WHAT WENT WRONG - The Shining

Episode Date: October 20, 2020

How many takes does it take to take one's sanity? This week, Chris & Lizzie learn how Stanley Kubrick's all-work-and-no-play mentality led to a far-from-dull production. Plus, learn more about the invention of one of cinema's most incredible innovations: the steadicam.Go Ad-Free - Join Our Patreon!Check Out Our Merch!Follow Us on Instagram!What Movie's Next? Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hello and welcome to another episode of What Went Wrong. I am one of your host, Lizzie Bassett, here in spirit, but not physically, of course, because of a pandemic with our co-host Chris Winterbauer. Chris, how's it going? Going well, feeling good about that third take of the intro, you know, finally got it together there. Thanks for being here, guys, for another spooktacular episode of What Went Wrong, your favorite podcast covering film disasters and production mishaps on your favorite

Flops and success stories. As Lizzie mentioned, it's October, so it's spooky spooky movie month. And this week, we are covering one of my favorite horror films, actually, which is Stanley Kubrick's The Shining. Lizzie, I believe you watched this movie today during daylight hours. Tell me, what was your experience like watching this 1980 classic? I'd seen it before a bunch of times, as I think everyone has, but I don't think I'd ever sat down and given it my full attention as I did this time, which was great. A couple of critiques, number one, I just don't need that mosquito noise going in the background the entire time, the like the tea kettle going off sound that just doesn't stop. And it's very long. Otherwise, good job, Stanley. I loved it. Very good.

Yes. It clocks in at two hours. Oh, I have one more thing, which I wonder if you're going to talk about today. But the only thing, the joking aside, that does bother me a tiny bit about this movie is that it doesn't seem like Jack Nicholson's character changes much. Like, he is a weirdo from the get-go. And then he's just weird throughout. He is just a piece of shit from the beginning. Yes.

We will talk about that. So the Shining is, if you don't know, and I don't know how you wouldn't know, but if you don't, the Shining is a 1980 horror film produced and directed by Stanley Kubrick, written by Stanley Kubrick and Diane Johnson, based on the 1977 Stephen King novel of the same name. It stars Jack Nicholson, Shelley Duval, Skeppman Crothers, and Danny Lloyd. In case you've lived under a rock. Scatman. Yes, poor scatman indeed.

We'll get to it. In case you've lived under a rock your entire life, the film follows aspiring writer slash recovering alcoholics slash just general weirdo from the get-go, Jack Torrance, played by Jack Nicholson, who takes a job as the off-season caretaker of the world's creepiest hotel, the Overlook Hotel, dragging along his wife, Wendy, played by the one-and-only Shelley Duvall,

and his somewhat psychic son, Danny, played by Danny Lloyd, and Danny's, I love you, as a star, his finger character, Tony, who lives in his mouth. Now, as they're in this somewhat quarantine-esque scenario, Jack starts spiraling, although not that far. He doesn't have far to go. And Wendy and Danny, with the help of the similarly, psychically imbued Dick Halloran, played by Scatman Crothers, have to fight for their survival after being snowed in. creepy crawlies ensue.

So the film was a modest financial success, but was very negatively reviewed by critics when it first came out, and has since gone on to become a horror classic. Yes, yeah, we'll get to that. It heralded the coming ubiquity of the Steady Cam. It further established Jack Nicholson as a terrifying talent to watch, and it cemented at Kubrick as a prickly director willing to do nearly anything to get the performances needed from his actors.

Really quickly, before we get started, I want to acknowledge the two main sources that I used in finding the information for this week's episode. Those are Vincent Labroto's book, Stanley Kubrick, a biography, which is excellent, highly recommend it, and perhaps more importantly,

Vivian Kubrick, that's Stanley's daughter, her 35-minute documentary Making of the Shining, which you can watch on YouTube, it's free, it's incredible. Stanley Kubrick gave her unparalleled access to the shoot. She could be there at all hours, filming everything. You've got Jack Nicholson talking off camera, Shelley Duvall. I mean, it's really remarkable what she captured and very

unique. Kubrick was very secretive with his sets. And on this note, we're going to reveal a very interesting fun fact about this specific documentary at the end of this episode. So stick around for that and be sure to check out Vivian Kubrick's Making of the Shining. You can watch it on YouTube. So, without further ado, let's dive into The Shining. So Stanley Kubrick was born on July 26, 1928 in New York City to a Jewish family. He lived in the Bronx. He considered himself an atheist, which makes sense. I thought he was British for a long time because he shot a lot of his movies in the UK.

He was very smart, obsessed with literature, but he was a terrible student. He flunked out of school all the time. And then at 13, his dad bought him a film camera. and he became obsessed with still photography. So he became a street photographer, started developing his own photos. He graduates from high school in 1945. He's so bad in school that he can't get into college. This was in 1945 when there were no people and he couldn't get into college.

So he starts a career as a photographer. He plays chess for quarters in Washington Square Park. And his photos start getting him some notoriety because they're very much storytelling photos. He would create these like photo essays following people through their lives and it would tell these kind of stories of their mundane existences and he would kind of capture the essence of who they are through his photography. And as he's falling in love with photos, he is also falling in love with film. He becomes obsessed with Elia Kazan. He's devouring books on film theory. And so he starts making his own short films.

And this is basically like his film school portion of his life where he's borrowing money from people constantly. he's shooting these short films. He's selling documentaries to various publications. He finally like shoots his first feature film. He borrows $50,000 to shoot it. He spends months editing and sound designing it. Nothing happens with it. He keeps releasing more and more of these like low budget feature films that nobody's seen. I think he made like eight or nine of them in a period of four years. And then in 1956, he's playing chess in Washington Square Park when he meets James B. Harris, an aspiring film producer, and they decide they're going to make a movie together. And And they scrounge together the funds to make The Killing, which is Kuberk's first feature with a professional budget.

And so no one's seen this movie. The key is that Kuberk, though, spent four years making films where he had 100% control over the process. So he would shoot them. He would edit them. He would sound design them. He could do everything that he wanted. And so when he was working with his first professional crew, he couldn't stand the fact that he couldn't do all the jobs the way that he'd been used to doing all the jobs. because union rules prohibited him from doing so.

So he wanted to be the DP, but the union was like, no, you can't be the DP. So he had to hire Lucian Ballard, a veteran cinematographer, and they go at it on set. Kubrick, in fact, threatened to fire him, even though Kubrick was 27 and Ballard was 50

and, like, established in Hollywood. And so Kubrick was obsessed with getting control over his films. And the kind of arc of this story is going to be how controlling his films leads to Cuba. Eubrick's demise, like, in the end. But this became like his single goal and obsession. So he makes the killing. It kind of comes and goes. Doesn't even get a U.S. theatrical release, but he's now known in Hollywood. He then shoots Paths of Glory, which is actually really good. It's like a World War I film. It's a modest commercial success. And then Kirk Douglas asks him to direct Spartacus, which I did not

realize Stanley Kiebric directed, but when I started researching this project. I had no idea he directed Sparticus. Yeah, yeah. Kirk Douglas brings him in. Stanley Kubrick instantly gets in fights with Kirk Douglas over the creative control because Douglas is the big star. Kubrick's just the young director. And Kubrick is cutting all of Kirk Douglas's dialogue from the opening act, basically being like, we need to tell this story and not have you say the story. And Douglas is like, you can't take away my dialogue. They go out it. It's a terrible experience for Kubrick, but it's a big success. The movie makes like $15 million. Cuberk's a major director now. And so he goes on the classic Kubrick tear right after this.

