Watch Kubrick, Douglas and Trumbo’s Astonishing Love Scene
Romance in Three Lines
The 1960 motion picture, Spartacus, was a true collaboration between three large personalities: Director Stanley Kubrick, writer Dalton Trumbo, and producer-star Kirk Douglas.
The “genius of the system” a phrase coined by film historian, Thomas Schatz, is apparent in this love scene between stars, Kirk Douglas and Jean Simmons. In the great Hollywood movies, it was not a single genius, but a collaborations of artists who made a genius film.
I am not convinced this scene would have been all it is without three headstrong personalities in the midst of developing, writing, and producing the scene.
In the scene, Spartacus, a gladiator-slave meets for the first time the slave girl played by Jean Simmons. The economy of language in this scene is striking. The male and female leads exchange only three lines.
The scene is so deeply revelatory that the next time we see these two characters, they have become married to one another.
But pay special note of these elements in the scene:
~Most writers over-write a scene. This scene is very spare, suggesting an actor and a director worked over the scene.
