Heeeeeere's Johnny!
33. The Tonight Show-skewering line Jack delivers as he pokes his face through the freshly hacked door has been parodied every which way—but only out of reverence, as it's still considered one of the most terrifying movie moments of all time. And it was an ad lib.
"I quit using my script," Nicholson told Vivian Kubrick, acknowledging the ever-evolving screenplay. "I just take the ones they type off each day."
What's Up, Doc
34. After The Shining, Danny Lloyd played a young G. Gordon Liddy of Watergate infamy in a 1982 TV movie and then moved on with his life, becoming a biology professor at a community college in Kentucky. He's married with four children and has been the subject of endless what-happened-to-him speculation over the years. "I once read that I had six kids and was a pig farmer," he quipped to The Guardian in 2017. "That's not entirely accurate."
He continued going on auditions until he was 13 or 14, then decided not enough was happening to keep going. "I always enjoyed it," he said. "It was exciting. But as I got a little bit older, it got kind of boring. Then I had to tell my parents that I was ready to quit. Which they were fine with. They were never stage parents. They made sure I had a normal upbringing."
"I don't do many interviews," Lloyd noted. "But when I do, I try to make it clear, The Shining was a good experience. I look back on it fondly. What happened to me was I didn't really do much else after the film. So you kind of have to lay low and live a normal life."
Wheeling and Dealing
35. Lloyd said a crew member told him he'd send him the tricycle he so memorably pedaled through those halls on when the shoot was over. "I was waiting and waiting for it, but it never came," Lloyd told The Guardian in 2017.
But he did receive a seal of approval from Stanley Kubrick, who stayed in touch and called him around the time he graduated from high school. "He was a terrific boy," the director told Ciment. "He had instinctive taste. He was very smart, very talented and very sensible. His parents, Jim and Ann, were very sensitive to his problems and very supportive, and he had a great time. Danny always knew his lines, and despite the inevitable pampering which occurred on the set, he was always reasonable and well-behaved."
Together Forever
36. Louise and Lisa Burns also stopped acting after The Shining and went on to lead regular lives, their place in pop culture history assured.
According to a Q&A for Scream, Lisa became a criminal attorney and Louise is a scientist and teacher.
Horror Show
37. Stephen King famously thought the movie was trash (and he was hardly alone, with critics divided on what it betrayed more, King's book or Kubrick's previous work). Brian DePalma's Carrie in 1976 and a 1979 Salem Lot miniseries both took significant liberties with their source material, but The Shining really stuck in King's craw—even after his own 1997 miniseries, which he wrote and produced, starring Steven Weber as Jack Torrance, landed with a thud.
"I think The Shining is a beautiful film and it looks terrific and as I've said before, it's like a big, beautiful Cadillac with no engine inside it," King told Deadline in or around 2013. "In that sense, when it opened, a lot of the reviews weren't very favorable and I was one of those reviewers. I kept my mouth shut at the time, but I didn't care for it much."
"I feel the same [now]," he continued, "because the character of Jack Torrance has no arc in that movie. Absolutely no arc at all. When we first see Jack Nicholson, he's in the office of Mr. Ullman, the manager of the hotel, and you know then, he's crazy as a s--t-house rat. All he does is get crazier. In the book, he's a guy who's struggling with his sanity and finally loses it. To me, that's a tragedy. In the movie, there's no tragedy because there's no real change. The other real difference is at the end of my book the hotel blows up, and at the end of Kubrick's movie the hotel freezes. That's a difference.
"But I met Kubrick and there's no question he's a terrifically smart guy. He's made some of the movies that mean a lot to me, Dr. Strangelove, for one and Paths of Glory, for another. I think he did some terrific things but, boy, he was a really insular man. In the sense that when you met him, and when you talked to him, he was able to interact in a perfectly normal way but you never felt like he was all the way there. He was inside himself."
The Ins and Outs of the Overlook
38. Stuart Ullman is described by Jack as an "officious little prick" in the book, and the Overlook's general manager tells Jack that, if it were up to him, he wouldn't have given him the job as winter caretaker of his precious hotel. Ullman, played by Barry Nelson, is less of an antagonist in the film, Kubrick going all in on the hotel being the primary villain (or maybe Jack's just insane, you don't know right away), while the book spends time with all of the outside and internal forces that eventually grind Jack's gears into overdrive.
Ullman was supposed to play an even bigger role: A week into the movie's theatrical run, Kubrick cut a scene in which Wendy is in the hospital after she and Danny escape and Ullman is there telling her that they hadn't found her husband's body—after which the camera returns to the halls of the Overlook, eventually settling on the old black and white photograph featuring a grinning Jack that closes the film. Because there he is, in the hotel's past!
The Final Twist
39. Kubrick explained to Michel Ciment that he changed the ending from King's book, in which the Overlook blows up with Jack inside and Wendy, Danny and Dick escape, in part because he wanted an audience who'd read the book to be surprised. Oh, and he thought King's ending was lame.
"To be honest, the end of the book seemed a bit hackneyed to me and not very interesting," the director said. "I wanted an ending which the audience could not anticipate. In the film, they think Hallorann is going to save Wendy and Danny. When he is killed they fear the worst. Surely, they fear, there is no way now for Wendy and Danny to escape. The maze ending may have suggested itself from the animal topiary scenes in the novel. I don't actually remember how the idea first came about."
And that is a real photograph from 1921 that the crew found in a picture library, with Nicholson airbrushed in (after Kubrick had photographed him from multiple distances, playing with angles and lighting, to get the image just right).
40. Ironically, the Overlook did still burn down in a way. A fire at Elstree Studios destroyed one of the main hotel sets toward the end of production, adding $2.5 million to the budget and three weeks to the shooting schedule, a bit of a madhouse till the end.