RARA-AVIS: Jim Thompson/Stanley Kubrick

From: ejgorman99@aol.com
Date: 31 Oct 2006


http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/31/movies/31scri.html?ref=arts& pagewanted=print

After Death, My Sweet: From an Idea by Kubrick, a New Film May Be Born By CHARLES McGRATH

Stanley Kubrick never threw anything away. On the other hand, he didn't have much of a filing system, and when he moved - permanently, it turned out - from Hollywood to London in 1962, a great many things went astray. Among them was the sole copy of a film treatment called "Lunatic at Large," which Mr. Kubrick had commissioned in the late '50s from the noir pulp novelist Jim Thompson, with whom he had worked on "The Killing," a 1956 bank-heist story that became his first successful feature, and then on 1957's "Paths of Glory."

The manuscript remained lost until after Mr. Kubrick's death, in 1999, when his son-in-law, Philip Hobbs, working with an archivist, turned it up, along with a couple of other scripts, and set about trying to make it into a movie.

There were a couple of false starts. Mr. Hobbs originally approached the French company Pathé - partly because the French hold Jim Thompson in the same esteem as Edgar Allan Poe and Mickey Rourke - and after that arrangement fell through, he formed a partnership with Edward R. Pressman, a New York-based producer, and the London producers Finch & Partners. Mr. Pressman, who is expected to announce the completion of the deal today, said the film would be directed by Chris Palmer, from a finished script by Stephen R. Clarke.

"When Stanley died, he left behind lots of paperwork," Mr. Hobbs said in a telephone interview. "We ended up going through trunks of it, and one day we came across 'Lunatic at Large.' 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.

[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

RARA-AVIS home page: http://www.miskatonic.org/rara-avis/
  Yahoo! Groups Links

<*> To visit your group on the web, go to:
    http://groups.yahoo.com/group/rara-avis-l/

<*> Your email settings:
    Individual Email | Traditional

<*> To change settings online go to:
    http://groups.yahoo.com/group/rara-avis-l/join
    (Yahoo! ID required)

<*> To change settings via email:
    mailto: rara-avis-l-digest@yahoogroups.com
    mailto: rara-avis-l-fullfeatured@yahoogroups.com

<*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:
     rara-avis-l-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com

<*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to:
    http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
 



This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : 31 Oct 2006 EST