>Not once did Kubrick say anything about King’s constant criticism of the film and, in the same quiet fashion, took his revenge: since he still held the rights to the novel, one of his stipulations for giving them up was that King would be prevented from further commenting on his film; the other was $1,5 million. In a stunning move, Kubrick bought King’s silence but had King pay for it.
Stanley Kubrick's The Shining is clearly a masterpiece of film making and to be honest, Stephen King's opinion just makes me think less of him (King) although I'm also a fan of his writing too.
I'd never noticed Jack's glances towards the camera, but once you notice them, it's clear that they were totally intentional and designed to unnerve the viewer (he's looking at me!). It's this attention to detail that makes Kubrick the master that he is.
Jack’s seeing lots of phantoms—why not also the viewer, whom the camera brings “in” to the scene?
(When you start pulling on that thread—the viewer as a vital part of the fiction, as really present, as encouraging and complicit in what takes place—and make that the focus of a horror film, you get Funny Games)
Never seen "Funny Games" - looking on IMDB, there's what looks like the original from 1997 and a remake in 2007 that doesn't seem as well received (shame as I have a high opinion of Tim Roth).
The Funny Games remake was poorly received because it was released at the height of the torture porn craze and contemptuous spat in the face of audiences for liking that sort of thing. When a movie entices an audience to come see it them tells them to go fuck themselves, it often doesn't go over well.
I don’t think less of King for it, though it strongly disagree with him. An artist sometimes has a much different connection to their artwork than the audience does.
Maybe I was over-harsh - I think less of Stephen King's taste in films. And yes, he's absolutely allowed to like or dislike any adaptations of his books. I used to think that the majority of Stephen King film adaptations were likely to be rubbish, but I think there's plenty of exceptions to that now.
I can imagine that King has a very deep connection to The Shining as Jack is probably the closest that King has got to an autobiographical character.
> I can imagine that King has a very deep connection to The Shining as Jack is probably the closest that King has got to an autobiographical character.
Kimg has a few autobiographical characters, but surely the closest has to be when he literally self inserted himself into the gunslinger series.
I haven't read them but that certainly sounds more autobiographical.
I've also seen the theory that Jack Torrance in the film had been sexually abusing Danny. There's various links with the use of bears (e.g. the fellatio scene with the man in the bear suit) and the subtle use of pornography around the hotel (e.g. Jack reading PlayGirl in the hotel lobby).
> Stephen King's opinion just makes me think less of him (King) although I'm also a fan of his writing too
This happens in software development, too: someone is so single-mindedly fixated on their own approach to building understandable, maintainable software that they can't recognize understandable, maintainable software built any other way.
I've seen something happen a few times with senior engineers who are being integrated into a team. It makes sense for their first task to be a fairly easy change in the best codebase, the "model" codebase where everything runs smoothly and there aren't any nasty surprises. You won't show them the cesspool codebase that causes all your problems until later.
So you give them the easy problem in the easy codebase, and they react like they've been dropped into the pits of hell. They might say, "Where's the dependency injection?" or "Oh my god, you're instantiating this object directly instead of using a factory!" or something else, depending on their taste. They don't see any sign of the techniques they would use to build maintainable software, so they assume the worst. You reassure them: we don't have any quality or maintainability issues with this codebase. It's fast, it doesn't break, everyone understands it, and it has absorbed every requirements change product has thrown at us for eighteen months, tripling in size in the process, without losing those desirable qualities.
At this point they have a choice. They can keep an open mind, see if what you're telling them proves to be true in practice, and maybe learn how a codebase can be understandable and maintainable without looking like they expect, or they can let their obsession with their own techniques be their final thought on the issue.
Obviously this is much more crucial for software engineers, who almost always work collaboratively, than for a novelist who works alone. A novelist with a track record of success doesn't have as many reasons to appreciate the techniques of other creators as a software engineer does.
Shining is a technical masterpiece. However, its characters and their progression is below-average at best and lacks all nuance or subtlety.
Kubric was also a sadist who was known for torturing actors on set. When you see how Shelly Duval was a mental mess, about to be mentally broken down… that part wasn’t acted.
Art is rarely made by nice people. You need to have a certain level of ego and narcissism. Many of Hollywood's great directors had their own personal demons.
Do you have actual factual support for that? Because plenty of great art is made by actually perfectly normal people who do not enjoy torturing others.
