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Extract: Weegee and Kubrick on the set of ‘Dr. Strangelove’

Posted on 28 Jan 2025

In this extract from ‘Weegee: Society of the Spectacle’, David Campany explores the creative pairing of two mavericks: iconic photographer Weegee and filmmaker Stanley Kubrick.

Center of Photography, New York. Weegee, [Stanley Kubrick directing his film "Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb"], 1963. International Center of Photography, Bequest of Wilma Wilcox, 1993 (7489.1993) © International Center of Photography/Getty Images

What could a street photographer known for capturing New York’s dark underground during the 1930s and 1940s have in common with one of cinema’s most precise and deliberate filmmakers?

Arthur (Usher) Fellig, famously known by the name ‘Weegee’, was a photographer whose work was as unorthodox as the man himself. Allegedly named after his preternatural ability to arrive at crime scenes before the police – like a Ouija board predicting chaos – Weegee built his career documenting the gritty, unfiltered reality of New York City in the 1930s and 1940s. Equipped with a Speed Graphic camera, flashbulbs and a portable darkroom in his car boot, he captured everything from grisly murders to vibrant street life, producing images that were raw, immediate, and often darkly funny. By the mid 1930s, having been the only photographer to acquire a police short-wave radio and often beating officers to crime scenes, Weegee secured his name as the leading press photographer of the time.

It’s hard to imagine a figure more distinct from Stanley Kubrick, the meticulous filmmaker known for his control and precision. Yet, on the set of Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964), the two visionaries found common ground. Weegee’s offbeat eye and absurdist take on the human condition aligned perfectly with Kubrick’s razor-sharp satire.

In the following essay from Weegee: Society of the Spectacle, David Campany delves into their history, exploring how their contrasting styles merged to expand the boundaries of both photography and film.

Weegee, Weegee at the Typewriter in the Trunk of the 1938 Chevrolet, New York, ca.1943, Collection Galerie Berinson, Berlin. © Weegee Archive / International Center of Photography, New York.

Perhaps the last great body of work made by Weegee, and certainly one of his most intriguing, is the group of photographs he produced during the production of the movie Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964), Stanley Kubrick’s nightmarish black comedy of Cold War paranoia and nuclear threat. ‘Weegee and Kubrick’ might seem an unlikely pairing but in many ways their collaboration was an inevitable and joyous outcome of their intertwined lives in photography and cinema.

The two men had crossed paths much earlier, in late 1940s New York. Weegee was still just about active in the city, while the precociously talented teenage Kubrick was devising and shooting ambitious photo stories, primarily for Look magazine. At that time, they both belonged — aesthetically and temperamentally, at least — to the common streets. Photography was prized for its immediacy and the possibility it offered to conjure striking and dramatic pictures from the tensions of the everyday. When Kubrick turned from photography to moviemaking, it was the low-life themes of film noir that first appealed to him. This was a genre that Weegee’s photography had already anticipated and in some instances, had influenced directly.

Always interested in new equipment and technical developments, Weegee had begun his own experiments with 16 mm filmmaking as early as 1941. He moved to Hollywood in 1948, picking up acting and consulting work over the next decade or so, while continuing to shoot film and stills for his Distortions series, which often featured well-known actors. In 1948 the title of Weegee’s hit photobook Naked City was acquired by producer Mark Hellinger for a film noir to be directed by Jules Dassin. Shot almost entirely on the streets of New York, this detective story about a murdered model could have come straight from the lurid pages of Weegee’s book.

Weegee, Marilyn Monroe, Distortion, ca.1955, Courtesy Weegee Archive, International, Center of Photography, New York. © Weegee Archive / International

[…]

Weegee came to Europe, taking small parts in movies in the early 1960s, before playing a comically exaggerated version himself in the low-budget pseudo-documentary The Imp-Probable Mr. Weegee (shot in 1962, released in 1964). […] Luckily, salvation came in the last weeks of filming, when he received the invitation to join Kubrick in pre-production at Shepperton Studios, on the outskirts of southwest London.

[…]

But what exactly did Kubrick want from Weegee? Nothing exact, it seems. Weegee was not required to be one of the official production photographers. Two of these had been hired already, Dmitri Kasterine and Bob Penn, with additional images to be taken by Nicolas Tikhomiroff. In general, their brief was to replicate in stills the crisply elegant black and white vision established by Kubrick with the cinematographer, Gilbert Taylor. Instead, Weegee was free to shoot what he wanted, roaming the sets at Shepperton, and on location. Kubrick loved the stark flash light in Weegee’s celebrated photographs and requested he shoot that way when possible. In other words, he wanted ‘Weegee’” photographs of this ‘Kubrick’ movie.

[…]

In the complexity of a film shoot, Weegee’s wandering, autonomous presence was a reminder not just of his and Kubrick’s shared roots in photography but of the singular determination an artist must have in the midst of creative collaboration. Moreover, Weegee, like Kubrick, was a self-made maverick, a pioneer who had done extraordinary work on his own terms. Kubrick seemed to enjoy the idea that this energetic but elderly man of sixty-four years, whom he admired deeply, had been invited to be so free. So, it is significant that among the photos Weegee made there are several of Kubrick seen hunched over or lying down as he struggles alone to find the exact angle from which to shoot a scene. Weegee made far fewer images of Kubrick ‘directing’ or even interacting with others. Perhaps he still saw in Kubrick not the consummate director of big budget films, but the kid photographer he had first met in the 1940s.

