>This is a sincere question.

Thank you for posing it.

>If Kubrick was such a box office mojo as your comment above suggested.

I wish I could expand on and support the statement you believe I suggested. Unfortunately, the information in my post above (how Kubrick planned his limited releases) is all I have to go on right now. (There are a ton of technical-related distribution decisions I could get into though like his choice to use mono sound).

I've read Stanley Kubrick: A Biography, The Making of Kubrick's 2001, and most of the interviews he's done, but very little is said about the numbers. Just before your comment, I ordered a copy of The Stanley Kubrick Archives, because I wanted to learn more. Wikipedia cites this book as a source for some of its budget / box office numbers, so I'm hopeful it will shed some light on this topic.

I don't think The Shining was a disaster. I don't believe the facts support calling it a disaster. I don't know enough about Full Metal Jacket to make the same argument.

>How is it that it only made 46 million?

I don't know.

>Isn't that pretty bad considering the budget was 30 million?

It looks better put into perspective, but it's certainly not great. $46 million puts it at rank #23 out of 238 theatrically released films in 1987. The numbers don't suggest to me that it was marketed poorly. Maybe it was, but maybe the film simply cost too much. I don't really know.

>And that's not factoring in what they (or Kubrick, as your comment suggests) spent on market. Or knew how to spend on marketing, so to speak.

There is a Kubrick interview where he goes into hollywood's tendency to overspend, stating that some films needed to gross 5x their production budget just to make a profit (his tone seemed to indicate he rejected this practice). I assume the limited release strategy was a way of reducing the P&A costs. Reducing the number of theaters a film plays in reduces the costs of both prints and advertising (less markets to advertise in). If the film is good enough, and plays long enough, word of mouth can take a small P&A budget very far. Unfortunately, it looks like FMJ had a sharp decline in theatre average and didn't play for very long so it must not have worked out. I don't know what the P&A budget was on FMJ, but wish I did.

u/sbsk · 3 points r/StanleyKubrick

Stanley Kubrick - LoBrutto

The Stanley Kubrick Archives - TASCHEN

KUBRICK - Ciment

Kubrick - Baxter

A Life In Pictures

Kubrick: Herr

u/former2001italia · 3 points r/StanleyKubrick

u/PeteIRL · 3 points r/StanleyKubrick

Not so much an academic book, but stunning to look at-

http://www.amazon.com/Stanley-Kubrick-Archives-Alison-Castle/dp/3836508893/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1312966128&amp;sr=1-1

Got it for Christmas a few years ago. Beautiful book.

u/GustyAeroplane · 2 points r/criterion

https://www.amazon.com/Criterion-Designs-Collection/dp/160465936X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1500586225&amp;sr=8-1&amp;keywords=criterion+designs

https://www.amazon.com/Stanley-Kubrick-Archives-Alison-Castle/dp/3836508893/ref=sr_1_8?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1500586243&amp;sr=8-8&amp;keywords=kubrick+book

u/find_my_harborcoat · 1 point r/CineShots

No problem at all! In this case, I mostly learned it by reading a lot of essays and interviews and books, in this case especially ones on Kubrick and on cinematography. I don't remember specifically what stuff in particular, unfortunately. The best advice for watching EWS (or any film) in its intended format is to find a screening of it that's in 35mm--depending on where you're located, good bets are museums like MOMA in NYC, a local university, or arthouses and repertory theatres that might have a Kubrick retrospective or something.

As far as becoming well-versed in film, the first step is to watch everything you can get your hands on, even if you think it will be awful, and pay as much attention to the choices that are being made, how a camera is moving, what is in the frame and what isn't, lighting, color, dialogue, etc., even if you have no idea really what to be paying attention for. Anything you can think of or see onscreen, think about why that choice is being made and what the purpose of that choice is. And then after viewing something, look up some reviews of it (to find good critics, a good start is to go to Rotten Tomatoes, narrow down a movie's reviews to Top Critics, and then read the full reviews from there), positive and negative, and try to match what they're talking about to what you just saw and see if you can recognize what they're mentioning. And if you can't, just store the type of thing they're talking about and remember to think about it during the next movie you watch, and the next, and so on. Practicing this will build up your knowledge quite quickly, and it will become second nature to pick up on all kinds of things, and once that becomes habit and you don't have to pay as much attention consciously, you'll pick up on more and more subtle nuances. (If you want to have a starting point for films, you can go with a list like this, a list of 1000 movies that are "the best of all time" as a result of aggregating several different polls. Obviously, you never want to put too much stock in other people's opinions of what the best is, and it seems intimidatingly long, but like I said, it's just if you want a reference point. And they link to the polls they use, so if you want a smaller list to work with you, you can try one of those. This is helpful because again you'll discover what you like, so you might find one movie on that list by a director you love and then go off and watch everything else she ever did. And then you come back to the list. So it's not really about completing the list, just using it as another starting point for discovery.) Also, I recommend you keep at least a brief log of everything you watch, along with some notes about it--this will help you keep track of directors/screenwriters/cinematographers you like, as well as help you understand what you like and don't like about films better.

Once you start to feel comfortable with some of the basics, you can start seeking out books that discuss the film-making experience. With both movies and books, you'll discover your tastes as you go along, so it's best to start casting a broad net and reading books that cover a lot of topics, and then you might find that cinematography interests you most and then start reading books that are more specifically about that, and subscribing to specialty magazines like American Cinematographer, or you might find it all appealing and want to read books on all aspects of filmmaking.

That probably seems like a ton of info and fairly intimidating, but I basically started from nothing and basically just taught myself whatever I know by this method, no film school or anything certainly. Not saying I'm an expert on this stuff by any stretch of the imagination, but I've been able to become knowledgeable enough.

Some specific recommendations that I found immensely helpful that hopefully might be helpful to you too:

Current film critics: Dana Stevens (Slate), Stephanie Zacharek (Village Voice), Karina Longworth (freelance), Manohla Dargis (NYT), Wesley Morris (Grantland), A.O. Scott (NYT)

Kubrick:
The Stanley Kubrick Archives - A great book that also features Kubrick's drawings, personal notes, continuity photos, and interviews with him

Napoleon: The Greatest Movie Never Made - A book on SK's uncompleted Napoleon film

The Kubrick Site - A really amazing online resource with a lot of links to essays and articles

Film magazines: Sight and Sound, Film Comment, American Cinematographer, Filmmaker, Little White Lies, Screen International

Books (if you only ever read one book on film, I'd make it Hitchcock/Truffaut--I learned more from it than from any other single source):
Hitchcock/Truffaut

What is Cinema?

Pictures at a Revolution

Negative Space

A Cinema of Loneliness

Easy Riders, Raging Bulls

The Age of Movies

Making Movies

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