Director says Guillermo del Toro’s ‘Jazz Hands’ at Oscars Luncheon is a remake of a bright picture | film

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

Del Toro responded to a post – in which he and Anderson were included in the photo from Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 horror film – by saying: “[Y]You got it! The PTA and I said: let’s do the shine pose and we tried it.

The original image forms the enigmatic final shot of The Shining, showing Nicholson among a group of party-goers in a photo with the caption: “Overlook Hotel – 4th of July Party – 1921.” In the photo, Nicholson raised his right arm, as one of his fellow mustachioed partygoers placed his hand behind him.

In 2025, New York Times reporter Eric Toler said he and British academic Alasdair Spark tracked down the source of Nicholson’s photo, which was a modification of a much older photo. Kubrick obtained the photo, which was of a Valentine’s Day dance at the Royal Palace Hotel in London in 1921, from the Hulton Photo Archive (now owned by Getty Images) – where Nicholson’s head had replaced that of well-known dance instructor Santos Cassani.