Stanley Kubrick's unrealized projects

Film director Stanley Kubrick worked on many film projects which never saw completion.

In 1956, after MGM turned down Harris and Kubrick's request to film Paths of Glory, they invited him to look through their other properties. Harris and Kubrick discovered Stefan Zweig's novel The Burning Secret, in which a young baron tries to seduce a young Jewish woman by first befriending her twelve-year-old son, who eventually becomes wise to the situation. Kubrick was very excited about this novel and hired novelist Calder Willingham to produce a screenplay, but Production Code restrictions made the project impossible.^[1]

Kubrick had earlier been interested in adapting another Calder Willingham novel (Natural Child), but quickly realized it could not be done within the Production Code.^[2]

After the success of 2001, Kubrick planned a large-scale biographical film about Napoleon Bonaparte.^[3] He conducted research, read books about the French Emperor, and wrote a preliminary screenplay (which has become available on the Internet). With the help of assistants, he meticulously created a card catalog of the places and deeds of Napoleon's inner circle during its operative years. Kubrick scouted locations, planning to film large portions of the film on location in France, and in the UK studios. He was also going to film the battle scenes in Romania, where he enlisted the help of the Romanian army, which gave Kubrick 40,000 soldiers, and 10,000 cavalrymen to film the battle scenes with paper costumes. In a conversation with the British Film Institute, Kubrick's brother-in-law Jan Harlan, stated that at the time the film was about to go into production, David Hemmings was Kubrick's favorite choice to play Napoleon, and Audrey Hepburn was his favorite choice to play Josephine. In notes to his financial backers, preserved in The Kubrick Archives, Kubrick told them he was unsure how his Napoleon film would turn out, but that he expected to create "the best movie ever made."^[4]

Ultimately, the project was canceled for the prohibitive cost of location filming, the Western release of Sergei Bondarchuk's epic film version of Leo Tolstoy's novel War and Peace (1968), and the commercial failure of Bondarchuk's Napoleon-themed film Waterloo (1970). Much of Kubrick's historical research would influence Barry Lyndon (1975), the storyline of which ends in 1789, about 15 years before the Napoleonic Wars began. As late as 1987, Kubrick stated that he had not given up on the project, mentioning that he had read almost 500 books on the historical figure and that he was convinced that a film worthy of the subject had not yet appeared.

As early as 1976, Kubrick wanted to make a film about the Holocaust, trying to persuade Isaac Bashevis Singer to contribute an original screenplay. Kubrick sought a "dramatic structure that compressed the complex and vast information into the story of an individual who represented the essence of this man-made hell." Singer declined, saying, "I don't know the first thing about the Holocaust."^[5][6] In the early 1990s, Kubrick almost went into production on a film of Louis Begley's Wartime Lies, the story of a boy and his aunt in hiding during the Holocaust. The first-draft screenplay, titled Aryan Papers, had been penned by Kubrick himself. Full Metal Jacket co-screenwriter Michael Herr reports that Kubrick had considered casting Julia Roberts or Uma Thurman as the aunt. Eventually, Johanna ter Steege was cast as the aunt and Joseph Mazzello as the young boy, with Kubrick even travelling to the Czech city of Brno as a possible location for wartime Warsaw. But Kubrick chose not to make the film due to the release of Steven Spielberg's Holocaust-themed Schindler's List in 1993. In addition, according to Kubrick's wife, Christiane, the subject itself had become too depressing and difficult for the director. Kubrick eventually concluded that an accurate film about the Holocaust was beyond the capacity of cinema and abandoned the project in 1995 and turned his attention back to A.I.^[7]

On November 1, 2006, Philip Hobbs, Kubrick's son-in-law, announced that he would be shepherding a film treatment of Lunatic at Large, which was commissioned by Kubrick for treatment from noir pulp novelist Jim Thompson in the 1950s, but had been lost until Kubrick's death.^[8] This project is currently being developed for future release.

A number of screenplays remain for which Kubrick was either commissioned or wrote for unsuccessful projects, include The German Lieutenant (co-written with Richard Adams), featuring a group of German soldiers in a mission during the final days of World War II;^[9] I Stole 16 Million Dollars, about notorious 1930s bank robber Willie Sutton (the film was to be made by Kirk Douglas' Bryna production company, despite Douglas believing the script was poorly written, and Cary Grant was approached for the lead);^[10] and a first draft of a script about the Confederate Mosby Rangers guerilla force in the Civil War.^[11]

Kubrick is reported to have been fascinated by the career of Nazi filmmaker Veit Harlan, his wife's uncle, and to have contemplated a film about the social circle surrounding Joseph Goebbels. Although Kubrick worked on it for several years, this never got further than a rough story outline.^[12]

Kubrick wanted to make a film based on Umberto Eco's 1988 novel Foucault's Pendulum, but Eco declined because of his dissatisfaction with the filming of his earlier novel The Name of the Rose and Kubrick's unwillingness to allow him to write the screenplay himself; after Kubrick died, Eco would admit he regretted his decision.^[13]

Before moving onto 2001, Terry Southern suggested that Kubrick should make a high-budget pornographic film called Blue Movie in an attempt to take the genre and reinvent it. He decided not to do it, believing that he did not have the temperament for pornographic cinema and did not think he could successfully reinvent the genre enough to truly elevate it. At this time, Southern started work on a novel that would not be published until 1970, also entitled Blue Movie, about a highly regarded art film director named Boris Adrian who attempts just such a film (the book is dedicated to Kubrick).^[14]

When J. R. R. Tolkien sold the film rights of The Lord of the Rings to United Artists in 1969, the Beatles considered making a film of it, and approached Kubrick as a possible director, but Kubrick told John Lennon he thought the novel was unfilmable due to its immensity.^[15][16] Peter Jackson, who later directed The Lord of the Rings film trilogy, states a major factor killing the project was Tolkien's opposition to the Beatles' participation.^[17]

Kubrick also toyed with the idea of adapting Perfume by Patrick Süskind, a book he greatly enjoyed, though nothing came of it.^[18] It would later be adapted for the screen by Tom Tykwer as Perfume: The Story of a Murderer.

• Baxter, John (1999). Stanley Kubrick: A Biography. Seuil. ISBN 978-0-7867-0485-9.
• Castle, Alison, ed. (2009). Stanley Kubrick's Napoleon: The Greatest Movie Never Made. Taschen. ISBN 978-3-8228-3065-9.
• Caldwell, Thomas (March 27, 2006). "(Review of) The wolf at the door: Stanley Kubrick, history & the Holocaust. [[#Cocks2004]]". Screening the Past. 19. Latrobe University. ISSN 1328-9756. Retrieved 2008-10-25. {{cite journal}}: URL–wikilink conflict (help)
• Ciment, Michel (1982). "Kubrick on A Clockwork Orange: An interview with Michel Ciment". The Kubrick Site. Retrieved 2010-01-09.
• Cocks, Geoffrey (2004). The Wolf at the Door: Stanley Kubrick, History, and the Holocaust. Peter Lang. ISBN 0-8204-7115-1.
• Drout, Michael D. C., ed. (2006). J.R.R. Tolkien Encyclopedia: Scholarship and Critical Assessment. Routledge. ISBN 0-415-96942-5.
• Dupont, Joan (September 15, 2001). "Kubrick Speaks, Through Family's Documentary". New York Times. Retrieved 2008-05-08. ^{[dead link]}
• Mason, Darryl (October 4, 2000). "The greatest movie Stanley Kubrick never made". Salon. Retrieved 2010-01-10.
• Naperstak, Ben (December 15, 2007). "The Armani of Literature". Melbourne: The Age. Retrieved 2010-01-17.