Three ear­ly Stan­ley Kubrick scripts have been unearthed

Though it has been 20 years since Stan­ley Kubrick​’s death, his leg­end seems to grow a lit­tle more with every pass­ing year. The pub­lic won’t let up at the ongo­ing process of exca­vat­ing the mas­ter filmmaker’s every last scrap of work, from designs to pho­tographs to, as of today, unpro­duced screenplays.

The Guardian has today revealed the dis­cov­ery of three pre­vi­ous­ly unknown scripts, all dat­ing from the director’s pre-fame peri­od of 1954 – 1956. Though they’re all in par­tial form – ​‘Mar­ried Man’ runs 35 pages, ​‘The Per­fect Man’ has sev­en and ​‘Jeal­ousy’ spans 13 – they nonethe­less pro­vide a win­dow into the inner work­ings of an artist in his ear­li­est phases.

All three scripts focus on the recur­ring themes of domes­tic dis­cord, adul­tery in par­tic­u­lar, and sug­gests that it may not be coin­ci­dence Kubrick penned them dur­ing his brief and unsuc­cess­ful sec­ond mar­riage to per­former Ruth Sobot­ka. As his pro­file grew, Kubrick’s rep­u­ta­tion as dif­fi­cult-to-get-along-with pre­ced­ed him, and the seedlings of that ten­den­cy seem to be appar­ent in this for­mer­ly lost work.

The arti­cle includes a sam­ple of Kubrick’s writ­ing for the public’s perusal, repro­duced below:

“Mar­riage is like a long meal with dessert served at the begin­ning … Can you imag­ine the hor­rors of liv­ing with a woman who fas­tens her­self on you like a rub­ber suc­tion cup whose entire life revolves around you morn­ing, noon and night? … It’s like drown­ing in a sea of feath­ers. Sink­ing deep­er and deep­er into the soft, suf­fo­cat­ing depths of habit and famil­iar­i­ty. If she’d only fight back. Get mad or jeal­ous, even just once. Look, last night I went out for a walk. Right after din­ner. I came home at two in the morn­ing. Don’t ask me where I was.”

Here, he express­es the cre­ative impuls­es that would lat­er ani­mate Eyes Wide Shut, specif­i­cal­ly the pair­ing of inti­ma­cy with tedi­um. Kubrick’s final mar­riage would last him his final 40 years, and yet he always regard­ed the insti­tu­tion with a mix of sus­pi­cion and fear, the idea being that a woman’s devo­tion can suf­fo­cate a man plac­ing a high pre­mi­um on his own freedom.

The new­found mate­ri­als will reside in the Kubrick Archive at the Uni­ver­si­ty of the Arts in Lon­don, though the ques­tion of when curi­ous par­ties on the oth­er side of the Atlantic will be able to get eye­balls on the new cache of pages has yet to be deter­mined. Even so, the sim­ple knowl­edge of their exis­tence sheds new light on a man who remains enig­mat­ic even after two decades of gran­u­lar posthu­mous analysis.