The Twelve Lives of Alfred Hitchcock by Edward White (best finance books of all time TXT) 📕

mold, intuiting the vision of the man in charge. For a short time, the designer and illustrator Saul Bass was just such a contributor, designing the title sequences that beautifully augment Vertigo, North by Northwest, and Psycho, as E. McKnight Kauffer’s had done on The Lodger decades earlier. Bass claimed that he’d done such a good job in storyboarding the shower scene in Psycho that Hitchcock allowed him to direct it, only to deny him his due credit once the scene gained its fame. Pretty much everybody connected with Psycho rejected Bass’s claim. “Alfred Hitchcock was right next to his camera for every one of those seventy-odd shots,” declared Janet Leigh, the woman on the other side of the lens. When asked why nobody else remembered the shoot as he did, Bass said that Hitchcock’s decision to hand him the reins was “spontaneous, not something he planned, discussed, or organized. At that time, nobody paid much attention.” More important, “Hitch was always there and his ‘presence’ naturally dominated the set. As far as everybody was concerned, including me, he was in charge whether he said ‘action’ or ‘cut’ or not.” Even in staking a claim to a headline piece of Hitchcock’s legacy, Bass did so by putting Hitchcock’s ineffable influence at the center of the story.

In the months he spent working on the screenplay for The Birds, Evan Hunter wrote excitedly to friends and family that Hitchcock planned on telling the world that the movie was a joint vision. “This is our picture, Evan,” Hitchcock had told him. “I want this to say ‘Alfred Hitchcock’s THE BIRDS, written by Evan Hunter’ and that’s what we’re going to sell.” In reality, there was only one name that the public would associate with the picture, as Hunter discovered when he tried to tell his young son’s friend that he was the man who wrote the screenplay. “No, you didn’t,” said the little boy, eager to show that he wasn’t so dumb as to believe an obvious lie, “Alfred Hitchcock did.”

It is often assumed that, as is the case with Ingmar Bergman, Quentin Tarantino, Woody Allen, and many other so-called auteurs, Hitchcock hammered out his own scripts. In fact, on only one of his films, The Ring, did he take sole writing credit, and even on this he had uncredited assistance from Eliot Stannard, one of the leading British screenwriters of the silent era. But with Hitchcock, the notion of authorship was slippery; when opportunity presented itself, he confirmed that though he may not have sweated over the dialogue within each scene, the creative credit was, morally, his. Sidney Gilliat, cowriter of The Lady Vanishes and Jamaica Inn (1939), was aggrieved when The New Yorker reported that all Hitchcock films are “about 99.44-percent Hitchcock.” Hitchcock swore that the figure quoted in the article had not come from him, but it does sound very much like the sort of thing he would have said. Years later, in a deposition regarding a copyright dispute over Rear Window (1954), Hitchcock told the court that in the writing of Hitchcock scripts, “I dictate the picture,” and that the Rear Window screenplay should therefore be regarded as “eighty percent Hitchcock,” despite it being officially adapted by John Michael Hayes from a Cornell Woolrich short story.

When it came to screenwriting, Hitchcock relied on the talents of others—though for most of his career, one of those talents had to be a capacity to digest and express what was called the “Hitchcock touch.” The “biggest trouble is to educate writers to work along my lines,” he once complained. Perhaps Samuel Taylor, screenwriter of Vertigo and Topaz (1969), put it best: “I can’t really say where Hitch’s input began or ended. When you worked with him on a film, you wrote a Hitchcock picture.”

Usually, the process started with a novel, a short story, or a play. What constituted a suitable source for a Hitchcock film is hard to define. Sometimes it was a question of what was available, or what was urged on him by the studios, into which he tried his best to insert his vision. By the 1960s, at the height of his powers, the search for new movie material was an industrialized effort involving Alma, his secretaries, his agent, employees at his production company, and various people at Universal, all looking for some inarticulable mix of suspense, melodrama, and humor. Original scripts were sent in by both established and untried writers, and lists of promising talents were collated by his staff, tantalizing future generations with hypothetical Hitchcock collaborations with Harold Pinter, Tom Stoppard, and Gore Vidal, among many others.

Given the time and effort dedicated to identifying it, Hitchcock could be remarkably dismissive about his source material. “I never read a book through if I am considering making a picture of it,” he asserted in 1937, lest “I get so saturated with the novel that I cannot discard easily what often must be discarded to make a real film and not a mere photographic reproduction of a book.” Hitchcock drove notoriously hard bargains when buying the rights to material, and frequently did so anonymously to avoid having to pay a penny more than he absolutely had to. In transcripts of his meetings with Ernest Lehman, the writer of his final completed picture, Family Plot (1976), Hitchcock made uncharitable remarks about the movie’s source material, The Rainbird Pattern, whose author, Victor Canning, was “a very lucky man” for having his work associated with the Hitchcock name. “These fellows,” grumbled Hitchcock, referring to the writers of his source material, “you know what happens—they re-release the book with our new title on it.”

The resentment is palpable, though one wonders at its derivation. Was it because Hitchcock felt exploited by those profiting from his work? Certainly he had form on that front: for years he silently fumed—not without reason—after learning that the mogul who brought him to Hollywood, David O. Selznick, made several times his own fee when Hitchcock was loaned to other