This Is Who Really Typed All Those Pages In The Shining
Stanley Kubrick's 1980 psychological horror film "The Shining" is one of the most iconic movies in the genre. Based on a novel by the master of horror, Stephen King, the adaptation chronicles the deteriorating sanity of a writer while he and his family care for a haunted hotel.
While King wasn't a fan of the film's portrayal of Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson), critics and audiences celebrated the deranged character. At the peak of the film, his wife Wendy (Shelley Duvall) finds the manuscript he's been obsessing over and discovers it's the same sentence typed out hundreds and hundreds of times. "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy" fills a stack of typewriter pages, but includes curious typos.
Because of these variations in the sentence, the pages were manually typed out to allow for different layouts and chilling misspellings. Who was the one that typed out all of those pages in "The Shining"?
All work and no play made Kubrick an infamous director
Anyone familiar with the famed late director's work wouldn't be surprised to hear that Stanley Kubrick was allegedly the one to type out the film's proverbial sentence. An article from Mental Floss reveals that all 500 pages of the manuscript were not handled by the prop department because of the specific requirements.
The article explains that Kubrick's typewriter "had built-in memory, so it could have turned out the pages without an actual person." However, the director was notoriously strict on set and allegedly made working with him difficult. Because of this no-nonsense persona, the article said that some claimed it would've been "characteristic of the director to individually prepare each page."
It's jokingly said that "2001: A Space Oddity," one of Kubrick's most famous films, was the first moon landing. The 1968 film was released one year before the moon landing, though fans will poke fun at this saying, "Kubrick wanted it to look real so they staged the scenes on the actual moon."
With a repertoire like that, it doesn't seem so crazy that the director would opt to type out the same sentence over and over.