A couple of months before Stanley Kubrick and screenwriter Calder Willingham embarked on their masterful "Paths of Glory" collaboration, they were working a screenplay adaptation of Stefan Zweig’s “The Burning Secret“, a 1913 novel about the manipulative backstabbing between a divorced mother, her new love interest, and her 12 year old son. Sounds like it would have been right up Kubrick's alley. A nice companion piece to his "Lolita." The script was submitted to the MGM script department on 10.24.56, but MGM execs rejected it and it was never to be worked on again.
During the late '80s Andrew Birkin, a Kubrick worker on "2001: A Space Odyssey" and "Napoleon," wrote and directed his own version of "The Burning Secret" starring Faye Dunaway. I've never seen the film, but reception back in 1989 was mixed on it.
All of this to say, Bangor University film professor Nathan Abrams has found a copy of Kubrick's screenplay for "The Burning Secret." Is an adaptation on the horizon?
It does make sense, especially given the fact that HBO had announced they were producing a version of Kubrick’s ultimate unrealized opus, "Napoleon." Cary Fukunaga was supposed to direct with Steven Spielberg producing.
Now that we've mentioned "Napoleon," what exactly is going on with that? The project is still categorized as in development on its IMDB page, but with Fukunaga not mentioned as director.
I never thought Fukunaga was a good fit for the screenplay and, for that matter, Kubrick's original artistic intent. Having read the Napoleon screenplay many years ago, I do know that the film would have very much benefited from having the artistic style Kubrick was developing for himself back in the late '70s. I always mention to people that the unrealized screenplay very much read like it needed the visual sensibilities that Kubrick masterfully brought to "Barry Lyndon," but mixed with the subversive edge of "A Clockwork Orange." Only Kubrick could have directed that 'Napoleon" screenplay and, maybe, Paul Thomas Anderson today. PTA is the only modern director that could pull off a Kubrick "Napoleon," with the darkly obsessive visual style and modern-day subversiveness that it was intended to be delivered with. And, maybe, Christopher Nolan. Yes, subversiveness is very much missing in Nolan's vocabulary, but he does have the visual style to pull it off. Just watch "Dunkirk."