Heeeere’s Johnny!

Fans of Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 thriller The Shining, based on the bestselling Stephen King novel, were left mystified by the ending: a photograph hanging on the wall of the haunted Overlook Hotel, revealing Jack Nicholson’s character posing in the hotel’s crowded ballroom... taken in 1921.

What did it mean? Was Jack a ghost? Did the hotel trap him in time? Film buffs have debated the scene for over 40 years.

Well, at least one mystery has finally been solved: the source of the photo itself. The image was a real one, actually taken in 1921 of a room of dancers, licensed by the film and airbrushed by Kubrick’s crew to include the psychotic Jack Torrance. But the source and location of that original photograph has plagued fans for decades--until now.

The Getty Images Archive announced this week that a long search, led by a UK professor, a New York Times journalist, and a team of Reddit users, has come to an end. The amateur investigators tracked the photo to the Getty Images Hulton Archive, which was purchased from the BBC in 1988 after the film’s release. That’s where Kubrick found the photo. The BBC archive, in turn, had held the image since acquiring the Hulton archives in 1958. The photograph itself was produced by the Topical Press Agency at the Royal Palace Hotel in Kensington, England. Jack Torrance’s haunting image was composited over the photograph’s original subject, famed London ballroom dancer Santos Casani.

Why did it take so long? No one involved could remember precisely where they found it. The film’s set photographer Murray Close, who took the photograph of Jack Nicholson with the same lighting and angle to match the 1921 image, believed it came from the BBC archives. But Joan Smith, the artist who retouched Nicholson into the photo, claimed it came from the Warner Bros. Archive, an organization which does not seem to actually exist. Smith also recalled in interviews that the photo dated to 1923. Stanley Kubrick placed its origin correctly in 1921. The photo was published once before, in a textbook on retouching. Facial recognition software was used to identify Casani, but offered no clues as to the date or location of the image. Finally, following Murray Close’s tip to search the BBC Hulton Archives, the team located the photograph among the millions in the Hulton Archives, re-indexed decades earlier and identifying Casani by his birth name, John Golman.

All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy -- but in this case, it also makes for a big payoff.

Getty announced the discovery in an Instagram post, revealing the indexing notes found with the photograph including that it had been licensed to Kubrick’s “Hawk Films” in 1978. Alasdair Spark, the retired University of Winchester academic who led the search, remarked, “Nobody was composited into it except Jack Nicholson. It shows a group of ordinary London people on a Monday evening. “All the best people” as the manger of the Overlook Hotel said.”

Stanley Kubrick himself died in 1999. But among the many secrets hidden within the walls of his legendary horror hotel, here’s one he didn’t take to the grave.

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