Kubrick replies: “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 onto his letter box.

“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 favorite 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 talk about?” 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.”

“So is that note to the postman a sort of private tribute from you to Kubrick?” I ask.

“Yeah,” says Tony. He smiles to himself. “Yeah, yeah.”

For a moment I also smile at the unlikely image of the two men discussing the relative merits of typefaces late into the night, but then I remember the first time I saw the trailer for Eyes Wide Shut, the way the words CRUISE, KIDMAN, KUBRICK flashed dramatically onto the screen in large red, yellow, and white colors, to the song “Baby Did a Bad Bad Thing.” Had the words not been in Futura Extra Bold, I realize now, they wouldn’t have sent such a chill up the spine. Kubrick and Tony obviously became, at some point during their relationship, tireless amateur sleuths, wanting to amass and consume and understand all information.

But this attention to detail becomes so amazingly evident and seemingly all-consuming in the later boxes, I begin to wonder whether it was worth it. In one Portakabin, for example, there are hundreds and hundreds of boxes marked EWS—Portman Square, EWS—Kensington, and Chelsea, etc., etc. I choose the one marked EWS—Islington because that’s where I live. Inside are hundreds of photographs of doorways. The doorway of my local video shop, Century Video, is here, as is the doorway of my dry cleaners, Spots Suede Services on Upper Street. Then, as I continue to flick through the photographs, I find to my astonishment pictures of the doorways of the houses on my own street.

Handwritten at the top of these photographs are the words “Hooker doorway?”

“Huh,” I think.

So somebody within the Kubrick organization (it was, in fact, his nephew Manuel Harlan) once walked up my street, on Kubrick’s orders, hoping to find a suitable doorway for a hooker in Eyes Wide Shut. It is both an extremely interesting find and a bit of a kick in the teeth. Judging by the writing on the boxes, just about every doorway in London has been captured and placed inside this Portakabin. This solves one mystery for me—the one about why Kubrick, a native of the Bronx, chose the St. Albans countryside, of all places, for his home. I realize now that it didn’t matter. It could have been anywhere. It is as if the whole world is to be found somewhere within this estate.

•   •   •

LATER I GET TO MEET Manuel Harlan. “How long did all this take you?” I ask him.

“A year,” he says.

“Every day?” I ask.

“Pretty much,” he says.

“Was it a good year?” I ask.

“It was a great year,” he says. “I think I took thirty thousand photos in all. That’s a number I arrived at once. At first it was just going to be stately homes. Then I started looking for coffee shops. And then doorways. Then toy shops. Mortuaries. Oh! Costume places! That was a really long job. I was in every costume shop in the southeast of England.”

“Did he look at them all?” I ask.

“All!” he says. “With tremendous excitement! One time he wanted me to do the whole of Commercial Road. But he didn’t want the buildings tilting back or forward in the photographs. So I had to take a ladder. I’d climb the ladder, take the picture, get down, move the ladder twelve feet, and on and on. Commercial Road is a very long road. Stanley was constantly on the phone going, ‘Have you finished yet? How fast can you get here?’”

Manuel says once he reached the end of Commercial Road, he hurried straight to the St. Albans branch of Snappy Snaps to get the pictures developed. Then he assiduously taped them together to form a perfect panorama of the whole of Commercial Road. Back at the Kubrick house he carefully laid the panorama out—like a homemade Google street view years before Google had conceived of such a thing—down a long corridor. Kubrick emerged from his room, looked at it, and said: “Well. It sure beats going there.”

So was it all worth it? Was the hooker doorway eventually picked for Eyes Wide Shut the quintessential hooker doorway? Back at home I watch Eyes Wide Shut again on DVD. The hooker doorway looks exactly like any doorway you would find in Lower Manhattan—maybe on Canal Street or in the East Village. It is a red door, up some brownstone steps, with the number 265 painted on the glass at the top. Tom Cruise is pulled through the door by the hooker. The scene is over in a few seconds. It was eventually shot on a set at Pinewood.

I remember the Napoleon archive, the years it took Kubrick and some assistants to compile it, and I suggest to Jan Harlan, Kubrick’s executive producer and brother-in-law (and Manuel’s father), that had there not been all those years of attention to detail during the early planning of the movie, perhaps Napoleon would have actually been made.

“That’s a completely theoretical and obsolete observation!” replies Jan. “That’s like saying if Vermeer had painted in a different style he’d have done a hundred more paintings.”

“OK,” I say.

“Why don’t you just accept that this was how he worked?” says Jan.

“But if he hadn’t allowed his tireless work ethic to take him to unproductive places, he’d have made more films,” I say. “For instance, the ‘Space: 1999’ lawsuit seems, with the benefit of hindsight, a little trivial.”

“Of course I wish he had made more films,” says Jan.

Jan and I are having this conversation inside the stable block, surrounded by hundreds of boxes. For the past few days I have been reading the contents of those marked “Fan Letters” and “Résumés.”

They are filled with pleas from hundreds of strangers, written over the decades. They say much the same thing: “I know I have the talent to be a big star. I know it’s going to happen to me one day. I just need a break. Will you give me that break?”

All these letters are—every single one of them—written by people I have never heard of. Many of these young actors and actresses will be middle-aged by now. I want to go back in time and say to them, “You’re not going to make it! It’s best you know now rather than face years of having your dreams slowly erode.” They are heartbreaking boxes.

“Stanley never wrote back to the fans,” says Jan. “He never, never responded. It would have been too much. It would have driven him crazy. He didn’t like to get engaged with strangers.”

(Actually, Kubrick did write back to fans, on random, rare occasions. I find two replies in total. Maybe he only ever wrote back twice. One reads, “Your letter of 4th May was overwhelming. What can I say in reply? Sincerely, Stanley Kubrick.” The other reads, “Dear Mr. William. Thank you for writing. No comment about A Clockwork Orange. You will have to decide for yourself. Sincerely, Stanley Kubrick.”)