Since Vivian Kubrick was in grade school, she worked as a col­lab­o­ra­tor with her famous film­mak­er father. She had cameos in a num­ber of his movies includ­ing 2001: A Space Odyssey and Bar­ry Lyn­don. She shot the behind-the-scenes doc­u­men­tary about the mak­ing of The Shin­ing at the age of 24. And she com­posed the score for Full Met­al Jack­et under the pseu­do­nym of Abi­gail Mead. Kubrick seemed to groom his daugh­ter to be his cin­e­mat­ic heir. And then in the late 90s, that all stopped. She cut off all con­tact with her fam­i­ly.

Kubrick’s fam­i­ly was ini­tial­ly cagey about what hap­pened to her, say­ing sim­ply that she was liv­ing in LA. But then in 2010, Kubrick’s step­daugh­ter Katha­ri­na opened up. “We weren’t lying, we were just being eco­nom­i­cal with the truth,” she told The Dai­ly Beast. “Because if you say, ‘My sis­ter has become a Sci­en­tol­o­gist,’ where do you go from that?”

The Church of Scientology’s pol­i­cy of dis­con­nec­tion is one of its most con­tro­ver­sial prac­tices. It’s not clear if Vivian for­mer­ly dis­con­nect­ed with her fam­i­ly but she did report­ed­ly attend her father’s funer­al in 1999 with a Sci­en­tol­o­gist min­der. When her sis­ter Anya died of can­cer in 2009, she did not attend that funer­al even though they were, by all accounts, insep­a­ra­ble grow­ing up.

The rift between Kubrick and his daugh­ter became final when he asked her to score Eyes Wide Shut and she refused, as “They had a huge fight. He was very unhap­py,” recalled Kubrick­’s wife and Vivian’s moth­er. “He wrote her a 40-page let­ter try­ing to win her back. He begged her end­less­ly to come home from Cal­i­for­nia. I’m glad he didn’t live to see what hap­pened.”

Crit­ic Lau­rent Vachaud argues that Eyes Wide Shut – a movie that seems about as open to inter­pre­ta­tion as The Shin­ing – is real­ly a requiem to his lost daugh­ter.

Recent­ly on her Twit­ter feed, Vivian post­ed a series of pho­tos of her­self on the set of her father’s movies. One pic­ture shows an eight-year old Vivian clutch­ing a baby chimp used on 2001. Anoth­er shows her hang­ing out on the milk bar set of A Clock­work Orange. “I helped cut out those Sty­ro­foam let­ters on the wall,” she writes. Anoth­er pic­ture shows Vivian sit­ting before a 16mm Steen­beck, edit­ing her doc­u­men­tary on The Shin­ing. And, most poignant­ly, one of her pic­ture’s shows Vivian and Kubrick embrac­ing on a deck chair.

“In Mem­o­ry of my Dad,” she writes. “Who I loved with all my heart and soul… Dad and Me on the back veran­da of Abbots Mead.”

More pho­tos can be found on her Twit­ter stream.

Via Dan­ger­ous Minds

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Stan­ley Kubrick’s Anno­tat­ed Copy of Stephen King’s The Shin­ing

Rare 1960s Audio: Stan­ley Kubrick’s Big Inter­view with The New York­er

Stan­ley Kubrick’s List of Top 10 Films (The First and Only List He Ever Cre­at­ed)

Jonathan Crow is a Los Ange­les-based writer and film­mak­er whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hol­ly­wood Reporter, and oth­er pub­li­ca­tions. You can fol­low him at @jonccrow.

Since 1994’s Clerks turned him from a proud New Jer­sey slack­er into a lead­ing light of the 1990s’ Amer­i­can inde­pen­dent film boom, cinephiles have ener­get­i­cal­ly debat­ed Kevin Smith’s abil­i­ties as a film­mak­er. Even Smith admits that he con­sid­ers him­self more a writer who hap­pens to direct than a direc­tor per se, and his fans and detrac­tors alike seem to con­sid­er his scripts more a vehi­cle for his enter­tain­ing way with speech — with jokes, with cul­tur­al ref­er­ences, with elab­o­rate foul­mouthed­ness — than any­thing else. It cer­tain­ly does­n’t sur­prise me that so much of his 21st-cen­tu­ry out­put con­sists of pod­casts, nor that, when you go all the way back in his film­mak­ing career, even before Clerks, you find a short but talk­a­tive, joc­u­lar, by turns placid and vit­ri­olic, only seem­ing­ly impro­vi­sa­tion­al piece like Mae Day: The Crum­bling of a Doc­u­men­tary, his first and only stu­dent film, made while enrolled for just four months at the tech­ni­cal­ly ori­ent­ed Van­cou­ver Film School.

