Meet the man who showed up to be Jack Nicholson's body double in <em>The Shining</em> — 57 years early
Jamie Frevele
When the Overlook Hotel swallowed Jack Torrance’s soul in The Shining, sucking him into their haunted history, did you ever wonder if Stanley Kubrick actually got a whole bunch of people to pose for that last vintage-looking photo of happy partygoers, with Jack Nicholson front and center? Or did you consider that it was an existing photo taken at a whole other party from another time? You might want to ask the gentleman pictured here, because he was actually at such a party, in that very real photograph.
The Overlook Hotel, which has its own Tumblr account, stumbled upon the pre-Photoshop retouching process for the memorable photo, which was originally taken in 1923. Used as an example for the magic of airbrushing, the process was detailed in The Complete Airbrush and Photo-Retouching Manual. In a nutshell, this unidentified man had his head replaced with that of Jack Nicholson, which sounds like the logline for a rejected psychological comedy called “Being Jack Nicholson.” Visit the site to see the before-and-after shots.
