Bobby Solomon of The Fox is Black posted a few rough sketches made by Saul Bass before he came up with the winner for Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining.

According to Solomon, “I’ve read online that Kubrick made Bass go through at least 300 versions of the poster until finally ending on the extremely alien looking version we now know.”

You can see larger images over at The Fox is Black website.
 

 

 
Via Nerdcore

 
A winter bobble hat inspired by the carpet from the Overlook Hotel in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining.

The hat will be available in December for £27.00 at Connoisseur.

Via Nerdcore

 
Yes, totally silly, but I’m still posting it anyway.

Which Romney Son Is Creepiest?

Via Retrogasm

 
Dean Cavanagh is that very rare breed – a maverick whose talents have been successfully proven over several different disciplines.

He is an award-winning artist; a screenwriter and playwright, writing the highly acclaimed Wedding Belles with Irvine Welsh and the forth-coming movie version of the hit on-line series Svengali. He has also been a journalist, with bylines in i-D, NME, Sabotage Times and the Guardian. Dean is also a documentary-maker, a film and TV producer and a musician, with along list of collaborators, including Robert Anton Wilson.

Now the multi-talented Cavanagh has written and directed (with his son Josh), his first movie - the much anticipated Kubricks.

In this exclusive interview with Dangerous Minds, Dean talks about the ideas and creative processes behind Kubricks. How he collaborated with Alan McGee, and developed the film with his son Josh, discussing his thoughts on cinema and synchronicity, and explaining howKubricks came to be filmed over 5 days, with a talented cast this summer.

Dean Cavanagh: ‘Stanley Kubrick has always fascinated me in that he was clearly trying to convey messages through symbols, codes and puzzles in his films.

‘For me his genius was in the way he presented the ‘regular’ audience with a clear narrative structure and for those who wanted to look deeper he constructed hidden layers of subjectivity. He was clearly a magician working with big budgets in such an idiosyncratic way that it’s hard not to be intrigued by him and his oeuvre.

‘I’ve been following Kubrick researchers like Rob Ager and Jay Weidner for the last few years and I really wanted to dramatize a story based around Kubrick as an inspirational enigma. There is a wealth of material about the esoteric side of Kubrick on the net and Ager and Weidner are great places to start the journey from.’

DM: How did you progress towards making ‘Kubricks’?

Dean Cavanagh: ‘I’ve been writing screenplays and theatre on my own and also with Irvine Welsh since the 1990’s. Up until last year, I never really had any desire to direct a film but Alan McGee encouraged me to have a go. He offered to produce a film if I would write and direct with the emphasis being on us having total control. This was music to my ears after having mainly dealt with people who are always looking for reasons not to make a film.  Alan’s credo was “just do it and let’s see what happens”. There’s a great freedom in working with him.’
 
Read more of Dean Cavanagh’s exclusive interview, plus free ‘Kubricks’ soundtrack download, after the jump…
 
Previously on Dangerous Minds

 
Sifting through Foxtongue‘s Flickr sets—which are a goldmine, btw—I came across this rather peculiar undated vintage photo which has a “Come and play with us, Danny …for ever, and ever, and ever” vibe going on, doesn’t?

Foxtongue on Flickr (NSFW-ish).

 
Self-taught Detroit-based sculptor Bob Causey aka Bobby C creates these incredibly realistic life-sized and scaled down busts. In an online interview with The Armchair Empire, Bobby C discusses how long it takes to make one, “Upward to 6 months for the proto, I can get my end done fast but It seems to take everyone else a bit longer for the clothes.”

You can view the finished Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson) bust here. Apparently this sculpture was a wacky Christmas gift for someone named “Wendy.”
 
Bobby C Sculptures
 

 
Via reddit

 
This looks more like a frosty Noel Fielding (from The Mighty Boosh) Halloween costume than Jack Nicholson in The Shining, doesn’t it? It’s all about the face! And this is the face of Vince Noir!

Below, Nicholson as “Jack Torrance” in The Shining. No way, right?

 
(via Super Punch)

 
Nicely!

I highly suggest looking through Jeff Yorkes’ Vimeo account—he has many, many more fun movie mashups.

 
Rob Ager has no academic credentials in the realms of psychology or film making, but he clearly doesn’t need them. He has an incredible intuitive grasp of the links between celluloid and the subconscious mind. He’s not only a brilliant thinker, he’s a tenacious researcher. In this fascinating study of Stanley Kubrick’s disruption of spatial logic in order to create a sense of unease in his film The Shining, Ager gets at the heart of what makes the movie so spooky - the fact that it’s so fucking disorienting, an Escher-like maze of endless corridors drifting into infinity. A terrifying dream folding into itself. Jung would have loved this movie and Ager’s take on it.

Ager wrote, narrated and edited this outstanding analysis of Kubrick’s much-maligned vertiginous masterpiece.
 

 
Via Mister Honk

 

 
Superb animated timeline of Stanley Kubrick’s filmography by animator Martin Woutisseth. Music by Romain Trouillet.

 
(via KFMW)

 
Ha! Clever Overlook Hotel children’s placemat by artist Shane Parker. This is way cooler than a Denny’s “Moons Over My Hammy Omelette” placemat.

Click here to see a larger image.

(via Neatorama)

 
Jack Torrance laffs in your face.

(via the always fun If We Don’t, Remember Me)

 

 
Wave of Mutilation skateboard deck by Kevin Tong available over at SLOW for 54.90€.
 
Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Miles Davis Quintet Skateboards
 
(via Super Punch)

 
Ran across this thinking it was possibly a cartoon rendering of The Fall’s Mark E. Smith (see previous post).  Nope, just E.T. looking to take an axe, or, in this case, his finger, to The Shining‘s Wendy Torrance.  And here’s a bit of that film’s Shelley Duvall (now, sadly, bonkers) talking about shooting with director Stanley Kubrick:

 
(via SlashFilm)

 
As a kid I spent roughly two hours a day getting bussed back and forth to middle school and when I wasn’t dodging apples, I had plenty of time to immerse myself in the then still-slim oeuvre of Stephen King.  Carrie, Salem’s Lot and The Shining all made somewhat more tolerable the stupidity of my fellow riders, and gave my own outsider-ish existence if not heroic contours, then something just as good: the potential for them.

I mean, I knew I wouldn’t be bumping into migrating vampires or telekinetic prom queens.  But say I did, and needed to save not just my ass, but the asses of everyone I loved, and even, what the hell, the asses of those apple-chuckers.  In terms of how to make that happen, King’s books offered up a pretty persuasive set of blueprints.

Maybe more than King’s novels themselves, though, I remember being absolutely mesmerized by their covers, and spending many long moments at the local library (a frequent King setting) simply gazing at them.  The artwork of those early hardcovers did a fantastic job of whittling core themes down into imagery that was as simple as it was evocative (see above).

If you’d already read the book, with just a glance at its cover, you could relive it all over again.  And say you hadn’t read the book, the covers made you want to, like, immediately.

Well, fans of that early artwork can now skip the library and gaze at the more than 2,000 King covers gathered over at StephenKingShop.  They’re arranged by title, and I find it particularly interesting (and saddening) that, with the advancement of years—and books—the elegance of the cover art grows less and less striking.  And that’s especially true for the paperbacks.  Don’t get me started on those “Signet” ‘90s!

Via Cabinet: All The Stephen King Covers In The World