Hav­ing come up with the idea for a doc­u­men­tary on a local trans­sex­u­al named Emel­da Mae, Smith and class­mate Scott Mosier, who would go on to become Smith’s long­time pro­duc­ing part­ner, found them­selves unpre­pared to fol­low through on the project as they’d (vague­ly) envi­sioned it. To make mat­ters worse, Mae her­self then skipped town, leav­ing behind not a hint as to her where­abouts. But amid this film-school cri­sis, Smith’s true film­mak­ing tal­ent flow­ered: instead of a “seri­ous” pro­file of his absent sub­ject, he made a satir­i­cal exam­i­na­tion of how that idea ran so quick­ly and unsal­vage­ably aground, con­sist­ing not just of his and Mosier’s par­o­d­i­cal­ly con­fi­dent reflec­tions on the nature of the “fail­ure,” but also their irate instruc­tors’ and col­lab­o­ra­tors’ earnest­ly detailed accounts of how they could­n’t get their act togeth­er. But just two years lat­er, Clerks would slouch its way to game-chang­ing promi­nence in Amer­i­can cin­e­ma. What­ev­er you think of every­thing Smith and Mosier have put out since, you have to admit that this lazy-stu­dent gam­bit worked out pret­ty well for them.

You will find Mae Day: The Crum­bling of a Doc­u­men­tary list­ed in our col­lec­tion of Free Online Doc­u­men­taries, part of our larg­er col­lec­tions of 635 Free Movies Online.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear Kevin Smith’s Three Tips For Aspir­ing Film­mak­ers (NSFW)

Lick the Star: Sofia Coppola’s Very First Film Fol­lows a 7th-Grade Con­spir­a­cy (1998)

The First Films of Great Direc­tors: Kubrick, Cop­po­la, Scors­ese, Taran­ti­no & Truf­faut

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on cities, lan­guage, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

The whole cat­e­go­ry of cult movies is a slip­pery one. Every­one knows what a hor­ror flick or a West­ern looks like but describ­ing a cult movie is much more sub­jec­tive. Cult movies can be any genre. They tend to be campy or kitschy or in some oth­er way very strange. Often they are either movies that are so weird­ly and intense­ly per­son­al that they alien­ate and baf­fle main­streams audi­ences, or films that are such utter and com­plete train wrecks that some­how they push through the mere­ly mediocre into the sub­lime. Or, in the best cas­es, both.

Dan­ny Peary, in his sem­i­nal 1981 book Cult Movies, put such high art movies as Cit­i­zen Kane along­side mid­night movie sta­ples like Freaks (watch it free online) and El Topo. Some­how that doesn’t feel right. Hav­ing the sup­posed best (or sec­ond best) movie ever made in the same cat­e­go­ry as a hap­less mess like Troll 2 seems to be a dis­ser­vice to both movies, no mat­ter how rabid the fan­base is.

For their list 30 Cult Movies That Absolute­ly Every­body Must See, the writ­ers of the web­site io9 wres­tled with this exact issue:

We debat­ed a lot what we would con­sid­er a “cult movie” for the pur­pos­es of this list, and we most­ly stuck to films that were not huge box-office hits and did­n’t get mas­sive main­stream expo­sure when they were first released. The films on this list most­ly either flew under the radar or were con­sid­ered mas­sive flops when they came out orig­i­nal­ly.

Like any such list, there is plen­ty to be quib­bled with — Don­nie Darko is ranked high­er than Eraser­head? Real­ly? – but that’s real­ly just part of the fun. Below are a few cult movies that you can watch right now for free – two of which are on the io9 list.

Plan 9 from Out­er Space – There’s a great scene in Tim Burton’s biopic Ed Wood where a cross-dress­ing Wood runs into Orson Welles at a bar. They share a drink and com­mis­er­ate about the dif­fi­cul­ties of being a vision­ary in Hol­ly­wood. By all def­i­n­i­tions, Wood was as much of an auteur as Welles. His movies were a prism through which he worked through some very per­son­al issues.

It’s just that, unlike Welles, Wood was a com­i­cal­ly inept and lazy film­mak­er. Crit­ic Michael Medved once dubbed his Plan 9 from Out­er Space as the worst movie ever made. And it’s a hard to argue with that asser­tion. Shots in the movie alter­nate dis­ori­ent­ing­ly between day and night in the mid­dle of the same scene. The act­ing isn’t so much as wood­en as som­nam­bu­lis­tic. The spe­cial effects are laugh­ably child­ish –a flam­ing space­craft at one point of the movie was accom­plished by set­ting a hub­cap alight with some gaso­line. Yet through­out the entire film, Wood’s boy­ish enthu­si­asm shines through. Plan 9 might be ter­ri­ble, but it’s also a lot of fun.

