“Did you do this kind of massive research for all the movies?” I ask Tony.

“More or less,” he says.

“OK,” I say. “I understand how you might do this for Napoleon, but what about, say, The Shining?”

“Somewhere here,” says Tony, “is just about every ghost book ever written, and there’ll be a box containing photographs of the exteriors of maybe every mountain hotel in the world.”

There is a silence.

“Tony,” I say, “can I look through the boxes?”

I’ve been coming to the Kubrick house a couple of times a month ever since.