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The iconic photograph from the end of THE SHINING sourced
Iconic ‘The Shining’ Photograph Is Traced Back to a Real-Life 1921 Valentine’s Day Dance in London
The legendary group photo “proving” that Jack Nicholson’s Jack Torrance never really left the Overlook Hotel in “The Shining” has been finally found in real life, 45 years later.
New York Times reporter Aric Toler has sourced where the photo exactly was from, and who was really in it. Toler wrote in a thread on X that he worked with retired British academic Alasdair Spark for almost a year to solve the “mystery” of the picture, wondering “where did the original photo from the end of ‘The Shining’ come from, and where/when was it captured?”
Toler discovered that the original photo was taken from the BBC Hulton Archive, which was later purchased by Getty Images. Murray Close, a photographer who worked on “The Shining,” confirmed to Toler that this is where the image was taken from, with Nicholson’s face being “pasted on” on the body of famous jazz dance instructor Santos Casani. The photo itself is from a Valentine’s dance on February 14, 1921 at the Empress Ballroom in the Royal Palace Hotel in London.
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From instagram:
"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.
"I, Aric Toler from the NYT and others (thank you Reddit) had trawled newspaper archives trying to find matching photos of the venue or the people in it, many hours of hard brute force effort, all without success. 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.
"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.
"I asked Getty Images, now the holders of the Hulton Archive to check for anything licensed to Stanley Kubrick’s company Hawk Films – Matt Butson, the VP Archives there, found one photo, dating from 1929 and bizarrely also showing Santos Casani, but it was not the photo at the end of the film.
"This week, he found it, after realising that some Topical Press images had been re-indexed after the agency was acquired by the Hulton in 1958. An index card identifies the photo as licensed to Hawk Films on 10/10/78. The other interesting feature is that Santos Casani is identified in the daybook ledger under his previous name, John Golman. I had always assumed that his dancing career began with his change of name, but not so. He appears to be working with Belle Harding, a famous dance teacher herself, who is also credited at the event. A few months later, in June 1921, newspapers begin reporting on Casani, but there are no references to John Golman as a dancer (or otherwise) in the British Newspaper Archive for earlier in 1921. Joan Smith had said the photo dated from 1923. Stanley Kubrick had said 1921 and he was correct.
"The photo doesn’t show any of the celebrities I had speculated on – the Trix Sisters for instance - nor the bankers, financiers or presidents others like Rob Ager have imagined there. No devil worshippers either. 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."