
Citizen Kubrick (2004) - akkartik
http://www.theguardian.com/film/2004/mar/27/features.weekend
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wahnfrieden
There is a documentary video of this by the author, KUBRICK'S BOXES:
[http://vimeo.com/78314194](http://vimeo.com/78314194)

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subdane
I had the good fortune to study the films (made and unmade) of Stanley Kubrick
for a semester in college. If ever a filmmaker embodied the hacker spirit it
was Kubrick - he taught himself still photography, dropped out of high school
to successfully pursue the career, hustled chess, bootstrapped his first film,
licensed the rights to a book, put together a round of funding, and built a
career in Hollywood. Then left Hollywood and the U.S. and took huge chances
with his career to pursue his art, hack innovative tech for his films, and
change the history of cinema. Many years after college, I'm still inspired by
Kubrick's life. But man was Eyes Wide Shut a clunker.

~~~
l33tbro
Well, you're not actually describing a 'hacker' \- you're describing an
entrepeneur. But, yes, he was a lot more technically invested than a lot of
other auteurs. I recommend the documentary 'Stanley Kubrick: a life in
pictures' to anybody interested in living life on their own terms. Very
inspiring.

Oh, and I find 'Eyes Wide Shut' to be a woefully mistunderstood and underated
gem. I'd rate it second to 'Barry Lyndon' in the Kubrick oeuvr. A lot of his
other films (Shining, 2001, Clockwork) I found to be technically marvelous but
mishandled in terms of storytelling.

~~~
spikels
"Eyes Wide Shut" is a masterpiece but also a very difficult film to
understand. Even at its very slow pace it is too much to understand in one
viewing. I paticularly love all the incidents that tangential to the main
plot: the drug overdose, encounter with a streetwalker, and costume shop
daughter's perversions. Great stuff.

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scott_s
Whenever I read about the eccentricities of famous, wealthy people, I remind
myself that these are the same kinds of quirks that I have, just amplified by
near infinite means. This is also, perhaps, a warning against reading too much
into a famous, wealthy artists' eccentricities.

The other side of this piece may also be a warning against spending too much
time preparing, just because you have the luxury of doing so. Yes, as his
assistant says, that's just how Kubrick worked. But when Kubrick had less
means, he still worked that way, I just assume that he had less means, and
eventually an outside party would push him to actually complete something.
When you have near infinite means of your own, that push may not exist, and
you may end up being less productive as a result.

~~~
logicallee
>Whenever I read about the eccentricities of famous, wealthy people, I remind
myself that these are the same kinds of quirks that I have, just amplified by
near infinite means.

maybe there is no amplification - just that nobody goes through _your_ shit
after you die.

~~~
scott_s
Wealthy people can amass much, much more than you and I.

~~~
spikels
Everything is not class warfare. You just argued above that he created less
because of his (well deserved) wealth later in life. So you can be both
jealous and disappointed. Nice rhetoric!

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cf
I remember about this time last year seeing the Kubrick exhibit at LACMA
[http://www.lacma.org/art/exhibition/stanley-
kubrick](http://www.lacma.org/art/exhibition/stanley-kubrick). They had many
of the items mentioned in this article. So you can see the index cards about
Napoleon.

Oddly, the article doesn't mention why Kubrick wanted a copy Hotel Auschwitz.
Kubrick was known to making a film on the Holocaust
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wartime_Lies](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wartime_Lies).
Not long after Schindler's List came out was the project abandoned.

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rocky1138
And, just like everything Kubrick, I don't understand the ending. What did
being fussy about boxes, and only having them available to people inside the
house, have to do with finding what he was looking for?

~~~
swang
My interpretation is that the author wrote this article to find something
about Kubrick that defines who he was.

Kubrick is known to have demanded perfection, jotting down tons and tons of
notes and details. But the public only seems this side of Kubrick in the
movies he makes. One can be a perfectionist about a trade, but carefree in
other aspects of their life.

But the boxes were the author's "Rosebud" in that even though no one outside
of the estate would see/use these boxes, and by the looks of it would have
rarely been opened, Kubrick still took the time to get boxes that were
incredibly well-designed. So in essence, the boxes embodied Kubrick's true
self, a perfectionists.

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tzury
It is worth mentioning that in his 1968's Film you see video conferences and
touchscreen tablets - as skype and iPad was invented by him.

Samsung even used it in their case agains Apple..

[http://thenextweb.com/apple/2012/08/02/judge-rules-out-
samsu...](http://thenextweb.com/apple/2012/08/02/judge-rules-out-samsungs-
kubrick-did-the-ipad-before-apple-patent-defense/)

~~~
acqq
> touchscreen tablet

No, I haven't seen anybody used touchscreen there.

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQ8pQVDyaLo](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQ8pQVDyaLo)

We can even recognize that "the tablet" is by IIX and that it has 10 real
buttons (1..9 than 0):

[http://9to5mac.files.wordpress.com/2011/08/rapny-1.jpeg](http://9to5mac.files.wordpress.com/2011/08/rapny-1.jpeg)

So it was probably then designed as a portable flat TV. Still it looks good.

~~~
fredoralive
The device is by IBM, not IIX. The site below has some better pictures of the
device's logo (and some other bits of “IBM” hardware), along with lots of
pictures of Kubrick's preference for san-serif fonts:

[http://typesetinthefuture.com/2001-a-space-
odyssey/](http://typesetinthefuture.com/2001-a-space-odyssey/)

~~~
acqq
You're right, I haven't seen that even better resolution photo.

[http://typesetinthefuture.com/postfiles/2001/2001_ibm_tele_p...](http://typesetinthefuture.com/postfiles/2001/2001_ibm_tele_pro.jpg)

We see even the brand:

    
    
       IBM
       TELE PRO
    

So it is a flat TV set after all, made by IBM.

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JanezStupar
What I wan to know is why Tony called the author two years after Kubrick's
death...

That has to be an interesting story in itself.

Edit: The answer is in the documentary Kubrick's Boxes
([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7615310](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7615310)).
It appears that Tony (Kubrick's assistant) was reading a book by the author
and remembered his request for the tape and gave him a call.

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JetFire
Aren't we all amassing a collection boxes? Some which will go untouched from
the moment they are organized. We just do it with folders on a hard drive
today. Just yesterday I started to organize my media archive
([http://pastebin.com/ZhtNgiBK](http://pastebin.com/ZhtNgiBK)). Some things
I've only collected on the prospect that maybe a friend or relative would like
to watch it one day, I have no intention of viewing it myself.

On a note related to Kubrick, here's a link to the analysis of The Shining
referenced in Room 237 by mstrmnd:
[http://www.mstrmnd.com/log/802](http://www.mstrmnd.com/log/802)

It's a cool read if you're into his films, and you've approached a point in
your own personal analysis when you thought, the deeper I go, the closer to
madness I am.

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paul_f
What's the point of being a great artist if you don't produce? Only one movie
in the last 12 years of his life is sad for him, and for us.