The business or local culture here and there sometimes favors sociopath and enable them to the maximum. That is however different claim.
I don’t know about _rarely_, but I think it is like rich people, most of the had to dish out a lot of pain and misery to get where they are. Sure, there are occasional examples where the rise to rishes doesn’t take that path, but it’s pretty rare. I say this as a 40 year founder having watched many of my peers become rich in a pretty horrific way. And me liking to sleep at nogjt being nice and not rich.
Collaborative art requires, I think, a strong hand and it’s often rough over people’s feelings.
> Collaborative art requires, I think, a strong hand and it’s often rough over people’s feelings.
I would say the opposite. Collaboration, including in art, have better results if the people running the show are not complete assholes.
A strong hand "rough over people’s feelings" is more likely to end up with completely crappy result. It does not mean that being doormat would get you good results, but these kind of people destroy team motivation and engagement - regardless of whether we talk about software development or art.
King has good points though. The story and psychology is pretty flat in the movie. What he miss is the movie makes up for it with stunning visuals and atmosphere.
I think it’s undeniable that Kubrick’s film is excellent. I do think that the TV adaptation of the shining is both a better adaptation of the story and flatly a better story than Kubrick’s. But execution on the film itself is just way more memorable.
In present day terms where books are constantly, dramatically changed for film so far from the original plot that they’re basically different stories with polar opposite ideologies King’s criticisms feel a lot less heavy hitting than they may have in the past.
Ugh I got to the last paragraph and that definitely sounds like GPT. I can't stand those in summary paragraphs. The way it has to twist off and add a ribbon to every body of text. I hate that.
It reminds me of the rote methods of essay writing that they teach in US schools in order to pass standardized tests. It usually comprises an obvious "thesis statement" followed by supporting evidence and a final, contrived recapitulation of the previous few paragraphs. Thankfully this essay starts off well enough by avoiding the stilted "here is my point followed by a slew of observations and three filler sentences" convention, but yeah, that last bit seems a little rough.
In the interest of fairness I'm not sure that I could do much better since I've not written long-form in years.
The Shining is one of my favorite King books and I always thought the movie was a bastardization of his work. One of my biggest peeves is the fact that Wendy in the book was a much stronger character than the one played by Shelley Duvall. Also the hotel was actually haunted and not a mental breakdown by John. There was a very real supernatural element.
The best interpretation of The Shining film that I've heard does explicitly acknowledge that the Overlook was haunted. Basically, the different murderers are reincarnated versions of themselves - this is shown in the last shot with the original version of Jack being shown in the Baphomet posture in the old photo. Jack also mentions that he felt that he had been in the hotel before and could tell what was behind each corner (there's a constant corner/hidden theme running through the film too). There's also the hint that Grady appears to be two people - Delbert Grady and Charles Grady - presumably Charles is the reincarnation of Delbert. This is also borne out by the confusion between Grady having twin daughters and also their ages being 7 and 9 (i.e. not twins).
the movie does show the house is haunted. when danny gets attacked by the woman in the room and at the very end of the movie when shelly duvall is running around the house and shes all of those people and the skeletons in the lounge area. although i do admit it took me a while before reading the book to realize that they all werent having mental breakdowns. the movie definitely could have been a little clearer there
I find it interesting that I like a lot of movies based on Steven King's writing (The Shining, Stand By Me, Shawshank Redemption, and Misery are top of mind), but I don't particularly care for Steven King's writing style or many of the books that are considered his best. I didn't care for 'IT' at all. It's like Lovecraft, I appreciate the ideas, body of work, and talent, even if it needs a different style for me to get into it.
> Many of King’s criticisms of the film largely arise from the fundamental differences in the intentions behind the book and the movie.
As with "Heart of Darkness" / "Apocalypse Now", this gets at one point I always bring up in these contexts: a book and movie can be related, but they are distinct works of art. (HoD/AN being an extreme example of distance.)
"The book was better" always strikes me as unhelpful. What is communicated visually is radically different than what is communicated in prose. Plus, an actor is an artist, too. "Here's Johnny!" cannot be achieved in text the way Nicholson delivered it on the screen.
King himself is standing too close to the prose work to assess whether the film is any good. Of course Kubric couldn't match a vision that exists in King's head.
