"Shining" time

At the Vulture website for New York magazine this morning, there's an item linking to a post on The Overlook Hotel, a website devoted to "[e]phemera related to Stanley Kubrick's masterpiece of modern horror, 'The Shining'," concerning the deleted epilogue of the film. The post has stirred up a very slight flurry in my circle of Twitter, with one commentator expressing not entirely inapt amusement at a title card proposed in the epilogue in a draft of the screenplay, the relevant pages of which are reproduced in the post. "The Overlook would survive this tragedy, as it had so many others. It is still open every year from May 20th to September 20th. It is closed for the winter." The post at the site assures the reader, thought, that said title card probably didn't make it past the draft reproduced: "Clearly, the final text about the Overlook's history was an idea omitted in the writing process." Silly tone of the prose aside, it was probably obvious almost from the point that typewriter key hit paper that it would not do to go all Barry Lyndon in the context of a contemporary story. 

"Even the many people who saw the epilogue when The Shining was first released have varying recollections of the exact details," the post observes.  Indeed. I was one of those people. Well I recall the excitement building up to the May 23 1980 opening. My Close Personal Friend Ron Goldberg™, relatively fresh out of NYU Film School, had somehow or other acquired a one-sheet for the movie several months prior, and while we were not crazy about the pinscreen inspired Saul Bass graphic, it grew on us eventually. We knew we had to be there on opening day, and we Jerseyites were in luck, because one of the theaters in which it was opening was the Cinema One on Route 46 in Totowa, a pretty swank first-run then-single-screen theater constructed atop a short cliff of the side of the highway. We would be there for the first screening, one p.m. A bunch of us had been living in this dump in Orange from which we would soon be evicted for blasting Roxy Music records on Ron's Bose 901s at all hours (the landlord, who lived downstairs, was married to a nurse who worked odd hours and needed plenty of rest because "lives depend[ed] on her") but relations had recently been strained on account of Ron's girlfriend having been my girlfriend scant weeks earlier. While our shared  cinephilia tended to transcend such relatively petty personal concerns, the rift meant that we'd all be coming in from different points in north Jersey, I from some form of an ancestral home. I had talked my 16-year-old younger brother Michael into playing hooky from school (it didn't take much); he had read Stephen King's novel a while before and was keen to see whether Kubrick was gonna be able to pull off all the hedge maze stuff. Ron turned up with his-current/my-former girlfriend Debra and this stout, gruff, not-quite hippie chick named Tonka, who was the lover of one of the in-and-out Orange roommates. She was the first lesbian my little brother had ever met, and I was so proud. 

Anyway. The Overlook post quotes Diane Johnson as saying that "Kubrick felt  felt that we should see them in the hospital so we would know that they were all right. He had a soft spot for Wendy and Danny and thought that, at the end of a horror film, the audience should be reassured that everything was back to normal." The epilogue as I remember it did nothing, or at least very little, of the sort. As the Overlook says, people's recollections vary. I don't recollect any interaction between Ullman and a reception nurse, or Ullman  with Danny. (The above picture is a continuity Polaroid from the set, so obviously such an exchange was shot.) I can almost swear that the exchange in which Ullman tosses a ball to Danny was not in the sequence. I mainly remember the exchange between Ullman and a still-shaken Wendy in which he recounts to her, in terms more officious than comforting, that there was no physical evidence that any of the phenomena she claims to have witnessed at the Overlook, e.g., gallons of blood gushing from the elevators, ever actually occured. Barry Nelson's portrayal struck me more as manager trying to steer an ex-employee away from a lawsuit than a caring former boss. Of course that could just have been my anti-authoritarian streak, a common trait in twenty-year-olds. 

This was not really a "return to normal" kind of scene, in other words. It left more of a "what the hell happened" feeling in this viewer. We knew that Danny and Wendy had survived; Danny getting pulled into the Sno-Cat and that vehicle driving away had a very satisfying modern fairy-tale feel to it. The hospital scene threw us into a state of doubt again.