He goes, Lolita, Dr. Strangelove, 2001 Space Odyssey, a clockwork orange, which I think is like maybe the most famous stretch of four films that any director has ever had. Throughout this, he's increasingly making controversial work, obviously like Lolita love affair between a grown man and a child, which was censored. He actually had to cut scenes because it was deemed to be too erotic for that type of material. he makes this nihilistic satire around nuclear annihilation with Dr. Strangelove, this grim look at man's future in space with a space odyssey, and then, of course, a clockwork orange, which was considered almost pornographically violent when it was released back in the day. And so I think it's also such a weird, wide variety of genres, too. Like, he's not really, he's not really narrowing in on one thing. Like, Lolita is so different from Dr. Strangelove, which is so, different from Clockwork Orange. And I mean, the thing that stands out to me, there is humor in all of his stuff, but like,

particularly Dr. Strangelove is so funny. Yes. It's always kind of weird to me that the same director made that, that made The Shining. Although I do think The Shining is kind of funny, but we'll get to that in a second. So, yes, he's very, he's very eclectic. He has interests all over the place. And whenever he picks a movie, he obsesses over it. And I think most people would assume that the Shining would assume that the Shining would

was his next film after a Clockwork Orange. But there's one film that came in between that's very important because it led to The Shining. And that movie's called Barry Lyndon, which is probably his least seen major film. So Barry Lyndon is an 18th century period piece following the ups and downs of the titular Barry Lyndon, an Irish rogue and social climber. And this is the project where Kubrick, you know, it sounds so interesting. This is the project where Kubrick cements his reputation as this uncompromising master of detail. So they meticulously recreate art from the 1700s. They're using specially created lenses that were developed by NASA and Zeiss to allow them to shoot scenes that were lit only by candlelight. So these lenses had such wide apertures that they

could light with just candles, entirely natural lighting and film people in the dark. You would do dozens and dozens of takes to make sure that every scene was perfect. The movie was extremely expensive and it flopped. It was popular in Europe, but it bombed in the United States. Warner Bros. spent $30 million making and marketing the movie, and it did not make its money back. The movie was nominated for Seven Academy Awards. It won four, but audiences ignored it.

It was three hours long. It was slow. It was following, like, this weird Irish dude in the 17th century. Nobody cared about it. And so all of a sudden, Kubrick's, like, meteoric rise comes to this plateauing halt in the middle of his career. and he's very frustrated. So, Kubrick kind of takes stock of the audience reaction to Barry Lyndon,

and he decides in a very self-aware way that he has to make a movie next that's going to be both creatively satisfying and commercially viable. His solution is it's time to make a horror film, which is the last thing that people expect from Stanley Kubrick. But when you mentioned before, like, he's made all these different genres, it seems almost inevitable that he would make a horror film at some point. Also interesting that he's turning back to something that's based on a book because I think Lolita did have relative success, right? And launched him a bit further. So I wonder if that was part of it

as well. Yeah. And some of his other works. I mean, so Barry Lyndon was based on a book as well. And 2001 Space Odyssey was inspired by Arthur C. Clark's writing. So it was not based on a book, but it was inspired by it. So he pulls from literature a lot. But yes, I mean, he specifically sought out a book in this instance. And so I think it's important to set the stage that there's a reason he picked horror. And it's that the 1970s was this horror birth moment in the United States. We've got all of this societal uncertainty. There's anxiety that the nation's facing. We've got an energy crisis with the oil shortage, economic downturn. There's like inflation, the economy's slowing down, rising crime rates, the Cold War, the end of the Vietnam War, Nixon's presidential

scandal, people are freaked out, and they're consuming films that are reflecting those concerns. And so the era is rife with these incredibly popular, increasingly mainstream horror movies that used to be things that people would only watch late at night after the A movie screening. The Exorcist and Jaws alone grossed nearly a billion dollars during this period. You've got Halloween, the birth of the slasher genre, Alien, the Omen, the Texas chainsaw mask or Carrie. It was so popular that we were running out of villain. for horror movies. Here are some other titles. Orca, about a psychopathic killer orca whale, attack of the killer tomatoes, the car, piranha, piranha two, directed by James Cameron.

The glut of horror films also wasn't just a cash grab. Filmmakers are able to hide their themes more easily in horror. There's fear of the suburbs in Halloween, corporate greed and aliens, small town politics and jaws, bullying, and fear of feminism and carry. So much like horror today, the metaphor is kind of front and center. So Kubrick's like, great, I can play inside this genre. This is the same thing that we saw a little bit with Twilight Zone, too. That's sort of Rod Serling's initial idea and what we've always seen with sci-fi is that it's so much easier to slip the deeper meanings in.

Exactly. So Kubrick locks himself in his office. He tells his staff, bring me horror books until I find the one I want to turn into a movie. According to Stephen King, quote, 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's writer's work biting the dust. She walked into check on her boss and found Kubrick deeply engrossed in reading The Shining. So Stephen King, even though Kubrick had not read his work before, was becoming a major mainstream force to be reckoned with at this time. Not only were his books successful, but Brian De Palma had just directed the incredibly popular Carrie adaptation. Toby Hooper had just done the TV movie of Salem's Lot, which is actually pronounced Sullum's Lot, short for Jerusalem's Lot,

and George Romero was developing an adaptation of The Stand. That movie never came to pass, by the way. So, Kubrick's found his story, but he's just using the novel as an entry point. He's not really interested in being faithful to it. So he hires novelist Diane Johnson to co-write, the story with him. He'd liked a 1974 novel she wrote called The Shadow Nose, and she would end up winning the Pulitzer for later work. She was a very talented writer. So at first, Stephen King's very flattered that Stanley Kubrick's adapting his book. Kubrick would call him at like weird hours,

asking him, you know, questions about the story and the themes. That's okay, though, right? Him calling it weird hours. Stephen King was on mountains of cocaine at this point, wasn't he? I don't know that he slept. Stephen King was, I don't know if he was on cocaine at this point or if he was just an alcoholic. He has like three distinct periods. There's like alcoholic Stephen King who doesn't remember writing books because he was too drunk. There's cocaine Stephen King who wrote books so fast that his editors thought he was plagiarizing other people's work because he was typing too quickly. And then there was pain killer Stephen King after his car accident where he was so hopped up on like oxycodone that he has like disowned a couple books that he wrote while he was under

the influence of pain. That's right. The guy has had a wild experience. I forgot about that. Yeah, he's he is amazing. And you're right. You can definitely hear and feel the influence of whatever substance he was on when writing. Yes. Yes. Keep it together, Stephen King. We love you. We do. We all love you, Stephen King. So King starts to realize through these conversations with Stanley Kubrick that this movie is probably going to turn out pretty different from the book. So to show you just how Kubrick was all over the place, an early treatment of the screenplay that was unearthed in later years had a completely different ending. where Jack attacks Wendy, she stabs him in the stomach with a knife, he bleeds out and dies,

