The scene that holds the Guinness World Record for most retakes for a scene with dialogue — 148 takes — is a quiet one. Scatman Crothers and a child actor. Nothing dramatic. Stephen King sold the rights to The Shining to Stanley Kubrick in 1976. Kubrick moved the whole production to Elstree Studios in England and started filming in May 1978. He didn’t wrap until July 1979. Thirteen months. Fifty-six weeks. Kubrick wouldn’t print a take until at least the 35th attempt on any scene. The baseball bat confrontation between Shelley Duvall and Jack Nicholson was filmed 127 times.
Shelley Duvall played Wendy Torrance and the whole thing nearly broke her. She cried 12 hours a day for the last nine months of filming. Clumps of her hair fell out. Jack Nicholson was so worried he showed Kubrick the hair himself. Kubrick’s daughter Vivian filmed a making-of documentary on set, and it caught Kubrick telling the crew not to feel sorry for Duvall. It wasn’t careless. Kubrick deliberately set her up to be distressed — he thought a genuinely frightened actress would give him something a comfortable one couldn’t. Duvall told Roger Ebert: “Going through day after day of excruciating work was almost unbearable.” When the film came out, critics called her performance comically exaggerated. She was nominated for a Razzie for Worst Actress. The Razzie organization rescinded it in 2022. Shelley Duvall died on July 11, 2024. She was 75.
Stephen King hated the film. In his book Danse Macabre, he called it “a big beautiful Cadillac with no motor inside” and said it was “maddening, perverse and disappointing.” His biggest problem was Wendy Torrance. In King’s novel, Wendy’s tough, smart, and capable. In Kubrick’s version, she spends most of the film screaming and backing into corners. His second problem was Jack. Nicholson had just won an Oscar for One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest four years earlier, and King felt audiences would walk in already assuming he was mad. “When we first see Jack Nicholson,” King said, “you know right then that he’s crazy.” No arc. No slow slide from loving father to something monstrous. Just a man who was always going to end up here. King was bothered enough to make his own TV miniseries in 1997 to show what he’d actually meant.
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Both of them are right. King’s right that Wendy got flattened and that Nicholson’s Jack has nowhere left to go. Kubrick’s right that keeping the audience guessing — is Jack mad or is the hotel genuinely evil — makes the whole thing more frightening, not less. King’s novel is about a good man destroyed by a place that feeds on weakness. Kubrick’s film is about a man who was always going to end up here and a hotel that just helped him get there faster. They read the same story two completely different ways. Kubrick’s version is the one that kept the lights on while making something that’s still unsettling 40 years later. The empty hallways. The carpet. The twins. The elevator. None of that lands the same way in King’s novel. King gave Kubrick a story. Kubrick gave the world a nightmare.
They’re Both Right
The Shining came out May 23, 1980, to mixed reviews. Two Razzie nominations. It’s now on virtually every greatest horror films list ever made. A 2012 documentary called Room 237 was made entirely about fan theories on The Shining’s hidden meanings — the moon landing and the genocide of the Holocaust. Duvall’s Razzie was rescinded. Kubrick died in 1999. King still doesn’t love it. The film’s one of the most-watched titles on HBO Max right now, and Kubrick’s personal collection, including the axe, goes to auction early next year. Both of them have a point. The film has outlasted the argument.
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