Stanley Kubrick

Last night I was watching a True Stories documentary called Stanley Kubrick's Boxes. Apparently Stanley Kubrick kept almost everything related to his professional life in cardboard boxes, of which there were thousands all over his estate. The documentary was made by film-maker Job Ronson, who was contacted by the Kubrick family and allowed access to the boxes (one of the few people who were). The documentary details some of the things hidden in the boxes and interviews some of the people referred to in the documents about their memories of Kubrick. There are thousands of pictures of random doorways and gates, and apartment and shop interiors shot over a year in preperation for Eyes Wide Shut, actors Malcolm McDowell and Warren Clarke modelling a wide variety of hats in order to find the perfect hat for A Clockwork Orange, memos asking there to be no less than three melons in the Kubrick house at any one time and requesting the exact barometric pressure in London at a particular date and time, every fan letter Kubrick ever received meticulously filed by location and labelled by Kubrick himself under three categories: "Positive", "Negative" and "Crank", Kubrick's vast collection of stationary, and footage of him on the set of Full Metal Jacket argueing about the amount of tea-breaks the crew could take and tellig the actors how to march, as well as a touching acceptance speech for an award that Kubrick filmed only a few months before his death where he describes film-making as being like: "writing War and Peace in a dodgem car". Among many other things.
The people interviewed all seemed to have very affectionate memories of Kubrick who came across as a very shy, quiet and extremely intelligent man who did have a healthy sense of humour about his perfectionism.
I can still remember when I heard about Kubrick's death in March 1999: I had just come back from the movies where I had been to see The Roaring Twenties and the first thing my mum said to me when I returned was that Stanley Kubrick had died.

I tend to collect stationary myself. There's a particular kind of large hard-back notebook that I like and I have boxes full of them, some have stuff written in them, but most haven't. I like to stock up in case they stop making them. I also try and stock up on pens, because I'm always losing them or they're running out.

The documentary was followed by a very early short documentary film by Kubrick from 1951 called Day of the Fight which followed a boxer over the day of a big fight. Despite the film only being twenty minutes long, they still had to interrupt it in the middle for five minutes of adverts, which I was pretty annoyed about because it did spoil it a bit.

It was a fairly average day at work, as usual. The pay dispute goes on apace with the latest offer being rejected by the Union.