This Lost Stanley Kubrick Film Is Finally Being Made

When the great director Stanley Kubrick died in 1999, he left behind a treasure trove of archival material that included detailed notes for many unfinished and unmade productions. The list of projects developed by the Eyes Wide Shut and The Shining director that never got off the ground is long and fascinating. An Indiewire article in 2013 took a deep dive into Kubrick's unmade projects, like The Aryan Papers, a Holocaust drama that he developed in the '90s but shelved after the release of Schindler's List, a movie Kubrick didn't like; and Napoleon, a historical epic Kubrick wanted to be his follow-up to 2001: A Space Odyssey but never came to fruition. Steven Spielberg announced a miniseries version of Kubrick's Napoleon in 2013, per the BBC, but that never happened, either.

Spielberg famously finished a project Kubrick started, a science fiction film about a robot boy that Kubrick had been working on with various screenwriters for decades before he handed it off to Spielberg, who made the film, A.I. Artificial Intelligence, after Kubrick died. So far, A.I. is the only posthumous Kubrick project finished, though many attempts have been announced and abandoned. But now it sounds like some intrepid producers are finally bringing one of Kubrick's old scripts to the screen.

Variety reports that producers Bruce Hendricks and Galen Walker have optioned the rights to Lunatic at Large, an idea by Kubrick and his frequent collaborator Jim Thompson that dates back to the '50s.

Thompson is considered one of the great pulp crime novelists, and Kubrick hired him to work on the screenplays for two of his early movies, 1956's The Killing and 1957's Paths of Glory. According to Indiewire, Lunatic at Large was to be their next collaboration. Thompson wrote the script and Kubrick was happy with it, but then Kubrick got busy with the historical epic Spartacus and Lunatic at Large fell by the wayside. Kubrick always wanted to circle back and finish Lunatic at Large, but he lost the script, and it never happened. Kubrick's son-in-law Philip Hobbs rediscovered the work for Lunatic at Large after Kubrick's death and has been trying to get it made since at least 2006, according to The New York Times. (Scarlett Johansson and Sam Rockwell were attached to a version in 2010 that never materialized.)

Variety says that Hendricks and Walker are keeping the story under wraps, but unless they're drastically changing the plot, the story is already known. Indiewire describes it as "the story of an ex-carnival worker with serious anger-management issues, and the nervous, attractive barfly he picks up in a Hopper-esque tavern" set in 1956 New York City. Hendricks and Walker's take is described as "a film-noir thriller" like The Killing. It's slated to go into production this fall.