Development The creation of this miniseries is attributed to Stephen King's dissatisfaction with director
Stanley Kubrick's
1980 film of the same name. In order to receive Kubrick's approval to re-adapt
The Shining into a program closer to the original story, King had to agree in writing to eschew his frequent public criticism of Kubrick's film, save for the sole commentary that he was disappointed with
Jack Nicholson's portrayal of Jack Torrance as though he had been insane before his arrival at the Overlook Hotel.
ABC's success with previous miniseries adaptations of King's work made them more than willing to offer the author to work on the screenplay for
The Shining miniseries with small
Broadcast Standards and Practices enforced. The casting team had a very difficult time finding an actor for the role of
Jack Torrance King became very impatient, threatening to "wait another 18 years" if the role for Jack Torrance wasn't booked. Finally, via a suggestion from
Rebecca De Mornay, Weber was chosen for the role The producers approached her in 1994, and she accepted the role, enjoying the script for being "creepier, more disturbing, and more entertaining," and closer to the novel than the Kubrick version.
Filming , the source material's inspiration. Aside from the motive behind the creation of the miniseries, the 1997 rendition featured an important set piece that helped to inspire the original story:
The Stanley Hotel in
Estes Park, Colorado. King used the hotel that inspired him to write the book as the miniseries' location, with some interior shots in stages also in Denver. Garris tried to make the hotel feel as "enclosed" as possible to add a vibe of
claustrophobia when in a closed hotel; the crew did this by emphasizing the "darkness" of the hotel, painting some of Stanley's areas that had recently been painted white, brown. The production team began shooting at the Stanley Hotel in March 1996, the date chosen as it was Denver's snowiest month. However, on the day filming began, they realized the hotel as well as most of Estes Park was in a "snow shadow," meaning it garnered the least amount of snow out of all Denver areas. As a result, they spent $100,000 in
snowmaking machines sent from
Los Angeles while lucking out on "three or four" shooting days with actual snow falling on Estes. Producer Mark Carliner attributed the lucky snowfalls to a
Ute shaman doing a ritual at the highest peak of the Rocky Mountains. The cast and crew, such as Cynthia Garris, Mick Garris' wife who plays the woman in Room 217; and Dawn Jeffrey-Nelson, Courtland Mead's acting coach claimed paranormal experiences occurring at the hotel during shooting. Some of the cast enjoyed working on
The Shining. Mead "wasn't scared" as he had acted previously in horror films like
Hellraiser: Bloodline (1996);
John Durbin enjoyed the "madness" he got to portray with his character of Horace Derwent; and
Stanley Anderson, who accepted the part of Delbert Grady based on his disappointment with the Kubrick version, tried to play the character "real" but with "a sense of distance to [his] view of the other and the world, so it comes out as irony or wryness." However, it was tough for Weber to play his character; because the scenes were not shot in chronological order, it was very difficult to master the character's mental state deterioration, due to it occurring gradually as the story progresses.
Effects and his XFX team handled the effects of
The Shining.
Steve Johnson and his XFX team were responsible for the effects of
The Shining. When it came to the moving
topiary animals, both live static and computer-animated versions of them were made. For the more-than-80 dead extra characters in the ballroom,
Bill Corso came up with the idea to add black marks on their cheeks and foreheads to make them look dead. A special-effects-predominant ballroom sequence wasn't in the final version, where Gage Creed and his orchestra "run like tallow," in King's words. Garris' reason was that it slowed down the miniseries' pacing and wasn't as "close[] to the real world" as the other scenes. For the makeup of the woman in Room 217, thin shells of
Saran Wrap were first glued on to certain areas of the actress' body via
K-Y jelly. Then, "some really milky-looking flesh tones" were added over the wrap and purple tones under it, before thin
latex was covered over the entire body with certain areas ripped off.
Foam latex was also used to slightly alleviate how "creepy" the woman's make-up looked. As Johnson explained what the effects team were going for with the dead lady, "the idea was to try to do something that was different, that would look cool, play in the scene and be allowed on TV." ==Reception==