Seven years after his death, Stanley Kubrick is about to become more prolific than he was for most of his eccentric career.

He has already been credited with creating one posthumous film: Steven Spielberg adapted Artficial 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 the first Kubrick script from an original Kubrick idea since Killer’s Kiss (1955) 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.

Two of them were almost full scripts, according to Philip Hobbs, his son-in law, who worked with him for 12 years. “One is called The Down Slope and was written with the American Civil War historian Shelby Foote. It’s a strong anti-war film set against the backdrop of that conflict.

“The other is the true story of a priest who became the biggest bank robber in America. It’s called God Fearing Man and he wrote it himself.”

However 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,” Mr Hobbs said. “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.”

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