she then hears a snow cat approaching, she runs outside, it's Dick Halloran in the Snowcat, played by Scatman Crothers. Danny inside then has a vision of Halloran talking to Delbert Grady and realizes Halloran's working for the hotel and he's bad. So then Halloran chases Wendy into the hotel, like becoming this bloodthirsty monster, until Danny, freezes him with his shining powers, Wendy stabs Scatman Cruthers, and then they escape in the snow cat. Very different ending to the movie. Uh, what? Yes, indeed. Uh, so I would love to play you a clip of Stephen King talking about his interactions with Stanley Kubrick and they're different philosophies when it comes to the story. I have a real problem with the shining and uh, Stanley Kubrick knew

that I had a problem with the Shining. I had a discussion with him beforehand. He said, Stephen, Stanley Kubrick here, don't you agree that all stories of ghosts are fundamentally optimistic? I said, what do you mean?

And he said, well, if there are ghosts, it means we survive death, and that's fundamentally an optimistic view, isn't it? And I said, well, Mr. Kubrick, what about hell? And there was a long pause on the telephone. online and then he said in a very stiff and very different voice, I don't believe in hell. And I thought to myself, well, that's fine, but some of us do and some of us believe that

ghosts may survive and that may be hell. And that was sort of where I was coming from with The Shining. But in the novel, The Shining, Jack Torrance is a difficult character, but he's fundamentally a sympathetic character. And I always visualized him as a piece of metal that's bent first one way and the other by these malignant spirits who basically want his son because his son is a psychically powerful person. So I saw these all as warm characters,

characters that were being threatened by forces from without, from ghosts, from real supernatural creatures. And the film is extremely cold. Stanley Kubrick saw it by the way. haunting is coming from Jack Torrance, from the Jack Nicholson character, whereas I always saw it from outside. So we had a fundamental difference of opinion about it. I always thought that the real difference between my take on it and Stanley Kubrick's take on it was this. In my novel, The Hotel Burns. In Kubrick's movie, The Hotel Freezes. Yeah, that speaks to exactly my one problem with it,

that a hundred percent all of the evil emanates from Jack Nicholson from the second you see him in the interview room with his crazy, creepy eyebrows and the way that he talks to the wife. And I even wonder if the thing about him hurting the kid earlier was in the book or not. But yeah, I'm with Stephen King on this one. It was in the book. Okay. Yeah. So a lot of the, so I'm a big fantasy.

I've read, I'm embarrassed to say it. I've read every single one of Stephen King's books. and I read The Shining a few times. And there are a lot of differences. I love both as separate works of art. But Jack was, it was like he kind of hurt him, but it was very clear that it was an accident and that he was drunk. And it like made him change his ways.

And he was trying so hard to be a good person. Whereas in the movie, it's just like, little fucker got away from me. He's just like not sympathetic at all. he's totally unhinged. Yeah. And the way he's like, they'll love it here. It's just, he's so creepy.

So, so obviously this is the fundamental change that Kubrick makes to the story from the get-go. Yeah. Something that we, that David noticed while we were watching too, is that this movie very much portrays him as a man who wants to get away from his family from day one and that they are the burden on him. And it's just, it seems like he wants, he wants to. to kill them literally from the first second of the movie. Yes. Kubrick's version is Jack Torrance is a man with baggage that he needs to cut loose. And so he's unhinged from the time that we meet him.

Kubrick once said of the film's themes, quote, there's something inherently wrong with the human personality. There's an evil side to it. One of the things we can do with horror is confront that side directly. Like he was very interested in someone who was evil from the get-go. Now, it's reasonable to assume that Kubrick intended for Jack Torrance to be fundamentally off from the beginning. but I also think it was his insistence that he worked with Jack Nicholson that forced that to happen. So he was obsessed with Nicholson since Easy Rider.

They'd been looking for an opportunity to work together. There was a lot of mutual admiration between the two of them. And he said from the beginning, it can only be Jack Nicholson. The studio wanted him to look at Robin Williams, Oh my God. Harrison Ford and Robert De Niro. Oh. I personally would have been really interested in a Harrison Ford, The Shining.

Think like what lies beneath something like that. That is exactly what I was thinking about is that his character in what lies beneath is, is a, I feel like an excellent version of someone who is evil from the beginning, but hides it very well. I agree. I think he would have been a very interesting choice.

Stephen King did not like Jack Nicholson for the part. He pushed for John Voight and Christopher Reeve for the role of Jack Torrance, wanting a more accessible actor who could be sympathetic and sane first and then descend into madness. Both of those could have been great, honestly. Yeah, they could have been very interesting. But Kubrick was demanding, and he was an autour, and he got his way when it came to casting. He also said, from the beginning, it is only Shelley Duval.

She is the only person that can play Wendy. And he specifically said, I need someone who can act and who is mousy and vulnerable. I do not need a Jane Fonda type, is what he said. So they cast Shelley Duvall as one. Wendy and they cast Jack Nicholson as Jack. He's 100% right on Shelley Duval because there is, she's amazing in this, but just the way that she looks and moves, Mousy is 100% on point. And it's just she's so helpless in a way that is both pathetic and slightly annoying and

also extremely sympathetic. Absolutely. So Kubrick then sent a casting team to, on a multi-city tour of Chicago, Denver, and Cincinnati, they interviewed over 5,000 little boys for the role of Danny Torrance. It took them six months before they found Danny Lloyd, a five and a half year old boy who was not an actor. Here, I would just love to play you a clip of Danny Lloyd on set because it actually seems like Danny Lloyd had a great time making this movie.

He didn't really know what was going on. And he had this, they had like assigned him this like assistant director to be his caretaker who seems like he was great with kids. And like Danny Lloyd just seems like he's having a lot of fun. So here's Danny Lloyd. All I thought about is... What do you think about? All I thought about is what my mom and my dad were going to buy me.

Go buy you? For what? Without that money. Uh-huh. And did you know how much you were going to be earning per week? No, really. Did they tell you? I didn't know really how much I was going to.

I didn't know really I'm going to earn any money. No, I just thought I would just get $2 a seller. A bit of pocket money. Yeah. Yeah, right. And so now I know I probably have $500 or $600. So there's Danny Lloyd thinking. Oh, man, you got a little more than that.

