"The first and only (as far as we know) Top 10 list Kubrick submitted to anyone was in 1963 to a fledgling American magazine named Cinema (which had been founded the. Achetez vos livres TASCHEN préférés en ligne : Albert Watson. Kaos - Mert Alas and Marcus Piggott - Steve McCurry. L'Afghanistan - de Chirico - Carl. 5. Browse correspondence written by, to, or about, the following notable people (listed alphabetically, by first name). Citizen Kubrick | Film | The Guardian. In 1. 99. 6 I received what was - and probably remains - the most exciting telephone call I have ever had. ![]() ![]() It was from a man calling himself Tony. I'm phoning on behalf of Stanley Kubrick," he said."I'm sorry?" I said. Stanley would like you to send him a radio documentary you made called Hotel Auschwitz," said this man. This was a programme for Radio 4 about the marketing of the concentration camp. Stanley Kubrick?" I said. Let me give you the address," said the man. He sounded posh. It seemed that he didn't want to say any more about this than he had to. I sent the tape to a PO box in St Albans and waited. What might happen next? Whatever it was, it was going to be amazing. My mind started going crazy. Perhaps Kubrick would ask me to collaborate on something. Oddly, in this daydream, I reluctantly turned him down because I didn't think I'd make a good screenwriter.) At the time I received that telephone call, nine years had passed since Kubrick's last film, Full Metal Jacket. All anyone outside his circle knew about him was that he was living in a vast country house somewhere near St Albans - or a "secret lair", according to a Sunday Times article of that year - behaving presumably like some kind of mad hermit genius. ![]() Nobody even knew what he looked like. It had been 1. 6 years since a photograph of him had been published. He'd gone from making a film a year in the 1. Paths Of Glory), to a film every couple of years in the 1. Lolita, Dr Strangelove and 2. A Space Odyssey all came out within a six- year period), to two films a decade in the 1. The Shining and Full Metal Jacket), and now, in the 1. What the hell was he doing in there? According to rumours, he was passing his time being terrified of germs and refusing to let his chauffeur drive over 3. But now I knew what he was doing. He was listening to my BBC Radio 4 documentary, Hotel Auschwitz. The good news," wrote Nicholas Wapshott in the Times in 1. Kubrick is a hoarder .. There is an extensive archive of material at his home in Childwick Bury. When that is eventually opened, we may get close to understanding the tangled brain which brought to life HAL, the [Clockwork Orange] Droogs and Jack Torrance." The thing is, once I sent the tape to the PO box, nothing happened next. I never heard anything again. Not a word. My cassette disappeared into the mysterious world of Stanley Kubrick. And then, three years later, Kubrick was dead. Two years after that, in 2. I got another phone call out of the blue from the man called Tony. Do you want to get some lunch?" he asked. Why don't you come up to Childwick?" The journey to the Kubrick house starts normally. You drive through rural Hertfordshire, passing ordinary- sized postwar houses and opticians and vets. Then you turn right at an electric gate with a "Do Not Trespass" sign. Drive through that, and through some woods, and past a long, white fence with the paint peeling off, and then another electric gate, and then another electric gate, and then another electric gate, and you're in the middle of an estate full of boxes. There are boxes everywhere - shelves of boxes in the stable block, rooms full of boxes in the main house. In the fields, where racehorses once stood and grazed, are half a dozen portable cabins, each packed with boxes. These are the boxes that contain the legendary Kubrick archive. Was the Times right? Would the stuff inside the boxes offer an understanding of his "tangled brain"? I notice that many of the boxes are sealed. Some have, in fact, remained unopened for decades. Tony turns out to be Tony Frewin. He started working as an office boy for Kubrick in 1. One day, apropos of nothing, Kubrick said to him, "You have that office outside my office if I need you." That was 3. Tony is still here, two years after Kubrick died and was buried in the grounds behind the house. There may be no more Kubrick movies to make, but there are DVDs to remaster and reissue in special editions. There are box sets and retrospective books to oversee. There is paperwork. Tony gives me a guided tour of the house. We walk past boxes and more boxes and filing cabinets and past a grand staircase. Childwick was once home to a family of horse- breeders called the Joels. Back then there were, presumably, busts or floral displays on either side at the bottom of this staircase. Here, instead, is a photocopier on one side and another photocopier on the other. Is this .. ?" I ask. Yes," says Tony. "This is how Stanley left it." Stanley Kubrick's house looks as if the Inland Revenue took it over long ago. 