Agree. Also, Kubrick's other works strongly emphasize lighting, composition, music, and effects over plot. Just look at Barry Lyndon's candlelit scenes (which look like paintings by the Dutch masters), Eye's Wide Shut's Christmas lights, Clockwork Orange's use of Beethoven, or 2001's match cut from a bone to a spaceship. You can't achieve those in a book, because they are purely audiovisual phenomena. And movies have different constraints: like time limits.
King doesn't have to worry at all about what the score is, or how to film a wall of blood. It's simply not part of the medium. The requirements and constraints are completely different.
> "The book was better" always strikes me as unhelpful. What is communicated visually is radically different than what is communicated in prose.
I think that the difference is deeper then that. Film writing tend to lean toward schematic and dumbed down motivations/characters. It is not that it would be impossible to write more smartly for film, it is possible and it was done on occasion.
But most of the time, when book is adapted every character becomes more of his own stereotype - whether by gender, age or type of person. Nuance is killed. Likewise with plot events.
If the script contains one dimensional characters, there is only so much actors can do. The rest of the crew even less so. Director is able to have some influence, but he still needs to work with script as it is.
Writing a bit more complex characters/plot takes skills contemporary film writers just don't have - even if the source material has that. And it would take a bit of additional time too, so they don't have option to develop those skills.
As others point out this essay is not good (does not even touch on the Native American threads prevalent in the movie that are missing in the book).
However, it does sort of point to a major characteristic in King’s typical “could’ve been good” villains: As opposed to totally evil characters, eg Bev’s husband in It, who are driven by their primal urges, these characters would have landed in a whole different place had the dice landed differently. Overall they are good but with a few weaknesses, which evil forces manipulate to pull them under. Another good example of such a character is Nick, in The Stand.
If you replace “evil forces” above by “life’s circumstances”, I think this to be a good description of how real-life villains are made.
If you’ve ever seen the tv series one, with the guy from Wings in it, it is pretty good too. I like it a lot. An ex-gf introduced me to it, as she liked how it was much more true to the book. You can appreciate each version for what they are. Kubrick’s is riffing on the book like jazz, to go its own way and explore things Kubrick finds interesting. The tv series one goes for what makes the book scary and moving.
I suppose this is really due to the needs of getting things read on the web as a medium. The article is at basically the optimal length for read metrics.
Sucks if you have the attention span to handle more, for example if you came from a pre-internet reading culture
on edit: in a way this article on the Trinitonian exemplifies a common strategy for Internet writing, the TLDR article that summarizes another longer form article, or a number of related articles, as this one summarizes a bunch of the Senses of Cinema article https://www.sensesofcinema.com/2020/the-shining-at-40/king-v... (although not in the traditional way that one summarizes)
Often of course such a summary article is written by the same person who wrote the original and related articles.
gosh, evidently being the bearer of bad news deserves a down vote. Or maybe people just think it's wrong and the internet does not reward shorter articles?
But of course. Jack is King’s self-insertion, and when he sees Jack as completely unsympathetic and evil in the movie, of course he doesn’t like it too much.
I only discovered King a few years ago, having purposely avoided his books as something that "everyone liked". Now I am a fan. However, I am less fond of the film adaptations. I think that it is very challenging to make King's books into movies. The Shining is one of the more successful adaptations and ironically that which King most despises.
I always thought King adaptations work best the less he is involved with them - adapting a story to another medium requires a very different way of thinking, and a novellist (especially an incredibly talented one like King) isn't always well suited to the visual storytelling medium.
Yes, but you can adapt the story to the visual medium ("show don't tell" and all that) while staying true to its original intention. Or you can turn King's autobiographical character into a stereotypical psycho axe murderer.
I'll preface this by saying that my love of cinema is more about the visual than the characterisation, so it may be that we're coming at this from two different angles... I do love both the book and Kubrick versions of The Shining, and I don't think either detracts from the other.
I can't help but think keeping Jack's character more faithful to King's character of a good man slowly being corrupted by the hotel and resisting would have really changed the pace of Kubrick's movie for the worse, and taken away a lot of his really beautiful compositions.
I think King's panned adaptation for the 1997 miniseries is evidence supporting that Kubrick's character adaptations were good choices for the film he was making / the medium shift.
Edit: not sure why you're being downvoted, I think your characterisation of the changes Kubrick made to Jack's character is entirely valid
> I always thought King adaptations work best the less he is involved with them
Maximum Overdrive[1] certainly provides some support for this hypothesis. About the only good part of this movie is the soundtrack, which was provided by AC/DC.
