It is amazing. The boxes contain two volumes of what appears to be a slightly cheesy sci-fi radio drama script. The story begins with a sick dog:
“Can you run me over to Oxford with my dog?” says the dog’s owner. “He’s not very well. I’m a bit worried about him, John.”
This is typed.
Kubrick has handwritten below it: “THE DOG IS NOT WELL.”
A virus has been carried to earth on a meteorite. This is why the dog is listless, and also why humans across the planet are no longer able to control their sexual appetites. It ends with a speech:
There’s been so much killing—friend against friend, neighbor against neighbor, but we all know nobody on this earth is to blame, Mrs. Brighton. We’ve all had the compulsions. We’ll just have to forgive each other our trespasses. I’ll do my part. I’ll grant a general amnesty—wipe the slate clean. Then perhaps we can begin to live again, as ordinary decent human beings, and forget the horror of the past few months.
This, too, is typed. But all over the script I find notes handwritten by Kubrick. (“Establish Brighton’s interest in extra-terrestrial matters.” “Dog finds meteorite.” “John has got to have very powerful connections of the highest level.” “A Bill Murray line!”)
“I know what this is,” says Tony.
Kubrick was always a keen listener to BBC radio, Tony explains. When he first arrived in the UK, back in the early sixties, he happened to hear this drama serial—Shadow on the Sun. Three decades later, in the early 1990s, after he had finished Full Metal Jacket, he was looking for a new project, so he asked Tony to track the scripts down. He spent a few years, on and off, thinking about Shadow on the Sun, reading and annotating the scripts, before he abandoned the idea and eventually—after working on and rejecting AI—made Eyes Wide Shut instead.
“But the original script seems quite cheesy,” I say.
“Ah,” replies Tony, “but this is before Stanley worked his alchemy.”
And I realize this is true. “Dog finds meteorite.” It sounds so banal, but imagine how Kubrick might have directed it. Do the words “Ape finds monolith” or “Little boy turns the corner and sees twin girls” sound any less banal on the page?
All this time I have been looking in the boxes for some embodiment of the fantasies of the outsiders like Mr. Sam Laks and me—but I never do find anything like that. I suppose that the closer you get to an enigma, the more explicable it becomes. Even the somewhat crazy-seeming stuff, like the filing of the fan letters by the towns from which they came, begins to make sense after a while.
It turns out that Kubrick ordered this filing in case he ever wanted to have a local cinema checked out. If 2001, say, was being screened in Daly City, California, at a cinema unknown to Kubrick, he would get Tony or one of his secretaries to telephone a fan from that town to ask them to visit the cinema to ensure that, say, the screen wasn’t ripped. Tony says that if I’m looking for the solution to the mystery of Kubrick, I don’t really need to look inside the boxes. I just need to watch the films.
“It’s all there,” he says. “Those films are Stanley.”
• • •
ALTHOUGH THE KUBRICKS always guarded their privacy inside Childwick, I come to the end of my time at the house just as Christiane and her daughter Katharina decide to open the grounds and the stable block to the public. They’re going to hold an art fair, displaying their work and the work of a number of local artists. Christiane has decided to let the boxes go. She’s donating them to the University of the Arts London—to a special climate-controlled Kubrick wing, where film students and other students can look through them. She’s letting them go because, she tells me, “I get very upset at seeing some of his old things. The paper is so dusty and old and yellow. They look so sad. The person is so very dead once the paper is yellow.”
I’m there to watch a fleet of removal vans arrive to take them away. During the months and years that follow, Christiane oversees the publication of two books about the things inside the boxes—The Stanley Kubrick Archives (Taschen) and Stanley Kubrick’s Napoleon: The Greatest Movie Never Made (Taschen). She turns up for special screenings of his films—I watch her introduce Paths of Glory in the open-air cinema at Somerset House, Central London, and we have dinner afterward. I mention this to a friend, a Kubrick buff. “Oddly, I was just thinking about her today,” he replies. “A Twilight fan said to me, ‘Is there anything more romantic than Edward and Bella?’” I immediately thought, “Christiane Kubrick’s protection of her husband’s legacy.”
One of the very last boxes I opened before the removal vans came contained a videotape. Kubrick was on the tape, addressing the camera, looking nervous. It was an acceptance speech. He’d been awarded the D. W. Griffith Award. It was just a few months before he died.
“Good evening,” he says. “I’m sorry not to be able to be with you tonight . . . but I’m in London making Eyes Wide Shut with Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman and at just about this time I’m probably in the car on the way to the studio. . . .”
All this time I’ve been looking for some kind of Rosebud and I think I find it in a few lines in this speech.
“Anyone who has ever been privileged to direct a film,” he says, “also knows that although it can be like trying to write War and Peace in a bumper car in an amusement park, when you finally get it right, there are not many joys in life that can equal the feeling.”
I think Kubrick knew he had the ability to make films of genius, and to do that—when most films are so bad—there has to be a method, and the method for him was precision and detail. I think his boxes contain the rhythm of genius.
PART THREE
EVERYDAY DIFFICULTY
“I’ve thought about doing myself in loads of times.”
—“Bill” to Christopher Foster
Santa’s Little Conspirators
It is a Monday in late October and I’m standing inside a smoke-filled Lotto shop in the tiny Alaskan town of North Pole, population 1,600. This shop sells only two things: cigarettes and Lotto scratch cards. Chain-smoking inveterate gamblers sit at the counter and frantically demolish mountains of the scratch cards. They have names like Royal Jackpot, Blame It on Rio, and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.
Outside, people are going about their business on Frosty Avenue. Friends are chatting on Kris Kringle Drive. A gang of hoodies are slouched against the candy-cane-striped streetlights on Santa Claus Lane, having just emerged from the Christmas-themed McDonald’s.
Everything in North Pole is Christmas-themed. It is Christmas Day here 365 days a year. The decorations are always up. It never stops being Christmas here. Never. Wherever you are in the world, if you write a letter to Santa, and address it simply “Santa, North Pole,” your letter will most likely end up in this tiny Alaskan town.
Actually, specifically, your Santa letter will end up right here, in this smoke-filled scratch-card and cigarette shop. It’s late October, and boxes of them are already piled up on the counter near the fruit machine. They’re automatically forwarded here from the post office. I pick an envelope up at random. It has only one word scrawled on it, in a child’s handwriting: “Santa.” It’s postmarked Doncaster, UK.
I get talking to Debbie, who works here, selling scratch cards to the gamblers. Debbie is herself a chain-smoker, a blowsy strawberry-blonde with a tough, good-looking face. She says she can frequently be found alone in here in floods of tears, having just opened yet another heartbreaker.