It’s a magical moment in the movie – and the unsung hero behind it is Stanley Kubrick’s secretary.
The director’s assistant had to spend months and months typing the same 10 words thousands of times, each page getting a fresh format, and enough copies had to be made so that Shelley Duvall could destroy an endless number of them while flipping through ream take after take.
Thanks to the “copy + paste” function in modern word processors, the most concerning thing about finding reams of paper reading “All Work And No Play Makes Jack A Dull Boy” now is the harm to the environment and the waste of ink – but what made the scene in The Shining so particularly impactful was the recognition of how much time Jack Torrance must have spent typing that same sentence over and over on a typewriter.