Hello, everyone. Welcome to Slashfilm Daily. Today is Monday, December 23rd, 2024. Today we have a very

special episode of the podcast. My name is Ben Pearson. I'm an editor at slashfilm.com. And listeners

may remember that I teased the fact that I read a book recently that I would devote an entire episode

to, and the time has come to finally talk about that. So some context here. In 2022, a company called Tashen released a

limited edition book called Stanley Kubrick's The Shining. That was the result of a collaboration

between filmmaker Lee Unkrich and the late Jonathan J.W. Rinsler, who died in 2021 after writing

more than 20 books. Rinsler was the executive editor at Lucasfilm for 15 years

and wrote an incredibly well-received making of book about Star Wars, and his name is

pretty legendary among film geeks for his ultra-detailed approach to uncovering secrets from

beloved films. This special edition book about The Shining, which contained six volumes that included a facsimile of the script, some typewriter pages, and sketches from Saul Bass, who designed the movie's iconic poster, cost a staggering $2,500 and was limited to only a thousand copies, and it's still sold out.

But thankfully, as of this week, Tashin has now officially released a popular edition of the book that only costs $125.

It doesn't have those things that I just mentioned, but it does have a 476-page scrapbook with behind-the-scenes photos from the production that almost no one has ever seen before, as well as another volume that's nearly a thousand pages of writing containing everything

you could possibly want to know about the making of the 1980 Kubrick classic.

I thought I'd read detailed making of books before, but I was mistaken, frankly.

Stanley Kubrick's The Shining, which was edited by Uncrich and written by Rensler, is

hands down the most detailed accounting of a production

that I've ever seen and a genuinely remarkable piece of work that really takes you through

the entire process of the movie from Kubrick's earliest encounter with Stephen King's yet to be

published book and the handwritten notes that he jotted in the margins of its pages all the way

through to after the movie was released.

It's the written equivalent of that Beatles documentary where you watch them in real time,

take the kernel of an idea and then eventually transform it into the version that we recognize.

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