The Shining Stanley Kubrick

Genesis

Before making The Shining, Kubrick directed the film Barry Lyndon (1975), a highly visual period film about an Irishman who attempts to make his way into the British aristocracy. Despite its technical achievements, the film was not a box-office success in the United States and was derided by critics for being too long and too slow. Kubrick, disappointed with Barry Lyndon's lack of success, realized he needed to make a film that would be commercially viable as well as artistically fulfilling. Stephen King was told that Kubrick had his staff bring him stacks of horror books as he planted himself in his office to read them all: "Kubrick's secretary heard the sound of each book hitting the wall as the director flung it into a reject pile after reading the first few pages. Finally, one day the secretary noticed it had been a while since she had heard the thud of another writer's work biting the dust. She walked in to check on her boss and found Kubrick deeply engrossed in reading a copy of the manuscript of The Shining".[14]

Speaking about the theme of the film, Kubrick stated that "there's something inherently wrong with the human personality. There's an evil side to it. One of the things that horror stories can do is to show us the archetypes of the unconscious; we can see the dark side without having to confront it directly".[15]

Casting

Nicholson was Kubrick's first choice for the role of Jack Torrance; other actors considered included Robert De Niro (who said the film gave him nightmares for a month),[16] Robin Williams, and Harrison Ford, all of whom met with Stephen King's disapproval.[17] Kris Kristofferson was Kubrick's backup choice if Nicholson had declined.[18] King, for his part, disavowed Nicholson because he thought that, since his part in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, the viewer would tend to consider him an unstable individual from the beginning. For this reason, King preferred Jon Voight, Michael Moriarty, or Martin Sheen for the role, who would more faithfully represent the profile of the ordinary individual who is gradually driven to madness.[19][20] In any case, from the beginning the writer was told that the actor for the lead role "was not negotiable."[21][22]

Although Nicholson initially suggested that Jessica Lange would be a better fit for the role of Wendy,[23] Shelley Duvall knew early that she was the one cast for the role (Nicholson would work with Lange on his next movie, The Postman Always Rings Twice). Wendy's character in the film differs notably, appearing less capable and more vulnerable than the novel. Throughout the filming Kubrick pushed Duvall hard; it is said that the scene in which, armed with the baseball bat, she walks backward up the stairs before the attack of her husband (one of the most reshot scenes in all of cinema), she was not representing a terrified woman; Shelley was literally "terrified".[24][25][26][27] According to The Guinness Book of Records, Kubrick demanded the shot be repeated 127 times.[28]

Slim Pickens was offered the role of Dick Hallorann, and told Kubrick that he would take the role only if his scenes in the film were shot in fewer than 100 takes. Kubrick declined, and Scatman Crothers got the part after he had been suggested by Pickens's agent.[29]

The director's initial candidate to play the Torrances' son was Cary Guffey (Close Encounters of the Third Kind), but the young actor's parents prevented him, claiming that the film was too gruesome for a child. In his search to find the right actor to play Danny, Kubrick sent a husband-and-wife team, Leon (who portrayed Lord Bullingdon in Barry Lyndon) and Kersti Vitali, to Chicago, Denver, and Cincinnati to create an interview pool of 5,000 boys over a six-month period. These cities were chosen since Kubrick was looking for a boy with an accent that fell between Jack Nicholson's and Shelley Duvall's speech patterns, with Nicholson coming from New Jersey and Duvall from Texas.[30] During the filming, the young actor selected, Danny Lloyd, was protected in a special way by Kubrick; the boy believed at all times that he was shooting a drama, not a horror movie. Following his role in the 1982 film Will: G. Gordon Liddy, Lloyd abandoned his acting career.[31][32]

Filming

Main photography began in May 1978 and wrapped in July 1979, it took place mainly in Elstree Studios, in southern England.

