GELMIS, JOSEPH

(1935– )

This film critic for the Long Island, New York, paperNewsdaywas one of the first to recognize the genius of STANLEY KUBRICK by designating him a “superstar” and including him in a collection of interviews with older, proven luminaries of the film world, such as Lindsay Anderson, Bernardo Bertolucci, Milos Forman, and Roman Polanski. Born in Brooklyn in 1935, Joseph Gelmis graduated from the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism in 1960 before becoming a regular film critic forNewsday.Gelmis elevated Stanley Kubrick to “superstar” status in his bookThe Film Director as Superstar,published in Doubleday & Company in 1970. The book operates from the auteurist assumption then coming into vogue that the director was “no longer simply another name in the credits, a small cog in a huge machine,” but “the artist in control. ” Gelmis considered2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY“the most awesome underground movie ever made. ” The book concludes with a 23-page interview with Kubrick recorded in 1968 in New York and London.

J. M. W.