November 6, 1978

Kubrick Films 'The Shining' In Secrecy in English Studio

By ALJEAN HARMETZ

Mr. Kubrick, unlike most film makers, has been scrupulous about not feeding off the themes and challenges of his past films. "Barry Lyndon" was a different emotional and intellectual puzzle from "A Clockwork Orange," which preceded it. "2001: A Space Odyssey" has neither form nor content in common with "Lolita." "The Shining" is his attempt to take a top thriller, a supermarket Gothic novel from the author of "Carrie," and sculpture it into a great horror film.

"I think Stanley wants to make the best horror film ever made, " says Diane Johnson, an American novelist who collaborated on the script of "The Shining." The word she kept using was 'right.' "He sees a certain amount of intellectual challenge in doing a horror film right. The film must be plausible, use no cheap tricks, have no holes in the plot and no failures of motivation. It must be a scary horror film without insulting the intelligence of the audience."

"The Shining," by Stephen King, is about a potentially violent man, his wife and their small son who come as winter caretakers to a deserted hotel in Colorado, where a previous caretaker has murdered his family. "The Shining," by Stanley Kubrick, has much of the same plot, but a different rhythm, a different ending and a different intent. The metamorphosis of novel into screenplay occurred over innumerable dinners of takeout tandoori chicken in the living room of Mr. Kubrick's London house between June 1977 and January 1978.

Made Short Outlines

"Almost all the substantive decisions were made before we wrote the script," says Miss Johnson, who had first met Mr. Kubrick in 1976, when he was thinking of optioning her edgily ominous and comic novel, "The Shadow Knows." "We talked for one month before we wrote anything at all. Stanley uses the Socratic method. 'Is the husband a nice man?' 'Does his wife love him?' 'What kind of clothes would she wear?' In an attempt to understand the essential seriousness of the genre, we discussed 'Wuthering Heights' and 'Jane Eyre.' How Poe ended his stories. We read Freud a lot. In his essay on the uncanny, Freud says specific things about why eyes are scary and why inanimate objects like puppets are scary in their animate shapes. We talked about the role of memory and wish in making you afraid, and we read Bruno Bettelheim's book about fairy tales, 'The Uses of Enchantment.'

"Then we each did a separate short outline--one line to a scene. 'Jack and his family arrive at the hotel.' We reconciled our outlines and wrote a more complicated one. 'Filled with expectation, Jack and his family arrive at his new job at the hotel.' The outlines were like moving kits, those cardboard dollhouses with cardboard chairs, sofas, tables and fridge you play with so that when the real moving man comes, you can say, 'This chair goes here!' The writing was secondary to knowing who the characters were, what the events were, and the exact function of every scene. Stanley kept saying, 'When you know what's happening in a scene, the words will follow.'"

'Trouble Getting a Voice'

Work lasted from 2 P.M. until 7 P.M. Evenings were spent watching movies in the same living room--some for pleasure, some for information. "We saw most of Jack Nicholson's movies," says Miss Johnson. "In some, he played a down person, measured, slow. We decided he was more interesting up--as an active, voluble person, like the role he played in 'One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest,' rather than as a contemplative, brooding person. Luckily, our character was driven and energetic. We would have changed the character to fit Nicholson, but we didn't have to. The character was even named Jack. We discussed changing his name. Is it distracting to have a famous actor named Jack playing a character named Jack? Inertia decided for us, and we kept the name.

"We had trouble getting a voice for Jack. Jack Nicholson speaks in short blocks. It's no good having him do long speeches. Luckily, there were no long speeches required. But the character had to be a specially demanding verbal combination--intelligent, unpleasant, mordant, and sarcastic. What struck me was how well Stanley wrote Jack. Much better than I could. Considering the ease with which Stanley wrote Jack, you wouldn't imagine Stanley to be the pleasant kindly husband and father he is."

'Completely Scary'

She guesses that Mr. Kubrick was drawn to "The Shining" for his horror film because of its "psychological underpinnings. A father threatening his child is compelling. It's an archetypal enactment of unconscious rages. Stephen King isn't Kafka, but the material of this movie is the rage and fear within families."

Once he had chosen the material, the basic decision Mr. Kubrick made was, says Miss Johnson, "that the movie be completely scary. And to be completely scary means that your suspension of disbelief can never be tampered with by some implausibility. There were ghosts in the film. We had to decide if these were actual ghosts or the projections of people's imaginations. Either way, there are implications. Real ghosts can presumably move things around, open doors, hand you a real dagger. Projections of your psyche are pretty much the final comment on whether you're nuts. If the ghosts are imagined by the characters, it means the characters must be nearing a mental breakdown. And there's a third, more complicated, possibility. The psychological states of the characters can create real ghosts who have physical powers. If Henry VIII sees Anne Boleyn walking the bloody tower, she's a real ghost, but she's also caused by his hatred. Stanley did not know from the beginning which kind of ghost he wanted, but the audience will know by the end."

"The most important thing that must carry its own weight is the film's ending. Endings to this kind of film are usually disappointing," says Miss Johnson, "because they: 1. violate probability, or 2. cheat in some way like 'now I woke up', or 3. everyone is arbitrarily disposed of or rescued in some gratuitous way, or 4. magic is invoked. It is very difficult to reconcile the supernatural and the reader's sense of reality. And if the ending is wrong, people are irritated--especially if there is too simple an explanation, such as 'now the spell is broken.' You must re-establish normality without falsifying what went on before, or making it trivial or facile."

It is Miss Johnson's hope that the ending of "The Shining" will have "the artistic satisfaction of a fairy tale."