Interior sets

Having chosen King's novel as a basis for his next project, and after a pre-production phase, Kubrick had sets constructed on soundstages at EMI Elstree Studios in Borehamwood, Hertfordshire, England. Some of the interior designs of the Overlook Hotel set were based on those of the Ahwahnee Hotel in Yosemite National Park. To enable him to shoot the scenes in loose chronological order, he used several stages at EMI Elstree Studios in order to make all sets available during the complete duration of production. The set for the Overlook Hotel was at the time the largest ever built at Elstree, including a life-size re-creation of the exterior of the hotel.[33] In February 1979, the Colorado Lounge set at Elstree was badly damaged in a fire, causing a delay in the production.[34][35][36]

Exterior locations

While most of the film was shot on interior sets and the full-scale exterior facade replica at Elstree Studios, a second-unit crew headed by Jan Harlan shot some sequences on location in the American West. Saint Mary Lake and its Wild Goose Island in Glacier National Park, Montana were featured in the aerial shots of the opening scenes, with the Volkswagen Beetle driving along Going-to-the-Sun Road. The Timberline Lodge on Mount Hood in Oregon was filmed for a few of the establishing shots of the fictional Overlook Hotel; absent in these shots is the hedge maze, which the real Timberline Lodge does not have. The Ahwahnee Hotel (the Overlook Hotel's main interior reference) and the Timberline Lodge (the hotel's main exterior) were both designed by architect Gilbert Stanley Underwood, in the 1920s and 1930s respectively.[37]

Outtakes of the opening panorama shots were later used by Ridley Scott for the closing moments of the original cut of the film Blade Runner (1982).[38]

Writing

In 1977, a Warner Bros. executive, John Calley, sent Kubrick the proofs of what would become the novel.[39] Its author, Stephen King, was already at that time a best-selling author who, after the blockbuster of Carrie, could boast of successes in adaptations for the big screen. For his part, Kubrick had been considering directing a horror film for some time; a few years before, while Barry Lyndon disappointed at the box office,[40] another Warner film he had refused to direct, The Exorcist,[41] directed by William Friedkin, was breaking box office records around the world.

Asked what it was that attracted Kubrick to the idea of adapting the novel by the popular writer, a regular on the best-seller lists, his executive producer (and brother-in-law) Jan Harlan revealed that Kubrick wanted to "try" in this film genre, although with the condition of being able to change King's novel. And that condition would finally be guaranteed by contract.[42]

The script was written by the director himself with the collaboration of novelist Diane Johnson. Kubrick had rejected the initial version of the draft, written by King, as too literal an adaptation of the novel.[43][44] Furthermore, the filmmaker did not believe in ghost stories because that "would imply the possibility that there was something after death," and he did not believe there was anything, "not even hell." Instead, Johnson, who was teaching a Gothic novel seminar at the University of California at Berkeley at the time, seemed like a better fit for the project.[45] Shortly after the premiere, in an interview with the Parisian magazine Positif, she stated:

Among us, The Shining (the novel) is not part of great literature. It is scary, it is effective and it works, without further ado ... But it is precisely interesting to see how a very bad book can also be very effective.-  ... It's quite pretentious. But it is also true that one has less scruples when destroying it: one is aware that a great work of art is not being destroyed.[46]

Kubrick, for his part, was more enthusiastic about the possibilities of the manuscript:

It was the first time that I had read to the end a novel that was sent to me with a view to a possible film adaptation. I was absorbed in its reading and it seemed to me that its plot, ideas and structure were much more imaginative than usual in the horror genre; I thought that a great movie could come from there.[47]

