Return of Garage Kubrick

Cinema is commonly discussed as a "collaborative medium." What else could you call a kind of art-making that requires, in some cases, thousands of people to work in coordination over a number of years before the resulting art is finished and released? Even an independent film—even a "no-budget" "DIY" film—nearly always requires a division of labor among a handful of collaborators.

Film is not unique in this; but the romantic notion of the Artist generally identifies a single creator. The painter, working mostly alone; or a sculptor; or the ink-stained wretch of a writer. The notion persists even in more plainly group efforts such as dance or music-making. In film, we have the venerable "auteur theory" to inject the notion of the singular creative genius into the plural activity of filmmaking; a single unifying vision that corrals and subjugates the collective action to its command, thereby deserving of the title Author.

The power of that supposedly individual vision to so subjugate the work of a battalion of artists is generally directly related to the perceived quality of the final product, deserved or not. Directors get the lion's share of credit, although few of them, in the history of film, have ever had such complete control.

But this is the dream. The dream of the auteur is that it might be possible to truly create individually the precise vision in their mind's eye, without the need to bend other artists to their will. Traditional filmmaking renders this dream ludicrous. But the promise of AI filmmaking is the realization of the dream; ultimately, the ability to create an entire movie by yourself.

In the last month I have rewatched both Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli's Spirited Away (2001) and Docter and Pixar's Inside Out (2015), both of them masterpieces of animation. In great animation it is possible to glimpse the dream of the solo-auteur—a purity of vision unconstrained by the base realism of live-action cinema—even though, of course, animated films are among the most expensive and human-resource intensive of all.

But it is possible now to imagine a time in the not-too-distant future when anyone with the vision and storytelling chops will be freed from the need for collaborators entirely. This creator is someone I've long-imagined, perhaps even before I read the memorable phrase "Garage Kubrick" in some long-ago essay. The idea of the obsessive auteur, finally able to perfectly realize her vision, alone, perhaps in her garage.

The term appeared—as I've just now rediscovered via Google—in a piece from October 1999 in Wired magazine written by no-less a futurist than William Gibson, who had toyed with the phrase in relation to a character he subsequently deleted from the book he was writing at the time. He was struggling a little to understand such a character, but then he attended, with his daughter, a private screening of early works of digital cinema at Hollywood's Chateau Marmont, and the vision for the character became a little clearer.

The Garage Kubrick is a stone auteur, an adolescent near-future Orson Welles, plugged into some unthinkable (but affordable) node of consumer tech in his parents' garage. The Garage Kubrick is single-handedly making a feature in there, some sort of apparently live-action epic that may or may not involve motion capture. That may or may not involve human actors, but which will seem to.

The Garage Kubrick is a control freak to an extent impossible any further back along the technological timeline. He is making, literally, a one-man movie; he is his film's author to the degree that I had always assumed any auteur would want to be.

And he will not, consequently, come out of the garage. His parents, worried at first, have gone into denial. He is simply in there, making his film. Doing it the way my friend assumed Stanley Kubrick would have done it if he'd had the tech wherewithal.

Prescient, as always, Gibson's vision is about to come true.