Most people had tube TVs (CRTs) in the early days of DVDs. Director Stanley Kubrick didn’t like the way his widescreen movies looked on the 4:3 screen. He thought the black bars on the top and the bottom of the screen were distracting and in widescreen the movie looked too small. His solution was to release his later films on DVD in an open matte aspect to fill the screen. Technically, you were getting more movie because you could see everything the camera filmed, but you wouldn’t get the intended 1.85:1 composition. Ironically, the film has black bars on either side of the screen on today’s TVs.
These DVDs came with a disclaimer on the back cover. It almost reads like an apology, “We know... We know... It's not our fault."
As you’s expect, the Blu-ray corrected this
It’s well-known that Stephen King hated Kubrick’s film interpretation of The Shining. King tried to correct course with the 1997 TV mini series that he wrote and produced. This version of The Shining closely aligns with his book. I found this DVD at Goodwill last Monday. I bought it to hear the feature-length commentary by King and the crew.
The novel, Doctor Sleep, is the sequel Stephen King wore for his book, The Shining. The screenplay for Doctor Sleep is the sequel King wrote for both the original book and the original movie. For example, The Overlook Hotel burns down at the end of the novel and the miniseries. At the end of the original movie, the Overlook is live and well and evil. King had to admit that more people would be aware of the film than his miniseries, so some of Kubrick’s ideas like the Overlook made it to Doctor Sleep as well. I bet Stephen grumbled about that a bit.
Steven Spielberg made some great changes when he adapted Ernest Clines’s book, Ready Player One, to the big screen. The VR car race through a recreation of New York City is probably way more exciting than watching a guy and a knight in armor playing Joust on an arcade machine. Also, with no disrespect to 1983’s film War Games, having the players navigate a game level designed inside The Shining was amazing! Daphne and I went to see this movie in the theater, and when we got that part I exclaimed, “They’re going into The Overlook!” The people around us just nodded and smiled in agreement. No one scowled at my small outburst.
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