The shining
USA Color 148 minutes
Release date: May 23, 1980
Stephen King tried to talk Stanley Kubrick out of casting Jack Nicholson in the lead. King had felt that Nicholson appeared fairly crazy from the very start, thus there was little or no surprise when Jack ultimately went totally overboard.
The Timberline Lodge was used for the exteriors, but all the interiors were built on a soundstage in London, England. The management of the Timberline Lodge requested Kubrick not to use room 217 (as specified in the book), fearing that nobody would want to stay in that room ever again. Kubrick changed the script to use the nonexistent room number 237
At first the set designers used a prop door made of very thin wood, but Nicholson's technique with the axe was so good that the prop doors shattered into a million pieces when he hit them, so a real, thickly constructed door was substituted.
Kubrick demanded 127 takes from Shelley Duvall in one scène.
Jack Nicholson came up with “Heeere’s Johnnie”
The shining is the third novel by author Stephen King.
Stephen King was unhappy with Kubrick’s take on his work so he re-acquired the rights to write another screenplay, which was the basis for a 1997 miniseries.
This week 28 years ago The shining premiered (May 23, 1980)
March 7, 1999
Stanley was born in New York City (USA). As a child he was encouraged by his father to take up still photography as a hobby. He entered the field by selling amateur photos to New York's Look magazine. Together with a friend, Kubrick planned a move into film, and so he sank his savings into making the documentary Day of the Fight (1951).
Kubrick's first real film of note was Killer's Kiss (1955) followed by the dark picture The Killing (1956). His breakthrough came with the antiwar movie Paths of Glory (1957) and so Stanley was asked to replace Anthony Mann as the director of the high-budget multistar epic Spartacus (1960). But Kubrick was at odds with both the cast (especially Kirk Douglas) and the crew. The experience was so unpleasant that he forsook Hollywood altogether and moved to London (UK), where he was based ever since.
He made a series of classic films: the sexualized and uproariously comic Lolita (1962), the black comedy Dr. Strangelove (1964), the science-fiction classic 2001: A space odyssey (1968), and the violent A clockwork orange (1971). After Barry Lyndon (1975), Kubrick's filmmaking pace slowed extremely. He made only three more films in the next twenty-five years. Kubrick died shortly after completing his final film, Eyes Wide Shut