Lunatic At Large: Terry Gillian Was Working on a Lost Stanley Kubrick Film Prior to Covid


Damn. As if we need another reason to be depressed over the Covid-19 lockdowns. We've just found out that prior to the coronavirus lockdown, creative mastermind Terry Gilliam was in the early stages of developing a long lost Stanley Kubrick project called Lunatic at Large. According to The Playlist, Gilliam had secured the rights to develop and film a movie based on the original Stanley Kubrick project that never got made but was still at the forefront of the director's catalog of unmade movies. 

"I was doing a film that was originally an idea by Stanley Kubrick. There was a script and I had a cast, but the lockdown has ruined everything."


The original story which Kubrick optioned from writer Jim Thompson chronicles a mental hospital escapee in New York. Stanley had initially begun working on the film way back in the '50s and had previously worked with Thompson on other films like The Killing and Paths of Glory. Now it looks like the movie is once again dead as Gilliam has moved on to working on a new novel. Just on year ago, Terry finally released his long awaited The Man Who Killed Don Quixote which sat in development hell for years. 


Here's a brief synopsis for Lunatic at Large:


Set in New York in 1956, it tells the story of Johnnie Sheppard, an ex-carnival worker with serious anger-management issues, and Joyce, a nervous, attractive barfly he picks up in a Hopperesque tavern scene. There’s a newsboy who flashes a portentous headline, a car chase over a railroad crossing with a train bearing down, and a romantic interlude in a spooky, deserted mountain lodge. The great set piece is a nighttime carnival sequence in which Joyce, lost and afraid, wanders among the tents and encounters a sideshow’s worth of familiar carnie types: the Alligator Man, the Mule-Faced Woman, the Midget Monkey Girl, the Human Blockhead, with the inevitable noggin full of nails.


-CG