Kubrick wrote to Pasternak personally and Douglas hoped to shoot the production in the Soviet Union, previously unpublished material reveals.
He also recalled his disbelief that Douglas should have wanted to produce a movie in the Soviet Union then, “considering the context in America of the Communist witch-hunt”.
James Fenwick, a British film historian, has discovered that two of cinema’s most revered film-makers – Hollywood star Kirk Douglas and director Stanley Kubrick – had tried in vain to acquire the movie rights earlier, in the late 1950s.
Fenwick said: “[This] perhaps indicates how Kubrick might have gone about adapting something like Zhivago …