Well, dear readers, here’s the long and the short of it. Yes, you heard it here, dear readers, here it is, the long and the short of it, it begin The Shining. Yes, I speak of The Shining, a motion picture directed by Stanley Kubrick from the novel by Stephen King. I saw The Shining on its opening day at the Chinese Theater. I was there early to get in line for choice seats. So, whilst standing in that line for a bit over an hour I actually finished reading the novel. Everyone on that line was primed to not only see the film but to love it. Why? Because for two months or more we’d been seeing the coming attraction, which was then and is now one of the great trailers of all time. It began with the shot of the elevator doors while the text of the film credits rolled, accompanied by weird, unsettling music. As soon as Stanley Kubrick’s director credit cleared the screen, the blood began pouring forth from the elevator, flooding everything including the camera. It was brilliant and we all knew it was going to be the scariest movie ever.
So, imaging our surprise to find a movie that had exactly one scare in it and even that wasn’t much – just a bit of a surprise jump because someone appears out of nowhere. While Jack Nicholson certainly got good laughs, my disappointment in this 146-minute film was profound, mostly because the novel was so fresh in my mind and because I think that novel is a masterpiece of horror fiction. It was like Mr. Kubrick went out of his way to not be scary. Both movie and novel have a slow build, but in the movie Mr. Nicholson plays Jack Torrence as a little off, a little crazy, right from the top, whereas in the book, Jack is besieged by his demons but trying to be a better man, until he learns about the hotel and the evil begins to overtake him. It was clear to me that Kubrick shot all of that, because you can see, for example, the scrapbook where he’s been reading about the hotel on his typing table – but you never know why it’s there or what it is. The book’s single scariest scene, Room 237, is completely botched in the film, almost subverted. Danny goes in and it fades out, and only later do we see what went on in there but only in fragments that are intercut with Jack’s nosing around the room. Again, it was clear it was shot the way King wrote it, and I would love to see it cut that way, but alas, that will never happen.
At the end, after the maze scene, there was a long scene with therapist Anne Jackson – she’d had one scene early on, and this was kind of an “Danny will be okay” scene – kind of interminable – then it went to the famous final shot of the photo on the wall. The film received some boos at the end, and I left the theater not understanding how something could have gone so wrong.
The reaction to the penultimate Anne Jackson scene was so bad, that after the first day, Mr. Kubrick ordered it removed from the prints. Either the prints came back to Warner Bros. and were edited there and returned to the theater, or the projectionists were instructed on how to remove it and it had to be immediately returned to the studio. That’s why in all the early home video releases there’s a bad music edit there.
The next time I saw the film was on home video. Several years had passed, the novel was but a shadowy memory, and watching the film again I began to appreciate it as its own thing – the atmosphere, the incredible photography and production design, and Mr. Kubrick’s careful and meticulous direction. Each time I saw it subsequent to that my admiration for the film being its own thing grew – I found I could watch it over and over again. Of course when it came out on laserdisc and DVD, Mr. Kubrick insisted it be open matte/full frame – he didn’t like letterbox and he wanted the image to fill what were then standard TVs. The widescreen TV revolution was still several years down the road. And so, it wasn’t until late in the game that The Shining was finally put on video in its proper 1.85 ratio. Of course the usual armchair experts were up in arms – they only knew the film from its open matte video incarnation and that’s what Mr. Kubrick preferred, with a whole slew of inane suppositions to justify it. When the huge Taschen book on Kubrick came out, there were storyboards from The Shining on which Mr. Kubrick had written the shots were to be framed precisely for 1.85. Oops.
The Blu-ray release came pretty early in the Blu-ray game. I bought it and watched it and thought it was pretty decent. I’d heard over the years vague things about Mr. Kubrick having cut the film way down for its UK release, but I never really heard anything that would prove that to me. But then I began reading that the UK Blu-ray was indeed this shorter version, shorn of twenty-five minutes. Well, that piqued my interest and I finally got it to watch with my very own eyeballs, and that I did last night up to what is in the US version is 100 minutes or thereabouts. In the shorter version that 100 minutes runs all of eighty minutes. Anne Jackson does not appear in the film at all, and all the scenes that show the isolation and help with understanding what it must feel like are gone. Dick Halloran’s introduction is gone, so he just appears out of nowhere. Barry Nelson no longer introduces the hedge maze so that appears out of nowhere with no explanation. I know the film was a bomb, but it’s fascinating to know that Mr. Kubrick would decimate his film in that way. I know there’s another five minutes or so missing from here to the end, so apparently I’ve seen the majority of the cuts already. Yes, it moves faster, but Jack is also even crazier faster and that just doesn’t work at all. Of course the UK contingent who have only seen the film in that version think that that version is great. When they finally see the long original version they poo-poo it, saying shorter is better – but it isn’t, not for me, but that may be because I only knew the original cut of the film. But all the slow build and that attendant dread and atmosphere is simply missing from the short version and for me that just robs the film of its impact. And there you have the long and the short of it.
