Everybody who makes it big has some sweet stroke of luck early on. That’s what the movies say, anyway. And for Stanley Kubrick that charmed moment came at age 16. As a skinny misfit growing up in the Bronx, Kubrick wanted to be a film director. By 29 he had made four features, including the World War I masterpiece Paths of Glory. But what happened in between?

Long before he was a dark, charismatic Hollywood boy genius—destined to direct some of the seminal films of the last half-century (Dr. Strangelove, 2001: A Space Odyssey, A Clockwork Orange)—Stanley Kubrick was a dark, eccentric, exasperating kid from the Grand Concourse, bursting with ambition. He was a doctor’s son who lived in a house when everyone else lived in an apartment. He drove his father’s Buick when most families didn’t even own a car. He played drums in the school band, if rather poorly. He watched films religiously, spending more time in the movie house, by some accounts, than in the classroom. He took photographs incessantly, toting around a big Speed Graphic. And in that brief era presided over by Harry Truman, when most of Kubrick’s peers went into the family business or off to college or succumbed to the draft, the future filmmaker landed his first steady job—at America’s second-favorite picture magazine, Look. Kubrick considered it a miraculous break. “The experience was invaluable to me,” he would later say. “Not only because I learned a lot about photography, but also because it gave me a quick education in how things happened in the world.”

The Bronx teenager liked to call himself Stan; the back of his early photos bore a rubber-stamp imprint: stan kubrick photo, 1414 shakespeare ave., nyc. In 1945, during his junior year of high school, he was already quite comfortable behind a lens, shooting for the Taft Review, the student newspaper. He fancied himself a street-smart journalist and sometimes dressed like a news photographer in the movies.

Then, on April 12 of that year, President Franklin D. Roosevelt died. The next day Kubrick went out, camera in hand, and found a corner news vendor surrounded by papers announcing plans for F.D.R.’s funeral. Kubrick made the shot—capturing the vendor’s grim and homely face, wrinkled and expressive, set amid headlines (roosevelt dead) that worked like internal picture captions. Kubrick took the photo into Manhattan to sell. At Look magazine, Helen O’Brian ran the picture desk. She offered him $25. At the New York Daily News, he was offered only ten. So Kubrick went for the big bucks, and Look, due to its long, six-week lead time, ran the photo (credit: Stan Kubrick) on June 26, 1945. Kubrick, one month from turning 17, had made real money shooting an artful news picture: succinct, graphic, and humane.

Pleased with his good fortune and with having nudged a foot in the door at Look, Kubrick began to deliver short picture stories to O’Brian, and the magazine bought them. Luckily enough, when he graduated, in January 1946, she offered him a bona fide job—at $50 a week. Over the next four years, Kubrick would shoot several hundred assignments, from silly stories about bubble-gum-blowing contests to celebrity profiles of Montgomery Clift, Frank Sinatra, and Rocky Graziano. Today these images are buried in copies of a magazine that almost no one remembers. But if you can find a few stray issues (and if you can believe your eyes) you’ll see: that’s exactly where a reclusive, perfectionist, driven director named Stanley Kubrick learned to tell stories in pictures.

From 1937 until 1971, Look and Life were fraternal twins—oversize magazines that brought eye-popping photographs right to your living room. They published pictures you could find nowhere else—especially in the days before television took hold. Think Alfred Eisenstaedt’s randy soldier kissing a reluctant nurse on V-J Day in Times Square. Or David Douglas Duncan’s G.I.’s struggling through a Christmas in Korea. Look and Life both folded in the early 1970s, done in largely by rising postal costs and a migration of ads to TV. But the Life name stayed famous, its trademark images representing everything trivial and important and all-American that took place during those years.

