The Shining (film)

For other uses of this term, see Shining.

The Shining
File:Shining-kubrik.jpg Theatrical release poster
Directed by	Stanley Kubrick
Written by	Novel: Stephen King Screenplay: Stanley Kubrick Diane Johnson
Produced by	Stanley Kubrick Jan Harlan Martin Richards
Starring	Jack Nicholson Shelley Duvall Danny Lloyd Scatman Crothers
Cinematography	John Alcott
Edited by	Ray Lovejoy
Music by	Wendy Carlos Rachel Elkind
Distributed by	Warner Bros.
Release dates	May 23, 1980
Running time	Original cut 146 min. Cut version 142 min. European cut 119 min.
Countries	United States and United Kingdom
Language	English
Budget	$22 million
Box office	$64,984,856

The Shining is a 1980 horror film directed by Stanley Kubrick, based on Stephen King's novel of the same name. Kubrick co-wrote the screenplay with novelist Diane Johnson. The film stars Jack Nicholson as tormented writer Jack Torrance, Shelley Duvall as his wife, Wendy, and Danny Lloyd as their son, Danny. References to The Shining are prominent in U.S. popular culture, particularly in movies, TV shows and other visual media, as well as music.

Plot

File:Overlook timberline.jpg

The Overlook Hotel (Timberline Lodge).

Jack Torrance interviews for a job at the Overlook Hotel. It is in an isolated location and it features a massive hedge maze. Jack plans to work on a novel during this time. The hotel manager, Mr. Ullman, tactfully informs Jack that many years earlier, a prior caretaker, Charles Grady, went crazy while performing the same job and brutally killed his family and himself. Jack's son, Danny, has an imaginary friend named Tony. Danny uses strange voice to vocalize what Tony tells him. While at home with his mother, Wendy, Tony warns him about the hotel. It is also mentioned by Wendy to a doctor that Jack has had problems with alcohol but that he is currently sober. Jack gets the job and the family arrives at the hotel as it is being shut down for the season. Danny sees two girls for a few moments but they say nothing and exit. The head chef Dick Hallorann recognizes that Danny is telepathic. When alone together, Hallorann explains that he has the gift, referring to this communication as "shining." He tells Danny that not only do people shine, but sometime places shine. Danny spontaneously asks about Room 237, but Hallorann sternly warns him not to go in it.

The first month passes without incident. They have a cozy suite of rooms and they enjoy the serenity of the hotel and the mountains, but Jack has writer's block and he grows steadily more frustrated and depressed. On Tuesday, Danny goes to room 237, but find the door locked. Jack is busy typing in the spacious Colorado room, but he is quite irritable and guarded about his book and declare the room off-limits. On Thursday, while Wendy and Danny play in the snow, Jack is slowly becoming deranged. On Saturday, the storm knocks out the phone lines. Danny again sees the two girls, but this time he sees that they were murdered. He does not know about Grady, and while terrified, Tony tells him that these visions are merely pictures, so he does not tell his parents. Jack is keeping to himself, but at one point he talks with Danny, who asks for assurances that he will never hurt Wendy and Danny.

The rest of the film happens on Wednesday during the day and into the night. On Wednesday, Danny finds the door to room 237 open and he enters it. Immediately afterwards Jack has a terrible nightmare in which he used an axe to chop Danny and her to pieces, which he tells Wendy about. Danny appears with his sweater is ripped and there are bruises on his neck. Wendy angrily accuses Jack of abusing Danny and takes the child back to their suite. Jack is furious about the accusation, storming around the hotel, making his way to the Gold Room. When he goes to the bar, he perceives a bartender, who serves him a drink. A frantic Wendy enters to find Jack asleep at the bar. She says that Danny claims to have encountered "a crazy woman" in the hotel with them in room 237. Wendy locks herself and Danny in their suite while Jack goes to investigate. He sees a naked attractive woman in the bath tub. She steps out of the tub and they kiss, but then Jack sees her as a naked witch-like old woman with rotting skin. He escapes, locking the door. When Jack reports back to Wendy, he denies that anything is amiss in room 237. Wendy now wants to leave for Danny's sake, but they argue and Jack leaves to wander about the hotel. Jack returns to the Gold Room, which is now the scene of a posh 1920's style New Year's party. After getting another drink, he has a minor accident where advocaat is spilled on his jacket, and he goes with a butler to the bathroom to clean up. The butler introduces himself as Delbert Grady. Jack recognizes his name. Grady tells Jack that Danny has "a great talent" and is using it to bring an outsider — Dick. Grady refers to how he "corrected" his family and advises Jack to do the same.

