A closer look
Stanley Kubrick forced his secretary to spend weeks manually typing out hundreds of pages of the infamous 'All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy' manuscript for The Shining, completely refusing to just use a copy machine. He genuinely wanted the slight, natural variations in keystroke pressure and ink density that only come from a human being driven slowly insane by a wildly repetitive, mind-numbing task. While cinema historians frequently praise this as the brilliant hallmark of a demanding auteur, any modern human resources department would immediately recognize it as a spectacularly toxic workplace environment and a gross misuse of administrative staff. The fact that the legendary director basically subjected a poor assistant to the exact same psychological torture the main character was going through just to make a prop look authentic perfectly encapsulates the unhinged obsession of twentieth-century filmmaking
