Death is no obstacle to Kubrick's career
By Ben Hoyle, Arts Reporter Times UK 11/1/06
Seven years after his death, Stanley Kubrick's career as a
screenwriter is taking off in a big way. He has already been credited with
creating one posthumous film: Steven Spielberg adapted Artificial Intelligence:
AI from notes and drafts that the director left behind. Now three new projects
that Kubrick either wrote or worked on extensively are poised to see the light
of day half a century after they were filed away and lost.
They include God Fearing Man, an original Kubrick
idea and a road movie that promises
to provide the missing link between two of his best known films, A Clockwork
Orange and The Shining. The three manuscripts, all written in the late 1950s,
were found after Kubrick's death in 1999 in one of the many trunks where the
director hoarded valued possessions at his home near St Albans.
Mr. Hobbs was most excited by the discovery of an
80-page treatment for Lunatic at Large, a dark mystery thriller about an
axe-murderer who has escaped from an asylum. "I knew what it was right away,
because I remember Stanley talking about Lunatic. He
was always saying he wished he knew where it was, because it was such a great
idea." It is set in New York in 1956 and was worked up into a narrative by
Kubrick's collaborator at the time, the pulp fiction novelist Jim Thompson.
Charles Finch, the British producer of Ghosts, which showed
last week in The Times BFI 50th London Film Festival, and Edward R. Pressman,
the American producer of Wall Street and Reversal of Fortune, are now guiding
the project. Finch described Lunatic at Large as "a wild and crazy Kerouac
style adventure. In Kubrick terms, its like A Clockwork Orange meets The Shining
with a fantastic twist at the end". Colin Farrell has been offered the lead
role.
The director will be Christopher Palmer, one of Britain's
leading directors of commercials and the man behind the Carlsberg World Cup
advert that showed Bobby Charlton and other luminaries of the game playing park
football. The script has been fine tuned from Kubrick and Thompson's original by
Stephen R. Clarke, a veteran of British television.
Kubrick's widow, Christiane, said last night: "Stanley
threw a lot of things away. These weren't among them, so he really liked these
three projects. I remember reading them at the time. He was very excited about
Lunatic but then other things happened...the stories were packed away and
then we moved to England (in 1961) to do Lolita here."
Archived 2006-09 Alex D. Thrawn for www.MalcolmMcDowell.net