'The Shining' Was A Bigger Nightmare Behind The Scenes Than Anything On Screen

Scatman Crothers has a small but pivotal role in The Shining; he plays Dick Hallorann, the Overlook Hotel's psychic cook. Although the actor has since praised Stanley Kubrick for his directorial skills, the two had at least one tense moment while on-set. For the scene in which Hallorann shows Danny and Wendy around the hotel kitchen, Kubrick demanded an endless string of takes. Around take 85, a frustrated and exhausted Crothers broke down in tears. He reportedly pleaded, "What do you want, Mr. Kubrick? What do you want?" 

Stanley Kubrick knew what he wanted, and he didn't stop until he got it. Doing multiple takes of scenes is common on movie sets, but Kubrick took things to a whole new level. The shot of Shelley Duvall waving a baseball bat in front of Jack Nicholson required 127 tries for the director to feel satisfied. Another shot, in which Scatman Crothers explains his character's ability to "shine" to child actor Danny Lloyd, was done 148 times.

The clue that proves Jack Torrance has gone mad is revealed when his wife Wendy peeks at the book he has allegedly been working on. Instead of finding a manuscript, she sees hundreds and hundreds of pieces of paper bearing the same sentence: "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy."

Stanley Kubrick wanted the scene to be visually unsettling, which meant that the audience had to see writing on a large number of pages. His personal secretary, Margaret Warrington, was instructed to type that phrase onto 500 of pieces of paper. (And then she had to do it again in four different languages to account for foreign releases of the film!) The task was undoubtedly grueling, and it took months to accomplish, yet it adds immeasurably to the impact of the scene.

The screenplay for The Shining is credited to Stanley Kubrick and Diane Johnson, based on Stephen King's novel. However, one scene was written by the movie's star, Jack Nicholson, and he went to a dark place to find the words.

In 1986, the actor told the New York Times that he penned the scene where Jack Torrance chews out his wife after she interrupts his writing, using his own real-life pain as inspiration. While writing a different movie, Nicholson's then-wife distracted him, and he behaved like a "maniac" in response. After relaying that to Kubrick, the director wanted to include something similar in the film. Nicholson volunteered to write it up, since he'd already lived it.

Pretending to slowly descend into lunacy can be tiring, and Jack Nicholson expended a lot of energy conveying his character's unraveling. In 2015, Louise Burns, who plays one of the Grady daughters, told The Independent that Nicholson was so exhausted, he would fall asleep on the floor in between scenes. According to Burns: 

They were extremely long days and I think Stanley would have had Jack work until the matchsticks fell out of his eyes, so he needed to nap between scenes.

The Shining was filmed at Elstree Studios in London, and the massive scale of The Overlook — the story's fictional hotel — necessitated a large number of sets. Late in the production, a huge fire broke out at Elstree, destroying two sound stages in full. One of those sound stages housed sections of the faux Overlook, and the blaze caused filming to be halted until the sets could be rebuilt.

In 2014, Stanley Kubrick's widow told BBC that the director was actually grateful for the forced break, as it gave him a chance to take a breather during the intense production.