Why did the weekly *Life’*s legacy thrive and *Look’*s go the way of the Packard? A browse through some of *Look’*s old issues tells the tale. Today, its articles seem to record a slightly foreign civilization, a quirky, alternative universe. Page after page is devoted to politicians like Adlai Stevenson and Estes Kefauver (Look always seemed to back the wrong horse), B-movie actresses like Lizabeth Scott, radio personalities like Tex and Jinx McCrary. Look often probed what its genteel critics scorned as “the seamier side of American life.” In fact, Look was full of dark stories on unemployment, alcoholism, juvenile delinquency, divorce—topics that Life readers seemed to see less frequently, and then, quite often, with a silver lining. It is faintly embarrassing to read those Look stories today—like finding a picture of your father in high school, kissing a strange girl.

Where Life was polished, Look was bumpy, unpredictable. Life, according to some, made its stories by assembly line: material passed from photographers to picture editor to art department, and a decisive managing editor—always a shrewd journalist and storyteller—chose the shots and sequence of the final layout. In contrast, Look writers were called “producers,” and key articles moved from assignment through publication with the consensus of a team: writer, photographer, researcher, and art director. Together, they decided how to best tell the story. It made for an uneven and often surprising magazine.

Though both Look and Life were later resuscitated in different guises, Look never recovered. Most of the magazine’s picture files and negatives were shuffled off to the Library of Congress. Others landed at the Museum of the City of New York. Now, as it happens, researchers, with some difficulty, can make an appointment to access the old picture files and proof sheets, and find gems (and dogs) that never got published. Somewhere in that stash are the magical, little-known archives of Stanley Kubrick, photojournalist.

In 1950, Look occupied three floors of its own streamlined high-rise, which still stands on the northwest corner of 51st and Madison, a few blocks east of the current Time & Life Building. Inside, the décor was quite modern—desks shaped like amoebas, furniture in the style of Knoll and Eames. It is easy to imagine slight, scruffy Kubrick, slouched in a chair, wearing a red-and-blue checked shirt and orange corduroy trousers too short for his frame, holding his cameras in a brown paper bag, waiting for an assignment.

Shortly after Kubrick’s arrival, the photography department (including Arthur Rothstein, John Vachon, and Phil Harrington) quickly formed the “Bringing Up Stanley Club” to watch out for their new colleague. They managed to get him out of saddle shoes and lounge jackets and into a glen-plaid suit, white shirt, and tie. In the words of a Look behind-the-scenes article from 1948, they helped him remember minor things, such as “keys, glasses, overshoes.” And they admired his intense preoccupation with work. He was already dreaming, the magazine observed, “of the day when he [would] make documentary films.”

As Kubrick biographer Vincent LoBrutto learned in the 1990s from the filmmaker’s old friends, teachers, and neighbors, Kubrick’s ultimate success was never a surprise to his Bronx compatriots. But those less familiar with him had their doubts. Allegra Kent used to room with Kubrick’s girlfriend (and later wife), Balanchine dancer Ruth Sobotka. Kent, herself a dancer with the company, claims that in his Look days Kubrick would sometimes show up to greet Sobotka after a performance carrying armfuls of laundry. The stage-door guard, says Kent, would shake his head and ask, “What’s a nice girl like you doing with a guy like that? He’ll never amount to anything.” When LoBrutto interviewed G. Warren Schloat Jr., a Look reporter in the 40s, Schloat remembered Kubrick as a quiet fellow. After Kubrick described his aspirations to make feature films, Schloat thought, “Gee, this guy just doesn’t have the personality to run around in Hollywood.… You’ve got an awful lot of guys to scream and holler at when you’re making a movie.” (That reticent demeanor, in fact, became one of Kubrick’s directorial trademarks.)

Bert Stern, the fashion photographer best known for his images of Marilyn Monroe, worked in the Look mailroom at the time. He remembers prowling the office one night, only to encounter Kubrick photographing a “very pretty girl” in the studio—a model named Eleanor Mostel (stage name: Teddy Ayer), whom Stern would later marry. He recalls Kubrick’s odd habit of checking out the medicine chest of anyone he visited—just to see what pills they were taking. (Their friendship continued: when Kubrick was filming Lolita, in 1961, he hired Stern to take alluring stills of teenage actress Sue Lyon. Stern says that during the shoot he bought the now famous pair of heart-shaped sunglasses at a local five-and-dime in Sag Harbor.)

