July 21, 2024 • 14 mins
Guest host Rich Berra and documentarian Jay Weidner decode the secret confession lurking in Stanley Kubrick's adaptation of a Stephen King classic.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Now here's a highlight from Coast to Coast AM.
Speaker 2 (00:03):
On iHeartRadio Coast to Coast AM our guest Jay Wider,
he believes that the moon landing's happened at some point,
but the video you see completely done by Stanley Kubrick
back in the nineteen sixties and maybe even subsequent missions,
is he got a a bigger budget and some better
special effects. And then we started talking about the shining
in how that was a confession of sorts from Stanley Kubrick.
(00:26):
And one of the things that struck me when I
was watching the documentary is when they first go to
the hotel and Jack Nicholson is getting his assignment to
watch the hotel, the guy at the other end of
the desk kind of looks like, Kennedy, you want to
speak to that a little bit.
Speaker 3 (00:42):
Well, yeah, so when a lot of people don't realize that.
When Spartacus, Stanley Kubrick's film was released in nineteen sixty two,
a lot of people were criticizing it from the right
(01:04):
wing for being a left wing film, and so it
was kind of when it started out, Spartacus was kind
of wavering and its support and then Kennedy went to
see Spartacus, and then he came out and said, no,
Spartacus is a great film and made Spartacus one of
(01:25):
Cubic's biggest hits. And so Kubrick kind of owed Kennedy
a lot. But I think that Kennedy also was discussing,
you know, how to do things with Kubrick. We know
that Kubrick was recruited by the Department of Information early
(01:45):
in the nineteen sixties to do some kind of unknown work.
The thing is is that in nineteen sixty three nineteen
sixty four, it was kind of well known in the
film making community that Kubrick was the next dude. His
film Pathsive Glory, Lolita, Spartacus, Doctor Strange Love. They were,
(02:13):
you know, in the film community. They were like, Wow,
this is the guy. And the US government noticed it
and brought him in. And there's no doubt about it.
He's always had really deep relations with the military industrial complex.
Arthur C. Clark was his co writer of two thousand and one,
(02:35):
and he was way deep into the whole military industrial complex,
and Kubrick was just the perfect guy to recruit to
do this kind of covert work. His work in Doctor
Strangelove with the B fifty two flying over Siberia, which
was done with a model wasn't real at all. The
(02:59):
Air Force saw that and went, oh my god, this
guy is like he can make anything.
Speaker 2 (03:05):
Happen and wants to screen. Like, when I watch it
on your documentary, it looks a little uh, you know,
it looks it needs some work now. But I bet
when you saw it on a big screen back in
the day, it probably looked very impressive.
Speaker 3 (03:18):
Oh it did, And yes, of course it doesn't look
anywhere near what they can do nowadays. But this is
way before digital or any kind of computer effects reformed.
He was doing this all with in camera effects, and
as a filmmaker, I can tell you what he was
achieving was incredible at his day and age, and no
(03:41):
one else was anywhere near the effects that he was
achieving in both Doctor Strangelove and two thousand and one
Space Odyssey. So what I'm pretending is that two thousand
and one of Space Odyssey was the template for him
to learn how to do it, and then later he
did it in like nineteen sixty nine and seventy just
(04:05):
really because they didn't want the Soviet Union to understand
what kind of technology we had. It wasn't like a
gigantic cover up to hide things in a way that
a lot of the conspiracy theories think serious thing. It's
really just the idea that you don't really want your
(04:26):
enemy to see what you've got the sun zoo, you know,
art of war kind of thing.
Speaker 2 (04:32):
So when why confess it in the Shining? Then if
he basically pulled it off, the you know, the secret
filmmaking masterpiece that he did, why confess to it? Or
why give those easter eggs in the Shining? And let's
cover some of those here before we got to break
because we when we come back, we got to get
into the whole JFK thing because I don't want to
miss that either your new documentary. It just seemed like
(04:53):
this is a good time on the anniversary to start
with the moon. So let's talk about the room number
that you shouldn't go in in what the significance of
that is.
Speaker 3 (05:05):
Yeah, So in the movie, you know, Danny, the boy
is worn by Hallerin who is the cook at the
Shining at the Overlook Hotel, to not go into room
to thirty seven, and he is about an hour into
the film. Danny is playing with his toy trucks in
(05:28):
the hallway in one of the hallways of the Overlook Hotel,
and the whole entire geometry of where he's playing on
the carpet is very similar to the launch pad thirty
nine A where the Apollo eleven was launched, and Danny
(05:50):
is wearing a sweater that says Apollo eleven with a
rocket that's taking on. Oh yeah.
