#Razzies Founder Regrets Shelley Duvall’s Nomination for The Shining

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“#Razzies Founder Regrets Shelley Duvall’s Nomination for The Shining”

The Shining getting recognition at the Golden Raspberry Awards has always stood out as one of the parody award show’s biggest missteps, given how the film is now widely considered to be one of cinema history’s greatest movies. At the first-ever Razzies in 1981, director Stanley Kubrick was nominated for Worst Director for The Shining, a factoid that’s hard to fathom in 2022. Also nominated that same year for Worst Actress was for The Shining was Shelley Duvall, who may not have been acting all that much given the time she had filming the movie.

These days, it’s pretty well known that Kubrick was rather hard on Duvall during the production of The Shining. The grueling shoot had taken a toll on Duvall’s physical and mental health, and given what we now know about the situation, Duvall’s Razzie nomination is especially controversial. Razzie co-founder Maureen Murphy recently admitted, per Variety, that she now regrets allowing Duvall to be nominated for Worst Actress.

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“Knowing the backstory and the way that Stanley Kubrick kind of pulverized her, I would take that back,” Murphy said.

If you’re wondering, the “winner” for Worst Director was Robert Greenwald for Xanadu while Brooke Shields took the Worst Actress Razzie Award for The Blue Lagoon. John J.B. Wilson, who co-founded the Razzies with Murphy, stands by Kubrick’s nomination even if they have regrets over Duvall’s. Wilson says that the decision to nominate Kubrick stemmed from the changes he’d made from Stephen King’s original novel when adapting the story for the big screen.

“The voting membership the very first year were largely people that Maureen and I worked with at a trailer company,” Wilson explained. “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.”

Wilson added, “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.”

“Exactly. I think that guy’s overrated,” Murphy said, though she concedes that The Shining is a good film. “He did one good movie, and that was about it. And we’re willing to say, ‘Yeah, maybe that shouldn’t have been nominated.’ Everybody makes mistakes. That’s being human.”

Related: Best Worst Picture Razzie Awards Winners of All Time

Shelley Duvall Holds No Ill Will Toward Stanley Kubrick

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It’s been more than four decades, but Shelley Duvall still has trouble remembering the experiences she had filming The Shining. Last year, the actress spoke about the situation in a lengthy interview with The Hollywood Reporter. Watching footage of the film brought Duvall to tears as she recalled how she hard it was on both her body and mind to have to cry all day, every day for an extended period of time. She also admits that while Kubrick had a rough side to him, Duvall describes him as “very warm and friendly” to her and doesn’t seem to be holding any resentment for the grueling shoot.

“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,” Duvall said of constantly filming crying scenes. “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.'”

On Kubrick, Duvall added, “He’s got that streak in him. He definitely has that. But I think mostly because people have been that way to him at some time in the past. His first two films were Killer’s Kiss and The Killing. No, [he wasn’t cruel]. He was very warm and friendly to me. He spent a lot of time with Jack and me. He just wanted to sit down and talk for hours while the crew waited. And the crew would say, ‘Stanley, we have about 60 people waiting.’ But it was very important work.”

The 2022 Golden Raspberry Awards are scheduled for March 26. Diana the Musical leads the list with nine nominations while other films with a lot of recognition include Karen, The Woman in the Window, Dear Evan Hansen, and Space Jam: A New Legacy.