But chess and the movies still fascinated him. When he was not taking pictures, Kubrick was hustling the players at Washington Square and frequenting every movie house in town. He made his first motion picture at age twenty-two, basing it on "Day of the Fight", a Look photo study he had done on middleweight boxer Walter Cartier. He wrote, produced, directed, and edited the one-reel short and sold it at a small profit to RKO Radio Pictures, which released it in 1952 as part of their This Is America series. That year Kubrick's first marriage, to Toba Metz, ended in divorce.
Kubrick next wrote and directed The Flying Padre (1952) for RKO-Pathé's Screenliner series and directed and photographed other informational films for various sponsors, including The Seafarers for Seafarers International Union in 1953. During this period he was able to independently produce and direct his first feature, Fear and Desire (1955), from a Howard O. Sackler screenplay about a unit of soldiers on patrol. The film was distributed to a limited art-house circuit by Joseph Burstyn.
Collaborating with Sackler, Kubrick quickly wrote the script for his second feature, a series of inexpensive action scenes linked by a narrative thread just strong enough to tie them together.
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