I also recall the placement of the scene differently than how it's described on the Overlook site. The post says it's "located between the shot of Jack frozen in the snow and the long dolly shot through the lobby that ends on the July 4, 1921 framed photo." Oddly enough, my own recollection is that the scene occurs after the shot of the Sno-Cat taking off. There was then a blackout, then the hospital scene, and then the shot of Jack frozen in the maze, then the lobby shot. Of course this makes no sense. Obviously if the Overlook people had been able to check out the hotel and insure that the elevators had not been flooded with blood and so on, they would also have discovered and disposed of Jack Torrance's mortal remains while on the job, and hence he would not be sitting frozen in the maze after Ullman had debriefed Wendy. On the other hand, the placement makes sense in terms of delivering a final shock to viewers, and also linking the mad dead Torrance to the droll champagne-glass-holder of 1921. We'll never know who's right, or who's "right," but again, that's how I remember it. (Roger Ebert's musings on the epilogue, cited in the Wikipedia entry on the movie, have Ullman saying that Jack's body was not found during the investigation, which would make the placement of Jack in the maze after that scene make a sort of sense/nonsense; my recollection of the scene does not have that dialogue and neither do the script pages reproduced in the Overlook post.)

The reason I had/have such a strong impression of the missing ending is because I ended up seeing The Shining again, with at least one of the same party, pretty shortly after seeing it the first time, and being flummoxed by the absence of the hospital scene. Ron did some investigating, and according to the story he told me, on the evening of the first day of screening, Warner Brothers had dispatched a batallion of in-house editors, armed with razor blades and Scotch tape and a memo from Kubrick himself, to every theater that had a print of the film, and sliced out the scene and taped the reel back together, and that was that. 

As I've said elsewhere, The Shining kind of became our social activity that summer. It was like a remake of Marty, only we were idiots: "Whaddya wanna do tonight?" "I dunno, whaddya wanna do tonight?" "Wanna go to The Shining?" "Sure." Think we saw it nine times before September. Ace picture!

UPDATE: I was so caught up in describing the more comic/picaresque aspects of my first Shining outing that I forgot to include one crucial member of our party, Joseph Failla, who as of 1980 had been my stalwart movie-going mate for over a decade. He too was there, and he e-mailed his thoughts last night: 

"It's funny how we can remember the same event so differently particularly since I was sitting right next to you at the time. As I recall, the deleted SHINING footage does indeed begin just after the shot of Jack Nicholson frozen in the snow and finishes on that long track down the hotel hallway into the black and white photo. It should be mentioned that the footage ends as a dissolve and not the quick cut that we see in the film today. The transitional shot originally started on a close up of Shelley Duvall and then slowly fades, revealing more of the corridor further back, so you could not yet tell where we were headed as the pictures on the wall were too small to make out. 

"As to whether the original ending is any more comforting, I'd say partially in that at least Danny has seemed to come through it OK. We see him enjoying a meal (ice cream I think), he looks as if he's forgotten all that has come before and there's no evidence of his imaginary friend Tony returning. Duvall's Wendy doesn't appear so much traumatized but rather emotionless and deeply confused. She's shown sitting up in her hospital bed nervously smoking a cigarette, as the hotel manager and his associate from the interview scene calmly and coldly explain there's no evidence of the mysterious occurrences she's told them. 

"So does the scene add any weight or clarity to the movie at all, or does it just puzzle the audience even more? I'm not sure if the ending as is, can tidy things up any better than what we first saw in 1980, but having seen the footage as part of the film, it's hard even today to ignore my memory of it. Keep in mind the European version of THE SHINING is further cut to under 2 hours, removing a substantial 25 minutes of more material we have always had access to. The cuts amount to numerous trims of existing sequences including the entirety of Anne Jackson's scene as a doctor examining Danny and questioning Wendy. The removal of that scene would take us directly from Danny's nightmare, to the family's drive up the winding highway to the Overlook. It's a possible smoother segue but it does rob the film of a memorable 'shining' moment when Wendy explains to the doctor how Jack nearly dislocated Danny's shoulder by pulling his arm too hard as, 'Just one of those things...'. "

Looks like we have a potential Shining Rashomon here. Maybe I'll ask MCPFRG™ and my brother how they remember the ending. I don't know about Debra though. As for Tonka, she's MIA. 

