I can't help but think keeping Jack's character more faithful to King's character of a good man slowly being corrupted by the hotel and resisting would have really changed the pace of Kubrick's movie for the worse, and taken away a lot of his really beautiful compositions.
I think King's panned adaptation for the 1997 miniseries is evidence supporting that Kubrick's character adaptations were good choices for the film he was making / the medium shift.
Edit: not sure why you're being downvoted, I think your characterisation of the changes Kubrick made to Jack's character is entirely valid
Maximum Overdrive[1] certainly provides some support for this hypothesis. About the only good part of this movie is the soundtrack, which was provided by AC/DC.
Stephen King: The movie is about all these vehicle goings crazy and running by themselves, so we started shooting a lot of gas pedals, clutches, transmissions, things like that, operating themselves. We had one sequence: The gas pedal goes to the floor, the gas pedal goes up, the clutch goes in, the gears shifts by itself, the clutch comes out and the gas pedal goes back to the floor again. We were able to shoot everything but the transmission from the driver's side door. The transmission was a problem, because we kept seeing either a corner of the studio of a reflection.
So I said: This is no problem, we will simply take the camera around to the other side and shoot the transmission from there. Total silence. Everybody looked at everybody else. You know what's happening here, right? I'd crossed the axis. It was like farting at the dinner party. Nobody wanted to say you've made a terrible mistake. I didn't get this job because I could direct or because I had any background in film; I got it because I was Stephen King.
So finally [cameraman] Daniele Nannuzzi told me I'd crossed the 180-degree axis and that this simply wasn't done, and although I didn't understand what it was, I grasped the idea that I was breaking a rule.
Later on, I called George [Romero] up on the phone and I said, "What is this axis shit?" and he laughed his head off and explained it, and I said, "Can you break it -- the rule?" He said, "It's better not to, but if you have to, you can. If you look at The Battleship Potemkin" (which I never have), "it crosses the axis all the time, and the guy [Sergei Eisenstein] gets away with it." Then I saw David Lynch and asked him: "What's this about crossing the axis?" and he burst out laughing and said, "That always gets me." And I asked if you could do it, and he gave me this startled look and said, "Stephen, you can do anything. You're the director." Then he paused and said, "But it doesn't cut together."
https://sites.google.com/site/cultoddities/home/carrie/carri...
Aaaand... there's actually a much more relevant set of quotes about The Shining, like:
There's a lot to like about it. But it's a great big beautiful Cadillac with no motor inside. You can sit in it, you can enjoy the smell of the leather upholstery -- the only thing you can't do is drive it anywhere. So I would do everything different. The real problem is that Kubrick set out to make a horror picture with no apparent understanding of the genre. Everything about it screams that from the beginning to the end, from plot decisions to that final scene -- which has been used before on "The Twilight Zone."
I think even his short stories adapt better to movies as well…Shawshank, Stand By Me, The Green Mile…all three to me are simply awesome movies but were heavily adapted from the source story. Misery was good as well, but I kind of blame the casting of Kathy Bates as a genius move that really made that one work.
As a canonical series, it's a jumbled mess of barely connected themes tied together only by Kingcs own ego (maybe that's the point, but its still narcissistic).
At some point he even tries to take credit for Harry Potter and Star Wars, albeit in a vague "everything's connected" type of way.
I tell anybody who wants to read the series to simply read the first book, and the last chapter of the last book.
He's a brilliant writer, but his strength lies in leaving some things to mystery, instead of micromanaging his worlds.
I don't know about that. The whole idea behind the series is to serve as a recounting of Roland's mistakes along the way, and how he progressively refines his course at each iteration. Cutting to the proverbial chase just leaves the reader (and Roland) stuck in the cycle forever. You have to suffer alongside him (and his companions) to get it, I think.
By the end it was obvious that King was writing from a place that is uncomfortably familiar on a personal level. "Christ, I'm so tired of this project. If I were less conscientious, I could just walk away from it. Let's chop out some features and link in some third-party libraries so we can ship it already."