Center of Photography, New York. Weegee, [Stanley Kubrick directing his film "Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb"], 1963. International Center of Photography, Bequest of Wilma Wilcox, 1993 (7489.1993) © International Center of Photography/Getty Images

Weegee’s most striking photographs were made on the War Room set, where much of the drama of Dr. Strangelove takes place. […] Preeminently a photographer of the night, Weegee was perfectly at home in the darkened space. He could use his flash or the production’s bright lights to pick out his subjects, just as he had done in the treacly midnights of 1930s and 40s New York.

[…]

For Kubrick, Weegee and his work were an honest and important reminder that photography, whether still or moving, becomes stale and lifeless if it is denied the spontaneity that it is so well suited to capturing. Kubrick was at a place in his career where he was being granted complete control of his filmmaking, but he understood that a completely controlled film can be tedious both to make and to watch. While he was becoming known for his supreme mastery of framing, timing, camera movement, vantage point, cinematography, and so forth, he knew that human behaviour, with its unpredictable beauty and wild energy, is vital.

Weegee, [Peter Bull as Russian Ambassador Alexi de Sadesky in cream pie fight in the War Room on the set of "Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb"], 1963. International Center of Photography, Bequest of Wilma Wilcox, 1993 (7526.1993) © International Center of Ph (1963)otography/Getty Images

Kubrick always left plenty of space for improvisation and the unexpected. Think of Jack Nicholson’s volatile behaviour as the haunted writer Jack Torrance in The Shining (1980); or R. Lee Ermey as Gunnery Sergeant Hartman with his impromptu foul-mouthed berating of the new army recruits in Full Metal Jacket (1987); or the sudden switches to a shaky handheld camera in the otherwise stately Barry Lyndon (1975). There are always moments in Kubrick’s films that feel like verité documentary, with the camera ready to record whatever happens. Sometimes what happened would prompt swift rewrites of the script and even changes in narrative direction. If an artist is not alive to chance, their art will die. Weegee’s best photography had always been reactive, capturing scenes and gestures over which he had little control. His only planning came from experience, and his uncanny ability to be ready when things suddenly got interesting. This is what Weegee embodied for Kubrick.

The most celebrated photographs Weegee made on set are of Dr. Strangelove‘s most spontaneous scene. Kubrick had intended his film to end with an epic custard pie fight in the War Room. As tensions increase, the imminent and terrifying threat of planetary nuclear annihilation panics the politicians and military men into childish antics. The fight is not with the Russian ambassador, who sneakily tries to photograph the U.S. plans on the War Room’s huge screens, but between the different branches of the American military: Army, Navy, Marines, and Air Force.

Unidentified Photographer, [Weegee getting hit in the face with a cream pie on the set of "Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb"], 1963. International Center of Photography, Bequest of Wilma Wilcox, 1993 (7536.1993) © International Center of Photography/Getty Images

With over three thousand custard pies, it was a spectacular eleven-minute sequence. Trashing the pristine War Room set, it could be performed only once, without clean-ups. The white of the pies splatters over the men’s dark suits and the slick black interior, until everyone and the whole floor are all but covered in the sticky mess. Characters go wild, climbing on the furniture and swinging from the lights. The circular table is piled up with pie cream.

[…]

The movie was edited in November 1963, around the time President Kennedy was assassinated. When Peter Sellers’s President receives a pie full in the face, a character shouts: ‘The President has been struck down in his prime!’ The line was too close to reality. Kubrick also felt the tone of the actors had been overly comic. Many were in fact smiling and laughing in the fun of it all. The whole scene was cut from the final film. Instead, Dr. Strangelove concludes with the equally iconic shot of the actor Slim Pickens hollering while riding a nuclear warhead like a rodeo cowboy as it is dropped from a military airplane, followed by a conversation in the War Room about post-nuclear survival. It then cuts to archive footage of atomic bomb explosions.

The custard pie scene does exist, but it has been screened in public just once, at the British Film Institute in London during a posthumous Kubrick retrospective. While it might be disappointing that the scene did not make it into the film, this has made Weegee’s photographs all the more compelling and significant.

Fulfilling his contract, Weegee delivered around one hundred prints, which are now in the Stanley Kubrick Archive in London. A further seventy-one prints that he made for himself are part of the substantial Weegee Archive in the collection of the International Center of Photography, New York. Although these images are valuable documents of the genesis of Kubrick’s film, they are also supremely ‘Weegee’ photographs, full of crazy incident, unexpected tenderness, black humour, and strange beauty.

This extract is from the essay ‘Weegee and Kubrick’, by David Campany, featured in Weegee: Society of the Spectacle, which is available now.

The exhibition Weegee: Society of the Spectacle is at the International Center of Photography, New York, from 23 January to 5 May.

Discover the book:

Weegee

Society of the Spectacle Clément Chéroux, Cynthia Young, Isabelle Bonnet, David Campany
£45.00