Everyone was mad at the Razzie Awards for nominating The Last Duel stand-out Ben Affleck for Worst Supporting Actor, but everyone has been mad at the Razzies for years. The gimmick of honoring the worst that Hollywood has to offer grew stale the second The Thing was nominated for Worst Musical Score — or maybe it was a tired premise from the start, as The Shining director Stanley Kubrick and star Shelley Duvall were up for Worst Director and Worst Actress, respectively (?), at the first Razzies ceremony.
At least founders John J. B. Wilson and Mo Murphy have come to their senses when it comes Duvall’s vulnerable, striking performance psychological horror film (unlike Affleck in The Last Duel, who Wilson compared to “Beavis and Butt-head in the Dark Ages” — which is wrong, but pretty funny). “For me, it’s Shelley Duvall in The Shining,” Murphy told Vulture about the nomination they hear about the most. “Knowing the backstory and the way that Stanley Kubrick kind of pulverized her, I would take that back.”
Duvall called making The Shining a “difficult” experience, including filming one scene a Guinness World Record-setting 148 times. “After a while, your body rebels. It says, ‘Stop doing this to me. I don’t want to cry every day.’ And sometimes just that thought alone would make me cry,” she told the Hollywood Reporter last year. “To wake up on a Monday morning, so early, and realize that you had to cry all day because it was scheduled — I would just start crying. I’d be like, ‘Oh no, I can’t, I can’t.’ And yet I did it. I don’t know how I did it. Jack said that to me, too. He said, ‘I don’t know how you do it.’”
As for Kubrick’s nomination, Wilson added:
“The voting membership the very first year were largely people that Maureen and I worked with at a trailer company. A group of us who had read Stephen King’s novel went to see The Shining the night it opened at the Chinese, and we didn’t care for what Kubrick had done with the novel. The novel was far more visually astounding, far more terrifying, far more compelling, and we couldn’t understand why you would buy a novel that had all of that visual opportunity in it and then not do the topiary thing, not do the snakes in the carpet, not do the kids’ visions. If you’re going to say it’s The Shining, you have to have certain key things in there that were not. And as I understand it, Kubrick was the one who decided what they cut out from the novel. So I don’t feel that badly about Stanley Kubrick.”
Neither does fellow Razzie nominee Stephen King, for that matter.
(Via Vulture)