Kubrick’s Collaborators

Sony chief John Calley comments that “as a director, [Stanley Kubrick] didn’t believe in collaborating any more than if he were the author of a novel or the composer of a symphony” (“The Kubrick Mystique,” by Patrick Goldstein, March 10).

As a member of the Writers Guild of America, so by nature a cranky writer, please list the following names for the record: Anthony Burgess, Arthur C. Clarke, Howard Fast, Peter George, Gustav Hasford, Stephen King, Vladimir Nabokov, William Makepeace Thackeray, Lionel White.

Directors and studio chiefs might delude themselves into believing they aren’t collaborating with anyone when they are adapting stories and novels, but all of the above writers are actually the authors who didn’t collaborate with anyone when they wrote their original works that Kubrick then, quite brilliantly, adapted and/or co-adapted and directed.

The last Kubrick film based on a Kubrick original screenplay was “Killer’s Kiss” in 1955. After that, the so-called control freak never again derived a project from his own material.

STEVEN GAYDOS

Los Angeles

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I was 16 years old when I first saw “2001: A Space Odyssey.” A friend told me I just had to see it, but it was hard for him to say why. All I knew was that someone had made a new movie with spaceships and some sort of “trip.” To the moon, I figured. Anything would do. How was I to know?

The film became my favorite. So I can’t help thinking it was appropriate somehow to have learned of Stanley Kubrick’s death from my home computer. Thank you, Mr. Kubrick, for the great work.

BILL BARKE, Torrance