Speaker 2 (05:57):
In the beginning of the movie too, you're talking about
how everybody's kind dressed in red, white and blue, which
you don't even really notice.
Speaker 3 (06:04):
Yeah, the very first time that you meet Danny and
Wendy in The Shining, they're both dressed in red, white
and blue, and Wendy is reading Catcher in the Rye,
which was written by deep intelligence officer J. D. Salinger,
who actually debreathed the Nazis at the end of World
(06:25):
War Two. So you know, you're like wondering, what is
Stanley trying to tell you here? And I think he's
trying to tell you that the that the Shy, that
the Overlook Hotel is actually America, and that it is
(06:45):
part of this scheme to create the moon landing and uh,
and Stanley is telling you it over and over. So
every time he deviate from the book, he's telling you
his confession. So in the book, the room is two seventeen,
(07:06):
but in the movie it's Room two thirty seven. And
it was well known at the time. You can look
it up that the scientific analysis of the distance of
the Moon from the Earth in nineteen sixty nine or
nineteen sixty eight when he was making two thousand and
one was two hundred and thirty seven thousand miles. He changed.
Speaker 2 (07:30):
I mean, you pick up on a lot of stuff.
What about the part of the movie that I think
when your documentary you spelled this out pretty well. The
all work in no play makes Jack a dull boy.
Speaker 3 (07:43):
Yeah. So Jack is writing a book. That's the whole
reason he came to the overlook to spend the winter there.
He wants to write the great American novel. And he
tells Wendy, don't interrupt me when I'm writing my book.
But Wendy's wrote curious. So when he goes into his
room and picks up his novel that he's writing and
(08:07):
realizes that Jack's writing the same sentence over and over,
all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.
And then you look and you realize that the all
has the letters l LL looking exactly like the numbers
one one, and then you realize it's saying a one
(08:27):
to one or Apollo eleven. Work makes Jack a dull boy,
and Jack is clearly portraying in the movie Stanley Kubrick.
He even looks like Stanley Kubrick. He justice Stanley was
a nice, clean cut guy when he started making two
(08:47):
thousand and one his Face Odyssey. By the end he
had a beard that was uncamped, his clothes were dirty.
He looks exhausted, and that's exactly what happens to Jack
Nicholson throughout the movie of The Shining. He starts out
all nice and clean and everything, but by the end
of the movie he's just, you know, completely unkept. And
(09:11):
this is him portraying Stanley Kuban.
Speaker 2 (09:15):
Do you know, did Stephen King like that version of
the movie.
Speaker 3 (09:20):
Stephen King absolutely hated The Shining and was actually paid
a million dollars by Warner Brothers to stop criticizing the
movie in the movie. Okay, So in the book The Shining, Jack,
the lead character, has a red Volkswagen. Yes, in the movie, Jack,
(09:42):
played by Jack Nicholson has a yellow Volkswagen. But when
Howard and the cook in the movie is try to
get to the overlook, he passes a very terrible car
accident on the road in Denver, and the car accident
consists of a giant am I crushing a red Volkswagen.
(10:03):
It's clearly Stanley Kubrick telling Stephen King that I crushed
your vehicle and I've repossessed. Wow, just stopped, Stephen King.
Speaker 2 (10:17):
What do you think that? What's the most significant scene?
If people want to be like, oh, there it is?
Do you think it's the I was thinking might be
the Twins, but you might have a different take on this,
the Gemini Twins. What is your what does your take
on that? And what do you think the most important
confessional scene in that movie is?
Speaker 3 (10:35):
I think the most important scene is when Wendy comes in,
Shelley Duvall comes in, and she reads the book and
realizes that Jack's not writing a book, He's just writing
the same sentence over and over all work and no
play mixed shack a dull boy. And then she tells
Jack that she wants to leave the overlook, that you
(10:56):
know they're in danger, and Jack looks at her and
confronts her on that famous staircase scene and says, do
you have any idea what a contract means? Do you
have any idea what my employers would do to me
if I didn't fulfill my contract? And I think that
that's Stanley talking to.
Speaker 2 (11:17):
His wife because he couldn't really tell anybody what he did, right,
But do you think he did confess anybody?
Speaker 3 (11:25):
I do. I believe that he confessed to someone who
was actually probably killed because they knew that Stanley had confessed.
