Thursday, January 24, 2013

The Shining

Alternate ending to Kubrick's The Shining exposed in a viewing of the script.

I'm glad he didn't include that stupid epilogue, but I'm intrigued by the manager-tossing-the-yellow ball bit:
After we leave Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson) frozen in the hedge maze, we cut to a hospital where Overlook manager Stuart Ullman (Barry Nelson) is visiting a recovering Wendy Torrance (Shelley Duvall) along with her son Danny (Danny Lloyd). After some pleasantries that are oddly casual for those recovering from an axe murder, Ullman tells Wendy that investigators searching the hotel “didn’t find the slightest evidence of anything at all out of the ordinary,” and that, amid the trauma, she must have simply been hallucinating. After inviting Wendy and Danny to leave to come stay with him in Los Angeles, he begins to leave, but remembers that he forgot to give something to Danny, and throws him a yellow ball.
Adds to the creepy for, of course, this reason:
The scene explains … the importance of the yellow ball and the role of the hotel manager in the plot,” she said. (Earlier in the film the ball mysteriously rolls up to Danny and lures him toward Room 237, and Duvall took the closing scene as a clue that Ullman was in on it.)

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