Yesterday was an okay day – your most excellent vibes and xylophones worked wonders the entire week – potential irritants that I would not have had time to deal with never arrived and please keep sending those most excellent vibes and xylophones for next week, which is even more important not to have any irritants – it’s just way too crazy busy of a week to have a single irritant. I fell asleep around three and woke up at four-thirty feeling sketchy with a very bad taste in my mouth. Something from dinner didn’t agree with me, clearly, and I think it was perhaps the richness of the carbonara, which by itself would have been fine, but when combined by the small pepperoni pizza we had as an appetizer, well, there was a lot of tomato sauce on the pizza and I think that was my undoing, that and the fact that I took a leftover piece home and ate it at midnight. Bad idea. Anyway, I drank a bit of Diet Coke and some water, trying to get the yucky taste out of my mouth, along with the burning in my throat – I was coughing like crazy and I kind of really trashed my voice. I finally fell back asleep around seven and thankfully there wasn’t any real pounding so I slept until about eleven – maybe five hours total and certainly not enough.
I was very logy and could barely function once up. I managed to answer some e-mails, had a brief telephonic conversation about a potential Kritzerland project, and then went and had an omelet and an English muffin – very light and easy on the tummy. Then I came home and did some Brain work – we’re fully cast now, going with one less guy and gal in the ensemble so basically the same size cast we had for the NYMF production, sixteen. So, I got the ensemble the script and score and video clips.
Then Richard Sherman came by and we talked about a new Sherman Brothers project and we played some stuff and I’ll now begin doing transfers and getting them where they need to go. I can’t reveal what it will be, and we won’t issue it until around March of next year, but I think people will really like it. We also talked a bit about this musical project and I spoke to the book writer, who I’m a fan of – filmmaker Larry Cohen. He was thrilled I’d taken an interest and happily is willing to do work on it and is anxious to hear my notes and thoughts. So, early next year I’ll do an informal semi-staged reading of it, we’ll assess what we have and if we like it, and if we do, then that will become the show I’ll direct at LACC, rather than doing one of the classics I was considering. I’m sure they’d love to have a world premiere of a Sherman Brothers musical that’s never been seen anywhere. So, we’ll see how that all goes.
Then I picked up a package, came back home and did a two-and-a-half mile jog. After that, I had to get some stuff for she of the Evil Eye and I bought the rest of the Halloween candy. Then I sat on my couch like so much fish and watched most of The Shining.
After that I listened to more music and uploaded into iTunes an Ikuman Dan film score that had come in the mail – called The Last War, a 1960 film – the music is quite good. It’s a two-CD set with CD 1 presenting the score in stereo, and CD 2 presenting it in mono with a few differences and some different bonus tracks. The stereo version is great sounding and I’ll listen to it again very soon.
Today, she of the Evil Eye will be here bright and early. I’ll do a morning jog, then do some errands and whatnot, hopefully pick up some packages, then Sami and her mom are coming and Sami and I will work on her role in The Brain for a while, then we’ll go grab a bite to eat.
Tomorrow I’m relaxing and doing Brain work, then seeing a one-person show in the evening, written and directed by a friend of mine that I went to school with as a kid. I’m looking forward to it. Then we begin the crazy busy week, with two Kritzerland rehearsals, followed by three Brain rehearsals, followed by our stumble-through, followed by sound check and show, followed by a band run-through, then a final dress run-through, and then our benefit concert.
Well, dear readers, I must take the day, I must do the things I do, I must, for example, do a jog, do stuff, hopefully pick up packages, work with Sami, then sup, then relax. Today’s topic of discussion: What are your favorite films of Stanley Kubrick and Jack Nicholson? Let’s have loads of lovely postings, shall we, whilst I hit the road to dreamland, and that’s the long and short of it.