Saturday, January 11, 2014
Omaha Theater to Produce a Stage Adaptation of 'The Shining'
NYTimes.com: If you’ve always wanted to unleash your inner Jack Nicholson, and will be in Nebraska this winter, then here’s an opportunity. The Benson Theater, an enterprising Omaha company, is hoping to raise the money to buy and renovate a 1923 theater to call home, and among its fund-raising projects is a new theatrical version of “The Shining,” Stephen King’s tale of a substance-abusing and increasingly crazed hotel overseer stuck with his family at a resort during the snowy off-season – the role Mr. Nicholson played to magnificently creepy excess in the 1980 Stanley Kubrick film. The company is holding auditions this week.
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Having never written a book – let alone a book that was then developed into a feature film – I can only imagine how I might feel if the movie version did not live up to my expectations. To me, Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 film, The Shining, based on Stephen King’s 1977 novel, is a classic – one I have seen many times and look forward to viewing again at some point in the future. I cannot say the same for the King-endorsed 1997 television version. This is of course the conundrum of movie/visual adaptations of books never being able to live up to what an individual person – writer or reader – is able to conceive in their imagination.
I believe a comparison to the 1968 Philip K. Dick novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, and Ridley Scott’s 1982 film, Blade Runner, is an apt one to make my point. Both visually and emotionally brilliant, Scott’s telling only loosely follows Dick’s book. With Androids, the machines that can pass for human will never have empathy. There is a particularly disturbing scene in the book where the android character of Pris tortures a spider – a marvel in a world that no longer contains much in the way of non-artificial insects or animals – out of sheer curiosity. In Blade Runner, the Replicants are “more human than human,” as evidenced by Roy Batty saving Deckard, the bounty hunter tasked to kill him. Book and film are related-but-separate entities, and I am happy for both of them to live in my universe. More importantly, Dick praised Blade Runner as justifying and completing his life and creative work. Read Dick’s 1981 letter here: http://www.blastr.com/2013-3-26/read-philip-k-dicks-1981-letter-predicting-blade-runners-impact
Triva: Dr. Eldon Tyrell from Blade Runner – actor Joe Turkel – is the 1920s bartender in The Shining. Also, the closing-credit scene for the original theatrical cut of Blade Runner is extra footage shot for the opening of Kubrick’s The Shining. Watch them here: http://www.thedeepchannels.com/2/post/2013/01/the-beginning-of-the-shining-the-end-of-blade-runner.html
More recently, the television series, Hannibal, is an excellent example of a successful reimagining of both book and movie versions of a story. May the Omaha Theater creatively birth a unique interpretation of The Shining.
Last but not least, Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller’s art installation, The Secret Hotel (2005), is worth a peak: http://www.cardiffmiller.com/artworks/inst/secret_hotel.html#
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