http://www.dvdtalk.com/leonvitaliinterview.html
Q: Obviously Kubrick shot cans and cans and cans and cans and reels and reels and reels of film for each of his films. Has that work been archived and is it being saved so that at some point people can be able to get a window into his creative process?
A: I'll tell you right now, okay, on Clockwork Orange, The Shining, Barry Lyndon, some little parts of 2001, we had thousands of cans of negative outtakes and print, which we had stored in an area at his house where we worked out of, which he personally supervised the loading of it to a truck and then I went down to a big industrial waste lot and burned it. That's what he wanted.
Q: Wow.
A: He didn't want anybody to either show…because basically in Eyes Wide Shut, there were four middle scenes which were cut out of it otherwise everything that he shot is on the screen. But those are gone. Basically, for the most part anyway, all you're going to see are like maybe 20, 30, 40 takes of the same thing, but for some reason, whether it's the tracking shot that had stopped halfway through because something had gone wrong or the acting was bad or flubbed line or what have you, were basically the same. What's there to see? You know? What is there to see? People know he took hundreds of takes sometimes. That's known about him. But for him, it's what was up on the screen.
It's not that I don't sympathize or understand why people get agitated, but when you come down to it, I would rather have it the way Stanley wanted it than the way a lot of other people. You could have had a hybrid of 100 ways of showing his films if it wasn't for Stanley being insistent about the way he wanted them to be seen.
Also (from the digital bits) :
Bill Hunt: I know that when Columbia TriStar recently went back to do a collector's edition of Dr. Strangelove, they wanted to use the alternate "pie fight" ending, but the Kubrick estate denied the request.
Leon Vitali: Well, again... Stanley never wanted any of that to be seen. Stanley was never one to save a lot of deleted scenes and trims and so forth. He felt that if he didn't use it in the movie, it had no business being seen.
found this quote from shelley duvall here about the ending: http://www.anchorbay.co.uk/forum/showthread.php?t=832&page=21&highlight=shining
Shelley Duvall (1981)
He cut out the final sequence of the film after several days in the theatres.
I think he was wrong, because the scene explains some things that are obscure for the public, like the importance of the yellow ball and the role of the hotel manager in the plot. Wendy is in the hospital with her son. The manager visits her, apologizes for what happened, and invites her to live with him. She doesn't say yes or no. Then he goes into the hallway of the hospital, passes in front of Danny, who is playing on the ground with some toys. When he gets near the exit, he stops and says, 'I almost forgot, I have something for you.' And he pulls from his pocket the yellow ball that the twins had thrown at Danny. It bounces twice (we spent a whole day filming so it would bounce the right way), Danny catches it, looks at it, then lifts his eyes towards the hotel manager, stupefied, realizing that throughout the story he was aware of the mystery of the hotel. Ullman walks out the door with an evil smirk on his face and gets in his car with Jack in the back. There was a Hitchcockian side to this resolution, and you know that Kubrick was crazy about Hitchcock.