Steve Reads

My friend Chris pointed me to an article about digging through Stanley Kubrick’s estate, containing juicy bits like the following:

Tony takes me into a large room painted blue and filled with books. “This used to be the cinema,” he says.

“Is it the library now?” I ask.

“Look closer at the books,” says Tony.

I do. “Bloody hell,” I say. “Every book in this room is about Napoleon!”

“Look in the drawers,” says Tony.

I do.

“It’s all about Napoleon, too!” I say. “Everything in here is about Napoleon!”

I feel a little like Shelley Duvall in The Shining, chancing upon her husband’s novel and finding it is comprised entirely of the line “All Work And No Play Makes Jack A Dull Boy” typed over and over again. John Baxter wrote, in his unauthorised biography of Kubrick, “Most people attributed the purchase of Childwick to Kubrick’s passion for privacy, and drew parallels with Jack Torrance in The Shining.”

This room full of Napoleon stuff seems to bear out that comparison. “Somewhere else in this house,” Tony says, “is a cabinet full of 25,000 library cards, three inches by five inches. If you want to know what Napoleon, or Josephine, or anyone within Napoleon’s inner circle was doing on the afternoon of July 23 17-whatever, you go to that card and it’ll tell you.”

“Who made up the cards?” I ask.

“Stanley,” says Tony. “With some assistants.”

“How long did it take?” I ask.

“Years,” says Tony. “The late 1960s.”

Kubrick never made his film about Napoleon. During the years it took him to compile this research, a Rod Steiger movie called Waterloo was written, produced and released. It was a box-office failure, so MGM abandoned Napoleon and Kubrick made A Clockwork Orange instead.

“Did you do this kind of massive research for all the movies?” I ask Tony.

“More or less,” he says.

“OK,” I say. “I understand how you might do this for Napoleon, but what about, say, The Shining?”

“Somewhere here,” says Tony, “is just about every ghost book ever written, and there’ll be a box containing photographs of the exteriors of maybe every mountain hotel in the world.”

It’s all worth reading  . . .  if you’re into Kubrick, that is — or if, like me, you find the man’s films largely cold and dead. (Dr. Strangelove being perhaps the only exception.)

Kubrick apparently was a fan of the Futura typeface, as well as Bembo. This is the sort of information that you can use to get girls at cocktail parties. Believe me, I know.

Actually that’s a complete lie.