Yeah, I think he's only made $500 or $600. $800. Danny Lloyd, famously, he only ever acted in two films, this and one other, and then he left acting to become a teacher. But so Danny Lloyd, he was great. He was not the depressed little boy, you know, that you see in the movie that was very much acting. He seems like a very happy little kid. And that's, I think, because child labor laws protected him from Stanley Kubrick. He could only be involved with the production for 40 working days a year. And he had to be offset every day by 4.30 p.m. Now, Kubrick smartly hands. handed over the directing duties and caretaking duties for Danny Lloyd to Leon Vitale, who was kind of his assistant and right-hand man. He had been an actor in Barry Lyndon and then became a kind of standard player in Kubrick's movies doing all sorts of work on set, many different roles, and he became this kind of creative partner with him throughout the years, this unsung hero of his movies. There's a great documentary called Film Worker that shows just how

vital Leon Vitale was to his projects creatively and obviously in this instance in managing and helping get the performance out of Danny Lloyd, the young child actor. He got to just hang out with this assistant director and his parents and rehearse during the off days. And then when Kubrick needed him, he would come on set. And for the most part, this assistant would actually direct Danny. Kubrick would oftentimes like shout instructions through a megaphone, but the assistant was the one working with Danny. And so I think Kubrick knew that maybe he wouldn't have the great. greatest touch with a kid. And he was really smart. And he assigned this other guy who was great with kids. And then he used a dummy for the parts where Wendy's carrying him around. And it's not,

you know, they didn't need Danny. And they worked around it. So I think that that might be why Danny Lloyd was so happy on the shoot. But the thing that I want to get to is that Kubrick was pushing the technical limits of every movie that he was working on. And so while he was still working on Barry Lyndon, where we said that, you know, he was shooting with these lenses that were so crazy. he got this demo reel of a new camera device called a mystery stabilizer. And it's a reel that contained 24 shots that were deemed by the industry to be, quote, impossible shots. And you can still see this reel online.

We'll put a link in the show notes. And it's shots where it looks like the camera is floating. There's no means of control. It's too smooth to be handheld, too free to be on a dolly. And it's like home video footage. And it just blew people's. minds. They had no idea how this footage was getting captured. And it was, of course, the Steadicamp. So for anybody that doesn't know, Chris, can you explain a little bit what a Steadicam is and how it's

operated versus how cameras were operated prior to this? Yeah. So prior to the Steadicam, you had two basic ways of operating a camera. You could handhold it, meaning you throw it on your shoulder, you know, you're balancing it on your body, but you get the movement of your body with the camera. There's no way to work around that. Or you could put the camera on some sort of base, be it a tripod or a dolly track or a crane. You know, there's any number of ways, but it's attached to a large piece of machinery that then a human operates. A Steadicam uses a weight system. You basically strap yourself in with like a vest that then attaches to a rod system and like a mechanical arm that holds the camera in place.

with a balanced weight underneath. So as your body moves left, right, up, down, off axis, the camera actually stays in one position out in front of you. And now it requires an incredible amount of skill to operate, and these things are very heavy. And actually, if you really want to know what a Steadicam looks like, and you don't want to look it up right now and just want to imagine it,

if you remember in the film, aliens, those machine guns that they're operating that are attached to vests on their bodies, those are actually just prop guns attached to Steadicam rigs. in the movie aliens. That's how they made that prop. Kubrick saw this and instantly thought, oh my God, this is how I want to shoot my next movie. So Kubrick writes to Ed DeJulio, the head of Cinema Products Corporation. And he says, the mystery stabilizer was spectacular and you can count on me as a customer. It should revolutionize the way films are shot. I just have one question.

Is there a minimum height at which it can be used? So the Steadicam was this remarkable device that allowed a cameraman to move with the actors and make it look as if the camera was just moving on its own, like a ghost. And he gets to pre-production on The Shining, and he's like, I know how to use this now. We're going to follow these characters through every room of this hotel, which means every room of the set has to be connected. The great room, the gold room, the kitchen, the entrance, everything. It has to be connected because he's going to follow the characters throughout the whole thing. And obviously, Danny riding his tricycle is going to be the tour to force moment. Okay.

Yeah. So this was one of my big questions watching this again and paying closer attention is that I know the exterior of the hotel obviously was an existing hotel. But the interior, are you saying that they actually built all of those sets and that was not an existing hotel? Because it's huge. All right. So I'm about to blow your mind on two fronts.

Okay. So Kubrick wants complete control over his shooting location, right? and he wants to be able to connect all of these rooms. So he's deciding, should I film in the United States or should I film in the UK? He can film in an existing hotel in the United States. King wants him to film at the Stanley Hotel in Colorado, which is what the book is based on. But Kubrick instead decides, I'm going to film at EMI Elstree Studios in England, the same studios where Star Wars had been filmed a few years prior.

And so he sends his art director, Roy Walker, across the United States, to take photos at dozens of hotels. he then picks and chooses from those photos, and that becomes the design of the overlook. Yes, they built the entire hotel inside of soundstages at this studio. And not only that, that exterior that you said is a practical location, no, they built the outside of the hotel to scale on the studio lot. That exterior with the hedgemage, that's a build on the studio lot. What? Wait, I thought that was a hotel in Oregon or something. the like timberline lodge.

It is. It's the timberline lodge. It's the timberline lodge in Oregon. They built a duplicate of it in London to scale on the lot. Why? Because there's no hedge maze at the timber line. And if you look at the exterior, the long shot establishing shots, there's no hedge maze. And they wanted the hedge maze and they wanted to be able to shoot in controlled conditions next to the interior sets.

Yeah, you're right. Yeah. It's not just that they built this. They built it in the most incredibly detailed way possible. Every single light inside the overlook set was wired as if it were an actual hotel. It took four months of electrical work to rig the entire set. They also had to set up literally thousands of watts of lights outside the set to blast natural light through the windows. They then built a two-scale replica, as I said, of the Timberline exterior, and then they also built the hedge maze.

Now, you mentioned the Timberline Lodge, which is in Mount Hood, Oregon. they actually were very flattered that he wanted to use their exterior of the hotel. And then they asked him, could you change that room from 217 to 237, the room that Danny's not supposed to go into? Because they had a room 217 at their hotel. And they were worried that guests wouldn't want to stay in it anymore after the movie was released. So in the book, it's room 217. In the movie, it's room 237. But I believe this is also part of the foundation.

I could be wrong. I think this is part of the foundation for the conspiracy theory that Kubrick faked the movie. landing because 237 is 237 miles to the moon. But anyway, so interesting to know that it's not that at all. Well, yeah, we'll get to those conspiracies later. So the hedge maze, which is obviously so iconic in the movie, was another big deviation from the book. There's no hedge maze in the book.

