Long Lost Unproduced Stanley Kubrick Script is For Sale

Kubrick fans rejoice and get ready to open your checkbooks... or savings accounts... 

The script for Burning Secret, "certified by experts" to be a genuine work of Mr. Kubrick according to Deadline, could go for around $20,000.

That's actually not a terrible deal for a spec script sale, and while this route doesn't QUITE fit into the methods we explain in our how to sell a screenplay post, it could be an interesting new entry into that process... 

The script is an adaptation of 1913 work by Stefan Zweig. Zweig, born in Austria, fled his home country in 1934 and Europe altogether in 1940 sometime after Hitler's rise to power. 

But what of this story? And Kubrick's adaptation of it? And why didn't anyone make the movie? 

At first glance, it would appear that the subject matter was just a little too racy and weird for Hollywood. The basic plot is that a silver-tongued insurance salesman manipulates a 10-year-old-boy so he can get closer to the boy's married mother. 

The timing of this script within Kubrick's career was just after his crime movie The Killing, and around the time he was working on Paths Of Glory. 

Which, if you happen to be in Los Angeles, you can see this weekend. 

Burning Secret also could have been shelved for any number of standard reasons. And bringing it to the screen now presents a host of challenges to anyone attempting to do so. In all likelihood you will not see it coming to theaters, or Netflix, anytime... ever. 

Considering it wouldn't be long before he adapted Lolita for the screen, it seems like perhaps Kubrick fulfilled his desire to tell this type of story regardless of Burning Desire's fate. Did we need another version of it in the Kubrick oeuvre? 

Probably not. His oeuvre holds up pretty well without it.