Citizen Kubrick

Stanley Kubrick: director of Dr. Strangelove, 2001, Lolita, Spartacus. Stanley Kubrick: designer of cardboard boxes, obsessive-compulsive stationery collector, connoisseur of serif fonts, owner of thousands of biographies about Napoleon.

We've spoken about Stanley Kubrick's finicky genius before, but I just discovered Jon Ronson's 2004 essay on his time spent exploring the contents of the Kubrick estate, proving that Ian Watson's adventure working with Kubrick on the script for A.I. was, in fact, Kubrick working at his most laid-back and unclenched.

Ronson's article is a must-read, but here's Jon Ronson on discovering a box in Kubrick's house containing a photograph of every single doorway in London in his hopes to find the definitive hooker doorway for Eyes Wide Shut.

But was it worth it? Was the hooker doorway eventually picked for Eyes Wide Shut the quintessential hooker doorway? Back at home, I watch Eyes Wide Shut again on DVD. The hooker doorway looks exactly like any doorway you would find in Lower Manhattan - maybe on Canal Street or in the East Village. It is a red door, up some brownstone steps, with the number 265 painted on the glass at the top. Tom Cruise is pulled through the door by the hooker. The scene is over in a few seconds. (It was eventually shot on a set at Pinewood.) I remember the Napoleon archive, the years it took Kubrick and some assistants to compile it, and I suggest to Jan Harlan, Kubrick's executive producer and brother-in-law, that had there not been all those years of attention to detail during the early planning of the movie, perhaps Napoleon would actually have been made.

"That's a completely theoretical and obsolete observation!" replies Jan, in a jolly way. "That's like saying had Vermeer painted in a different manner, he'd have done 100 more paintings.

Which is to say, genius works at its own pace, and Kubrick worked at his: the internal alchemy of his films took years of just this sort of manic scrutinizing to become more than just movies.

Citizen Kubrick [Citizen Kubrick]