What did Kubrick see in Stephen King?
>>24833943A household name?
>>24833943Not much actually. The film bares very little resemblance to the book, only the basic concept
A concept he could execute much better.
>>24834223this
>>24834223A concept he could execute much better, that's almost an assured financial success due to the popularity of the author. Can't discount the business end of art.
>>24834314was it a personal project from the start or.did a studio pitch it to him? it's not unusual for a studio to seek film rights to popular fiction.
>>24833943I shine.Ask me anything
>>24834365Does Bruce Willis follow you around and give you psychiatric advice?
>>24833943Nothing. He wanted to make the ultimate haunted house movie, and he picked an average and at times stupid book that has a great premise. He took it made it into a masterpiece. King seethes because he knows the film better utilises his premise and removes the stupid shit that ruins the book.
>>24834365https://youtu.be/cGKv-KQ7kso?si=LoZ78hx-83So6RtU
>>24833943A decent horror story that he (Kubrick) could craft and mold as he pleased. Also, to his credit, King got book deals and put out lots of original content right around the golden age of tv/film horror and everyone wanted a piece of him for years.>>24834364After his earliest experiments (some quite bad), Kubrick always selected a pre-existing story to adapt, rather than writing one from scratch himself. Although he frequently punched up screenplays by himself (once he'd selected a suitable base text), he also collaborated with others on certain adaptations. In the case of the Shining, his (re-)writing collaborator was Diane Johnson. He just got into the habit of not writing the original story.Although Barry Lyndon was an excellent film and got Oscars, it also got criticized by stupid plebs for being "too slow". Kubrick's motivation with The Shining was to make something a bit quicker, with mainstream/commercial appeal. He settled on the idea of doing some kind of horror movie, and during his initial research phase, he had his staff bring him piles of recent horror books to look at. His secretary was in the next room, and every ten, fifteen, twenty minutes she'd know that he's scanned a book and rejected it because it's throw it at the wall, making a THUMP. THUMP. (fifteen minutes) THUMP. (twenty minutes or so) THUMP. (a half hour or so). No thump. The secretary goes into Kubrick's room, and Kubrick is reading The Shining.
Literally a potboiler. Kubrick was in need of a profitable film in order to keep getting bankrolled so he had mountains of goyslop books brought to him and he sifted through a shitton and when he came to the shining he settled on that
>>24833943What did Coppola see in Mario Puzo?What did Spielberg see in Peter Benchley?The fact is, great cinema can elevate lowly source material.
>>24833943a violent abusive father who was covering it up with drink
>>24834674Coppola didn’t choose to adapt it. Leone was offered it first but he turned it down. Coppola accepted because he needed the credit to bankroll the Conversation
>>24834693He made two sequels anyhow - in collaboration with Puzo.
>>24834717The third installment famously only happened because he went broke trying to make movies outside the good graces of major producers in the 80‘s.
>>24833943Someone to do coke with.
>>24834737Just when I thought was out
It's very telling that, out of all the slop that has been made out of his work, King is still seething, almost 50 years later, about the one film singled out as a masterpiece.
>>24834717Puzo also wrote the book as a potboiler by his own admission. He tried what he considered higher quality writing but then realized he could never making a living at that so he said he wrote the Godfather just because he knew it would make money that he needed to live on
>>24834737In 1988 Coppola's protege raped a child actor and Francis had the kid, who later killed himself, blacklisted from Hollywood for reporting it.
>>24833943I like the theory that Kubrick used the movie to explain he faked the moon landing
>>24834929Kubrick had no regard for King and only made a movie based on King’s work because he needed a strong success to keep him in good standing with producers and he knew an adaptation of King would sell. But he considered several aspects lacking including the strong woman facet which he said was not believable
