Bay Area writer Diane Johnson, who wrote the screenplay for Stanley Kubrick's The Shining, is a highly esteemed novelist whose works include “Fair Game,” “Loving Hands at Home,” “Burning,” “Lesser Lives,” “The Shadow Knows,” and “Lying Low.” In her novels, as in The Shining, Johnson focuses brilliantly on a special kind of horror - that found in everyday life. “(An) intelligent, lightly ironic...tone...is the hallmark of Diane Johnson's writing; a world that is her own, yet recognizably ours as well” (Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.). Diane Johnson is also a frequent contributor to The New York Times and the New York Review of Books. Tonight, introduced by Albert Johnson, she will discuss aspects of her work as both novelist and screenwriter.
Writing in Film Comment, Richard T. Jameson calls The Shining “the most expensive Underground movie ever made....
“Did Stanley Kubrick really say that The Shining...would be the scariest horror movie of all time? He shouldn't have. On one very important level, the remark may be true. But it isn't the first level people are going to consider....
“The action of the film can be synopsized in terms that seem to fulfill the horror-movie recipe. Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson) - sometime schoolteacher, shakily-ex alcoholic, and would-be writer - signs on as caretaker of this resort hotel in the Colorado Rockies, deserted and cut off from human contact five months of the year. Sharing the vigil will be his quiet-spoken, rather simple wife Wendy (Shelley Duvall) and their just-school-age son Danny (Danny Lloyd).
“Danny secretly possesses the gift of ‘shining' - the ability to pick up psychic vibrations from past, present, and future, long-distance or closer-up.... Jack has no acknowledged powers of shining, but he appears to be in tune with the hotel in his own way....
“...Transparent is the operative word. The devastating subtlety of Nicholson's Torrance lies in its obviousness.... (Kubrick) has, in short, deprived the audience of any real opportunity for identifying with his characters...thereby violating conventional theory on how to bring off a jolly good scareshow.
“Now it can be told: The Shining is a horror movie only in the sense that all Kubrick's mature work has been horror movies - films that constitute a Swiftian vision of inscrutable cosmic order, and of ‘the most pernicious race of little vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth.'”