It’s hard to believe, but filmmaker Stanley Kubrick only helmed 13 features in his career. To put that in perspective, director Michael Bay has also produced 13 feature films but is showing no signs of slowing down. Hardly seems fair, doesn’t it? Well, in an interesting series of events, a Kubrick historian has found a long, lost screenplay co-written by the legendary filmmaker, and maybe, just maybe, there could be a new Kubrick film in the future.
The Guardian reported that Nathan Abrams, a university professor and Kubrick expert, has uncovered a finished screenplay for the unproduced film “Burning Secret” that was co-written by Kubrick, alongside collaborator Calder Willingham. The screenplay was written in 1956 but was apparently shelved by MGM, for an unconfirmed reason.
As expected, Abrams was surprised to uncover the script. “I couldn’t believe it. It’s so exciting. It was believed to have been lost,” said Abrams.
The researcher discovered the script while doing research for an upcoming book about Kubrick’s final film, 1999’s “Eyes Wide Shut.” According to Abrams, the script is in the possession of the son of one of Kubrick’s collaborators.
“Burning Secret” is based on the 1913 novella by author Stefan Zweig. The story follows a young boy, who is befriended by an older man. The adult attempts to use his friendship with the young boy to help him seduce the boy’s mother. “Kubrick aficionados know he wanted to do it, [but] no one ever thought it was completed. We now have a copy and this proves that he had done a full screenplay,” Abrams says.
The script describes the young boy: “A young boy of about 10 stands on the veranda, hands clasped behind him in an almost adult manner … Lonely, bored, he plays with a yo-yo …”
“In ‘Burning Secret,’ the main character befriends the son to get to the mother. In ‘Lolita,’ he marries the mother to get to the daughter. I think that with the 1956 production code, that would be a tricky one to get by. But he managed with ‘Lolita’ in 1962 – only just,” says Abrams.
The original story is set in Austria, but according to Abrams, Kubrick updated the story for more modern times, “Kubrick rewrites it and it’s contemporary American with American names.”
The big question now is what is done with the script, now that its existence is known to the public. This isn’t just some treatment or random notes scribbled into a journal. “It’s a full screenplay so could be completed by film-makers today,” explains Abrams.
Does it just stay unpublished and seen by only a few people? Does it get published as a book? Or perhaps a studio is going to be willing to produce the film that Kubrick was never able to? No one is certain what the future holds, but one thing is for sure – there’s unproduced Kubrick work out there, and that’s great news for fans of the filmmaker.