The unusual stuff—the stuff that elucidates the ever-lengthening gaps between productions—can be found in the boxes that were compiled from 1968 onwards. In a box next to the Lolita box in the Portakabin I find an unusually terse letter, written by Kubrick to someone called Pat, on January 10, 1968:
Dear Pat,
Although you are apparently too busy to personally return my phone calls, perhaps you will find time in the near future to reply to this letter?
(Later, when I show Tony Frewin this letter, he says he’s surprised by the brusqueness. Kubrick must have been at the end of his tether, he says, because on a number of occasions he said to Tony, “Before you send an angry letter, imagine how it would look if it got into the hands of Time Out.”) The reason for Kubrick’s annoyance in this particular letter was because he’d heard that the Beatles were going to use a landscape shot from Dr. Strangelove in one of their movies.
“The Beatle film will be very widely seen,” Kubrick writes, “and it will make it appear that the material in Dr. Strangelove is stock footage. I feel this harms the film.”
There are a similar batch of telexes from 1975: “It would appear,” Kubrick writes in one, “that ‘Space: 1999’ may very well become a long-running and important television series. There seems nothing left now but to seek the highest possible damages. . . . The deliberate choice of a date only two years away from 2001 is not accidental and harms us.”
This telex was written seven years after the release of 2001.
But you can see why Kubrick sometimes felt compelled to wage war to protect the honor of his work. A 1975 telex, from a picture publicity man at Warner Bros. called Mark Kauffman, regards publicity stills for Kubrick’s somber reworking of Thackeray’s Barry Lyndon. It reads: “Received additional material. Is there any material with humor or zaniness that you could send?”
Kubrick replies: “The style of the picture is reflected by the stills you have already received. The film is based on William Makepeace Thackeray’s novel which, though it has irony and wit, could not be well described as zany.”
I take a break from the boxes to wander over to Tony’s office. As I walk in I notice something pinned onto his letter box.
“POSTMAN,” it reads. “Please put all mail in the white box under the colonnade across the courtyard to your right.”
It is not a remarkable note except for one thing. The typeface Tony used to print it is exactly the same typeface Kubrick used for the posters and title sequences of Eyes Wide Shut and 2001.
“It’s Futura Extra Bold,” explains Tony. “It was Stanley’s favorite typeface. It’s sans serif. He liked Helvetica and Univers too. Clean and elegant.”
“Is this the kind of thing you and Kubrick used to talk about?” I ask.
“God, yes,” says Tony. “Sometimes late into the night. I was always trying to persuade him to turn away from them. But he was wedded to his sans serifs.”
Tony goes to his bookshelf and brings down a number of volumes full of examples of typefaces, the kind of volumes he and Kubrick used to study, and he shows them to me.
“I did once get him to admit the beauty of Bembo,” he adds, “a serif.”
“So is that note to the postman a sort of private tribute from you to Kubrick?” I ask.
“Yeah,” says Tony. He smiles to himself. “Yeah, yeah.”
For a moment I also smile at the unlikely image of the two men discussing the relative merits of typefaces late into the night, but then I remember the first time I saw the trailer for Eyes Wide Shut, the way the words CRUISE, KIDMAN, KUBRICK flashed dramatically onto the screen in large red, yellow, and white colors, to the song “Baby Did a Bad Bad Thing.” Had the words not been in Futura Extra Bold, I realize now, they wouldn’t have sent such a chill up the spine. Kubrick and Tony obviously became, at some point during their relationship, tireless amateur sleuths, wanting to amass and consume and understand all information.
But this attention to detail becomes so amazingly evident and seemingly all-consuming in the later boxes, I begin to wonder whether it was worth it. In one Portakabin, for example, there are hundreds and hundreds of boxes marked EWS—Portman Square, EWS—Kensington, and Chelsea, etc., etc. I choose the one marked EWS—Islington because that’s where I live. Inside are hundreds of photographs of doorways. The doorway of my local video shop, Century Video, is here, as is the doorway of my dry cleaners, Spots Suede Services on Upper Street. Then, as I continue to flick through the photographs, I find to my astonishment pictures of the doorways of the houses on my own street.
Handwritten at the top of these photographs are the words “Hooker doorway?”
“Huh,” I think.
So somebody within the Kubrick organization (it was, in fact, his nephew Manuel Harlan) once walked up my street, on Kubrick’s orders, hoping to find a suitable doorway for a hooker in Eyes Wide Shut. It is both an extremely interesting find and a bit of a kick in the teeth. Judging by the writing on the boxes, just about every doorway in London has been captured and placed inside this Portakabin. This solves one mystery for me—the one about why Kubrick, a native of the Bronx, chose the St. Albans countryside, of all places, for his home. I realize now that it didn’t matter. It could have been anywhere. It is as if the whole world is to be found somewhere within this estate.
• • •
LATER I GET TO MEET Manuel Harlan. “How long did all this take you?” I ask him.
“A year,” he says.
“Every day?” I ask.
“Pretty much,” he says.
“Was it a good year?” I ask.
“It was a great year,” he says. “I think I took thirty thousand photos in all. That’s a number I arrived at once. At first it was just going to be stately homes. Then I started looking for coffee shops. And then doorways. Then toy shops. Mortuaries. Oh! Costume places! That was a really long job. I was in every costume shop in the southeast of England.”
“Did he look at them all?” I ask.
“All!” he says. “With tremendous excitement! One time he wanted me to do the whole of Commercial Road. But he didn’t want the buildings tilting back or forward in the photographs. So I had to take a ladder. I’d climb the ladder, take the picture, get down, move the ladder twelve feet, and on and on. Commercial Road is a very long road. Stanley was constantly on the phone going, ‘Have you finished yet? How fast can you get here?’”
Manuel says once he reached the end of Commercial Road, he hurried straight to the St. Albans branch of Snappy Snaps to get the pictures developed. Then he assiduously taped them together to form a perfect panorama of the whole of Commercial Road. Back at the Kubrick house he carefully laid the panorama out—like a homemade Google street view years before Google had conceived of such a thing—down a long corridor. Kubrick emerged from his room, looked at it, and said: “Well. It sure beats going there.”
So was it all 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 (and Manuel’s father), that had there not been all those years of attention to detail during the early planning of the movie, perhaps Napoleon would have actually been made.