And you know, I'm not alone in this. By the way,
there's a movie called Wag the Dog, which was made,
you know, many years after The Moonlighting, in which Dustin
(11:46):
Hoffin plays a movie director named Stanley who's invited by
the CIA played by Robert de Niro to do action
with a fake movie act. And at the end of
the movie, Dustin Hoffins running around saying, this is my
best work, this is my best work, and then he dies.
(12:10):
And so I believe that Hollywood is perfectly aware of
what I'm saying.
Speaker 2 (12:18):
And yeah, it's not like he stopped making movies at
that point. He kind of got into some other weird stuff.
I don't know much about when Eyes Wide Shut came out,
it was just the freakiest thing I've ever seen. But
then you get another fifteen ten years later and he's
basically sharing the story of Epstein Island. Am I wrong
(12:39):
or are groups.
Speaker 3 (12:39):
Like oh you are? You're right? In fact, this is
not only the fifty fifth anniversary of the moon landing,
but it's the twenty fifth anniversary of Isyeswai Shut, which
just came out twenty five years ago this week, And
it's also the twenty fifth anniversary of the death of
Stanley qu Riy, so it's a lot of and also
(13:00):
Standy Kubrick's birthday is in six days from now, on
the twenty sixth of July, so there's a lot of
anniversaries here. So yeah, Kubrick released Eye White Shut on
the thirtieth anniversary of the of Hollow eleven, launching on
July sixteenth, nineteen sixty nine. So in nineteen ninety nine,
(13:22):
on July sixteenth, that's the date that Is White Shut
was released with its very freaky story of the elites
having orgies and crazy parties and Tom Cruise being completely
bewildered by what's going on around him and some very
interesting film and so we can see over and over
(13:47):
that Kubrick is trying to bring you to notice that
he was involved in the moon landing. And I'll just
say this, right after Kubrick's Odyssey, my film about Kubrick's
confession in The Shining, I was notified by close to
(14:07):
Christopher Nolan that Christopher Nolan, the film director, was really
into my work and that his next film was going
to be an homage to Stanley Kubrick. And sure enough,
Interstellar came out and it was a complete, you know,
homage to Kubrick, including mentioning that the Moonlindings were fake.
Speaker 1 (14:30):
Listen to more Coast to Coast AM every weeknight at
one a m. Eastern and go to Coast to coastam
dot com for more
Now here's a highlight from Coast to Coast AM.
Speaker 2 (00:03):
On iHeartRadio Coast to Coast AM our guest Jay Wider,
he believes that the moon landing's happened at some point,
but the video you see completely done by Stanley Kubrick
back in the nineteen sixties and maybe even subsequent missions,
is he got a a bigger budget and some better
special effects. And then we started talking about the shining
in how that was a confession of sorts from Stanley Kubrick.
(00:26):
And one of the things that struck me when I
was watching the documentary is when they first go to
the hotel and Jack Nicholson is getting his assignment to
watch the hotel, the guy at the other end of
the desk kind of looks like, Kennedy, you want to
speak to that a little bit.
Speaker 3 (00:42):
Well, yeah, so when a lot of people don't realize that.
When Spartacus, Stanley Kubrick's film was released in nineteen sixty two,
a lot of people were criticizing it from the right
(01:04):
wing for being a left wing film, and so it
was kind of when it started out, Spartacus was kind
of wavering and its support and then Kennedy went to
see Spartacus, and then he came out and said, no,
Spartacus is a great film and made Spartacus one of
(01:25):
Cubic's biggest hits. And so Kubrick kind of owed Kennedy
a lot. But I think that Kennedy also was discussing,
you know, how to do things with Kubrick. We know
that Kubrick was recruited by the Department of Information early
(01:45):
in the nineteen sixties to do some kind of unknown work.
The thing is is that in nineteen sixty three nineteen
sixty four, it was kind of well known in the
film making community that Kubrick was the next dude. His
film Pathsive Glory, Lolita, Spartacus, Doctor Strange Love. They were,
(02:13):
you know, in the film community. They were like, Wow,
this is the guy. And the US government noticed it
and brought him in. And there's no doubt about it.
He's always had really deep relations with the military industrial complex.
Arthur C. Clark was his co writer of two thousand and one,
(02:35):
and he was way deep into the whole military industrial complex,
and Kubrick was just the perfect guy to recruit to
do this kind of covert work. His work in Doctor
Strangelove with the B fifty two flying over Siberia, which
was done with a model wasn't real at all. The
(02:59):
Air Force saw that and went, oh my god, this
guy is like he can make anything.