In comments, Partisan asks about DePalma's Dressed To Kill, released later on that summer. Indeed, it was another cinephile-Marty favorite, although not as monumental as The Shining. I have an anecdote about it, and its detractor Mr. Ron Jeremy, here. As for Parajanov's great film The Color Of Pomegranates, I missed out on its forst U.S. showings in '80; truth to tell my discovery of Parajanov, and Tarkovsky for that matter, would have to wait a few years.

UPDATE TWO (1/27/13): A third witness from the screening of May 23, 1980, the aforementioned Mr. Goldberg, weighs in in comments. 

Comments

[rotch]

Lovely. Stumble upon this just after the news that Room 237 finally has a release date. Really can't wait to catch up with that.

Also worth noting, Toy Story 3 director Lee Unkrich runs The Overlook Hotel site. His fascination with the film can be traced back to the carpet pattern in Sid's house in the original Toy Story.

[hace]

To think Barry Nelson could have joined James Mason and Tom Cruise who also had Kubrick scenes of checking in at a hospital reception desk wearing an overcoat in LOLITA and EYES WIDE SHUT. Of course McDowell checked in at a hospital desk in CLOCKWORK ORANGE but he wasn't wearing an overcoat.

[Robert Cashill]

I saw it at Cinema One on 46, too, with my mom. It was right after it opened; indeed, maybe that Saturday, May 24. No hospital ending. Could the minions have cut it that quickly?

[David Ehrenstein]

I saw that hospital scene at the press preview and was slightly surprised to hear that Kubrick had cut it shortly afterwards. As I recall Barry Nelson's rolling the ball to Danny was rather scary -- almost as if HE were one of the ghosts.

Still cutting the scene made for a more dramtically direct ending.

What most people discussed was how Kubick had completely avoided a finale filled with convulsive horror imagery a la Friedkin, De Palma or Ridley Scott. For him the REAL horror was Jack -- a psychotic abuser.

It's a testament to the power of Kubrick's art that the film continues to fascinate to this very day.

[Henry Holland]

Has anyone seen the European version, which is 31 minutes shorter due 21 cuts? Thoughts?

[Chip]

But wasn't it topiary in the novel? Hedge maze for the film? Oh the vagaries of memory!

[Chip]

Topiary ANIMALS, I should say. Oh to wrong again!

[Partisan]

Interesting anecdote. Was DRESSED TO KILL released too late that summer for multiple reviewings or did not all your friends like it? The #1 movie on Hoberman's top 10 that year was THE COLOUR OF POMEGRANATES, but I doubt it ran very long in New York that year.

[Scott Is NOT A Professional Film Critic]

Kenny, you fuckin' bad boy, keeping nurses from their much-needed rest by blasting Roxy Music albums. (Let me guess, you and your bros were Eno-era types? Side Two of For Your Pleasure at four in the morning?)

As to the subject at hand: hot damn off a redhead's tender ass if Kubrick isn't one of those few directors who make you wish we could get a load of all their deleted scenes on the DVD/Blu-Ray. From all the things I've read over the years, it sounds as if there were a good two or three versions of The Shining that potentially existed - each one altering a viewer's take on the ending and on the implications of the events inside The Overlook. Seems like those of you who were available for the film's initial screenings in '80 were privy to something that the rest of us will forever have to torture ourselves by merely imagining.

Damn my parents for not having met years earlier.

[D Cairns]

The shorter cut of The Shining was the first one I saw, so I probably have a different take on it than if I'd seen one of the US cuts first. Obviously I'm glad to have a longer version and wish we had all the outtakes, but I could see the reasons for the cutting. All the information we get in the extended version is there in the shorter one, just in a different order. And it doesn't have the skeletons, which are kind of silly. But kind of cool.

And yes, topiary animals in the book.

[Ron Goldberg (TM)]

As I remember it, we see Jack frozen in the snow. It then cuts to the hospital, as Ullman asks a nurse's station where Wendy's room is. The rest of the scene is poor Shelly Duvall basically repeating variations on "But I saw it!" while Ullman (and a cop?) tell her there was nothing there. No, Jack was not found. I wish I remembered Ullman rolling a ball to Danny -- that would have been creepy -- but I don't. I do remember that the scene was not only superfluous, but really undercut Duvall's performance, which until then had expertly straddled innocent and ninny - this scene just made her look like a ninny. Then we get the tracking shot to the photo on the wall. To this day, I'm amazed they were able to edit copies of a film already in the theaters. With digital, that shouldn't be hard anymore (perhaps unfortunately).

