Many thanks to Bessie for this wonderful article from The Guardian on the secret files of Stanley Kubrick. When Kubrick died, he left behind an estate filled with custom-made cardboard boxes containing the obsessively filed records of a lifetime: letters, scripts, books, discarded projects, and ghoulish mementos from the decades that he spent between films. The boxes reveal some marvelous Kubrickiana. For example:

- There is a blue room (not a red room, mind you) in Kubrick's house crammed with thousands of books and 25,000 index cards, all of them about Napoleon
- In preparation for The Shining, Kubrick obtained "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"
- Kubrick's favorite typeface was Futura Extra Bold. (See the opening credits of Eyes Wide Shut.)
- Kubrick kept all of his fan letters, filed by city or town of origin. Why? "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."

Anyway, this is a great article, and it makes me want to revisit some of Kubrick's movies, which I haven't watched in a long time. Kubrick used to be my favorite director, but he's been off my radar for a while now, not because his movies aren't wonderful, but because I sensed that I was following him into an artistic cul de sac.

For young artists, Kubrick is probably the most seductive of the great directors, and one of the most dangerous. I'm reminded of what Henry James says about Tolstoy: he compares Tolstoy to an elephant, and writes, "His own case is prodigious, but his example for others is dire: disciples not elephantine he can only mislead and betray." That's how I feel about Kubrick. Kubrick's genius was sui generis; only Kubrick could get away with being Kubrick, and the imitation of Kubrick only leads to cold, sterile places. (See One Hour Photo for details.)

This applies to the late Kubrick, mind you. A young director couldn't go very wrong by imitating The Killing or Lolita. But I can't imagine a watchable movie ever being made by a director whose artistic universe was circumscribed by Kubrick's last six or seven films, even though these include some of the best movies ever made.