In the book, there are these giant topiary animals, so animals carved out of, you know, bushes, that when Danny turns away from them, they chase him. So Kubrick, I think, smartly moved away from that and went with the hedge maze, which was entirely constructed out of plywood, covered in plants, and built to scale. They built that entire hedge maze, and they had to hand out maps to the cast and crew in case they got lost in it while they were filming. No thanks. Yeah, exactly. When they then needed to do the night scenes of the maze, they built it again. and they built it inside the sound stage

so that they could light it as a day for night sort of situation with Danny because he couldn't work after 4.30 p.m. So they can't shoot with Danny outside in the hedge maze. They have to shoot that inside. So they had to build the hedge maze twice. They then cover it with pulverized styrofoam. To create the snow texture

and then they create this oil smoke that's supposed to look like fog but heavier. And so you've got this steady cam operator Garrett Brown, who's like trudging through all of this styrofoam to get, you know, follow the actors, inhaling all of this smoke. He started with a gas mask and then he couldn't walk fast enough with the gas mask on because he couldn't breathe enough. So he ditches it. And then for the, to show how extreme this is for the steady cam off, this guy's so amazing. For the scene where Danny's hiding his footsteps in the snow, right, where he's like walking backwards in his own footsteps, the steady cam operator was on stilts with Danny's shoes attached to the bottom so he could also walk in Danny's

footsteps and not leave his own footprints behind. That's insane. Yeah. So filming on The Shining begins in May of 1978. The problem with wanting perfection, as Stanley Kubrick does, and working almost exclusively with a steady cam op is that it's very tiring. So the steady cam operator was Garrett Brown. He did remarkable work on this movie.

on his first day, he did 30 takes of just Jack Nicholson walking through the Overlook Hotel lobby. Now, it would be hard enough to be carrying this like 70 to 100 pound rig on his body in a normal environment, but because this was built on a soundstage and they had rigged up 700,000 watts of lights just outside the windows, the temperature on the set was 110 degrees. 110 degrees inside. They're mimicking daylight. They're recreating the sun. Brown said that he learned quickly that Stanley Kubrick demanded perfection, quote,

I quickly realized that when Stanley said the crosshairs were to be on someone's left nostril, that no other nostril would do. Oh, my God. Kubrick was a pioneer. He was frustrated by the image quality of the remote TV that projected the steadicam's view, because he can't see what the steady cam off can see, so it has to be sent via signal to his monitor. So he has a new one invented that improves the image.

He wants to go wireless so he can follow. the DP around, so they have to pull the walls apart of their set and install antennas in all the walls of the set so that he can walk anywhere and get a video signal with his monitor. So instead of seeking specific performances, Kubrick was notorious for collecting like a range of reactions from his actors across 50, 70 or more takes from like catatonia to hysteria. Some days they literally only got through one shot. One shot some days. Some days they would spend more. more than one day on a single shot. Kubrick, when he realized that Garrett Brown, the setty cam operator, was going to need brakes

if he had to continue running around with the steady cam on him, has his team get this, like, prototype wheelchair, and they retrofit it to allow Brown to sit in the wheelchair with a platform behind him that's got the sound operator and the focus puller on it so they can push him through the hotel and do like repeated takes with the steady cam where he is not having to catch his breath afterwards. They actually added a spodometer to the wheelchair so that the steady cam op could go the exact speed that Stanley Kubrick was telling him to.

There was one shot that required 300 feet of plywood roadway to be used. Kubrick had it rebuilt three times to get perfectly smooth. The final shot of the dolly that leads in to Jack Nicholson's photo being left in the hotel at the end of the film, it's the shot that basically ends the film. They did that for an entire day. They rebuilt the dolly four times because Kubrick kept noticing a bump in the dolly.

So they literally, like, they rebuilt the track. They rebuilt the dolly. They ordered new wheels. They put more people on it. They put less people on it. There was not a detail that went beyond, you know, his perfection. You know, the shot towards the end of the film, Wendy goes up three flights of stairs.

She turns down the hall. It's one of my favorite moment in the film. And she sees that man in the boar costume, like blowing the suited gentleman. That shot alone. Yeah. What is that? Love it. I don't care. I just thought it was so terrifying. I love that scene. They shot that 36 times. Just that moment of her going up the stairs. They had the

Steadicam Op go up the stairs 36 times, three flights of stairs, 36 times with a 70-pound camera on him. Not only that, Kubrick wanted to focus on production, so he didn't allow an editor on the project during production. So typically projects have editors on them while they're shooting so they can assemble scenes. And he just didn't want to deal with that. So he did not have an editor. He would only start and post afterwards. That was another way for him to maintain control. Anne Jackson, who played Danny's doctor at the beginning of the film. She met with Kubrick ahead of filming. This woman has two scenes. She probably has a total of 15 lines. This is what she said of meeting him. Quote, then he started teaching me how to be a doctor. He invited a doctor to the set. He sent me

home on a weekend with a stethoscope. I said, I don't know what you mean, Stanley. How do I get people to practice with? And he said, just ring your bell at the hotel and get the hotel personnel. And that's what I did. I did whatever he told me to do. It was like I was hypnotized. So Kubrick is taking this approach to every aspect of the production. Now, despite him wanting things very specific, he famously offered little direction to his actors. He would oftentimes just say again and again and again. And he would not say, do it different or anything like that. And so instead, the actors would start to get nervous and they'd start changing things themselves. And it caused like a lot of anxiety on set because nobody knew if he was happy or not. They would be like, am I going to get fired?

going to do it again. And Jackson, you know, those two scenes at the beginning, two scenes with her, Wendy, and Danny in the house in Colorado. That took three weeks to film. Oh, my God. Those two scenes. Hey, Lizzie, what's that in your hand? What? This can? Yeah, that can. It's a cannabis-infused, delicious bubbly beverage. Oh, tell me more. I can do that. It's a bubbly little treat that makes these apocalyptic end of days, just a little bit more bearable. It also makes you more pleasant to talk to. Can C-A-N-N for a refreshing, uplifting social buzz, and these times where you can't be social with anyone.

So you mentioned Scatman Crothers earlier. He's playing Halloran. He was having some trouble with Kubrick style. He's 69 years old, and he's growing a little tired after running the same scene over and over again. When Halloran and Danny are in the kitchen and they're talking about The Shining, they did that scene for one of the angles

148 times. What? At seven minutes per take, 148 times. Oh, my God. That's over 1,000 minutes. That's just... It's almost 20 hours of filming on just that alone.

It's just not fun. Like, that's the... That's, you know, like, it's amazing. The end product is amazing. I love watching it. I can't say that I would love to be involved in this production. Well, which is, this is where it gets a little complicated. So I agree, but Kubrick was adamant.

He said, it's nearly impossible to get a moment of movie magic. And so he knew he had to run it that many times to try to find that one moment. And to be fair, Kubrick printed every single one of those 148 takes. What they usually do is they would have the script supervisor select the takes he likes, and then they would pay to, quote, have the ones that he liked printed so he could watch them. He watched every single of those 148 takes. So, to be fair, he wasn't just doing it to be abusive. Like, he was going to do it to himself afterwards.

The scene where Halloran gets axed by Jack Torrance in one of the most brutal moments in the movie, they did that 40 times, 40 times for the axed moment. And after the 40th take, Jack Nicholson, who was very very, very good friends with Skatman Crothers, turns to Kubrick and is like, we need to stop because it was taking too much of a toll on Crothers to keep doing that physical scene over and over again. And even though Nicholson was kind of down with, you know, this approach from Kubrick, he stood up for Scatman. But what's interesting is good for Jack Nicholson because he, he was a young, a relatively young

man during this. Like you said, Scatman Crothers is, what, 69? So doing 148 takes, even if you're sitting at a table with a kid, like, that's a lot to ask of an almost 70-year-old man. It was very challenging, but some of the actors had positive feelings after this. Scatman and Crothers has a really positive emotional connection with this experience. And it's not in small part due to the fact that he forged a very compelling connection with the young actor, Danny Lloyd.