BTW, while overall it's not very good, the 2-part Stephen King made-for-TV version has its moments, and the topiary finally gets its due. It's just as creepy as in the book. I had heard Kubrick tried to film the topiary and the SFX just weren't good enough at the time, hence the hedge maze. I also heard that Tomita was originally considered for the soundtrack before Wendy Carlos. There, I've used up almost all my Shining trivia!

[NeilFC]

I remember reading something years ago (can't remember where) about the last scene in the hospital being cut - the article claimed that the point of the scene was to make it look like Ullman was somehow behind it all.

There was a documentary on British tv a while back called "Stanley Kubrick's Boxes" where the writer John Ronson was invited by Kubrick's estate to come to Kubrick's home and look through all his boxes (and there was thousands of them) filled with all manner of material, from abandoned projects, fan-letters & hate mail etc. There were interviews with Kubrick's employees that were fascinating - apparently Kubrick had US newspapers carrying ads for "The Shining" sent to his home and he would measure them to see if they were the proper size, and if they were smaller by one centimetre or so, he would get his people to contact the newspapers to complain and have the ads re-printed with the proper specifications. There was an interview with, i think, someone from Warner Bros. who Kubrick contacted a few days after the US premiere of "The Shining" and ordered him to go round the cinemas where it was showing and snip the hospital scene from the negatives. I think "The Shining" was only being shown on a few screens in it's first week, so it was easily done.

Clips from the documentary are on youtube, but sadly not the whole thing.

[Sdcinerama]

One of my film studies professors at UCLA told his class that he made sure to get down to a theater on opening day because he knew Kubrick would probably cut... Something.
The one piece of his description I remember, was that the last shot before the hallway pan, was Danny, bouncing a ball against a wall the way Jack had done earlier in the film.
Keep in mind that this was 1996 and info on the Internet wasn't very authoratative so I had no way of proving it right or wrong.

[Kevin Michael Grace]

Stanley Kubrick's Boxes is one of the extras on the new WB blu-ray of Full Metal Jacket.

[Jonathan Rosenbaum]

I not only saw the original versions of both 2001 and The Shining in New York; I'm nearly positive that I also saw Kubrick himself on the street in New York's Soho around the same time that The Shining opened--wearing a sloppy T-shirt and, interestingly enough, tearing down a small poster for the Soho News that advertised an interview with none other than Stanley Kubrick. Maybe I was hallucinating this or seeing an uncanny lookalike--I've never heard any other accounts of Kubrick being in New York at the time. But presumably he could have gone over on a boat (or gritted his teeth and taken a plane, despite his phobia), and it would have made sense for him to have been there to make last-minute adjustments.

For whatever it's worth, I don't think his cutting the hospital scene in The Shining represented any significant loss at all, because the sequence seemed quite perfunctory and unnecessary, adding virtually nothing. I'm much less sure about the much more extensive cuts that he made to 2001 being improvements--even though I was frankly so puzzled after my first viewing that it might have made the film a bit easier at the time for a rube like me.

[Oliver_C]

Was 'Stanley Kubrick's Boxes' shot on film, high-def or SD? If the last (as I suspect), it makes Warners' decision to limit its availability to a double-dip blu-ray of a second-rate Kubrick all the more infuriating.

[MSK]

TONKA!!

[Oliver_C]

TONKA!!!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ydmTjUwVpM

[sem]

Very interesant post.

[Jack Womack]

Same here. I saw The Shining on the Friday it opened in NYC, at a theater at around 3rd/86th (Lex/86th? one of the newer, at the time) and the footage following frozen Jack was exactly as described -- Shelly Duvall in hospital bed essentially being told nothing had happened. Then, back to long track leading up to photo from old hotel w/JN in center).Remember esp because this is only time I've seen a *pre-cut* version of any film.

[Grant L]

Excuse me, but are you the Jack Womack who wrote the Dryco series? Read the entire thing twice...harsh and moving, and I'm so glad you decided to take mercy on everyone in the last book.

[Jacquie Collins]

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