Brain Pickings

Kubrick’s Napoleon: The Greatest Movie Never Made

Forty years of anticipation and how to almost-get an autograph from a cinematic icon.

After the incredible success of 2001: A Space Odyssey, Stanley Kubrick began working on a large-scale biopic about Napoleon Bonaparte. He spent countless hours digging through manuscripts, reading books and researching the life of the great French emperor, created a meticulous card catalog of the places and doings of Napoleon’s inner circle, and amassed over 15,000 location scouting photographs and 17,000 slides of Napoleonic imagery. Then he wrote a preliminary screenplay. But in his obsessive genius, Kubrick envisioned such an epic movie that it was ultimately canceled due to the exorbitant costs of location filming. (Well, that and the fact that two similar historical biopics had failed miserably in the preceding years.) And for 40 years, fans mourned the nonexistence of Kubrick’s Napoleon.

Today, publisher Taschen releases Stanley Kubrick’s Napoleon: The Greatest Movie Never Made — an equally epic tome about the project that never happened, making Kubrick’s ambitious work on Napoleon available to the world for the first time as 10 books that live inside one giant volume.

There are only 1000 copies of the limited-edition collector’s title, but even with the hefty price tag of $700, there’s little doubt die-hard Kubrick fans will be elbowing each other for a copy.

The book is a treasure chest full of Kubrick’s precious archives — his correspondence, research material, costume studies, casting considerations, location scouting photographs, sketches, and even the final draft of the screenplay reproduced in facsimile. (Yes, that’s the closest you’ll ever get to an autograph from Stanley Kubrick.) All of this is tucked inside a cleverly designed carved-out reproduction of a Napoleon history book.

To sweeten the deal, the publisher is offering exclusive access to a searchable online database, featuring Kubrick’s complete picture file of nearly 17,000 Napoleonic images — and they’ve made them all downloadable.

Stanley Kubrick’s Napoleon: The Greatest Movie Never Made is among the most ambitious publishing projects to come by in a long while, both in terms of the incredible wealth of well-researched content in hosts and the brilliantly conceived vehicle. It offers a rare peek at the creative process of a cultural icon, delivered through a fittingly ambitious prism of book design innovation.

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Ed Emberley’s Make a World: The Film

What alligators from 1972 have to do with the visual culture of modern design.

In 1972, iconic illustrator Ed Emberley published Make a World — a seemingly simple yet tremendously influential 32-page book, filled with 400 priceless illustrations that taught children how to draw anything and everything, from alligators to zeppelins. It shaped the visual culture of an entire generation of artists, designers and casual art-dabblers, democratizing aesthetic perception and practice.

This year, a collective of dedicated enthusiasts is working on Make a World: The Film — an independent documentary about the life and magic of Ed Emberley.

One of the project’s goals is to crowdsource stories, drawings and sketches inspired by Emberley’s work — so if you have one, email it to the filmmakers.

And like any grassroots art and culture project, the film could use some help from like-minded Emberley evangelists — you can get involved by donating money or your professional services, support the film by buying one of these gorgeous t-shirts from their store, and follow the project on Twitter.

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A Metaphor for Creativity: 5 Shapes, 3520 Artworks

Why ideas are like pieces of leather and what sneakers have to do with your capacity for creativity.

We believe creativity is all about innovative ways of combining the existing ideas, skills and pieces of inspiration that live in your mental pool of resources. (And we make it our mission to continuously fill that mental pool of yours with fascinating bits of diverse and eclectic brilliance.)

Which is why we love the concept behind Hayworth Mid II, the latest line of limited-edition sneakers by Y-3, in collaboration with graffiti artist Momo.

The idea is brilliantly simple — Momo cut five double-sided shapes, combinable into 3520 artworks by changing up their layered order on a nail. (Well, technically, there are 3840 possible combinations, but 320 of them become redundant when the ring, the smallest shape, becomes obscured by one of the larger shapes.)

Y-3 only produced 350 pairs of sneakers, so each was technically unique, but this sort of semi-customization raises an interesting question: Can we really automatize customization while still maintaining its psychological and conceptual appeal?

In a way, ideas are like these shape combinations — except only a fraction of the combinations are truly great ideas. Which is why it’s so important to build a vast pool of mental “shapes” — thoughts and memories and pieces of inspiration — combinable in near-infinite ways into new ideas, thus maximizing the drops of brilliance within that sea of possibility. And there’s no better way to do that than by growing indiscriminate curiosity about the eclectic interestingness of culture.

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