ‘Kirk, you were right. You have to fire him.’’’ Mann, said Douglas, wasn’t upset at the firing. In fact, the two worked together on 1965’s THE HEROES OF TELEMARK.

Enter Kubrick, who had just been fired by Marlon Brando from the Western ONE-EYED JACKS (’61). Brando took over the directing reigns on that film.

“I sent the [SPARTACUS] script to Stanley over the weekend, and on Monday he was at the studio ready to direct,’’ said Douglas. “I remember when I introduced him to the cast, he looked like he was 14, like a little kid. I said, ‘This is your new director.’ They thought I was joking. Kubrick wasn’t intimidated. He did a great job.”

Blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo wrote the screenplay for SPARTACUS, as well as the script for producer/director Otto Preminger’s historical 1960 epic EXODUS thus helping to break the blacklist that still gripped Hollywood. Both Douglas and Preminger had insisted the scribe receive screen credit.

“The studios were intimidated; they embraced the blacklist,” explained Douglas. “When I was thinking of breaking the blacklist, people were saying ‘Kirk, jeez, you will never work again.’ But I think I was at the right age. If I would have been older, I might have been too conservative. So, I just said, ‘The hell with it.’ I left messages at the gate of the studio that Dalton Trumbo will come on the set.”

Douglas frequently went to Trumbo’s house to work on the script in the evenings. “He would be in the bathtub. He had a tray in his bathtub. He wrote most of the time there. He wanted a parrot. I bought him a parrot and sometimes the parrot would be on his shoulder.”

The Summer Under the Stars tribute to Douglas kicks off with his first feature, 1946’s film noir THE STRANGE LOVE OF MARTHA IVERS, directed by Lewis Milestone and also starring Barbara Stanwyck and Van Heflin. Also airing are Vincente Minnelli’s THE BAD AND THE BEAUTIFUL (‘52) and LUST FOR LIFE (‘56), Joseph Mankiewicz’s underrated 1970 Western THERE WAS A CROOKED MAN and two of my favorite Douglas flicks: 1950’s YOUNG MAN WITH A HORN and 1957’s GUNFIGHT AT THE O.K. CORRAL, one of the several films he made with his friend Burt Lancaster.

I found Douglas a changed man after suffering a major stroke in 1996—shortly before receiving an honorary Oscar—that left him with a pronounced speech impediment. He was very much the movie star and quite imposing when I first talked to him in 1986. But the four times I’ve talked to him since the stroke, Douglas couldn’t have been more funny or sweet.

“When I had my stroke, I saw things in a different way,” said Douglas in a 2009 interview at the Beverly Hills house he shares with his wife of 65 years, Anne.

“Everybody has to sometime in life take inventory. I think the final thing I had to discover about my life is you have to pay back. I came from abject poverty. I didn’t dream of being a millionaire. So, you have to pay back. Fortunately, my wife shares that view.”

They sold a lot of their art collection to fund everything from the Kirk Douglas High School in Northridge, CA, the Kirk Douglas Theatre in Culver City, CA and over 400 playgrounds.

Linda: I remember when you were born, mija, I thought I was gonna have more time too. I was gonna write my novel while you slept. That was a joke. You never slept. I never slept. I had the creativity of a prisoner of war. And taking a shower, that was a major accomplishment.

The Water Spirit (detail)