In 1957, Stanley Kubrick made a “negligent and irresponsible” mistake. It cost him his next movie

In 1957, Stanley Kubrick and producer James Harris lost the manuscript for *Lunatic at Large*, a crime thriller novel Jim Thompson had written for them to adapt into a film. The loss ended the planned collaboration and left Kubrick without the story for his next project, illustrating how a serious lapse in handling the manuscript derailed a film that had been specially commissioned.

Thompson had written about 18 novels by then, but said he had not kept a carbon copy, and Kubrick and Harris had not copied the manuscript either. Harris later called losing it “negligent and irresponsible”; searches by Thompson and Kubrick, including in storage and Kubrick’s cellar, failed to find it. Kubrick moved on to *Spartacus*, while Thompson went on to publish *The Grifters* and *The Killer Inside Me*.