The Look method—episodic narratives that progressed like a storyboard from the opening visual hook to the powerful “closer”—didn’t suit all photojournalists. Venerable photographer Arthur Leipzig, who worked for the newspaper PM at about this time, insists he never liked pitching stories to Look. “They always wanted you to follow someone around,” says Leipzig, now 86. “Photograph every little thing they did—get dressed, eat breakfast, walk to the bus stop.” But if *Look’*s style seemed confining to a serious-minded photographer like Leipzig, it proved an invaluable gift to Kubrick, who was allowed to act as both shooter and producer of his own articles.

His first stories were simple mosaics of photogenic characters in public places—a dentist’s office, a Greenwich Village Laundromat, Palisades Amusement Park, the subway. And Kubrick often worked surreptitiously. Though he let his camera hang close to his chest, visible to his subjects, he did not use the viewfinder to frame his stolen shots. Instead, he aimed the camera at his target, then released the shutter by means of a long cable that he hid in his pocket, or concealed in a paper bag. These early stories would generate tension from the simple device of turning an unexpected lens on unsuspecting prey. The result—sometimes only four pages in length, but incorporating 30 pictures—would offer narratives of human instinct and interplay. Kubrick found rich material in private moments that most of us would miss—not just because we’re not as smart and perceptive as he was but because it’s embarrassing and impolite to stare. Most people turn away from the sight of women pawing through heaps of 29-cent lingerie, or teen lovers telling secrets on the subway late at night. But Stanley Kubrick wasn’t most people.

According to Kubrick, his experience at Look was “tremendous fun.” Just two years into the job, he was getting plum assignments. He photographed heartthrob crooner Frank Sinatra on a trip to Richmond, Virginia. He went behind the scenes to watch variety-show host Ken Murray audition new starlets for his TV program. On the pages of Look, the resulting picture stories are simple fables: a heartwarming look at a hardworking singer; a young lovely gets her first break from an old pro. But Kubrick’s contact sheets reveal complex backstories that never saw print. What fascinated Kubrick was not Sinatra the Star but the intense adoration in the faces of his fans. What seemed to determine the fate of Murray’s up-and-comers—if the faces of his male assistants are to be trusted—was not the actresses’ skill but, rather, their cup size.

Through Kubrick’s wide-ranging assignments—Dwight D. Eisenhower at the helm of Columbia University, clarinetist George Lewis at home in New Orleans (which included a jam session in the backyard, with the photographer on drums)—he was learning to recognize strong faces, vivid conflict, pivotal moments, interwoven tales, good material. He was becoming adept at spotting and conveying the visual evidence that gets the message across. Even then, according to a piece at the time in Look, Kubrick “knew exactly what he wanted.”

Lots of famous types started out in the Bronx. Colin Powell grew up there. Kubrick’s era fostered Ralph Lauren (Lifshitz), Calvin Klein, Edith (later Eydie) Gorme, Bobby Darin—even Tony Curtis (Bernie Schwartz), who later appeared in Kubrick’s Spartacus. Just after World War II, when Kubrick graduated from gleaming new Taft High, the Bronx was bursting with ambitious Jewish, Irish, and Italian kids, who sped out like rockets. Few of them looked back fondly. But then, no one had ever intended to stay. For their parents the Bronx was a way station between the Lower East Side and a house in the suburbs. For adolescents like Kubrick and one of his contemporaries, Jules Feiffer (a friend of Kubrick’s high-school buddies), Manhattan was a glittering Emerald City.

“My heroes sure as hell didn’t come from the Bronx,” explains Feiffer, writer, illustrator, and Vanity Fair contributor. “My heroes came from the movies. I wanted to grow up to be William Powell or Fred Astaire, with a penthouse on Riverside Drive. George and Ira would come over for parties, Mickey and Judy would sing. Later on we all wanted to be John Garfield, the first Jew in the movies who talked back. He sassed the white bosses, bludgeoned through class barriers. I would be famous. That was always my plan. How else was I going to get laid?”