Night of the Liv­ing Dead – Though George A. Romero’s Night of the Liv­ing Dead was made for next to noth­ing, all of the production’s lim­i­ta­tions some­how turned into assets. The film’s grainy black-and-white cin­e­matog­ra­phy and hand-held cam­era gave Romero’s zom­bie gore-fest a lev­el of real­ism that was unseen in hor­ror movies up to that point — like a news­reel from the apoc­a­lypse. The Liv­ing Dead wound up being one of the most prof­itable movies of all time, which for investors proved to be unfor­tu­nate. In what has to be one of the costli­est cler­i­cal errors in movie his­to­ry, the dis­trib­u­tors for­got to include a copy­right state­ment in cred­its. As a result, the movie quick­ly fell into the pub­lic domain. Check it out.

Detour — Edgar G. Ulmer’s hasti­ly pro­duced film noir bears all the marks of a movie made on a shoe­string. The direc­tion is ham hand­ed. The act­ing is often shrill. A tale about tox­ic love and ill-got­ten gains, Detour should have by all rights been anoth­er for­got­ten, dis­pos­able B‑movie. Yet some­how Ulmer man­aged to cap­ture ligh­in­ing in a bot­tle. “Haunt­ing and creepy,” writes Roger Ebert. “An embod­i­ment of the guilty soul of film noir. No one who has seen it has eas­i­ly for­got­ten it.”

You can find more cult clas­sics in our col­lec­tion of 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More, includ­ing The Wild Ride with Jack Nichol­son, Blue­beard (also direct­ed by Edgar G. Ulmer), the 1962 indie hor­ror film Car­ni­val of Souls, Demen­tia 13 (an ear­ly Fran­cis Ford Cop­po­la  hor­ror film), and Abel Ferrara’s cult clas­sic slash­er film The Driller Killer.

Jonathan Crow is a Los Ange­les-based writer and film­mak­er whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hol­ly­wood Reporter, and oth­er pub­li­ca­tions. You can fol­low him at @jonccrow.

We all know the stages of cin­e­ma’s ear­ly devel­op­ment: first came the pic­tures, sec­ond came the motion, and third came the sound. But many of us, even rea­son­ably active film buffs, don’t real­ize how much the art form took its shape between steps two and three. Most of the visu­al lan­guage we instinc­tive­ly rec­og­nize as stan­dard in the movies today came togeth­er before their char­ac­ters ever spoke an audi­ble word. Hence the impor­tance of not just watch­ing the films of today, and not just catch­ing up with impor­tant works back to the the “gold­en age” of Hol­ly­wood, but going even far­ther back, to the ear­ly 1930s, even all the way to the 1910s — deep, in oth­er words, into the silent era. Out­side a uni­ver­si­ty film-stud­ies pro­gram, you could­n’t always do this eas­i­ly.  But now, to free you from the need to haunt spe­cial­ist video stores (if your city has them) and hope for silent screen­ings at the near­est reper­to­ry cin­e­ma (if your city has one), we give you our col­lec­tion of 101 free silent films online, part of our col­lec­tion 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More.

We don’t mean obscure silent films, either. You may remem­ber our post on Sight & Sound mag­a­zine’s list of the ten great­est silents of all time, nine of which you can watch right now in our col­lec­tion. In chrono­log­i­cal order: D.W. Grif­fith’s Intol­er­ance (1916), Erich von Stro­heim’s Greed (1923), Buster Keaton’s Sher­lock Jr. (1924), Sergei Eisen­stein’s Bat­tle­ship Potemkin (1925), Buster Keaton’s The Gen­er­al (1926), Fritz Lang’s Metrop­o­lis (1927), F.W. Mur­nau’s Sun­rise (1927), Luis Buñuel’s Un chien andalou (1928), Carl Theodor Drey­er’s The Pas­sion of Joan of Arc (1928), Dzi­ga Ver­tov’s Man with a Movie Cam­era (1929). You can also catch up, final­ly, on a vari­ety of oth­er impor­tant films besides, from four by French visu­al-spec­ta­cle pio­neer Georges Méliès (After the Ball, Cin­derel­la, The Dev­il­ish Ten­ant, The Impos­si­ble Voy­age) and six of Eng­lish sus­pense king Alfred Hitch­cock­’s ear­li­est works (Down­hill, Easy Virtue, The Lodger, The Plea­sure Gar­den). And that’s just scratch­ing the sur­face of our col­lec­tion of Free Silent Films.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Pow­er of Silent Movies, with The Artist Direc­tor Michel Haz­anavi­cius

Hol­ly­wood, Epic Doc­u­men­tary Chron­i­cles the Ear­ly His­to­ry of Cin­e­ma

Watch 10 of the Great­est Silent Films of All Time, All Free Online

Three Great Films Star­ring Char­lie Chap­lin, the True Icon of Silent Com­e­dy

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on cities, lan­guage, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.