TCM's 'The Plot Thickens' Turns to Stanley Kubrick — With a Never-Before-Heard 1972 Interview
A never-before-heard 1972 audio interview with Stanley Kubrick sits at the centre of the seventh season of Turner Classic Movies' podcast The Plot Thickens, titled Stanley, premiering September 24. The 11-episode season, hosted by TCM's Ben Mankiewicz, was produced in partnership with the Criterion Collection and traces Kubrick's path from a curious Bronx teenager to the director who redefined the boundaries of cinema (The Hollywood Reporter).
The buried treasure is a conversation Kubrick gave to Newsday film critic Joseph Gelmis, tied to the release of A Clockwork Orange (1971). Excerpts run across the season. Charlie Tabesh, TCM's senior VP of programming and content strategy, called the discovery of the previously unheard recording "extraordinary" in a statement announcing the season (The Hollywood Reporter).
Mankiewicz also sat down with a sweeping roster of filmmakers and voices to talk about Kubrick's reach. Directors Steven Spielberg, Sofia Coppola, Josh Safdie, George Miller and Lee Unkrich all appear, alongside Full Metal Jacket star Matthew Modine, producer Phil Rosenthal, cinematographer Michael Bauman, and Kubrick's stepdaughter Katharina Kubrick. Longtime collaborator James B. Harris — who produced The Killing (1956) and Paths of Glory (1957) — joins authors Claire Dederer and Jon Ronson to round out the interview list (The Hollywood Reporter).
New episodes drop every Thursday, and the podcast is available for free on YouTube or wherever podcasts are streamed (TCM).
TCM is backing the audio series with a full film retrospective. Starting September 3 at 5 p.m. PST, the network will air every one of Kubrick's features across four consecutive Thursdays, beginning with Killer's Kiss (1955). Criterion, for its part, will release a Complete Kubrick special edition box set in October (The Hollywood Reporter).
The official Stanley Kubrick Facebook page first signalled a new visual podcast in October 2025, teasing interviews with those who worked alongside the director (Facebook).
For fans, that means three connected ways into Kubrick this autumn: the podcast telling his life in his own and others' words, the TCM screenings putting every feature back on television, and the Criterion box set arriving for the shelf.
