Check in to the Grand Overlook Hotel
Something about Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining seems to unlock creative minds.
The 1980 horror classic, which recently notched the 35th anniversary of its release, has inspired all manner of fevered discussions about its supposed coded messages, on topics ranging from native American genocide to the Nazi Holocaust to Apollo moon-landing fakery. Rodney Ascher’s recent documentary Room 237 illuminates several of many conspiracy theories.
Kubrick’s rigorous design has led to late-night screenings of The Shining Forwards and Backwards, in which two copies of the film are projected over top of each other on a single screen, one unspooling from the start and the other from the end. Objective? To search for hidden meanings in disparate images that unnervingly connect. I’ve seen it and felt the chill.
All this for a rather conventional spook story, adapted from a Stephen King novel, about a family — played by Jack Nicholson, Shelley Duvall and Danny Lloyd — who experience very scary goings-on while acting as winter caretakers for a remote Colorado resort called the Overlook Hotel.
There’s a whole other subset of The Shining obsession, one that also seems to include Wes Anderson’s equally precise design. That’s the mashup movie trailer parody that matches Kubrick’s icy terror with Anderson’s simmering whimsy.
The most recent and by far the best of these is Wes Anderson’s The Shining, not to be confused with two earlier and less-satisfying mashups by similar titles. A complete delight, it combines clips from The Shining with Anderson’s recent The Grand Budapest Hotel, which stars Ralph Fiennes as the concierge of a palatial East European inn.
This new mashup is by Steve Ramsden, 27, a London-based filmmaker and editor, who works for a U.K. movie marketing firm called Synchronicity. In his spare time, over a few dozen hours, he worked on Wes Anderson’s The Shining, with some help from his firm’s creative director, David Hughes.
Ramsden’s intention was just to have a laugh, playing off the fact that both The Shining and The Grand Budapest Hotel involve numerous comings and goings in big drafty hotels.
He enjoys doing things like this, such as when he created an “alternate” ending to Rain Man by having Dustin Hoffman and Tom Cruise ride together in the bus scene at the end of The Graduate, which is also viewable on YouTube.
Samples of his work, which include directing short films, are on his website, steveramsden.com.
He told me he figured he’d get maybe 100 views of Wes Anderson’s The Shining when he put it online last weekend. That estimate was way low.
“It’s now at 353,000 views, which is incredible because I put it up five days ago,” Ramsden marvelled in a telephone interview late Wednesday. “I’ve never seen anything like this before with anything I’ve put up. It’s kind of insane to keep track of, you know?”
He had his work cut out for him, even with the hotel congruency. The Grand Budapest Hotel was shot in multiple aspect ratios with a warm orange-pink tone and The Shining is in widescreen with a cold white effect.
“In order for them to look anything like each other, you’ve got to crop The Shining to match Grand Budapest, and then why stop there? You’ve got to colour correct it a little bit as well.
“It’s easier to make The Shining look like Grand Budapest than it is to do the other way around, so I had to turn all the whites in The Shining slightly orange and pink to match. And since we’ve put it up, everybody is going, ‘Oh, it looks like the same movie!’ I don’t think it looks like the same movie at all, but it’s nice that people think that.” The mashup does more than amuse. It demonstrates how important editing and music are to a film, something that an earlier mashup artist called Robobos illustrated nearly a decade ago with Shining, a faux trailer that sells the film as a romantic comedy, complete with an inspiration Peter Gabriel tune. That one has had nearly 4.7 million views to date.
Ramsden surprised himself by how smoothly scenes from The Shining segued into ones from Grand Budapest. “The cut that everyone seems to be enjoying is the one with Shelley Duvall wheeling the food trolley through a doorway. It’s a Steadicam shot that I merged into a dolly shot with Ralph Fiennes in Grand Budapest.
“The perspective is close enough that it’s a kind of a ‘look again’ joke. So yeah, maybe the footage is more similar than I thought! Everyone seems to be reading things into it now, whereas I was just trying it for a bit of a laugh.”
Many movie watchers are unaware of how much an editor contributes to making a film. The director may call all the shots, but it’s the editor who has to piece them together into a cohesive whole.
“Mashups are quite a fun way of showing that,” Ramsden says. “You’re taking two things that have nothing to do with each other and you’re creating a third idea out of two completely different ones. I think videos like this are a nice way to show people what goes into editing.”
It occurs to me that the impulse with these mashups is always to make The Shining look like a comedy, rather than to make The Grand Budapest Hotel or other laugher look like a horror film.
Humour trumps horror, at least when it comes to mashups. This may also explain why filmmakers and movie studios take an indulgent approach to mashups of their creative property, although Ramsden was careful to put disclaimers at the end of Wes Anderson’s The Shining.
“The key is to keep them short and funny,” Ramsden says of his mashups, “and if you can put a new spin on it, that’s great.”
This makes perfect sense, although I’d still love to see someone’s clever mashup titled Stanley Kubrick’s The Grand Budapest Hotel. @peterhowellfilm
“In order for them to look anything like each other, you’ve got to crop The Shining to match Grand Budapest, and then why stop there?” STEVE RAMSDEN FILMMAKER AND EDITOR