I think he loved working with him. So here's Scatman Crothers. How did you find working with this little guy, Danny Lloyd, was it enjoyable? It was beautiful, just like my son. You see tears, there will be tears of joy. Because I thank the Lord I'll be here, was able to work with such beautiful people. So that was Scatman Kreathers who's crying as he's talking about getting to work with Danny Lloyd.

This is actually filmed on the set of The Shining. This was a documentary made by Stanley Kubrick's daughter while they were filming. So, you know, something was. possible that he was just so tired? It is. It is possible that he was simply running on one hour of sleep and he did not know what was happening. So Stanley Kubrick's perfectionism obviously extended to the script throughout the production process, which is dragging on forever.

He's writing and rewriting. He gives the actors new pages on a daily basis. He would stay up just like Jack Torrance on a non-electric typewriter, two fingers, typing new pages of the script every single night. Nicholson would try to stay in characters at all time on set. He'd like work himself up physically. If you, I'm not going to play the clip here because it's only fun if you watch it. Go watch The Making of the Shining by Vivian Kubrick.

And there is so much fun footage of Jack Nicholson running around being like, you're going to fucking murder him. You're going to fucking, he's like got an axe. And he's like, psyching himself up to like do something crazy. And it's this, he's, it's clear he's having a lot of fun. His here's Johnny line. The most famous line from the film was actually improvised. So that was a Jack Nicholson improv that barely made it into the final cut.

Oh, wow. Yeah, Kuberk only allowed improvisation when the actor was word perfect on the script, though. And so he trusted Nicholson and he would allow him to make certain changes. In fact, the very famous scene where Wendy interrupts, quote, interrupts him as he's typing. And he's like, even if you don't hear me typing, I'm still writing. That scene was actually written by Nicholson. And it was pulled from his previous failed marriage where his, wife interrupted him and he snapped like a psychopath at her and then she divorced him shortly after.

And so he wrote that scene into the movie. Oh, Jesus. Well, first of all, that wife may have had the right idea there. Yeah, exactly. Because that was not an appropriate response. No, I think he was very stressed. Speaking of typing, there's obviously the famous page reveal of all work and no play make Jack a dull boy, one of the most iconic moments of the film. Kubrick, in his obsessive fashion, of course, shot additional versions of Wendy pulling these pages up, written in all the different languages of the different markets that the film would play in. Now, Kubrick, though, wasn't satisfied with doing a direct translation. Instead, he went with idioms appropriate for every country. I won't try to pronounce the actual foreign language, but I'll tell you what the translation was.

So in Italian, it says, not all work and, you know, no play, make Jack, Dole Boy. It says, the morning has gold in its mouth. What? Over and over and over again. In German, it says, never put off until tomorrow, what can be done today? Over and over and over again. In Spanish, it says, no matter how early you get up, you can't make the sunrise any sooner. And in French, it says, one, here you go, is worth more than two you'll have it.

So Stanley Kubrick really making sure it translates for these foreign audiences. Now, obviously, there's one actor we haven't talked about, and so Kuberk got along well with Nicholson. It seemed like Scatman Crothers survived and loved working with Danny Lloyd, and, you know, Cuba couldn't get to Danny Lloyd because of child labor laws. So he was particularly hard on Shelley Duval. And he pushed her harder and farther than most of the rest of the cast because the film does depend on her performance.

Yeah, it really does. Jack Nicholson's performance is insane. she's the audience surrogate, right? Her fear is our fear, and he knew she was going to have to carry it. But he did it in a way that was oftentimes very manipulative. He would whine in front of the crew to her. You know, Shelly, that's not it. How long do we have to wait for you to get it right?

He would make it feel as if, you know, everybody was waiting on her. And to make matters worse, she felt that he had this connection with Jack Nicholson. And on top of that, Jack Nicholson was getting a lot of attention, both onset, and out of the movie because he was blowing up as this movie star, and Shelley Duval was kind of unknown outside of Robert Altman's work. So here's Shelley Duval about working with Nicholson. Jack's such a big star, such a famous personality, that people do tend to be a bit sycopantic with him.

But it wasn't everyone, but some people did. And it wasn't entirely ineffectual. I mean, I did get jealous sometimes, I must admit. So, you know, Duval is dealing kind of with this rising star issue with Nicholson, people treating him a different way. She would worry that she was holding people up, but she wasn't giving Kubrick what he wanted. And kind of much like David Fincher would later do with Jake Gyllenhaal on Zodiac, Kubrick was attempting to frazzle Wendy into the performance, Shelly into the performance that he wanted for Wendy. But she came from this other acting world.

Yeah, and it's interesting. To me, this brings us a little bit back to William Friedkin and The Exorcist, where he wanted such authentic reactions that he was literally firing guns off next to the actors. And at that point, I think it was the guy that played Father Carus who said, like, is that acting if you're shooting off a gun to get a reaction out of me? Like, it's not. You're just having someone react as a human being at that point. I just, I wonder where the line is sometimes when it comes to actors and how you manipulate a performance out of them.

I, full disclosure, I went to acting school and I did have experiences with some directors who, who used this kind of manipulation to get the performance that they wanted. And I have very mixed feelings about what it feels like to be the person who's kind of maneuvered in that way. Yeah. And I think, you know, Shelley Duvall came from this. Now, to be fair, Kubrick, was never firing any guns. No, no, no. And in fact, if you listen, he was very, he's very soft-spoken, even when he's being manipulative. He's not yelling at anyone for the most part. But he was definitely manipulative. And there's a great example that I can play here. This is the scene where

Shelly Duval is going to run out of the hotel. She's locked Jack Nicholson in the freezer. She's going to check on the snow cat, and she's going to come back. And so she has to run out of the hotel doors. They are dumping snow from an enormous crane that is circling overhead. There are hundreds of people around making this work. And she misses her cue. And so I'm going to play you an interaction between Shelley Duvall and Stanley Kubrick. Our goal video and action Shelley. Action Shelley. Cut it. Role video. Oh, come on. What do you mean roll video? We're killing ourselves out here and you're going to be ready. I am too. I'm standing right.

Mode music. No, I can't hear it. Yeah, but when you came out like this, it is. We're sitting there because they say, wait a minute, and then you say on the radio, go. But when you do it, you've got to look desperate, Shelley. You're just wasting everybody's fine. I can't even get this door over. So Duval and Kubrick were not getting along while making this movie.

And it's not helping that this shoot is stretching on and on and on. And so, Shelley Duval starts suffering from health problems. She's having fainting spells. She is really struggling to sleep. She had gone through a bad breakup prior to the shoot. She's shooting in London away from home for over a year. And then Kubrick is kind of dismissing that some of these things are happening. And then her hair starts falling out.

And there is a clip that I won't play for you. But Shelley Duvall literally pulls some of her hair out. It's the scene where Jack's knocking the door down of the bathroom. And she's like pulling her. hair out and she's showing it to Kubrick and Kubrick's just like, what do you want? Like, what am I looking at? She's like, I pull, like my hair, it's coming out in chunks. And he's like, okay, Shelly, like, let's focus on getting this next take. And she's like, I just like, my hair is coming out. And he's like, Shelley, can we focus on the next take? And like,

tuberic is just very much like, we have to get this take. And she's trying to get his attention. And I, it's interesting that I can see how they are just so ill-equipped to deal with each other. Kubrick is the ultimate pragmatist. He just cares about the movie. And to be honest, Shelley's kind of trying to get attention. It seems like in a bit of an indirect way. She doesn't, you know what I mean?

