The Shining and Other Complex Stanley Kubrick Films Recut as Simple Hollywood Movies

Nev­er has the work of so pop­u­lar a film­mak­er felt so dis­tant from the main­stream than in the case of Stan­ley Kubrick. Just think­ing of the man who direct­ed movies like 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Shin­ing, Full Met­al Jack­et, and Eyes Wide Shut in the same cul­tur­al con­text as a rom-coms and explo­sion-inten­sive block­busters gets one chuck­ling. But Robert Ryang took it to the next lev­el when he cut togeth­er the trail­er above, which con­verts The Shin­ing, one of the most haunt­ing psy­cho­log­i­cal hor­ror pic­tures ever made, into Shin­ing, a gar­den-vari­ety feel-good dram­e­dy.

Ryang, then a young edi­tor, pulled off this aston­ish­ing con­ver­sion as his win­ning sub­mis­sion for an Asso­ci­a­tion of Inde­pen­dent Cre­ative Edi­tors con­test, which asked for new trail­ers for exist­ing films that put them into dif­fer­ent gen­res. The Shin­ing trail­er’s suc­cess has spawned many imi­ta­tors, includ­ing quite a few based on Kubrick­’s work alone. Just above, we have 2001 turned into an entire­ly dif­fer­ent kind of sci­ence-fic­tion movie — the kind that try to over­whelm us with their sheer inten­si­ty sum­mer after tir­ing sum­mer.

This trail­er pro­duces anoth­er light­heart­ed Kubrick, this time out of per­haps Kubrick­’s most dark-heart­ed piece, the unre­lent­ing Viet­nam pic­ture Full Met­al Jack­et. Here it plays a lot more like Stripes with­out the satir­i­cal edge. Below, Kubrick­’s fam­i­ly-unfriend­ly Christ­mas film Eyes Wide Shut becomes a fam­i­ly-friend­ly Christ­mas film. Ulti­mate­ly, though, it speaks to the qual­i­ty of the orig­i­nal movies that, try as they might to con­vert them into the bland­est of stan­dard Hol­ly­wood fare, these trail­ers still can’t ful­ly con­ceal the pres­ence of some­thing cin­e­mat­i­cal­ly intrigu­ing indeed. I know I’d still buy a tick­et.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Lost Kubrick: A Short Doc­u­men­tary on Stan­ley Kubrick’s Unfin­ished Films

Napoleon: The Great­est Movie Stan­ley Kubrick Nev­er Made

Explore the Mas­sive Stan­ley Kubrick Exhib­it at the Los Ange­les Coun­ty Muse­um of Art

Stan­ley Kubrick’s Very First Films: Three Short Doc­u­men­taries

The Mak­ing of Stan­ley Kubrick’s A Clock­work Orange

Ter­ry Gilliam: The Dif­fer­ence Between Kubrick (Great Film­mak­er) and Spiel­berg (Less So)

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture as well as the video series The City in Cin­e­ma and writes essays on cities, lan­guage, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.