From Westminster to the Overlook Hotel: how ‘The Shining’ was born in London
On the surface, there’s nothing especially British about either Stephen King or Stanley Kubrick’s versions of The Shining, but the iconic novel and even more iconic movie adaptation were born in London.
The book was written in the same place where King writes most, if not all, of his stories: his home state of Maine. Meanwhile, Kubrick was born and raised in the Bronx, and the most British thing about his film was its shooting location, with most of the interior filming taking place in Hertfordshire.
The script was co-written by Kubrick and Diane Johnson, an American. Philip Stone’s Delbert Grady was the only notable character played by an actor from outside the United States, and the story unfolds at the Overlook Hotel in the Colorado mountains, none of which seems especially English.
And yet, how did King settle on the title, The Shining? By way of a song that was recorded on January 27th, 1970, at Westminster’s EMI Studios by John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s Plastic Ono Band. King knew that he wanted a catchy name for the titular psychic power, but he struggled to think of a good one.
Fortunately, one day, when he was listening to the radio, he heard ‘Instant Karma!’, and a lyric stood out in his mind. Suddenly, his book had a title. Or, to be more accurate, it kind of had a title until he ironed out the finer points, settled on the moniker, and used it to describe the supernatural gift possessed by Danny Torrance and Dick Hallorann.
“The origin of that was a song by John Lennon and the Plastic Ono Band called ‘Instant Karma!'” King confirmed to BHOB in 1980. “The refrain went, ‘We all shine on’. I really liked that and used it. The name of the book was originally The Shine, and somebody said, ‘You can’t use that because it’s a pejorative word for black.'”
“Since nobody likes to have a joke played on themselves, I said, ‘OK, let’s change it. What’ll we change it to?'” the author recalled. “They said, ‘How about The Shining?’ I said, ‘It sounds kind of awkward’. But they said, ‘It gets the point across, and we won’t have to make any major changes in the book’. So we did, and it became The Shining, instead of The Shine.”
The Shine doesn’t have the same ring to it, so it was the right call in the end. Still, it’s nothing if not a curious series of events that led from John and Yoko heading into the studio with Phil Spector in London to Jack Nicholson terrorising Shelley Duvall and inhaling every fragment of scenery in Kubrick’s masterpiece, but the latter couldn’t have happened without the former.
After all, not only is The Shining the title of the book, but it’s the descriptor used by Hallorann to inform young Danny of why he’s able to see the world differently from anyone else. Had King heard another song that was released in February 1970 instead, then things could have turned out differently, because Stanley Kubrick’s My Baby Loves Lovin’ or Stephen King’s Temma Harbour doesn’t have the same ring to it.
