A forgotten screenplay by filmmaker Stanley Kubrick has been discovered more than 60 years after it was written, The Guardian reported. An adaptation of Austrian author Stefan Zweig’s 1913 novella Brennendes Geheimnis, the script, titled Burning Secret, centres on a mysterious baron who befriends a 10-year-old boy in order to seduce his mother.
Bangor University professor and Kubrick expert Nathan Abrams discovered the script while researching a book. “I couldn’t believe it,” Abrams told The Guardian. “It’s so exciting. It was believed to have been lost.” He added that though Kubrick fans knew that the director intended to make the film, no one was sure whether the script had been completed. “We now have a copy and this proves that he had done a full screenplay,” Abrams said.
Kubrick co-wrote the screenplay with Calder Willingham for the MGM studio in 1956, shortly before collaborating with him on the anti-war drama Paths of Glory (1957). The predator is described as a “very handsome, masculine-looking man of about 30”, according to The Guardian report. While the mother and son are Jewish in Zweig’s original story, Kubrick’s version features American protagonists.
Kubrick died in 1999 after completing the Tom Cruise-Nicole Kidman starrer Eyes Wide Shut. Many of the 13 films that he directed over the course of his career are considered masterpieces, including 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and The Shining (1980).
According to Abrams, Burning Secret might not have been filmed because of the Motion Picture Production Code guidelines that were applied to American films between 1930 and 1968. Describing the film as “the inverse of Lolita”, Abrams told The Guardian, “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.”
Zweig’s story was adapted into a film titled Burning Secret by Kubrick’s former assistant Andrew Birkin in 1988. The movie starred Faye Dunaway and Klaus Maria Brandauer and won a special jury prize at the Venice Film Festival.