“There was a big problem with Warner Bros,” screenwriter Diane Johnson said in an interview with Entertainment Weekly’s James Hibberd. “The film was too long and the producers said it needed to be shortened.”
Authored by Stanley Kubrick Via Warner Bros
The two minutes that Kubrick cut from the finale are a hospital scene in which “the hotel manager, Ullman (Barry Nelson), visits Wendy and Danny after their ordeal and explains that no evidence has been found supernatural to support their claims about what happened”, and that her husband’s body was not found.
Just as the audience begins to question everything they’ve seen, Ullman menacingly gives Danny the same ball that was thrown to him by an unseen force outside Room 237.
All known copies of the scene have reportedly been destroyed, at the behest of Warner Bros, although it is said that a surviving copy may exist, “it looks like a movie you’ve seen before”.
Very little remains of the hospital epilogue beyond some continuity polaroids, costumes and 35mm film clippings housed in the Stanley Kubrick archive. Evidence of how late in the process the scene was removed lives in the form of two actors listed in the credits, despite the fact that they do not appear in the finished film: Burnell Tucker as “Cop” and Robin Pappas as “Nurse “.
It’s also important to know that this probably wasn’t the exact scene that Kubrick shot; since the scene no longer exists, it’s impossible to know exactly how it happened. Even the many people who saw the epilogue when The Shining was first released have different memories of the exact details. Clearly, the ending text about the Overlook’s story was an idea left out during the writing process.
Kubrick’s co-writer on The Shining, Diane Johnson, had this to say about the canceled epilogue:
“Kubrick had filmed a final scene that was cut, where Wendy and Danny are recovering from shock in a hospital and where Ullman visits them. Kubrick thought we should see them in the hospital so we would know they were okay. He had a thing for Wendy and Danny and thought that, at the end of a horror film, the audience should be reassured that everything was back to normal.”
Danny wears a sweater with the words Apollo – USA…. There are many other hidden meanings in The Shining. A documentary, Room 237, analyzes them.
