Boris is a chess computer from the late 1970s. God, it’s a weird thing: this tidy wooden box with chess pieces and a fold-out board and a lump of computer, basically, a brown shiny brick of computer with keys and a little display. That display! Boris wouldn’t just make moves. Boris would be a jerk about it too, typing out burn messages when you were up against it. Face to face with Boris a few weeks back, though, what filled me with delight wasn’t just that here was a funny little chess computer I had never heard of. Here was one that had once belonged to Stanley Kubrick.
I am a proper Kubrick bore. Honestly, I am bloody awful about Kubrick. But like a lot of bores, it’s because there is something about Kubrick that I feel everybody should get to experience. Over the years I have watched all the films dozens of times – I am the son of two Kubrick bores, for what it’s worth – and I have also read a bunch of books on Kubrick and his films, including at least one biography, by John Baxter.
The problem with reading about Kubrick, though, is that you’re often reading about someone who is reading about Kubrick. Because he kept to himself such a lot, Kubrick is terribly hard to get a handle on. I got a decent sense of the timeline from the Baxter book, and there are loads of lovely anecdotes in there, but the man himself did not quite emerge from the pages.