At about the same time as Danny goes into Room 237, Dick, who is spending his winter in Florida, has a horrible vision of bloodshed related to the hotel. The vision is of an elevator door opening an a flood of blood pouring forth. This vision is later repeated several times to other characters. Dick tries contact the Torrances and after finding no way to do so, he books the next flight back to Colorado. He is slowed by the storm, but he manages to borrow a snowcat and slowly drives up to the hotel that night. This is interleaved with the Wednesday action back up at the hotel.

Wendy arms herself with a baseball bat and goes to talk to Jack about leaving. Jack is not in the Colorado room, but Wendy looks at the page in the typewriter. The page is just repetitions of a single sentence, "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy". She then sees that Jack's entire manuscript is more of the same. Jack appears and asks: "How do you like it?", but Wendy is now terrified. Jack continues to taunt her and approach and threaten her. She hits him hard on the head with the bat and he falls down a flight of stairs, lying unconscious. Wendy drags Jack to the large pantry and locks him inside. He is wakes up and it become clear that Jack has hurt his leg during the fall. Wendy now arms herself with a large kitchen knife. Jack tells her he has already sabotaged the radio, as well as the snowcat, stranding them all at the hotel. Wendy goes to confirms this.

By the evening, Jack has fallen asleep on the floor, still trapped in the pantry. He is roused by the sound of Grady's voice. After another conversation with Grady, the pantry door unlocks.

Jack leers through the broken door frame in an iconic shot.

Wendy and Danny have locked themselves in their suite. Danny, who since visiting Room 237 has only been speaking in Tony's voice, has been having visions of the word "redrum", which is murder spelled backwards. While Wendy sleep, Danny, still speaking in Tony's voice, use Wendy's lipstick to draw the word on the bathroom door. Danny then wakens Wendy, who sees the word in the mirror and recognizes its meaning. At that moment, Jack arrives with an axe and starts to chop down the door to their suite. Wendy and Danny lock themselves in the bathroom. Danny is able to escape through the window but Wendy cannot fit through it. She grabs the knife and watches, horrified, as Jack starts to chop down the bathroom door. After chopping away one of the door panels, he sticks his hand through the gap to turn the lock and says "Here's Johnny!". Wendy slashes his hand with the knife and he recoils. They then both hear the rumble of an approaching snowcat engine, as Dick arrives. Dick enters the hotel, but Jack soon ambushes him and kills him with the axe. Danny, hiding in a kitchen cabinet, cries out as Dick dies. Jack hears Danny's scream and he searches, limping and armed with his bloddy axe. Danny climbs out his hiding place and runs with Jack in pursuit.

Wendy starts to search the hotel and has several ghostly encounters during the search. Danny has run outside, so Jack turns on all of the outside lights, including the hedge maze. Jack then follows Danny into the snowy maze. Danny realizes he is leaving a trail of footprints in the snow for Jack to follow and he retraces his steps, then hides nearby in the labyrinth. When Jack arrives, he finds that Danny's footprints suddenly end, but he continues wandering and searching. Danny takes his opportunity to follow his own footprints back to the maze's entrance. Wendy makes her way out of the hotel just as Danny emerges from the maze. They get into the snowcat and drive away. Jack, hearing the engine start and then fade, realizes that he has lost, and so he sits down, exhausted and in the morning, he has frozen to death.

File:Overlook hotel 1.jpg

The photograph on the hotel wall: Overlook Hotel, July 4th Ball, 1921. A young Jack stands smiling in the bottom center.