Looking back, Kubrick’s Bronx pal Steven Marcus remembers their vast confidence in what the future would bring. “If you were really good, the world would respond,” says Marcus, now emeritus professor of English at Columbia University. “My success was up to me, not anyone else. I was going to make it. Stanley was going to make it. Stanley had a demonic belief in his own capacity. Demons were driving him. Nothing could stand in his way.”

Stanley Kubrick, so his neighbor Cliff Vogel remembered, had an “aquiline face [and] sharp, piercing eyes.” (This “hypnotic, very Svengali quality,” says novelist-screenwriter Gwen Davis, an early friend of Kubrick’s, would later serve him well in Hollywood. “Everybody fell in love with him.”) Not so at Taft High, alas. Kubrick was the kind of kid the teachers hated. When he did show up for class, he often came in late, daydreamed a lot, and earned C’s. But he discovered a passion for all things visual and decided to major in art.

Kubrick took his camera everywhere, even to band practice. When he started shooting for the school paper, his status suddenly climbed—from oddball to intriguing misfit. By wearing a raincoat on occasion, he affected the image of a teenage Weegee, the New York City photographer who specialized in covering crime scenes, fires, and Coney Island crowds, and whose noir-ish style—bold, visceral, a little trashy—Kubrick admired and echoed.

He also watched movies voraciously. By the time he was a teenager, he had made it his business to see every major motion picture that the studios released (along with all the newsreels, sports shorts, serials, and trailers that he could lay his eyes on). And the more films he saw, the more confident he became. “I sat there,” he once said to an interviewer, “and I thought, well, I don’t know a goddamn thing about movies, but I know I can make a film better than that.”

At Taft, Kubrick met his future wife Toba Metz, who eventually helped with his first feature, Fear and Desire. (The movie, shot in 1951, was released in 1953, around the time they divorced. His second marriage, to Sobotka, who had a role in the making of Killer’s Kiss and The Killing, also ended in divorce. His third wife and life partner, German-born Christiane Susanne Harlan, appeared in Paths of Glory.) Taft was also where Kubrick forged a creative partnership with longtime best friend and fellow art major Alex Singer.

Singer, now 76, describes Kubrick and himself as a pair of intense, ambitious kids, with “a hunger to eat the world.” Neither one wasted much energy on school. Singer was too busy writing stories, making illustrations, figuring out how to hit it big. They often spent hours on the phone. “Stanley had a habit,” recalls Singer, today a Hollywood film and television director. “Calling up late to talk about art, science, the future, technology, film, until he eventually exhausted me, and I had to hang up.” (Kubrick would continue this practice with friends and collaborators up until his death, at age 70, in 1999.) Even then, Kubrick outlasted everyone. “He was an absolutist. He wanted all of you.”

Soon after they met, Singer found his own true calling. “In a burst of glory I realized: I will be a great boy-genius film director! Stanley had come to the same decision.” They agreed to help each other break into the movies by making one of their own. Their first film venture, never completed: Singer’s adaptation of the Iliad.

After graduation, Kubrick accepted the position at Look. Singer went to work as a copy boy at Time Inc. and for the March of Time newsreel division. The Korean War was on, and so was the draft. Stanley got rejected for reasons that remain unclear; Singer served for two years in the military’s film unit on Steinway Street, in Queens. “We didn’t have time for college,” he says with a laugh. Ultimately, they knew they wanted to head west, somehow, someway. The Bronx had meant oblivion. For Kubrick, journalism had brought promise. But he had even brighter dreams—of screens that could splash bigger stories, in pictures that moved. “My ultimate ambition,” Kubrick frequently said, “had always been to make movies.”

It was through a series of Look assignments, actually, that Kubrick was able to cross that bridge to cinema, where he would soon become, in the words of a 1958 Esquire article, “a stringy, wild-haired, carelessly dressed young man … with no time for small talk … a Hollywood phenomenon” who belonged in the company of Orson Welles and John Huston.

