The Shining (1980)

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

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: 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 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: 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.

sebb

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: 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: 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.

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

sebb

Trivia: Kubrick tortured Shelly Duvall to get the performance he wanted out of her. He told the crew to have no sympathy for her, and pushed her to do many retakes until she would cry. The scene where she walked backwards on the stairs with the baseball bat was filmed up to 127 times by some counts. At the end of filming she presented Kubrick with clumps of her hair that had fallen out due to stress.

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: 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: 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.

sebb

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

wizard_of_gore

Trivia: For the famous scene where Jack Nicholson breaks down the door with an axe, the crew made a fake door for him to break through, but had to replace it with a real door as the fake one broke too quickly due to Jack Nicholson's prior training as a fireman. This dates to his period of military service in the Air National Guard in 1957. After completing basic training at Lackland Air Force Base, Nicholson performed weekend drills and two-week annual training as a fire fighter assigned to the unit based at Van Nuys Airport. Some sources state they went through 60 doors during filming to get the footage Kubrick wanted.

Trivia: In real life, Jack Nicholson detests cheese sandwiches. When director Stanley Kubrick knew of this, he had them on set every day and made Nicholson eat them, believing that this would make him more agitated in his scenes.

Trivia: The infamous "Here's Johnny!" scene took three days to film.