Right before the end credits, the audience sees a photograph of a lavish ball which had been hanging in the hotel the entire time. In the center of the picture is a young Jack; the caption reads: "Overlook Hotel, July 4th Ball, 1921".

Cast

• Jack Nicholson as Jack Torrance
• Shelley Duvall as Winifred "Wendy" Torrance
• Danny Lloyd as Daniel "Danny" Torrance
• Scatman Crothers as Dick Hallorann
• Barry Nelson as Stuart Ullman
• Philip Stone as Delbert Grady
• Joe Turkel as Lloyd the Bartender
• Anne Jackson as Doctor
• Tony Burton as Larry Durkin
• Lisa Burns as Grady Twin #1
• Louise Burns as Grady Twin #2
• Vivian Kubrick (uncredited) as Smoking guest in ballroom

Cast notes

• Neither Lia Beldam (young woman in room 237), Billie Gibson (old woman in room 237) nor Lisa and Louise Burns (Grady's murdered daughters) would appear in another movie after this one.
• On the DVD commentary by Garrett Brown and John Baxter, it was said that Kubrick was able to film all of Danny's parts without the young actor (Danny Lloyd) realizing he was in a horror movie.

Production

Filming took place at both Pinewood Studios and Elstree Studios in England. The set for the Overlook Hotel was then the largest ever built. It included a full recreation of the exterior of the hotel, as well as all of the interiors. A few exterior shots were done at Timberline Lodge on Mount Hood in Oregon. They are noticeable because the hedge maze is missing. The interiors are based on those of the Ahwahnee hotel in Yosemite National Park. The Timberline Lodge requested Kubrick change the sinister Room 217 of King's novel to 237, so customers would stay in their own room 217 fearlessly.

The massive set would be the site of Kubrick's first use of the Steadicam.

The door that Jack breaks down with the axe near the end of the movie was a real door. Kubrick originally used a fake door, made of a weaker wood, but Jack Nicholson, who had worked as a volunteer fire marshal, tore it down too quickly.

Kubrick did not include the topiary animals of King's books in the hedge maze, which come alive at the novel's end, due to a lack of interest in them and limitations of special effects.

According to the Guinness Book of World Records, The Shining holds the record for the film with most retakes of a single scene (with spoken dialogue) at 127 takes. The participant in those retakes was Shelley Duvall.

Jack's line, "Heeeeere's Johnny!", is taken from the famous introduction for The Tonight Show host Johnny Carson, as spoken by Ed McMahon. The line was ad-libbed by Nicholson. Carson later used the Nicholson clip to open his 1980 Anniversary Show on NBC.

The film that Danny and Wendy watch on television at the beginning of the "Monday" segment is Summer of '42, reportedly one of Kubrick's favorite films.

All of the TV and radio personalities used in the film were actual members of the Denver, Colorado and Miami, Florida (in the scenes in which the hotel chef was in his Miami hotel) media of the time.

The opening panorama shots (which were used by Ridley Scott for the closing moments of the original cut of the film Blade Runner) and all scenes of the Volkswagen Beetle on the road to the hotel were filmed in Glacier National Park in Montana. These scenes were filmed out of a helicopter, which can be seen briefly in the open-matte version of the film in the lower right-hand corner of the screen and whose blades can be seen when first shown the exterior of the hotel.

According to Stephen King, Stanley Kubrick called Stephen King during preproduction around 3 a.m. to ask "Aren't ghost stories really just an affirmation of an afterlife?" King did not necessarily agree. During the conversation, Kubrick asked flatly, "Do you believe in God?" King thought a minute and said, "Yeah, I think so." Kubrick replied, "No, I don't think there is a God", and hung up.

Making The Shining

Stanley Kubrick allowed his then-17-year-old daughter, Vivian, to make a documentary about the production of The Shining. Created originally for the BBC television show Arena, this documentary offers rare insight into the shooting process of a Kubrick film.

The documentary, together with full-length commentary by Vivian Kubrick, is included on both DVD releases of The Shining.

