Showing posts with label Tony. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Tony. Show all posts

Thursday 7 July 2022

Who's Tony?





"....so, it's never gonna be Me,
You'll never Get It
You'll never Know --

and Whatever You Think I am, 
that's What I'm NOT..."


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?"