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 2. If you want to know what Napoleon, or Josephine, or anyone within Napoleon's inner circle was doing on the afternoon of July 2. 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 1. 96. 0s." 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." There is a silence. Tony," I say, "can I look through the boxes?" I've been coming to the Kubrick house a couple of times a month ever since. I start, chronologically, in a portable cabin behind the stable block, with a box marked Lolita. I open it, noting the ease with which the lid comes off. These are excellent, well- designed boxes," I think to myself. I flick through the paperwork inside, pausing randomly at a letter that reads as if it has come straight from a Jane Austen novel: Dear Mr Kubrick, Just a line to express to you and to Mrs Kubrick my husband's and my own deep appreciation of your kindness in arranging for Dimitri's introduction to your uncle, Mr Günther Rennert. Sincerely, Mrs Vladimir Nabokov I later learn that Dimitri was a budding opera singer and Rennert was a famous opera director, in charge of the Munich Opera House. This letter was written in 1. Kubrick was still producing a film every year or so. This box is full of fascinating correspondence between Kubrick and the Nabokovs but - unlike the fabulously otherworldly Napoleon room, which was accrued six years later - it is the kind of stuff you would probably find in any director's archive. The unusual stuff - the stuff that elucidates the ever- lengthening gaps between productions - can be found in the boxes that were compiled from 1. In a box next to the Lolita box in the cabin, I find an unusually terse letter, written by Kubrick to someone called Pat, on January 1. 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 this letter, he says he's surprised by the brusqueness. William Shatner Attacks Snowflakes, Social Justice Warriors, and Misandrists. William Shatner, perhaps best known as the narrator of the 1. Operation Bikini, is at it again. This time he’s taken aim at the snowflakes, misandrists, and social justice warriors (SJWs) that have annoyed him so much on Twitter. Despite his notable work on Operation Bikini, Shatner is also known to a small, cult fanbase as the first Captain of the USS Enterprise on the original Star Trek series. And many Star Trek fans are disappointed, as Shatner has gone viral for his recent attacks on people who thought that his presence on a socially progressive TV show from the 1. But none of this is new, as Shatner has been talking about his distaste for social justice warriors on social media for some time now. As early as July 2. Shatner was talking about SJWs and painted them as people who simply want to “attack and hide.”Shatner has claimed that social justice warriors (SJWs) are people who “stand for inequality” and that he’s just calling out misandry (bias against men) and people who are snowflakes (the alt- right term for delicate people who need safe spaces). Shatner has previously aligned himself with the so- called alt- right (he even claims to surf 4chan) and declined to speak against the intolerance of President Trump, joking that he might “be deported” (Shatner is Canadian). Back in September his old castmates signed an open letter denouncing Trump’s racism and bigotry. Shatner was notably absent from the letter, and it becomes clearer with each passing day why that might be. Ironically, despite his constant ridicule of “snowflakes,” Shatner is quite fond of reporting “bullying” on social media. Diehard fans of the little known space- themed show are disappointed.“It seems that Shatner has not so much misunderstood the source material than turned away from it,” Manu Saadia, author of Trekonomics: The Economics of Star Trek, told me.“Star Trek is the lone TV show that has carried the torch of equality, progress, and utopia in popular culture. To see one of its most famous ambassador using alt- right language should be a wake up call to fans,” Saadia continued.“It is ruinous for the 5. Shatner is known to be prickly and jealous of his status in Star Trek. Maybe he can’t stand that the limelights are now trained on a new, diverse crew?” said Saadia.“Star Trek is a lot of things but, at its heart it stands for the ideal that the fruits of technological and social progress should be equally shared among all of humanity. That’s definitely not what Shatner is advocating here,” said Saadia.“I should add that I think Trek matters more than just to fans. It was the only sci- fi universe that’s always been unabashedly utopian. It’s a fluke that it even made it on TV. There’s no sci- fi out there that lays out such a detailed vision of what could be, where ‘the accumulation of things’ is no longer the dominant passion in our lives. So it matters much more than it lets on at first sight,” said Saadia.“Shatner, because of his status and platform, is soiling that tiny ray of hope, however fleeting. It’s sad and it doesn’t help.”.
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