The screenplay credit names Stanley Kubrick and Diane Johnson. Their recollections of the work make it possible to trace decisions and alternatives, while always distinguishing a narrative proposal from what was filmed and what made it into the theatrical release.
Organizing Scenes Before Turning Them Into Dialogue
The screenplay for The Shining adapts Stephen King’s novel, but its development did not involve turning every chapter into an equivalent scene. Diane Johnson has described a process of selection and reorganization that she shared with Kubrick. In her interview with The Terror Trap, she recalls a stage when scenes could be reduced to brief formulations and moved around before they were developed into fuller dialogue.
This process makes it possible to distinguish a treatment from a detailed screenplay. A treatment might establish that someone discovers something, that a conversation changes a relationship, or that a character arrives too late, without yet deciding on every word and movement. Reordering it changes what information is available to the viewer. Writing affects more than what is said: it determines when something can be known and what expectations its placement among other scenes creates.
The shared credit documents a collaboration, but it does not assign percentages of authorship. Nor does it allow each line to be attributed to one person based on an intuition about their style. The participants’ recollections are helpful when they identify a specific contribution; in other cases, they preserve uncertainty. Respecting that uncertainty offers a more faithful account of the work than turning the screenplay into a contest to assign an individual signature to every decision.
Johnson also describes conversations about family relationships and what produces fear. That level of discussion is not yet a visual solution. A question about the threat within a family can lead to different scenes depending on how the information is organized. The comparison between the novel and the film examines the resulting changes; the writing process asks how possibilities were tested and selected before taking audiovisual form.
Recalled Decisions and Alternatives That Shouldn’t Be Mistaken for Footage
The repetitive manuscript is a useful example. In an interview with Donald Williams published by Jung Page, Johnson recalls that the idea came up during her sessions with Kubrick, but she does not say with certainty which of them came up with it. Her account connects it to their joint work and the testing of different formulations. It does not justify turning a shared memory into an exclusive attribution that the interviewee herself avoids making.
The choice turns an invisible activity into a tangible discovery. As Jack writes, Wendy and the viewer do not fully know what the result will be. The pages allow that withheld information to become a scene. From the screenplay’s perspective, what matters is the relationship between setup and revelation: an action repeated throughout the story later produces an object whose contents change what people thought they knew about it.
Johnson also recalls considering a different fate for Danny during discussions about the ending and notes that Kubrick opposed the possibility. This is an account of a writing alternative, not proof of a filmed sequence. The distinction should be maintained even when an idea is very specific. Imagining an image, describing it in an interview, or noting it in a treatment does not prove that it was built, filmed, and then removed.
The example helps distinguish several stages that are often confused: a verbal proposal, written material, production preparation, a filmed take, and the released edit. Each requires its own evidence. A document can establish the first or second without saying anything about the others. The production history and its documents must preserve these categories to avoid turning every discarded possibility into a supposed complete version that the public never got to see.
Writing Continues as It Meets Other Crafts
Johnson has explained that screenplay development took place alongside other preparation and production work. Her recollection discourages imagining a perfectly sealed sequence in which all the writing was completed before work on the visual world began. Decisions could move among scenes, sets, music, and practical concerns, even though the screenwriter’s involvement was not the same in every area.
The writer herself distinguishes her contribution from many visual details. That caution is useful when making attributions. Writing a scene does not mean choosing every color, object, or camera movement that appears in it. A screenplay sets out actions and relationships that other crafts bring to life. In turn, a visual possibility or a production challenge can change the shape of a scene without its origin being recorded in a single line of a draft.
Writing about fear provides another kind of context. A shared interest in the unsettling can guide a creative conversation, but it does not make the film a systematic application of a theory. The study of the Gothic and the uncanny distinguishes this documented background from later interpretations. Writing works with questions and associations; analysis should avoid presenting every result as a required illustration of what was read.
Comparing written versions also requires attention to the document’s date and purpose. An earlier draft may contain names, scenes, or connections that later changed. A transcript of the completed film does not automatically preserve the process that led to it. Two texts may look like screenplays yet come from very different stages. Provenance matters as much as content when reconstructing a decision.
Johnson’s work becomes more visible when described with these limits in mind. She took part in an adaptation that reorganized information, discussed endings, and found ways to turn family conflict into filmable actions. Her accounts preserve both decisions and uncertainties. Reading them without filling in the gaps with invented anecdotes lets us recognize a specific collaboration rather than reduce it to a footnote or attribute everything the film eventually showed to her.
References: Stanley Kubrick, The Shining (1980). Scenes exclusive to the U.S. cut are identified in the text. Diane Johnson, interview with The Terror Trap, The Shining Adapted; interview published by Jung Page. Stanley Kubrick, interview with Michel Ciment about The Shining, reproduced by The Kubrick Site.