Photography

The Shining had a very prolonged and arduous production period, often with very long workdays. Principal photography took over a year to complete, due to Kubrick's highly methodical nature. Actress Shelley Duvall did not get along with Kubrick, frequently arguing with him on set about lines in the script and her acting techniques. She eventually became so overwhelmed by the stress of her role that she became physically ill for months. At one point, she was under so much stress that her hair began to fall out. The shooting script was being changed constantly, sometimes several times a day, adding more stress. Nicholson eventually became so frustrated with the ever-changing script that he would throw away the copies that the production team had given him to memorize, knowing that it was going to change anyway. He learned most of his lines just minutes before filming them. Nicholson was living in London with his then-girlfriend Anjelica Huston and her younger sister, Allegra, who testified to his long shooting days.[48] Joe Turkel stated in a 2014 interview that they rehearsed the "bar scene" for six weeks and that the shoot day lasted from 9 a.m. to 10:30 p.m., with Turkel recollecting that his clothes were soaked in perspiration by the end of the day's shoot. He also described it as his favorite scene in the film.[49]

For the final Gold Room sequence, Kubrick instructed the extras (via megaphone) not to talk, "but to mime conversation to each other. Kubrick knew from years of scrutinizing thousands of films that extras could often mime their business by nodding and using large gestures that look fake. He told them to act naturally to give the scene a chilling sense of time-tripping realism as Jack walks from the seventies into the roaring twenties".[50]

For the international versions of the film, Kubrick shot different takes of Wendy reading the typewriter pages containing "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy" in different languages. For each language, a suitable idiom was used: German (Was du heute kannst besorgen, das verschiebe nicht auf morgen / "Never put off till tomorrow what may be done today"), Italian (Il mattino ha l'oro in bocca / "The morning has gold in its mouth"), French (Un «Tiens» vaut mieux que deux «Tu l'auras» / "One 'here you go' is worth more than two 'you'll have it'", the equivalent of "A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush"), Spanish (No por mucho madrugar amanece más temprano / "No matter how early you get up, you can't make the sun rise any sooner.")[51]

The door that Jack chops through with the axe near the end of the film was real; Kubrick originally shot this scene with a fake door, but Nicholson, who had worked as a volunteer fire marshal and a firefighter in the California Air National Guard,[52] tore through it too quickly. Jack's line, "Heeeere's Johnny!", is taken from Ed McMahon's introduction to The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, and was improvised by Nicholson. Kubrick, who had lived in England for some time, was unaware of the significance of the line, and nearly used a different take.[53]

During production, Kubrick screened David Lynch's Eraserhead (1977) to the cast and crew, to convey the mood he wanted to achieve for the film.[54]

Steadicam

The Shining was among the early half-dozen films (after the films Bound for Glory, Marathon Man, and Rocky, all released in 1976), to use the newly developed Steadicam,[55] a stabilizing mount for a motion picture camera, which mechanically separates the operator's movement from the camera's, allowing smooth tracking shots while the operator is moving over an uneven surface. It essentially combines the stabilized steady footage of a regular mount with the fluidity and flexibility of a handheld camera. The inventor of the Steadicam, Garrett Brown, was heavily involved with the production of The Shining. Brown has described his excitement taking his first tour of the sets, which offered "further possibilities for the Steadicam". This tour convinced Brown to become personally involved with the production. Kubrick was not "just talking of stunt shots and staircases". Rather he would use the Steadicam "as it was intended to be used — as a tool which can help get the lens where it's wanted in space and time without the classic limitations of the dolly and crane". Brown used an 18 mm Cooke lens that allowed the Steadicam to pass within an inch of walls and door frames.[56] Brown published an article in American Cinematographer about his experience,[57] and contributed to the audio commentary on the 2007 DVD release.

