Original Stock Photo Used in ‘The Shining’ Ending Discovered

Here’s (not) Johnny!

The original source of the Overlook Hotel 1921 July 4th Ball photo prominently featured at the end of Stanley Kubrick‘s The Shining has been located at the Getty Images Hulton Archive.

Alasdair Spark, a retired academic at the University of Winchester, detailed his investigation via Getty’s Instagram, along with a new scan of the photo from its original glass plate negative.

“At last, it has been found. Following the earlier identification by facial recognition software of the unknown man in the photograph at the end of The Shining as Santos Casani, a London ballroom dancer, I can reveal that the photo was one of three taken by the Topical Press Agency at a St. Valentines Day Ball, 14 February 1921, at the Empress Rooms, the Royal Palace Hotel, Kensington.”

Spark and others had trawled newspaper archives trying to find photos of the venue or the people in it but came up empty-handed.

“It was starting to seem impossible, every cross-reference to Casani failed to match. Other likely places that were suggested didn’t match. There were some places we could not find images for and we started to fear that meant the photo might be lost to history, and never be found,” Spark writes.

“The photo (and others) was found following my contact with Murray Close (the official set photographer, who took the image of Jack Nicholson used in the version seen on screen), who recalled that the original had been sourced from the BBC Hulton Library.

“This reinforced a remark by Joan Smith, who did the retouching work – she had said in interviews that it came from the Warner Bros photo archive, which proves never to have existed. However, she also said in passing, and often unreported, that it might have come from the BBC Hulton Library.”

Upon learning that some Topical Press images had been re-indexed following the agency’s 1958 acquisition by the Hulton — which was purchased by Getty in 1996 — the photo was discovered among the archive’s collection of over 94 million images.

“Nobody was composited into it except Jack Nicholson. It shows a group of ordinary London people on a Monday evening. ‘All the best people’ as the manger of the Overlook Hotel said,” Spark concludes.

Based on Stephen King‘s 1977 novel of the same name, The Shining is celebrating its 45th anniversary this year. Nicholson stars with Shelley Duvall, Danny Lloyd, and Scatman Crothers.

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