‘Burning Secret’: Stanley Kubrick’s Once-Lost Screenplay Has Been Found 60 Years Later — and Could Be Made Into a Film

Nearly 20 years after his death, Stanley Kubrick continues to fascinate and confound. The endlessly influential filmmaker is almost as notable for the films he didn’t make as he is for those he did, and it now appears one of those lost projects may not actually be lost: “Burning Secret.”

Kubrick co-wrote the adaptation of Stefan Zweig’s novella of the same name with Calder Willingham in 1956, shortly before making “Paths of Glory.” The script has been found by Nathan Abrams, a film professor at Bangor University, according to the Guardian. “I couldn’t believe it,” the Kubrick scholar said of the discovery. “It’s so exciting. It was believed to have been lost.”

“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 added. He describes the project as “the inverse of ‘Lolita,” saying that, “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.”

The script is more than 100 typed pages. “It’s a full screenplay so could be completed by film-makers today,” Abrams added. Read the full story here.