Guillermo del Toro’s ‘jazz hands’ at Oscar lunch a recreation of Shining photo, director says

The picture, taken with Paul Thomas Anderson at this year’s Oscar nominee lunch, recalls the eerie image that closes Kubrick’s 1980 horror classic

Frankenstein director Guillermo del Toro’s “jazz hands” pose in the Oscar nominee luncheon photo was part of his and fellow director Paul Thomas Anderson’s attempt to recreate the celebrated group shot, featuring Jack Nicholson, that appears at the ending of The Shining.

Del Toro responded to a post – in which he and Anderson had been inserted into the image from the 1980 horror film directed by Stanley Kubrick – by saying: “[Y]ou got it! PTA and I said: Let’s do the Shining pose and we tried.”

The original picture forms the mysterious final shot of The Shining, and shows Nicholson among a group of partygoers in a photo captioned: “Overlook Hotel – July 4th Ball – 1921”. In the photo, Nicholson has raised his right arm, on which a mustachioed fellow partygoer behind him has placed his hand.

In 2025, New York Times reporter Aric Toler said that he and British academic Alasdair Spark had tracked down the source of the Nicholson picture, which is an edit of a much older photograph. Kubrick had obtained the photo, which was of a Valentine’s Day dance at the Royal Palace hotel in London in 1921, from the Hulton picture archive (now owned by Getty Images) – with Nicholson’s head replacing that of well-known dance instructor Santos Casani.