Guillermo del Toro has revealed that his 'jazz hands' pose alongside Paul Thomas Anderson at this year's Oscar nominee luncheon was a deliberate recreation of the iconic final shot from Stanley Kubrick's 1980 horror classic, The Shining.
The director responded to a post on social media in which he and Anderson had been inserted into the original image from the film, saying: '[Y]ou got it! PTA and I said: Let's do the Shining pose and we tried.'
The original photograph appears at the end of The Shining, showing Jack Nicholson among a group of partygoers at the Overlook Hotel's July 4th Ball in 1921. In the image, Nicholson's right arm is raised, with a mustachioed man behind him placing his hand on it.
In 2025, New York Times reporter Aric Toler and British academic Alasdair Spark traced the source of the Nicholson picture to an edited version of a much older photograph. Kubrick had obtained the image from the Hulton picture archive, now owned by Getty Images, which depicted a Valentine's Day dance at the Royal Palace hotel in London in 1921. Nicholson's head was superimposed onto that of dance instructor Santos Casani.
