The Suite Life. Christopher HeardЧитать онлайн книгу.
and made a big-screen film entitled Zero Hour. (Decades later Paramount did a wildly funny spoof of the story with Airplane!) The story was so successful that Hailey was encouraged to write it as a novel. Runway Zero-Eight was published in 1958 and was well received. Hailey had found a new niche for his talents. He became known for tales that featured a multitude of diverse characters weaving in and out of one another’s lives within the context of a single setting, industry, or profession. His next book, The Final Diagnosis (1959), was situated in a big-city hospital’s pathology department. He followed that with In High Places, which has a backdrop of Cold War paranoia in North America. Then he turned his attention to the Royal York Hotel for his fourth novel, simply called Hotel.
Hailey had always been fascinated by the world within a world that hotels are and wanted to write a novel about what goes on in a suite juxtaposed against what transpires in the executive offices, the sort of things the general hotel guest would never imagine happening. He decided he wanted the setting for his novel to be a regal old hotel that had the distinction and colour of a long and storied history. Hailey needed a hotel that would be accessible to his audience. He didn’t want a hotel like the Ritz in Paris or the Waldorf-Astoria in New York because they were too well-known and too luxurious. If he used a model like that, his story would become focused on the place, not set in the place, would become about the hotel and not so much about the people in the hotel. He had to live in a hotel before he wrote his novel and knew he would be fictionalizing the establishment for added literary freedom. Without much thinking or searching, he chose Toronto’s Royal York.
The bestselling author’s methodology when writing a book was to do at least a year of research, followed by six months or so of reviewing and digesting everything he had come up with, then another year to construct the novel from the ground up. His research stint living in the Royal York began in mid-1962 and continued almost to the end of 1963. During his time in the Royal York, he read almost 30 books on hotel administration and made a detailed survey of the hotel from top to bottom.
Arthur Hailey’s Hotel was a mammoth bestseller from the moment it first appeared in 1965.
Hailey relocated his story from Toronto to New Orleans and renamed his hotel the St. Gregory, but every description in his book belongs to the Royal York. Knowing the Royal York as intimately as I do made for a strange experience when I first read Hotel. Hailey describes a character walking down the stairs, then out the ornate entranceway onto Corondelet Street. Well, I walk out those doors myself hundreds of times, and they don’t lead to Corondelet Street in New Orleans but to Front Street in Toronto. As dense as the book is in terms of characters and the dramas they’re involved in, the whole story plays out over five days. It has been suggested that Hailey based his novel not on the Royal York in Toronto but on the Roosevelt Hotel in New Orleans, another iconic hostelry that was coincidentally bought by the Fairmont chain in 1965, the year of the novel’s publication, and renamed first the Fairmont Roosevelt and then later dubbed the Fairmont New Orleans. However, that supposition doesn’t make sense, since Hailey did all his research while living in the Royal York.
Like many of Hailey’s novels, Hotel was translated into a movie first and then a long-running TV series 16 years later (a testament to the popularity of the book and its subject matter). In 1967 Warner Bros. released the film version of Hotel, directed by Richard Quine. It was extremely faithful to the book and starred Rod Taylor, Merle Oberon, Michael Rennie, and my pal Karl Malden, who will turn up in this book again a little later and a lot more personally. On September 21, 1983, a television series based on Hailey’s novel debuted. It was directed by Jerry London (Shogun), the king of the miniseries, and starred James Brolin, who was twice nominated for Golden Globe Awards for his work in the show, as was his female co-lead Connie Sellecca. The series, produced by Aaron Spelling, was a solid hit and ran for five seasons and 116 episodes. The St. Gregory Hotel in the television series was moved once again, this time from New Orleans to San Francisco. Much of the on-location work was done at the Fairmont San Francisco Hotel where to this day you can call down and have the pilot episode shown on your in-room entertainment system.
Apart from Hailey’s contribution to the canon, there have been 16 other films and TV shows called simply Hotel, and they come from everywhere — France, India, Japan. Strangely, the one theme that occurs more often than not in the non-Hailey versions is that of a man or woman waiting alone in a hotel for a love who isn’t returning for whatever reason.
Perhaps the most notorious of the hotel books that also became a movie and a television series is Stephen King’s classic The Shining. I first read King’s chilling novel when I was a kid who already had a healthy love of hotels and a real familiarity with the Royal York, so the hotel setting and haunting King prose held me in a tight grip from first page to last. In the novel a writer/teacher and his wife and young son spend a long winter alone as caretakers in a fictional hotel called the Overlook in the Colorado Rockies. Awful things happened in the hotel in the past possibly because it was built on an old Native American burial site. Slowly, the writer, Jack Torrance, descends into madness, the same insanity that appears to have befallen other caretakers in years gone by. The question posed seems to be: Does evil live in the walls and the fabrics of the Overlook, or has Jack been driven crazy simply by being alone in a huge old hotel in the dead of winter for months on end?
In the late 1970s, Kubrick wanted to explore the horror genre. Slasher or splatter horror films were coming out weekly at the time and making small fortunes, which prompted Kubrick to think of making a movie that was as intellectually stimulating as it was scary. So he instructed his assistant to buy the ten top-selling horror novels of the day. She reported sitting outside his closed door, listening to book after book thump against a wall. Kubrick would read ten or 15 pages, then throw the book away. Eventually, 20 minutes went by without any thumping, then a half-hour, then an hour. The assistant peeked inside the office to see Kubrick engrossed in The Shining.
Kubrick was American but chose to live and work in Britain where he made all his movies no matter where they were set (he even shot a Vietnam War film, Full Metal Jacket, there). He created much of the Overlook on soundstages and backlots at Elstree Studios, but the exteriors of the hotel were shot by a second unit at Timberline Lodge on Mount Hood in Oregon. However, the managers of the Timberline would only grant permission to use their property in the film if Kubrick took out a reference to room 217 as the place where all the notorious and gruesome things happen. They were scared that no one would ever want to stay in that room again! Kubrick complied and changed the room number to 237, which isn’t a number the Timberline uses. But what really made the hotel aspect of the film so effective was the use of long hallways, huge, ornate ballrooms, and sumptuous lobbies filled with comfortable furniture and giant fireplaces — the ambience of delightfully comfortable isolation.
As Torrance slips into madness, that isolation is one of the triggers, but as a hotel lover, I was intrigued by the scenes where Jack loses himself in delusions and believes he isn’t alone but in a giant, noisy celebration in a ballroom filled with people. That’s one of the interesting things about living in a hotel. You can be absolutely solitary in a socially relaxed crowd if you want. The choice is entirely yours. If you need to be blanketed in the comfort of your suite, you only need to shut the door and you’re in your own little world. And if you feel the need to be around people, you’re an elevator ride from that, as well.
The Shining, both novel and film, wonderfully captures the essence of what makes big, old hotels great: when you’re there, you’re exposed to the collective energies of all that took place before you. Venerable hotels wear their history like comfortable old sweaters. When The Shining became a 1997 television miniseries, the locations were a lot more authentic to the book than were Kubrick’s. King wrote the teleplay for the TV series himself, while Kubrick created his own screenplay with Diane Johnson, his writing partner. The miniseries’ director, Mick Garris, shot the show in Colorado, using the Stanley Hotel in Estes Park as his setting. This version, in which Stephen Webber plays Jack Torrance in a less manic, strangely more effective manner than Jack Nicholson does, stays much closer to the tone and substance of the novel.
But of all the hotel horror books that have been made into movies, one of the most wildly entertaining is 1408, which