Obsessive fans of Stanley Kubrick (are there any other kind?) will thrill to the weird ideas lobbed forward in the speculative documentary Room 237. Even more notoriously, several strange anecdotes have collected around the director himself over the years. Was he scared of flying? Actually, Kubrick was convinced of the inevitability of flight error; he himself had a pilot license and saw too much he couldn’t forget. Did he wear a crash helmet in cars? Nope—in fact, the filmmaker owned a Porsche. These are the obvious ones: Here, we cut through the haze of rumor to find five tales not as widely whispered but still with merit.

Did Stanley Kubrick save Albert Brooks’s life?
Yes—in a manner of speaking. According to Brooks (profiled in Esquire), the comedian-director was so depressed after the flop of 1981’s Modern Romance (pictured above) that he strongly considered giving up his career until Kubrick called him in the middle of the night to shower the movie with praise. Their friendship was short-lived: After Kubrick made “terrible” suggestions to the script of Lost in America, Brooks says that the mysterious phone calls dried up.
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