The Shining (1980)

Trivia: Stephen King has admitted not liking this version of his book.

Trivia: Initially, the bathroom door Jack Nicholson was to axe in was an extremely thin one, made by the prop department to make it easier to destroy. However, Nicholson's technique with the axe was so good (he'd been a volunteer fire marshal) the door shattered into a million pieces, so they had to build a much stronger door to handle his swing.

Trivia: The famous scene where Wendy reads through Jack's accumulated work naturally doesn't have the same impact if the viewer can't read English. Therefore, for every foreign language the film was released in, Kubrick remade this shot with an appropriate cliche in each language - French, German, etc. Also, every page of every manuscript was hand-typed to recreate the realism of typos and misalignments.

Trivia: Stanley Kubrick was very protective of Danny Lloyd, because he was so young. Through some careful and clever directing, Lloyd was unaware he was making a horror film until after the film's release.

Trivia: Stanley Kubrick's daughter, Vivian Kubrick, makes a cameo in the party scene. She wears a black dress and sits on the right side of the sofa closest to the bar.

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Trivia: The line "Here's Johnny" originated on the The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, where Ed McMahon always introduced him with that phrase. Nicholson improvised the line during the shooting; Kubrick liked it and left it in.

Trivia: The real Overlook Hotel (The Timberline Lodge) is near Portland, Oregon. It has no room 237 because the owners specifically requested the room number in the book, 217, be changed. They believed that after people saw the movie no one would want to stay in that room.

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

Trivia: Jack's limp at the end of the movie was a real injury sustained when Jack Nicholson got drunk and fell out of a hotel window the night before shooting this scene.

Trivia: The "snowy" maze near the conclusion of the movie consisted of salt and crushed Styrofoam.

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Trivia: Stephen King attempted to persuade Kubrick not to cast Jack Nicholson as Jack Torrance. King believed that either Michael Moriarty or Jon Voight could have played Jack's descent into madness more convincingly.

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Trivia: In the scene where Jack is writing and gets mightily upset when Wendy interrupts him, watch the chair behind Jack. It vanishes and then reappears. This was, however, intentional from Kubrick. The audience was supposed to get a subconscious feeling that something was wrong. Nice touch.

Trivia: The injured guest who frightens Wendy Torrance by saying "Great party, isn't it?" was played by film editor Norman Gay.

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Trivia: An outtake from the opening sequence was used in the "happy ending" version of Blade Runner, but removed from the director's cut.

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