Trivia: Stanley Kubrick was very protective of Danny Lloyd, because he was so young. Through some careful and clever directing, Lloyd was unaware he was making a horror film until after the film's release.
Trivia: The line "Here's Johnny" originated on the The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, where Ed McMahon always introduced him with that phrase. Nicholson improvised the line during the shooting; Kubrick liked it and left it in.
Trivia: Initially, the bathroom door Jack Nicholson was to axe in was an extremely thin one, made by the prop department to make it easier to destroy. However, Nicholson's technique with the axe was so good (he'd been a volunteer fire marshal) the door shattered into a million pieces, so they had to build a much stronger door to handle his swing.
Trivia: The famous scene where Wendy reads through Jack's accumulated work naturally doesn't have the same impact if the viewer can't read English. Therefore, for every foreign language the film was released in, Kubrick remade this shot with an appropriate cliche in each language - French, German, etc. Also, every page of every manuscript was hand-typed to recreate the realism of typos and misalignments.
Trivia: Kubrick tortured Shelly Duvall to get the performance he wanted out of her. He told the crew to have no sympathy for her, and pushed her to do many retakes until she would cry. The scene where she walked backwards on the stairs with the baseball bat was filmed up to 127 times by some counts. At the end of filming she presented Kubrick with clumps of her hair that had fallen out due to stress.
Suggested correction: The number of "127 takes" is an urban legend created, according to Lee Unrich, by someone who worked on the movie, but who wasn't here during the shooting of the scene. Plus, according to Gordon Stainforth (the editor of the movie) on IMDb, the scene was "only" shot 35-45 times. I also want to say that the "fact" that Kubrick may have tortured Shelley Duvall is also a legend. Duvall herself said, in 2021, for the magazine "Hollywood Reporter", that Kubrick was also warm with her.
Trivia: According to the Guinness Book of World Records, The Shining holds the record for the film with most retakes of a single scene (with spoken dialogue) at 127 takes. The participant in those retakes was Shelley Duvall.
Trivia: Stephen King attempted to persuade Kubrick not to cast Jack Nicholson as Jack Torrance. King believed that either Michael Moriarty or Jon Voight could have played Jack's descent into madness more convincingly.
Trivia: For the famous scene where Jack Nicholson breaks down the door with an axe, the crew made a fake door for him to break through, but had to replace it with a real door as the fake one broke too quickly due to Jack Nicholson's prior training as a fireman. This dates to his period of military service in the Air National Guard in 1957. After completing basic training at Lackland Air Force Base, Nicholson performed weekend drills and two-week annual training as a fire fighter assigned to the unit based at Van Nuys Airport. Some sources state they went through 60 doors during filming to get the footage Kubrick wanted.
Trivia: Jack's limp at the end of the movie was a real injury sustained when Jack Nicholson got drunk and fell out of a hotel window the night before shooting this scene.
Trivia: An outtake from the opening sequence was used in the "happy ending" version of Blade Runner, but removed from the director's cut.
Trivia: The injured guest who frightens Wendy Torrance by saying "Great party, isn't it?" was played by film editor Norman Gay.
Trivia: The infamous "Here's Johnny!" scene took three days to film.
Trivia: At various points in the film, Jack Nicholson flicks his eyes to the camera, often only for a few frames, frequently hard to catch. It's deliberate - in one clip of behind the scenes footage Kubrick lies under him while setting up a scene, and specifically tells him to look down to the camera when filming. But there's no specific answer as to why - genre-defying, or to make the audience feel more threatened, or to make the viewers feel like the ghosts he sees. Hard to unsee though.
