A Lost Stanley Kubrick Screenplay Called BURNING SECRET Has Been Found

For those of you who are fans of Stanley Kubrick, you'll be interested to learn that a lost screenplay for a film called Burning Secret that he was working on has been found. The script was discovered by a British film academic, Nathan Abrams, who was researching the legendary director’s last picture, Eyes Wide Shut. What a crazy cool find! 

Kubrick was co-writing the script with Calder Willingham (The Graduate) and it is an adaptation of a 1913 novella by Austrian novelist and playwright Stefan Zweig. Kubrick and Willingham also worked together on 1957 on the anti-war film Paths of Glory, starring Kirk Douglas.

The story for Burning Secret follows "a mother and son on a holiday and a mysterious man who befriends the young boy in an attempt to seduce his mother."

That definitely sounds like a story that Kubrick would want to tell. According to Variety, "It was known that Kubrick had worked on Burning Secret but not to what extent, or whether there was a completed screenplay."

It's said that what was found is a full screenplay with 100-plus pages. What we don't know is if it is a final draft. If someone wanted to develop a film out of the script, they totally could. But, as Abrams points out, "whether it would fit Stanley Kubrick’s vision, that’s a whole other matter….You have to add into the mix that Stanley only ever looked at a screenplay as a blueprint to which he then added his audiovisual expertise."

I'm sure that some studio and filmmaker will team up to attempt to bring Kubrick's vision of this story to life on the big screen at some point.