In a statement justifying the decision, the organization said, “We have since discovered that Duvall’s performance was affected by Stanley Kubrick’s treatment of her throughout production.” Earlier this year, Razzies co-founder Mo Murphy said in an interview with Vulture She regrets the choice: “If I know the backstory and how Stanley Kubrick kind of pulverized it,” Murphy said, “I’d take that back.”
Duvall played the petrified wife of Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson), a writer who takes an off-season job as a janitor at the outlying Overlook Hotel, loses his mind and attempts to murder his wife and son (Danny Lloyd). The 1980 film has garnered acclaim since its original mixed reception – it even ranked 29th on the American Film Institute’s list of “100 Most Exciting American Movies.” But in the years since the film’s release, the toxic conditions surrounding Duvall’s performance have come to light. Footage from “Making ‘The Shining’,” a short documentary filmed by Kubrick’s then-17-year-old daughter Vivian, and a 2021 interview with Duvall in the Hollywood Reporter revealed an abusive environment in which Kubrick sought his leadership to keep the actress in constant panic and made horror real by berating and angering her on set.
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The Razzies’ decision to revoke Duvall’s nomination comes as part of a broader conversation about the dangers and downsides of method acting, in which actors often seek full emotional identification with a character — sometimes by extreme means. The decision to withdraw the Razzie nomination also comes as Hollywood grapples with its failed-joke policy, with comedians like Amy Schumer apologizing for racist jokes and Eddie Murphy expressing remorse for making hurtful homophobic cracks in the past.
Founded in 1981 by UCLA film school graduates John Wilson and Murphy, the Razzies annually present awards for the “worst of” categories, voted on by members of the group, which are described as covering “almost every continent and 49 US -States except one of the Carolinas. ” The awards are given – and usually accepted – in good spirits. In 2011, actor Tom Green appeared at the ceremony with his own little red carpet and played harmonica until he was thrown off the stage. That same year, Sandra Bullock brought a trolley full of DVDs of her Razzie-winning film, All About Steve. This year’s winners, announced online, included LeBron James for Space Jam: A New Legacy. According to the Razzies website, he deserves it a trophy, gold sprayed, with an estimated value of $4.97.
Wilson says her own mission went into the decision to roll back the two raids. “With what we do, with the slogan ‘Own your bad’, we have to own up to our own mistakes. We have to own our own bad,” he told the Washington Post in a joint phone interview with Murphy. “We don’t want to be bullies,” Murphy added. “We want to bring out the humanity in celebrity.”
This week, Wilson and Murphy expressed humanity in a different way: by acknowledging an actress’ personal pain. In the very first year of the awards, the Razzies nominated Duvall for Worst Actress. That same year, they nominated Stanley Kubrick to direct what they felt was a poor adaptation of Stephen King’s 1977 novel. (King himself famously belittled Kubrick’s adaptation, comparing Duvall’s performance to a “screaming tea towel.”)
Duvall’s acting in the film was criticized for being over the top, and her character was called weak and submissive. But Michael Blouin, an English professor at Milligan University who studied King and co-edited “Violence in the Stephen King Movies,” sees it differently.
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“Kubrick tried to make this meta-commentary on the horror genre. The film is meant to be cartoonish,” he says. “If it’s an unrealistic representation, then so be it. If she comes off as weak, I think it just reflects a blindness to what’s really going on in abusive relationships. And that speaks more broadly to our blindness to the relationships that also took place on set.”
Over the years it has become clear that Duvall not only pretended to be scared, but often actually was scared. Vivian Kubrick’s documentary, originally shown on British television, shows Duvall collapsing on set from exhaustion and being berated by the elder Kubrick, who is said to have isolated and criticized the actress to create the alienation felt by her character in the film .
Known as a perfectionist, Kubrick is said to have never finished a take before the 35th take. The famous “Here’s Johnny” scene, in which Nicholson’s character breaks open a bathroom door, resulted in 60 broken doors in three days of shooting. It took Kubrick 127 takes to complete the stairway scene in which Duvall swings a baseball bat in front of her husband – just under the Guinness World Record of 148 repetitions set by another scene in the film.
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When Duvall gave an interview to the Hollywood Reporter last year, he broke down in tears as he rewatched the stairwell scene. “I can only imagine how many women go through this,” she said.
Filming The Shining – which lasted almost a year instead of the planned 17 weeks – took a toll on Duvall’s health. She had to constantly carry Lloyd around and maintain a state of sustained panic. She called the experience “excruciating labor … almost unbearable,” and told Roger Ebert in 1980 that for the last nine months of filming, she found herself crying 12 hours a day, five or six days a week. She likened it to “primal scream therapy.”
To prepare for scenes, she would listen to sad music or reflect on sad moments in her life. “But after a while your body rebels,” she told the Hollywood Reporter. “It says, ‘Stop doing this to me. I don’t want to cry every day.’ And sometimes just that thought made me cry.”
During filming, Duvall battled bouts of illness and her hair fell out from the stress. At one point in the making-of documentary, Duvall shows her hair to her director. Kubrick responds by telling her to get ready for the next scene, then says, “I don’t sympathize with Shelley.”
Murphy believes that the psychological damage inflicted by Kubrick may have permanently damaged Duvall’s career. “She was such a cool, quirky, three-dimensional character. It was a pleasure to see her on screen,” says Murphy of her previous performances. “It seems to me like there was a shift after The Shining. ”
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In recent years, Duvall has faded from the limelight. She left Hollywood in the 1990s after producing successful children’s programs for cable television. Duvall, 72, lives in Texas with her partner, musician Dan Gilroy. Duvall’s last acting credit was on Manna from Heaven 20 years ago.
More recently, she received unwanted attention after a 2016 interview on the Dr. Phil” TV show, in which she spoke incoherently and shared seemingly paranoid thoughts. At one point, she suggested that Robin Williams, her “Popeye” co-star, might still be alive and “forming.” Celebrities criticized host Phil McGraw, a clinical psychologist, who said he exploited a vulnerable issue.
But over the years, her character on The Shining has drawn criticism. In a 2013 BBC interview, King said the film felt “cold” and cited Duvall’s portrayal as “one of the most misogynistic characters ever made. She’s basically just there to yell and be stupid, and that’s not the woman I wrote about.”
What seemed to annoy King most was the distance from the characters. Kubrick had viewers watching the torrances like “ants in an anthill,” King complained — and Duvall’s experience suggests Kubrick may have been watching so does his actress.