Speaker 2 (03:05):
Happen and wants to screen. Like, when I watch it
on your documentary, it looks a little uh, you know,
it looks it needs some work now. But I bet
when you saw it on a big screen back in
the day, it probably looked very impressive.
Speaker 3 (03:18):
Oh it did, And yes, of course it doesn't look
anywhere near what they can do nowadays. But this is
way before digital or any kind of computer effects reformed.
He was doing this all with in camera effects, and
as a filmmaker, I can tell you what he was
achieving was incredible at his day and age, and no
(03:41):
one else was anywhere near the effects that he was
achieving in both Doctor Strangelove and two thousand and one
Space Odyssey. So what I'm pretending is that two thousand
and one of Space Odyssey was the template for him
to learn how to do it, and then later he
did it in like nineteen sixty nine and seventy just
(04:05):
really because they didn't want the Soviet Union to understand
what kind of technology we had. It wasn't like a
gigantic cover up to hide things in a way that
a lot of the conspiracy theories think serious thing. It's
really just the idea that you don't really want your
(04:26):
enemy to see what you've got the sun zoo, you know,
art of war kind of thing.
Speaker 2 (04:32):
So when why confess it in the Shining? Then if
he basically pulled it off, the you know, the secret
filmmaking masterpiece that he did, why confess to it? Or
why give those easter eggs in the Shining? And let's
cover some of those here before we got to break
because we when we come back, we got to get
into the whole JFK thing because I don't want to
miss that either your new documentary. It just seemed like
(04:53):
this is a good time on the anniversary to start
with the moon. So let's talk about the room number
that you shouldn't go in in what the significance of
that is.
Speaker 3 (05:05):
Yeah, So in the movie, you know, Danny, the boy
is worn by Hallerin who is the cook at the
Shining at the Overlook Hotel, to not go into room
to thirty seven, and he is about an hour into
the film. Danny is playing with his toy trucks in
(05:28):
the hallway in one of the hallways of the Overlook Hotel,
and the whole entire geometry of where he's playing on
the carpet is very similar to the launch pad thirty
nine A where the Apollo eleven was launched, and Danny
(05:50):
is wearing a sweater that says Apollo eleven with a
rocket that's taking on. Oh yeah.
Speaker 2 (05:57):
In the beginning of the movie too, you're talking about
how everybody's kind dressed in red, white and blue, which
you don't even really notice.
Speaker 3 (06:04):
Yeah, the very first time that you meet Danny and
Wendy in The Shining, they're both dressed in red, white
and blue, and Wendy is reading Catcher in the Rye,
which was written by deep intelligence officer J. D. Salinger,
who actually debreathed the Nazis at the end of World
(06:25):
War Two. So you know, you're like wondering, what is
Stanley trying to tell you here? And I think he's
trying to tell you that the that the Shy, that
the Overlook Hotel is actually America, and that it is
(06:45):
part of this scheme to create the moon landing and uh,
and Stanley is telling you it over and over. So
every time he deviate from the book, he's telling you
his confession. So in the book, the room is two seventeen,
(07:06):
but in the movie it's Room two thirty seven. And
it was well known at the time. You can look
it up that the scientific analysis of the distance of
the Moon from the Earth in nineteen sixty nine or
nineteen sixty eight when he was making two thousand and
one was two hundred and thirty seven thousand miles. He changed.
Speaker 2 (07:30):
I mean, you pick up on a lot of stuff.
What about the part of the movie that I think
when your documentary you spelled this out pretty well. The
all work in no play makes Jack a dull boy.
Speaker 3 (07:43):
Yeah. So Jack is writing a book. That's the whole
reason he came to the overlook to spend the winter there.
He wants to write the great American novel. And he
tells Wendy, don't interrupt me when I'm writing my book.
But Wendy's wrote curious. So when he goes into his
room and picks up his novel that he's writing and
(08:07):
realizes that Jack's writing the same sentence over and over,
all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.
And then you look and you realize that the all
has the letters l LL looking exactly like the numbers
one one, and then you realize it's saying a one
(08:27):
to one or Apollo eleven. Work makes Jack a dull boy,
and Jack is clearly portraying in the movie Stanley Kubrick.
He even looks like Stanley Kubrick. He justice Stanley was
a nice, clean cut guy when he started making two
(08:47):
thousand and one his Face Odyssey. By the end he
had a beard that was uncamped, his clothes were dirty.
