Todd Alcott on The Shining

Screenwriter Todd Alcott’s seven-part series on The Shining: one, two, three, four, five, six, seven.

Lots of great insight into the film, its structure, and who the actual protagonist is. I hadn’t heard this one:

One of my favorite factoids regarding the movie is that Kubrick didn’t just have a ream of “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy” typed up, no — he had reams and reams typed up, in different languages, one for every major territory the movie would play in — Spanish, Italian, French, German, etc., all with a regional phrase specific to the territory. Production Assistant on a Kubrick movie must have been the worst job available in show business.

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What The Old Timers Used To Call Cabin Fever

From left to right, every costume change Jack makes in The Shining.

Channel 4 recreates The Shining to promote its Kubrick season | Media | guardian.co.uk

Channel 4 recreates The Shining to promote its Kubrick season

What if all advertisements were this artfully done? I guess you’d still get sick of them and want to fast forward.

Diane Arbus

We’re doing a Stanley Kubrick Netflix marathon over the next week or two. In poking around Wikipedia, I discovered that the creepy apparition of the two girls in The Shining is inspired by a photograph by Diane Arbus, an artist about whom I’d never heard (which isn’t surprising considering my extremely limited knowledge of art history). Compare the image of the girls in The Shining to Arbus’s Identical twins. After doing some quick searching, I’ve found her work to be positively chilling. A few of her more famous shots:

(click to embiggen)