Kubrick personally aided in modifying the Steadicam's video transmission technology. Brown states his own abilities to operate the Steadicam were refined by working on Kubrick's film. For this film, Brown developed a two-handed technique, which enabled him to maintain the camera at one height while panning and tilting the camera. In addition to tracking shots from behind, the Steadicam enabled shooting in constricted rooms without flying out walls, or backing the camera into doors.[57] Brown notes that:

One of the most talked-about shots in the picture is the eerie tracking sequence which follows Danny as he pedals at high speed through corridor after corridor on his plastic Big Wheel tricycle. The soundtrack explodes with noise when the wheel is on wooden flooring and is abruptly silent as it crosses over carpet. We needed to have the lens just a few inches from the floor and to travel rapidly just behind or ahead of the bike.[57]

This required the Steadicam to be on a special mount resembling a wheelchair, in which the operator sat while pulling a platform with the sound man. The weight of the rig and its occupants proved to be too much for the original tires, resulting in a blowout one day that almost caused a serious crash. Solid tires were then mounted on the rig. Kubrick also had a highly accurate speedometer mounted on the rig so as to duplicate the exact tempo of a given shot so that Brown could perform successive identical takes.[58] Brown also discusses how the scenes in the hedge maze were shot with a Steadicam.[57]

Music and soundtrack

The stylistically modernist art-music chosen by Kubrick is similar to the repertoire he first explored in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Although the repertoire was selected by Kubrick, the process of matching passages of music to motion picture was left almost entirely at the discretion of music editor Gordon Stainforth, whose work on this film is known for attention to fine details and remarkably precise synchronization without excessive splicing.[59]

The soundtrack album on LP was withdrawn due to problems with licensing of the music.[60][61] The LP soundtrack omits some pieces heard in the film, and also includes complete versions of pieces of which only fragments are heard in the film.

The non-original music on the soundtrack is as follows:[62]

1. Dies Irae segment from "Symphonie fantastique" by Hector Berlioz, performed by Wendy Carlos and Rachel Elkind
2. "Lontano" by György Ligeti, Ernest Bour conducting the Southwest German Radio Symphony Orchestra (Wergo Records)
3. "Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta" by Béla Bartók, Herbert von Karajan conducting the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra (Deutsche Grammophon)
4. "Utrenja" – excerpts from the "Ewangelia" and "Kanon Paschalny II" movements by Krzysztof Penderecki, Andrzej Markowski conducting the Warsaw National Philharmonic Orchestra (Polskie Nagrania Records)
5. "The Awakening of Jacob", "De Natura Sonoris No. 1" (the latter not on the soundtrack album, Cracow Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Henryk Czyż) and "De Natura Sonoris No. 2" by Krzysztof Penderecki (Warsaw National Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Andrzej Markowski, Polskie Nagrania Records)
6. "Home", performed by Henry Hall and the Gleneagles Hotel Band. By permission of Decca Record Co. Remaster by Keith Gooden & Geoff Milne, 1977. (Decca DDV 5001/2)
7. "Midnight, the Stars and You" by Harry M. Woods, Jimmy Campbell, and Reg Connelly, performed by Ray Noble and his Orchestra, vocalist Al Bowlly

Segments that didn't appear on the soundtrack album also include:

1. "It's All Forgotten Now" by Ray Noble, performed by Noble and his Orchestra
2. "Masquerade", performed by Jack Hylton and his Orchestra
3. "Kanon" (for string orchestra) by Krzysztof Penderecki
4. "Polymorphia" (for string orchestra) by Krzysztof Penderecki, Cracow Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Henryk Czyż

Upon their arrival at Elstree Studios, Wendy Carlos and Rachel Elkind were shown the first version of the film by Kubrick: "The film was a little on the long side. There were great gobs of scenes that never made it to the film. There was a whole strange and mystical scene in which Jack Nicholson discovers objects that have been arranged in his working space in the ballroom with arrows and things. He walks down and thinks he hears a voice and a ghost throws a ball back to him. None of that made it to the final film. We scored a lot of those. We didn't know what was going to be used for sure".[63] After having something similar happen to her on Clockwork Orange, Carlos has said that she was so disillusioned by Kubrick's actions that she vowed never to work with him again. She and Elkind had considered legal action against Kubrick, but because no formal contract was in place, they reluctantly accepted the situation. Carlos's own music was released in its near entirety in 2005 as part of her Rediscovering Lost Scores compilation.[64]