He looks exhausted, and that's exactly what happens to Jack
Nicholson throughout the movie of The Shining. He starts out
all nice and clean and everything, but by the end
of the movie he's just, you know, completely unkept. And
(09:11):
this is him portraying Stanley Kuban.
Speaker 2 (09:15):
Do you know, did Stephen King like that version of
the movie.
Speaker 3 (09:20):
Stephen King absolutely hated The Shining and was actually paid
a million dollars by Warner Brothers to stop criticizing the
movie in the movie. Okay, So in the book The Shining, Jack,
the lead character, has a red Volkswagen. Yes, in the movie, Jack,
(09:42):
played by Jack Nicholson has a yellow Volkswagen. But when
Howard and the cook in the movie is try to
get to the overlook, he passes a very terrible car
accident on the road in Denver, and the car accident
consists of a giant am I crushing a red Volkswagen.
(10:03):
It's clearly Stanley Kubrick telling Stephen King that I crushed
your vehicle and I've repossessed. Wow, just stopped, Stephen King.
Speaker 2 (10:17):
What do you think that? What's the most significant scene?
If people want to be like, oh, there it is?
Do you think it's the I was thinking might be
the Twins, but you might have a different take on this,
the Gemini Twins. What is your what does your take
on that? And what do you think the most important
confessional scene in that movie is?
Speaker 3 (10:35):
I think the most important scene is when Wendy comes in,
Shelley Duvall comes in, and she reads the book and
realizes that Jack's not writing a book, He's just writing
the same sentence over and over all work and no
play mixed shack a dull boy. And then she tells
Jack that she wants to leave the overlook, that you
(10:56):
know they're in danger, and Jack looks at her and
confronts her on that famous staircase scene and says, do
you have any idea what a contract means? Do you
have any idea what my employers would do to me
if I didn't fulfill my contract? And I think that
that's Stanley talking to.
Speaker 2 (11:17):
His wife because he couldn't really tell anybody what he did, right,
But do you think he did confess anybody?
Speaker 3 (11:25):
I do. I believe that he confessed to someone who
was actually probably killed because they knew that Stanley had confessed.
And you know, I'm not alone in this. By the way,
there's a movie called Wag the Dog, which was made,
you know, many years after The Moonlighting, in which Dustin
(11:46):
Hoffin plays a movie director named Stanley who's invited by
the CIA played by Robert de Niro to do action
with a fake movie act. And at the end of
the movie, Dustin Hoffins running around saying, this is my
best work, this is my best work, and then he dies.
(12:10):
And so I believe that Hollywood is perfectly aware of
what I'm saying.
Speaker 2 (12:18):
And yeah, it's not like he stopped making movies at
that point. He kind of got into some other weird stuff.
I don't know much about when Eyes Wide Shut came out,
it was just the freakiest thing I've ever seen. But
then you get another fifteen ten years later and he's
basically sharing the story of Epstein Island. Am I wrong
(12:39):
or are groups.
Speaker 3 (12:39):
Like oh you are? You're right? In fact, this is
not only the fifty fifth anniversary of the moon landing,
but it's the twenty fifth anniversary of Isyeswai Shut, which
just came out twenty five years ago this week, And
it's also the twenty fifth anniversary of the death of
Stanley qu Riy, so it's a lot of and also
(13:00):
Standy Kubrick's birthday is in six days from now, on
the twenty sixth of July, so there's a lot of
anniversaries here. So yeah, Kubrick released Eye White Shut on
the thirtieth anniversary of the of Hollow eleven, launching on
July sixteenth, nineteen sixty nine. So in nineteen ninety nine,
(13:22):
on July sixteenth, that's the date that Is White Shut
was released with its very freaky story of the elites
having orgies and crazy parties and Tom Cruise being completely
bewildered by what's going on around him and some very
interesting film and so we can see over and over
(13:47):
that Kubrick is trying to bring you to notice that
he was involved in the moon landing. And I'll just
say this, right after Kubrick's Odyssey, my film about Kubrick's
confession in The Shining, I was notified by close to
(14:07):
Christopher Nolan that Christopher Nolan, the film director, was really
into my work and that his next film was going
to be an homage to Stanley Kubrick. And sure enough,
Interstellar came out and it was a complete, you know,
homage to Kubrick, including mentioning that the Moonlindings were fake.
Speaker 1 (14:30):
Listen to more Coast to Coast AM every weeknight at
one a m. Eastern and go to Coast to coastam
dot com for more
The Best of Coast to Coast AM News
Host
George Noory
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