top-selling horror novels of the day. She reported sitting outside his closed door, listening to book after book thump against a wall. Kubrick would read ten or 15 pages, then throw the book away. Eventually, 20 minutes went by without any thumping, then a half-hour, then an hour. The assistant peeked inside the office to see Kubrick engrossed in The Shining.
Kubrick was American but chose to live and work in Britain where he made all his movies no matter where they were set (he even shot a Vietnam War film, Full Metal Jacket, there). He created much of the Overlook on soundstages and backlots at Elstree Studios, but the exteriors of the hotel were shot by a second unit at Timberline Lodge on Mount Hood in Oregon. However, the managers of the Timberline would only grant permission to use their property in the film if Kubrick took out a reference to room 217 as the place where all the notorious and gruesome things happen. They were scared that no one would ever want to stay in that room again! Kubrick complied and changed the room number to 237, which isn’t a number the Timberline uses. But what really made the hotel aspect of the film so effective was the use of long hallways, huge, ornate ballrooms, and sumptuous lobbies filled with comfortable furniture and giant fireplaces — the ambience of delightfully comfortable isolation.
As Torrance slips into madness, that isolation is one of the triggers, but as a hotel lover, I was intrigued by the scenes where Jack loses himself in delusions and believes he isn’t alone but in a giant, noisy celebration in a ballroom filled with people. That’s one of the interesting things about living in a hotel. You can be absolutely solitary in a socially relaxed crowd if you want. The choice is entirely yours. If you need to be blanketed in the comfort of your suite, you only need to shut the door and you’re in your own little world. And if you feel the need to be around people, you’re an elevator ride from that, as well.
The Shining, both novel and film, wonderfully captures the essence of what makes big, old hotels great: when you’re there, you’re exposed to the collective energies of all that took place before you. Venerable hotels wear their history like comfortable old sweaters. When The Shining became a 1997 television miniseries, the locations were a lot more authentic to the book than were Kubrick’s. King wrote the teleplay for the TV series himself, while Kubrick created his own screenplay with Diane Johnson, his writing partner. The miniseries’ director, Mick Garris, shot the show in Colorado, using the Stanley Hotel in Estes Park as his setting. This version, in which Stephen Webber plays Jack Torrance in a less manic, strangely more effective manner than Jack Nicholson does, stays much closer to the tone and substance of the novel.
But of all the hotel horror books that have been made into movies, one of the most wildly entertaining is 1408, which few people seem to have seen. Again the story was hatched in the darkly fertile mind of Stephen King. However, what is wonderfully odd about the narrative this time is that while it was actually inspired by a real guy and a real (supposedly) series of events, the tale itself was never intended as anything more than an example in King’s instruction book On Writing of how to revise short stories. As he began penning the story for that purpose, King found himself getting deeper and deeper into it until it became a fully realized novella.
The story concerns a writer whose specialty is debunking paranormal myths. In the course of his research he is drawn to the dreaded room 1408 in the Dolphin Hotel in New York City, a suite that is said to be so haunted that the establishment has permanently declared the room off-limits. The writer, played by John Cusack, is convinced this will be his next great investigation, even though the manager of the hotel, played by Samuel L. Jackson, tells him that in the hotel’s 95-year history 56 people have died in the room and that people never seem to last more than an hour once inside. Again King employs the notion that big, old hotels contain a lot of stored-up energy from all the different people who have come and gone and all the events that have transpired within their walls. For my money this film (and story) far out-creeps The Shining in terms of hotel horror. The inspiration for the tale was derived from the real-life activities of parapsychologist Christopher Chacon’s investigation of the notoriously haunted suite of Hotel Del Coronado in Coronado, California.
Even directors such as Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez got into the old-hotel-as-perfect-setting realm when they collaborated with two other hot young directors, Alexandre Rockwell and Allison Anders, on the 1995 anthology film Four Rooms. (Actually, the movie was supposed to be called Five Rooms, since Richard Linklater was slated to do a segment, as well, but dropped out before production began.) This film is set on New Year’s Eve at the venerable Mon Signor Hotel in Hollywood. It is the first night on the job for a new bellman played by Tim Roth (the role was written specifically for Steve Buscemi, who ultimately had to turn it down due to scheduling reasons) who has to deal with four crazy sets of guests during his inaugural shift. West Hollywood’s Chateau Marmont was used during the shooting.
Of all the movies, television shows, and novels set in or about hotels, perhaps the grandest of them all is Grand Hotel from 1932. It stars Greta Garbo, who utters her signature line and somewhat prophetic statement, “I want to be alone,” in the film. Based on a Broadway show adapted from a German play about the life and times of a luxurious Berlin hotel, this movie was audacious for a number of reasons. First, it was one of the initial films to buck the two-star formula of the day. Studio bosses, especially young Irving Thalberg who was running Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer at the time, believed that for a movie to be cost-effective no more than two big stars could be in it, otherwise salaries would cause the film to be budget-heavy and the studio would be unable to recoup its expenses. Grand Hotel featured the top five stars in the MGM stable and ended up being one of the biggest-grossing movies in the history of the studio up to that point. The film is still the only picture to win the Best Picture Oscar without being nominated in any other category.
Garbo and co-star Joan Crawford (who never appear in any scenes together) also made Grand Hotel legendary for their monumentally ridiculous diva behaviour while working on the set. There were two things that Garbo really hated: lateness and Marlene Dietrich. So, because Joan Crawford was terribly angry that Garbo was getting top billing in Grand Hotel, she exacted a bit of revenge by always showing up late and playing Marlene Dietrich records loudly between the shooting of scenes. Garbo, for her part, demanded that the colossal and ornate hotel set be lit a smoky red during rehearsals to get her in a romantic mood.
Incidentally, the original MGM Grand Hotel in Las Vegas (now where Bally’s is) was designed to resemble the Berlin hotel built on the MGM soundstages for Grand Hotel. As a further side note, Garbo herself lived in the Fairmont Miramar, a hotel in Santa Monica, California, in the 1920s and presumably found some of the solitude she sought.
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The Fairmont Miramar is known as a celebrity hideaway and has been such since Greta Garbo famously made it one. She was followed in the 1930s by Jean Harlow, who lived in the Miramar for years. In the 1950s, Marilyn Monroe, who spent most of her Hollywood days in hotels, resided in the Miramar. Most recently the Miramar was the hotel Britney Spears lived in while her Malibu mansion was being renovated.
Because of my long and deep history with Toronto’s Royal York, I tend to use that hotel as the standard by which I compare all others. In Los Angeles, as I mentioned earlier, I have a great fondness for Chateau Marmont due to its colourful Hollywood history. However, the L.A. hotel I most closely associate with the Royal York is a lovely place on Stone Canyon Road called Hotel Bel-Air. The Bel-Air has been around since 1946 but was originally built as a relaxing, secluded office space to service the Bel-Air Estates development mushrooming in the canyon area in the early 1950s. The structures that now make up the Bel-Air were bought by Joseph Drown, a Texan, who converted it into a 91-room hotel. He added lush grounds, a wonderful swan lake (with swans so big they look almost prehistoric), and a footbridge that guests must cross to enter the hotel.
Part of the charm of the Bel-Air is its relative seclusion deep in a canyon surrounded by trees and vegetation. When I stayed there, despite the relative isolation, I could still jog from the hotel to Sunset Boulevard in 20 minutes, only to get lost on a daily basis on the way back in the seemingly endless, twisty
