Daily Dialogue — April 20, 2014

“My predecessor in this job left a man named Charles Grady as the Winter caretaker. And he came up here with his wife and two little girls, I think were eight and ten. And he had a good employment record, good references, and from what I’ve been told he seemed like a completely normal individual. But at some point during the winter, he must have suffered some kind of a complete mental breakdown. He ran a muck and killed his family with an axe. Stacked them neatly in one of the rooms in the West wing and then he, he put both barrels of a shot gun in his mouth.”

— The Shining (1980), screenplay by Stanley Kubrick & Diane Johnson, novel by Stephen King

The Daily Dialogue theme for the week: Job Interview, suggested by blueneumann who also suggested The Shining.

Trivia: During filming, Stanley Kubrick made the cast watch Eraserhead (1977), Rosemary’s Baby (1968) and The Exorcist (1973) to put them in the right frame of mind.

Dialogue On Dialogue: This is a spin on the job interview scene, instead of the focus being on the interviewee, here it’s all about providing some exposition about the hotel. Takeaway: If you’re going to lay down some backstory, might as well make it about a patricidal murder-suicice.

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