Response

• The film opened to mixed reviews, but did very well commercially with audiences and made Warner Brothers a profit. For example, Variety staff criticized Kubrick for destroying all that was terrifying in Stephen King's novel. As with most Kubrick films, subsequent critical reaction reviews the film more favorably.

• Film website Rotten Tomatoes, which compiles reviews from a wide range of critics, gives the film a score of 85%. Stephen King has been quoted as saying that although Kubrick made a solid film with memorable imagery it was not a good adaptation of his novel. He thought that his novel's important themes, such as the disintegration of the family and the dangers of alcoholism, were ignored. Kubrick made many other changes that King disparaged. King especially viewed the casting of Nicholson as a mistake and a tip-off to the audience (due to Nicholson's identification with the character of McMurphy in One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest) that the character Jack would go mad.

• As noted by Roger Ebert:

If Jack did indeed freeze to death in the labyrinth, of course his body was found -- and sooner rather than later, since Dick Hallorann alerted the forest rangers to serious trouble at the hotel. If Jack's body was not found, what happened to it? Was it never there? Was it absorbed into the past, and does that explain Jack's presence in that final photograph of a group of hotel party-goers in 1921? Did Jack's violent pursuit of his wife and child exist entirely in Wendy's imagination, or Danny's, or theirs?... Kubrick was wise to remove that epilogue. It pulled one rug too many out from under the story. At some level, it is necessary for us to believe the three members of the Torrance family are actually residents in the hotel during that winter, whatever happens or whatever they think happens.

• Ebert also notes in his review of the film that, whenever Jack sees or communicates with spirits, a mirror is always present, and, given the themes of madness and isolation, suggests he may be speaking with himself.

• King finally supervised a television remake of The Shining in 1997, which received lukewarm reviews.

Versions

• There are several versions of The Shining. After its premiere and a week into the general run (which ran for 146 minutes), Kubrick cut a scene at the end that took place in a hospital. The scene had Wendy in a bed talking with Mr. Ullman, the man who hired Jack at the beginning of the film. He explains that her husband's body could not be found, thus raising several questions and implications. This scene was subsequently physically cut out of prints by projectionists and sent back to the studio by order of Warner Bros., the film's distributor.

• The European version runs for 119 minutes due to Kubrick personally cutting 24 minutes from the film as mentioned above. Interestingly, many of the excised scenes in some way made reference to the outside world, usually with a television.

Music and soundtrack

The film features a brief electronic score by Wendy Carlos and Rachel Elkind, including one major theme in addition to a main title based on Hector Berlioz' interpretation of the "Dies Irae", used in his "Symphonie Fantastique", as well as pieces of modernist music. The soundtrack LP was taken off the market due to licensing issues and has never appeared as a legitimate compact disc release. For the film itself, many of the pieces were overdubbed on top of one another.

The non-original music on the soundtrack is as follows:

1. Lontano by György Ligeti, Ernest Bour conducting Sinfonie Orchester des Südwestfunks (Wergo Records)
2. Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta by Béla Bartók, Herbert von Karajan conducting the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra (Deutsche Grammophon)
3. Utrenja- excerpts from the 'Ewangelia' and 'Kanon Paschy' movements by Krzysztof Penderecki, Andrzej Markowski conducting Symphony Orchestra of the National Philharmonic, Warsaw (Polskie Nagrania Records)
4. The Awakening of Jacob (Als Jakob Erwacht) and De Natura Sonoris No. 1 and 2, by Krzysztof Penderecki, the Polish Radio National Symphony Orchestra conducted by the composer (EMI)
5. Home by Henry Hall and the Gleneagles Hotel Band (Columbia Records)
6. Midnight with the Stars and You by Jimmy Campbell, Reginald Connelly and Harry Woods performed by the Ray Noble Band with Al Bowlly
7. It's All Forgotten Now performed by Al Bowlly.
8. Masquerade by Jack Hylton and His orchestra (not on the soundtrack album)

External links

• The Shining at IMDb
• The Shining at AllMovie
• Official trailer
• Complete synopsis of the movie
• Extensive FAQ
• List of scenes cut from European version