Last week I was editing a fascinating book about Stanley Kubrick's last film, "Eyes Wide Shut." It discussed the extensive planning of the movie, the arduous process of writing a screenplay that "satisficed" the director, the lengthy, no-expenses-spared shooting (New York taxicabs and newspaper honor boxes were shipped to the London studio for verisimilitude), and the film's impact on popular culture.
In short, it was one of my rare work projects that I would actually read for pleasure (please don't tell my employer).
As part of my task, I had to keep a running list of where the footnotes appeared, so I printed out the list of notes and jotted down the page numbers as they appeared.
Call it frugality or what you will, I never recycle a piece of office paper without using both sides. So today I was preparing my quarterly financial report for an organization I belong to and printed it out, reusing my pages of notes. My fellow board members are going to get a surprise when they see on the back of the profit-and-loss statement details about fin-de-siècle wallpaper, 16-foot-tall Christmas trees, the precise measurements of Tom Cruise's face, the many alternatives considered for Nicole Kidman's famous line "if you men only knew," and how (conspiracy theorists believe) Kubrick was murdered for revealing the secrets of the Illuminati as part of the masked ball.
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