‘Do a Better Job on the Wings’

Tuesday, 30 December 2025

Randy Walters wrote a lovely little story, “Christiane’s Gift”, originally published back in 2012, about a visit to a Frankfurt museum hosting an exhibit from Stanley Kubrick’s personal archives in 2004. I toured the same exhibit at the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco in 2016; it was remarkable. Included the famed ƒ/0.7 Zeiss lens (designed for use by NASA for satellite photography in space) and jury-rigged Mitchell BNC camera Kubrick commissioned so he could use that lens to shoot scenes by candlelight in Barry Lyndon.

In the preface to his story, Walters references this quote from Kubrick, from his acceptance speech for the D.W. Griffith lifetime achievement award from the Director’s Guild of America in 1998:

I’ve compared Griffith’s career to the Icarus myth, but at the same time I’ve never been certain whether the moral of the Icarus story should only be, as is generally accepted, “Don’t try to fly too high,” or whether it might also be thought of as “Forget the wax and feathers, and do a better job on the wings.”

That Zeiss lens/Mitchell BNC was a better job on the wings.