Burning Secret by Stefan Zweig: Stanley Kubrick's Lost Screenplay Found

Burning Secret by Stefan Zweig

Lots of Hollywood buzz today as Stanley Kubrick’s so-called lost screenplay has been found. Based on the novella by Austrian writer Stefan Zweig, the screenplay was co-written with Calder Willingham who counts The Graduate, Paths of Glory, and Little Big Man among his credits.

A film academic, Nathan Abrams, a professor at Bangor University in Wales, told BBC radio that the son of one of Kubrick's collaborators who wishes to remain anonymous showed him the 100-plus-page screenplay. “It’s a full script: beginning, middle, end,” Abrams told BBC radio. “As to whether that was the final one, we can’t say.”

Abrams added “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.”

The film was adapted in 1988 by Stanley Kubrick’s assistant, Andrew Birkin, with David Eberts, Faye Dunaway and Klaus Maria Brandauer. That film—presumably written by Birkin himself—is available on Amazon.

About the book:

A suave baron takes a fancy to twelve-year-old Edgar’s mother, while the three are holidaying in an Austrian mountain resort. His initial advances rejected, the baron befriends Edgar in order to get closer to the woman he desires. The initially unsuspecting child soon senses something is amiss but has no idea of the burning secret that is driving the affair, and that will soon change his life forever.