Danny Leigh talks about "Parallel Cosmos" in a great article dated from March 20th at The Guardian debating the "spectral alternative history of cinema" of what might have happened if "Michael Powell had reedeemed his reputation after the career suicide of Peeping Tom with his long-gestating version of The Tempest", which was rejected due to budgeting reasons. I'm a sucker for alternative histories. Anything that involves Adolf Hitler never being born, surviving World War II, or Germany actually winning the war is the kind of literature I can, and often do eat up for breakfast. Cheerio's just can't compete with seeing what the world would be like if we were all speaking German. My cinematic favourites are often to do with the Bond franchise. What if Alfred Hitchcock's meeting to direct Thunderball had gone more favourably, or what if the studio had listened to Quentin Tarantino's plea that he was the right man to direct Casino Royale, in the way Ian Fleming originally told it. Leigh's article doesn't delve into that particular history but does talk about Stanley Kubrick's post-2001 A Space Odyssey career when he was telling producers everywhere he was about to make "the best movie ever made". That movie, as any Kubrick fan will automatically know was to be Napoleon. Kubrick spent years fully convinced that their was a movie of supreme quality in the life of Napoleon Bonaparte, just begging to be made and as part of his research, claimed to have read 500 novels on the great man. It was something of a lifelong obsession for him. Like the great Sergio Leone who forever wanted to adapt The Godfatherbut eventually had to settle for Harry Grey's novel The Hoods which eventually became Once Upon A Time in America, Kubrick took all his research and instead made Barry Lyndon, set in the period just before the Napoleonic wars and then took Jack Nicholson, the actor he so badly wanted to use and worked with him on The Shining instead. Neither Barry Lyndon or the 1971 released A Clockwork Orange would have been made if Kubrick had been able to make Napoloen in the 70's and as the change of one thing causes a string that changes everything, we would have probably never have gotten The Shining either. In three months, the whole tale of Kubrick's Napoleon will be available at the fingerprints of anyone willing to part with the several hundred of dollars or is even lucky enough to get their hands on the limited edition product, when the second coffee book sized Taschen book on Kubrick is released. This one is solely in regards to his doomed Napoloen production and has been written by Allison Castle and edited by Kubrick's widow Christiane. Alison Castle's previous Taschen spectacular on the works of Kubrick, titled The Stanley Kubrick Archives, remains the greatest coffee table book on film ever published and has a nice firm place on my shelf (note... the image below is not of mine but is identical to it). Mystery Man on Film wrote in January 2007...
Kubrick sifted through more than 18,000 documents and books about Napoleon. He constructed a monster index file of the 50 principal characters in his movie, which were all written on 3x5 cards and organized by the dates of all the key events in Napoleons life from his birth to his death. He had a different card for each character. That way, Kubrick could quickly determine where, during any given period in Napoleons life, each character was and what that character was doing. He had 25,000 index cards.
