The Hedge Maze from The Shining Gets Recreated by Mythbuster’s Adam Savage

Like myself, Adam Sav­age went to the trav­el­ing Stan­ley Kubrick exhi­bi­tion at LACMA last year and stayed sev­er­al hours, just absorb­ing all the genius, from the scripts to the slates to the blue­prints and the cos­tumes to the props. Unlike myself, he went back two more times, that lucky man! Because the Myth­buster noticed that the Hedge Maze prop in The Shin­ing sec­tion did not look like the one in the film in any way. In fact, it looked kin­da cheap. So, being Adam Sav­age, a man for whom prop-mak­ing is one of a series of child­hood obses­sions turned jobs, he set out to accu­rate­ly recre­ate the maze mod­el from the film.

In this fas­ci­nat­ing video (top) from his YouTube series Test­ed, we get a step-by-step walk­through of the process. The LACMA mod­el used plas­tic foam; Sav­age goes for a stur­dy par­ti­cle board, made to look like hedges through spray paint and flock­ing. His atten­tion to detail goes down to the crowns at the tops of the out­er maze wall, a news­pa­per kiosk and minia­ture map of the maze. He even geeks out (in the best way, of course!) about the scale mod­el fig­ures (at $4 a pop) he buys to pop­u­late the maze. (Strange­ly, there’s no rep­re­sen­ta­tion of Jack, Wendy, Dan­ny or even Hal­lo­ran to be seen.)
Savage’s ener­gy is infec­tious and if some of us had the time (55 hours total) and income to do this–and an under­stand­ing spouse–wouldn’t a lot of us love to trav­el down this rab­bit hole?

The film ends with a nice sur­prise that I won’t spoil, but let’s just say the uni­verse gets set right for once.

P.S. Does any­body know what is writ­ten on Savage’s work­sheet? Is it his ver­sion of “All Work and No Play…”?

via Metafil­ter

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Stan­ley Kubrick’s List of Top 10 Films (The First and Only List He Ever Cre­at­ed)

Saul Bass’ Reject­ed Poster Con­cepts for The Shin­ing (and His Pret­ty Excel­lent Sig­na­ture)

Stan­ley Kubrick’s Anno­tat­ed Copy of Stephen King’s The Shin­ing

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the FunkZone Pod­cast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills and/or watch his films here.