A look at Stanley Kubrick's archives
The Guardian has a great article about Stanley Kubrick and some of the insane things he did when making movies:
[Long-time Kubrick assistant Tony Frewin] 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."