The Shining is a novel by Stephen King, which saw the Torrance family - consisting of parents Jack and Wendy and their son Danny - move into the isolated Overlook hotel to act as winter caretakers. Jack is a frustrated writer and recovering alcoholic, and soon sinister forces in the hotel work to drive him insane and kill his family.
The book was a deeply personal work for King, who was himself dealing with addiction issues while writing the book. Stanley Kubrick would adapt The Shining book for the big screen in , with the resulting movie often considered one of the best horror film ever made.
The initial reception was cold, with the movie receiving mixed reviews and disappointing box-office, but throughout the decades its chilling atmosphere, haunting score and iconic scares have seen it reassessed in a major way.
Stephen King remains a vocal critic of the movie, for its major changes to the source material, its detached approach to its main characters and he feels Jack Nicholson was badly miscast. For King, the Jack Torrance of the novel was a good man working through his demons, while he thought Jack Nicholson's take was crazy from his first scene and only got crazier as the movie went forward. While it's certainly not his most subtle work, Nicholson's performance in The Shining remains one of his best and features famous line deliveries like " Here's Johnny!
Nicholson made two existential Westerns in Nicholson co-wrote the screenplay for this adventure film shot in the Philippines. His meaty villain role was enough to get him noticed.
Mike Nichols and Nicholson take the idea of a man turning into a werewolf quite seriously. Nicholson goes hard-boiled in this steamy remake of a classic noir novel and film. He has a torrid love affair with Jessica Lange. Nicholson squares off against De Niro in a tense take on F. Scott Fitzgerald as directed by Elia Kazan. Nicholson directed this Western-comedy in which he gets hitched as a way of escaping the gallows. And he plays opposite the first film roles of John Belushi and Mary Steenburgen.
Nicholson does a great James Dean impression as the lead in this black and white, low budget B-movie -- just his second film. He plays a slick, laid back, too-cool-for-school street racer who lets his ego get the better of him.
Director George Miller molded Nicholson into his most lascivious, crude and manipulative version of himself for this peculiar blend of fantasy and comedy, successfully seducing Susan Sarandon, Michelle Pfeiffer and Cher. While his cameo was essentially just a favor to James L. Brooks, Nicholson has a scene-stealing moment as a TV anchor threatening layoffs.
Meryl Streep and Nicholson star in this weepy, Oscar-bait period piece as two hard-on-their-luck bums in Albany.
At times his ragged, old-fashioned look makes him almost unrecognizable. Nicholson goes existential working with Michelangelo Antonioni for this drama of ennui and despair. Bob Rafaelson perhaps was first to cast Nicholson against type as an introverted, bookish, reserved and depressive radio broadcaster trading in tragedy.
But at least they were making movies. Before this, the debate was whether you should go ahead and make a movie — whether or not you thought it was going to be profit making — because the movie made a valid statement. Do you see a link between these new multiplex cinemas with their tiny screens and the banality of the studio film product?
You know, I like the big silver, I really do. The world is going to miss the movie-going experience. And I happen to be anachronistically in love with the movies, so I deeply resent the whole video thing. Now that most of your films are out in video, do you anticipate seeing any more money from them? They run my movies all the time.
That does nothing but hurt me. You seem to be saying that the decline of the movies is an index to our descent into some kind of Orwellian nightmare. If they had just outlawed these light boxes, the world would simply look bigger. All right. They understand work; they understand play; they understand love; they do not understand leisure. Literacy is dropping. These are not redeemable things. These are our lives. Is labor God? Is a job God? People vote like it is. Ronald Reagan is a vote to return to the company store.
Who are these rabble-rousers? What do they do? Dream on, dream on. I understand numbers. I just turned forty-nine.
I did my part. I screamed my ass off for ten, fifteen years. I paid those dues, too. The Japs got monopolies…. But you get the picture. I still make the movies I want to make. I have respect for myself and my collaborators, like Mike and Meryl.
You learn them, develop them. You have to learn how to dance. You have to learn how to read a book. You have to learn how to appreciate music, to enrich your mind in order to have a conversation. I heard someone call himself a conservative anarchist; I wonder where you feel yourself to be on the political spectrum.
One of the things I came across is the big, long — seems like century-long — debate about the definition of God. And the only thing they could come up with is that anything definite you can say about God must be supported by its paradoxical opposite.
I was flat-out anti-capital punishment. However, I agree with Reagan about terrorists. These people are not criminals against the United States. And this is a degradation of all mankind. This is an indication of an overall decline in civilization. I love the opportunity for working with Meryl Streep. For somebody who does what I do, you sit a lifetime yearning for that kind of feeling, and when it comes, you want to relish it. Something very wonderful has happened to me.
And you feel your work can help make a difference. My first acting teacher said all art is one thing — a stimulating point of departure. The thing I originally wrote so pretentiously as a young person, Ride in the Whirlwind , was about the Sisyphean mountain. You push that boulder up, it rolls down.
You push it up again. This is where artists are supposed to be of use, to make people, not necessarily happy, but enrich their vitality. And, not incidentally, your own. Friendships are a boon, love is a boon, contacts with other human beings and events, these are all boons.
My life is enriched by my friends — [screenwriter-producer] Don Devlin, my partner Harry Gittes. They fight with me about it. Quite the contrary. I gather the collapse of Two Jakes , the Chinatown sequel you planned to make with screenwriter Robert Towne, left a bit of a rift between you, him and producer Robert Evans. It also left hanging a third film that would complete the saga. What undid the deal?
This is a kind of special theatrical covenant. What the three films always were intended to do was to show the history of Southern California — starting with the water issue — through this central character, an unarmed private detective, and the undercurrents of family and back streets. The water issue is real; the issue of Two Jakes is going to be the petroleum issue. We always wanted me to play the part at the same age as the character. Your two years away from working before Terms of Endearment involved a lot of skiing at Aspen — but what else?
I had a wonderful summer with one of my favorite people, who passed on this year, Sam Spiegel [the producer of On the Waterfront and The African Queen ].
They just happened to be three older dudes who I got along great with for a long, long period of time. In that two years I think I spent one whole summer with Sam, just like his sidekick. He was certainly an inspiration; those movies he made in the Fifties were the movies, just about.
This is not where producers are at anymore. But did you miss working during this time? And when I came back to work, great; I talked to Jim Brooks [the cocreator of the television series Taxi and director of Terms of Endearment ], made the deal with him over the telephone. Brooks is a great genius, in my opinion.
Did you have that same sense of community growing up along the New Jersey shore? I grew up through age five there in Neptune. But Mrs. Your real mother — June — was the woman you believed to be your sister. The woman you call Mrs. Nicholson — Ethel May, whom you called Mud — was in fact your grandmother, and her husband, presented as your father, was this hard-drinking guy who was never around.
Plenty of company, but no real father…. Well, I had Shorty. I had Smith around. He was married to Lorraine. He took it for granted that he would become a protector of sorts for you? That would be pretentious to him, you see. When I went to his funeral, I ran into people, sixty-year-old women, who had known him since he was in grammar school.
He was a featherbedded railroad brakeman, you know, who went to gin mills and drank and sat around all day with his shirt off and bullshitted. Everybody did love Shorty. He was the first all-state football player from the region, and he stayed right there in Neptune. Shorty just had a grasp — innate, not a conscious ability — about life.
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