Like come at him and say like, I'm not feeling good. She's just like, huh, look at this thing. You know what I mean? And it feels like such a bad combination. It is. But I mean,

she also seems like somebody who really needed support. Like from we'll talk about her again on on Popeye as well. And from her work with Robert Altman, like I think she needed a collaborator. and a support system versus a real perfectionist, which is what you got with Stanley Kubrick. That's exactly right. Robert Altman, like, created a family on set.

Yes. She was used to being able to give her input, and she was not able to do that with Kubrick. And she talked about it. And I think it took her a long time to get over it, and we'll talk about later how that affected her in Popeye when we get to that film. In January of 1979, a fire broke out on one of the sound stages.

It burned down a large portion of the hotel. set the interior entryway. It added three weeks to the shooting schedule. They had to rebuild. It cost $2.5 million to the production. The door that Jack chops down with an axe was originally fake, but Jack Nicholson, who'd been a volunteer firefighter, broke it down so quickly that they had to put in a real door and let him get to work on a real door because he was actually very, very good with an axe. That's not what I want to hear about Jack Nicholson. The famed blood coming out of the elevator They shot that every 10 days throughout production. They shot that thing like at least a dozen times because Kubrick, it didn't look like blood.

It didn't move right. It didn't hit the camera right. And they just, they would shoot it. And then they would clean it. And then they would 10 days later, they would get 10,000 more gallons and they would shoot it again. And they just shot that again and again. So they wrapped at Elstree Studios in April of 1979. they shot for 11 months to make this movie.

Straight. The actors, Kubrick, everyone. All of the exterior stuff was shot, like that was St. Mary Lake and Glacier Park. The opening shot, like aerial shots the film. That's in Glacier National Park, Montana. They shot at the Timberline Lodge in Mount Hood, Oregon, as I mentioned. That was all handled by Jan Harland, Kubrick's brother-in-law, and an EP on the film. So then they go into Post, and I'm not going to dive.

Post is a whole separate beast, and we're going to get through it kind of quickly here. It takes post added another year. It was another year before the film got released. Kubrick hired this composing duo Wendy Carlos and Rachel Elkind to score the film. He then largely ditched their score and needle dropped a lot of classical music. And then that mosquito wine that you mentioned that he kept, those were actually the only elements of their original score that he kept. Oh, sorry, Rachel and Wendy.

So if he kept the part that you liked the least, they were very upset that their score had been cut from the film. They'd worked very hard on it. and apparently it had also happened on a clockwork orange, and Wendy Carlos vowed she would never work with Kubrick again. Kubrick was very secretive with the film and the final cut. Warner Brothers wouldn't screen the film for anyone before May 21st because Kubrick was unhappy with the final sound, and he made them redo it six days before that they were going to go release it in theaters.

Jack Nicholson refused to do promotion for the film until he saw the final cut, which he couldn't see because it was in London and Kubrick wouldn't show it to anyone, so they just said, we're not doing promotion for the film. Warner Brothers executives were only able to see the cut when they flew themselves to London and knocked on Kubrick's door and then watched it there.

And it was way too long. So that's why it ended up at two hours and 24 minutes. I think it was three hours and they made him cut it down. God, yeah. Kubrick actually strategized the release plan. So he created a trailer that's very famous that released in Christmas of 1979, that's 90 seconds long,

and it is just the shot of the blood coming out of the elevators. And it just says a movie from Stanley Kubrick, the shining jacket, and it's so effective. And it would drop before the Christmas movies, and people would be like, what the fuck? Are we about to go see? They reprinted the novel featuring the movie's logo. And then he hired this graphic artist, Saul Bass,

to create a poster for the film. Saul Bass made 300 pen and ink options for Kubrick to review of the poster before Kubrick settled on this ghostly image face. If you haven't seen it, there's a very famous poster that says the shining and wide block letters that with this like pointillism style ghost face above it, that was the domestic poster. The famous international poster is Jack Nicholson's face to the door. But it was this original kind of like weird ghostly. Oh. Yeah.

Okay. Yes, I have seen this. Yeah. If you look up like Saul Bass, the shining poster, the film got released in 10 screens in New York City and Los Angeles over Memorial Day weekend, 1980. a week into the movie's run. Stanley Kubrick decided he was unhappy with the cut. Originally, there was an epilogue scene to the movie. It takes place in a hospital between Wendy and Mr. Olman,

who was the manager of the hotel. He tells her that Jack's body couldn't be found at the hotel, and then he gives Danny a tennis ball, presumably the one that Jack had been throwing around the hotel. Kubrick, when he watched the movie with an audience, realized he didn't need the epilogue. So right before the wide release, Warner Brothers had to send editors out to every single movie theater and have them chop off that last scene and splice the credits in earlier.

And then for the European release of the movie, I don't know why he did this. He cut 25 minutes from the movie like Danny and the Doctor, footage of Halloran renting the snow cat, Wendy seeing the skeletons at the end of the movie. He just cut some stuff. I'm not sure why. And then The Shining was released and it got pretty much panned by the critics. They praised the visuals and the performances, but they were frustrated by the story. So the New York Times called it a supernatural story that has frustratingly little rhyme or reason. Critics said it was slow.

Siskel and Ebert ignored it on their show and then they gave it bad reviews. Siskel said it was a crushing disappointment. Ebert said the characters were hard to connect with. It was the only one of Kubrick's final nine films. So the stretch from Spartacus Ford that didn't receive a single Oscar or Golden Globe nomination, the only one. In fact, it received two Razzie nominations at the first ever. Razzie Awards. Worst director and worst actress for Shelley Duvall. No, poor Shelley. She doesn't need that.

So despite the bad press, the release plan concocted by Kubrick worked. The movie did very well in its first run on 10 screens. It beat out the per theater average of the Empire Strikes Back, which had also just been released. They then ramped it up over the summer, and it made Warner Brothers a profit. Shelley Duvall would immediately go on to the very challenging Popeye. Look out for our episode coming up on that. film. Danny Lloyd famously retired from acting. He would do one more role and then he became a

teacher and seems to have a great life. Jack Nicholson went on to supersonic fame and the two little girls who played the great Grady twins. I believe one is a microbiologist and the other's a researcher now. They also left film and it seemed like they had a nice time on set. I'm very glad that like no child actors were scarred in the making of this movie. Hell yeah. So over time, The Shining was reevaluated by critics by the late 80s. It started to be. be seen in a different light. And then in the 90s and 2000s, it became a cult classic. It is referenced in the Simpsons. It's played in the background of Twister. Iconic lines. Here's Johnny. All Work and No Play. These are things that exist now in the

zeitgeist. And of course, it has spawned endless conspiratorial speculation. Lizzie mentioned Kubrick Faking the Moon Landing. There's even more of that. And if you want to learn about that, go watch the documentary Room 237. It's very fun and also endlessly silly. Stephen King continued to voice his displeasure over this adaptation until he oversaw his own version of The Shining, which was a TV movie shot at the Stanley Hotel where he'd wanted to shoot in Colorado in the late 90s or early 2000s.