Directing a movie requires very different skills. Even on just a personality level: an author can be reclusive, but a director has to be extremely social, because a film is made by a large crew of people. And there's the obvious other skills too (this interview is from American Film magazine):
Stephen King: The movie is about all these vehicle goings crazy and running by themselves, so we started shooting a lot of gas pedals, clutches, transmissions, things like that, operating themselves. We had one sequence: The gas pedal goes to the floor, the gas pedal goes up, the clutch goes in, the gears shifts by itself, the clutch comes out and the gas pedal goes back to the floor again. We were able to shoot everything but the transmission from the driver's side door. The transmission was a problem, because we kept seeing either a corner of the studio of a reflection.
So I said: This is no problem, we will simply take the camera around to the other side and shoot the transmission from there. Total silence. Everybody looked at everybody else. You know what's happening here, right? I'd crossed the axis. It was like farting at the dinner party. Nobody wanted to say you've made a terrible mistake. I didn't get this job because I could direct or because I had any background in film; I got it because I was Stephen King.
So finally [cameraman] Daniele Nannuzzi told me I'd crossed the 180-degree axis and that this simply wasn't done, and although I didn't understand what it was, I grasped the idea that I was breaking a rule.
Later on, I called George [Romero] up on the phone and I said, "What is this axis shit?" and he laughed his head off and explained it, and I said, "Can you break it -- the rule?" He said, "It's better not to, but if you have to, you can. If you look at The Battleship Potemkin" (which I never have), "it crosses the axis all the time, and the guy [Sergei Eisenstein] gets away with it." Then I saw David Lynch and asked him: "What's this about crossing the axis?" and he burst out laughing and said, "That always gets me." And I asked if you could do it, and he gave me this startled look and said, "Stephen, you can do anything. You're the director." Then he paused and said, "But it doesn't cut together."
Aaaand... there's actually a much more relevant set of quotes about The Shining, like:
There's a lot to like about it. But it's a great big beautiful Cadillac with no motor inside. You can sit in it, you can enjoy the smell of the leather upholstery -- the only thing you can't do is drive it anywhere. So I would do everything different. The real problem is that Kubrick set out to make a horror picture with no apparent understanding of the genre. Everything about it screams that from the beginning to the end, from plot decisions to that final scene -- which has been used before on "The Twilight Zone."
It’s my opinion, and probably only my opinion that the shorter his stories, the better they are. I love love love his short stories, but his novels are only meh for me—-two exceptions being the The Stand and Misery. I have read most of his stuff except for anything released in the last 3 years or so.
I think even his short stories adapt better to movies as well…Shawshank, Stand By Me, The Green Mile…all three to me are simply awesome movies but were heavily adapted from the source story. Misery was good as well, but I kind of blame the casting of Kathy Bates as a genius move that really made that one work.
Agreed. The Dark Tower series works very well as independent books exhuding their own exotic charm.
As a canonical series, it's a jumbled mess of barely connected themes tied together only by Kingcs own ego (maybe that's the point, but its still narcissistic).
At some point he even tries to take credit for Harry Potter and Star Wars, albeit in a vague "everything's connected" type of way.
I tell anybody who wants to read the series to simply read the first book, and the last chapter of the last book.
He's a brilliant writer, but his strength lies in leaving some things to mystery, instead of micromanaging his worlds.
I tell anybody who wants to read the series to simply read the first book, and the last chapter of the last book.
I don't know about that. The whole idea behind the series is to serve as a recounting of Roland's mistakes along the way, and how he progressively refines his course at each iteration. Cutting to the proverbial chase just leaves the reader (and Roland) stuck in the cycle forever. You have to suffer alongside him (and his companions) to get it, I think.
The suffering becomes gratuitous after a certain point (spiderman? really?), so I think I just rejected that aspect and focused more on what made the Gunslinger so good: a slow relentless chase across an unknown world where the lines of good and evil are neither defined nor relevant.
Yeah, valid point there. I almost called it quits a couple of times myself.
By the end it was obvious that King was writing from a place that is uncomfortably familiar on a personal level. "Christ, I'm so tired of this project. If I were less conscientious, I could just walk away from it. Let's chop out some features and link in some third-party libraries so we can ship it already."
I believe him that he's clean. If he was still coked up it would be reflected in the themes of his work. He doesn't really have a filter. That's sort of his special genius.
