News Summary

• Stanley Kubrick had been dreaming of a Napoleon Bonaparte biopic long before he acquired the clout to make it.
• The director hired dozens of research assistants and consulted with prominent professors to help him reassemble le petit caporal on a near-genetic level.
• He inhaled 278 books and thousands of scholarly papers to understand not just the man, but the conflict-laden times in which he thrived.
• The draft is available online (having been discovered in a Kansas salt mine in 1994), and it's an engrossing read.