It has been online several times.
BOXES began as a story in the London Times.
http://film.guardian.co.uk/features/featurepages/0,4120,1177734,00.html
Citizen Kubrick
Stanley Kubrick's films were landmark events - majestic, memorable and richly researched. But, as the years went by, the time between films grew longer and longer, and less and less was seen of the director. What on earth was he doing? Two years after his death, Jon Ronson was invited to the Kubrick estate and let loose among the fabled archive. He was looking for a solution to the mystery - this is what he found
Saturday March 27, 2004
The Guardian
In 1996 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 16 years since a photograph of him had been published.
He'd gone from making a film a year in the 1950s (including the brilliant, horrific Paths Of Glory), to a film every couple of years in the 1960s (Lolita, Dr Strangelove and 2001: A Space Odyssey all came out within a six-year period), to two films a decade in the 1970s and 1980s (there had been a seven-year gap between The Shining and Full Metal Jacket), and now, in the 1990s, absolutely nothing. 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 30mph. 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 1997, bemoaning the ever-lengthening gaps between his films, "is that 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 2001, 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 1965, when he was 17. One day, apropos of nothing, Kubrick said to him, "You have that office outside my office if I need you." That was 36 years ago and 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 25,000 library cards, three inches by five inches. If you want to know what Napoleon, or Josephine, or anyone within Napoleon's inner circle was doing on the afternoon of July 23 17-whatever, you go to that card and it'll tell you."
"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 1960s."
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 1962, back in the days when 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 1968 onwards. 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 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 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 is 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 honour of his work. A 1975 telex, from a picture publicity man at Warner Bros called Mark Kauffman, regards publicity stills for Kubrick's sombre reworking of Thackeray's Barry Lyndon. It reads: "Received additional material. Is there any material with humour or zaniness that you could send?"
Kubrick replies, clearly through gritted teeth: "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 to his letterbox. "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 favourite 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 discuss?" 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."