Why would you do that? I don't know, and it wasn't very good. And I think when he realized that it was hard to make this into a movie, he kind of backed off a little bit. And then when Mike Flanagan, the director of Dr. Sleep, combines with the novel and the film last year to create kind of one semi-cohesive work. work, King said, quote, everything that I ever disliked about Kubrick, the Kubrick version of the

Shining is now redeemed for me here. So it seems like he is at peace with the Shining now. And Stanley Kubrick only grew more and more obsessive with each of the films that he made. And so it's really easy to see how this played out with his career because the time between his movie releases just grew longer and longer. And it wasn't because people didn't want to make movies with him. It's just because he became more and more obsessed with the details. So here are the release dates of his films. I'm just going to read him. 1951, 1951, 1953, 1953, 56, 57, 60, 62, 64. So all like year, year, year, two years, year, year, year, year, right? Then 64, four years, 68, four years, 71, four years, 75, four years,

85 years, 87, seven years, and then 99, 12 years. Wow. So he would, after the shining, only go on to make two more films, full metal jacket in 1987 and eyes wide shot in 1999. He died of a heart attack at the age of 70 in his sleep, only six days after screening a final cut of eyes wide shot. He died before its release. He had worked every day for 15 months, up until his death, 18 hours a day, trying to finish the film by its planned release date of July 16th, 1999. Wow. Now, before we go into our final discussion, I would like to play a clip for you here from Jack Nicholson and Shelley Duvall on Kubrick's approach and shooting this many takes for a demanding director.

Anything you do as many times is a successful actor, you can't have one set of theories. You know, you can go for years saying, I'm going to get this thing real because they really haven't seen it real. Do you know, they just keep seeing one fashion of unreal after the other that passes is real. and you go mad with realism and then you come up against someone like Stanley

who says, yeah, it's real but it's not interesting. You just appreciate all the pain. I mean, you always dislike whatever the cause is of pain. You always resent it. So I resented Stanley at times because he pushed me and it hurt and I resented him for it. I thought, why do you want to do? do this to me. How can you do this to me? You know, you agonize over it. And it's just a necessary

turmoil to get out of it, what you want out of it. I mean, we had the same end in mind. It was just that sometimes we differed in our means. And by the end, the means met. That's an interesting way of looking at it. Yeah, that was Stanley Kubrick, a man who didn't always know what he wanted, but he wasn't willing to stop until he saw it, whatever it was. So, as always, we like to conclude this show with a little section called What Went Right, because so little is going right in our day-to-day lives. So, Lizzie, in your eyes, what went right with The Shining? Well, first, Chris, I have to call out the cricket that's been making a guest star appearance

on your end of the podcast today. I think it's living in your house somewhere. Oh, it is. Love him or her. Welcome it to the show. So what went right? I think I would highlight Danny's performance is really excellent. And it's so hard to get a good performance out of a child actor.

And it's so hard to have it come across as so unassuming and sort of sweet. And they very much achieved that with this. And he's really wonderful. And it's clear, I think that that's a result of the direction. And I just, I think he was amazing. I agree. I think for me, like a big what went right is that. you could put a disclaimer to this day on this movie that says no child actors were at all emotionally or psychically harmed in the making of this film.

And that's a rare thing for a director to be able to say about their work, especially on a project that is as psychologically twisted as The Shining. For me, it has to be the, oh my God, the production design is so good in this movie. It is everything, all the ballrooms, the style, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the. scale of it. The way that the camera moves through it is obviously amazing, but everything from the carpet to the colors, like that blood red bathroom with the lighting, the men's room, you know, that he steps into or that like seafone green vomit-inducing bathroom in room 237, it feels like every color just holds up so well. And oftentimes I find when I watch movies from the 70s and 80s, maybe it's sometimes like the print or something, but the colors don't translate quite right.

and this one still feels so punchy and dynamic. It's also like they did almost like a parody of 1970s style in this, which is so interesting because it was at the time. But it's so heightened. And you're talking about the carpets and the shapes and like the brown on pink on, you know, the gold room is like pink and gold. And it did blow my mind when you told me that this was not an actual interior of a hotel. That is insane.

Yeah. I mean, I think a lot went right. in this project and it obviously came at a cost the exacting demands of Mr. Stanley Kubrick. Stephen King famously said of Stanley Kubrick, he thinks too much and he feels too little. And then Mark Browning, a critic of King, said, well, you feel too much and think too little. So you've got to have a balance of everything. So it's time to reveal the fun fact about Vivian Kubrick's The Making of the Shining that we promised at the top of this episode. Stanley Kubrick was famously secretive about his movies.

He rarely allowed any sort of press or publicity on set. He would keep things deeply under wraps. And in fact, he was so concerned about controlling the final product that at the end of shoots, he would have, usually his assistant, Leon Vitaly, go and literally burn light on fire, the outtakes from the film, the unused materials. He did not want people to see any part. portion of the sausage that didn't end up in the final product. So you can expect that this control freak might have a hard time with a documentary about his film and the making of his

film The Shining. I think what we would expect is that he would review the footage and much like I'm sure Michael Jordan did with his new documentary, remove anything that was unflattering. However, Kubrick actually did the opposite. So according to a source that I have, and remember this is unverified, but I do trust this person. Stanley Kubrick instructed his daughter to remove any sections of the documentary that reflected too favorably on him, moments where he was seemingly too collaborative or cheerful or goofy on set. He did not want people to see him in this position. He wanted them to see him brooding, quiet, thoughtful, stoic, combative. He had developed a reputation of being this prickly director and he wanted to maintain it. So at the end of the documentary, they actually pulled out all of the stuff that made him look good, and they literally burned it.

So he could maintain his image of the burly, prickly, auteur. And I just, I find it fascinating. I mean, I think it makes perfect sense. This is someone who only had a high school education who came from a middle to lower middle class Jewish family in the Bronx, who many people think is British because a lot of his films were shot in the UK or dealt with issues that made them seem British. Yet, in fact, he couldn't have been anything further from, you know, a well-heeled British filmmaker. And so I think it was very important for him to control this idea that he was an autour. And if he was seen as someone who was gregarious on set, who was outgoing, he felt that that might undercut that image.

So whatever you might think of Stanley Kubrick at the end of this, and you might think he's a bit of a monster like some of the other directors we've talked about. But I think unlike a few of them, William Friedkin comes to mind, Stanley Kubrick was incredibly self-aware about exactly what he was doing and why he was doing it. And I think in every instance, it was so he could try to make the best movie possible because he knew that people liking his movies was going to be more important than people liking him. Guys, thanks again for listening to another episode of What Went Wrong. We hope you enjoyed it.

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and What Went Wrong Pod at Gmail.com. Until the next spooky episode, we will talk to you guys soon. What Went Wrong is a Sad Boom podcast, presented by Lizzie Bassett and Chris Winterbauer. Editing and music by David Bowman with cover art from Euthonaui UOS.