Opportunity came through his work shooting boxers and boxing matches. In the 40s, only baseball was more popular than boxing, and the ring was still considered a great way for a poor kid to get ahead. While he worked at Look, Kubrick shot five fight pieces. Newsreel-style text accompanied his images: “Boxing brings a greater thrill than any other sport … [In 1948] 281,577 attended Friday night boxing shows … millions heard ABC broadcast crack team of Don Dunphy and Bill Corum, Gillette Cavalcade of Sport, thousands watched over television … All just to breathe the atmosphere of the big time … ” Radio fans back then outnumbered TV viewers 100 to 1, and the chief way to catch a boxing match was at the movies—in the form of highlight films of recent bouts, edited down to a few minutes, that were screened before the feature, along with newsreels and cartoons.

The most important story Kubrick ever shot for Look was his January 18, 1949, photo-essay, titled “Prizefighter,” relating a day in the life of a handsome 24-year-old Greenwich Village middleweight named Walter Cartier. After an establishing shot, the story moves to Cartier’s bedroom, which he shared with his twin brother, Vincent, and then follows Walter from breakfast to church. “Ability alone,” the copy notes, “cannot carry a fighter into the big money.” So Cartier relies heavily on “his manager,” Bobby Gleason, who “must cope with the intrigues and connivings of the ring—a business in which no blows are barred.”

The picture story is a series of big images crammed with drama and detail. Every shot sets up some kind of contest—between Cartier and his trainer, or his girl, or his opponent. (Cartier, in the first fight Kubrick ever shot, loses in a technical knockout to Tony D’Amico. The next time, he wins, downing Jimmy Mangia in the first round, to earn $700.) Kubrick’s stylized and densely filled frames are loaded with figures in the foreground and background fighting for the viewer’s attention. The eeriest of these scenes shows Cartier facing his identical twin, who looks like his living mirror.

The pictures resemble movie stills—and, in fact, that’s just what they were. “Prizefighter” would become a dry run for “Day of the Fight”—a 16-minute documentary, focusing on Cartier, that Kubrick and Alex Singer shot in 1950 for $300, plus $3,500 more for a soundtrack that featured CBS newsman Douglas Edwards and a film score written by Singer’s buddy Gerald Fried, now a Hollywood composer. (Cartier’s story, two years later, would also inspire Kubrick’s first commercial feature, Killer’s Kiss.)

No one ever questioned Kubrick on the set. “Anybody who worked with Stanley did just what Stanley wanted,” Vincent Cartier told biographer LoBrutto. “He’s got a calmness about him, there’s no noise with Stanley.” Kubrick used material from his Look shoot to plan the scenes leading up to the bout. But to trim costs, and to add excitement and spontaneity, he shot the match live—an idea Singer still calls “very good, and very risky.”

They recorded the fight with Eyemos—sturdy, reliable combat cameras that could shoot 100-foot loads of 35-mm. film. Each load lasted 60 seconds; each boxing round took three minutes. To cover his bases, Kubrick shot tag-team with Singer: while one camera was rolling, the other was being loaded. There was no time to think. “Fortunately, Cartier won,” says Singer. “The knockout came while I was shooting—part luck and part skill, and a delicious personal triumph. Stanley was absolutely delighted. He never forgot it.”

They sold “Day of the Fight” to RKO-Pathé for about $4,000, barely covering their outlay. Kubrick saw the premiere on the big screen at New York’s Paramount Theater. The feature: My Forbidden Past, with Robert Mitchum and Ava Gardner. The headliner: Frank Sinatra, who sang from the stage. The next day Kubrick quit his job at the magazine to begin moviemaking in earnest.

As he would later explain in an interview, it all started with his still pictures—of news vendors and subway riders and boxers. The career at Look “certainly gave me the first step up to movies. To make a film entirely by yourself, which initially I did, you may not have to know very much about anything else, but you must know about photography.”

This is Mary Panzer’s first piece for Vanity Fair.