“Plumbing Stanley Kubrick”, 1999 (; backlinks; similar):
[A Scottish writer’s memoir of years working on A.I. Artificial Intelligence & coping with Stanley Kubrick’s eccentricities.
Summoned to Kubrick’s secluded mansion and offered an enormous sum of money, Watson began collaborating on a film idea with Kubrick, who was a perfectionist who demanded endless marathon revisions of possible stories and ideas, only to throw them out and hare off on an entirely different avenue; he would spend extravagantly on travel or books on a topic or demand photos of a particular place or a specific item like a bag on sale only discard them without a second look, perennially challenging his assistants’ patience. (This attitude extended to his films, where he thought nothing of ordering in an entire plastic replica garden, only to decide it was inadequate, discard it, and order real palm trees flown in.) He was a lover of animals like cats, dogs, and birds, requiring a servant to mow grass & deliver it to a cat kept upstairs on a daily basis, although his affection was often quite as harmful as helpful (his generosity in ordering feeding of the birds made them obese). Careless of rough drafts, he’d lose printouts or erase disks, but even more paranoid, he would be infuriated when the local hacker who assisted them with computer problems restored files from backups the hacker had prudently kept. This paranoia further kept him terrified about global geopolitics, such as whether Saddam Hussein would trigger nuclear war in the Middle East.
For all the surreal comedy, when Kubrick dies—A.I still being nowhere near filming, of course—and Watson writes up his memoirs, he finds that he misses Kubrick and “I remain sad that he’s gone.”]
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