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

motive in an instant, second-guess them, and spot lies immediately. Considering how socially maladroit he could be, it seems a little hard to believe, but those who knew him best insist “he had an extraordinary sixth sense.” Even some of those who never had the honor of meeting him were of a mind to agree. Recounting the time when he crept onto the set of Family Plot in a vain hope of meeting his idol, Steven Spielberg said, “It was as if he sensed an intruder in his reverse vision. He couldn’t have seen me but he leaned over to an assistant director and whispered something.” Immediately, the assistant director approached Spielberg and escorted him off the set. “That was the closest I came to Hitchcock. I learned that he had eyes in the back of his head . . . very eerie.”

The legend of Hitchcock’s third eye has been perpetuated at least partially because Hitchcock’s ability to visualize is so central to his professional reputation as a director. He often claimed that he would “never look at the script again once it’s written, because it’s all been done,” and by that point, he could see the entire film in his head, shot by shot. “The general method that is used by, might I say, the average director,” he boasted, “is to shoot what we’d term plenty of material and then cut. I personally don’t use this method. . . . I aim at getting a complete vision of my film before it goes on to the studio floor.” All that remained was to go through the tedious process of committing the thing to film, which he did with the aid of detailed storyboards that told cast and crew exactly what was in his mind’s eye. He shot only the tiniest amount of footage that didn’t appear in the final cut, and reshoots were as rare as hen’s teeth. “Films,” he said, “are made before they are shot.” Once the process was complete, he didn’t need to see the finished product with an audience because he knew how they would react. He understood how people worked. He could press their buttons and pull their levers at will. Not only could he see a whole film in his mind, he knew how to project it into ours as well.

It is a remarkable testament to his unmatched visual genius—except it’s not entirely true. Scripting was clearly a highly stimulating process for Hitchcock, in which images solidified and pieces of the story slotted together. His preproduction planning was also rigorous, but it was an attempt to remove uncertainty and quell his nerves—a safety net rather than concrete walls from within which his films never escaped. On movies such as Topaz, The Birds, and Shadow of a Doubt, new pages arrived well after the cameras had started to roll, with Hitchcock adjusting his designs accordingly, giving the lie to his assertion that he never glanced at the script after the first day of filming. The usual equanimity of a Hitchcock set was frayed in Morocco during the filming of The Man Who Knew Too Much when the shooting script failed to materialize on time. Well after principal photography had begun, the assistant production manager, Hugh Brown, noted that the crew was receiving fresh pages each morning and having to work on the hoof. Robert Benchley, who both wrote dialogue for and acted in Foreign Correspondent, had a similar experience. From the set, he wrote his wife that “Hitchcock is a good director but an exacting one. . . . The picture isn’t written yet, and one of the most important roles isn’t cast. . . . They’re shooting the stuff that’s written, and then, when changes in the plot make that obsolete, they shoot it over.”

Neither did Hitchcock storyboard a whole movie in advance, only key scenes, and sometimes not even those. When MGM asked him to provide sketches of the famous crop-duster scene for publicity reasons, he acquiesced—even though no sketches of the scene had been made before filming. Bill Krohn explains that “tracings of each still [from the shoot] preserved among his papers show that Hitchcock, or someone, gave it a try, but what he seems to have done finally was ask a production illustrator to draw a storyboard” retrospectively, based on the action that was filmed. By this stage in his career, Hitchcock’s storyboards had become part of his public image, eye-catching props that purported to show us genius flowing through the nib of a pencil. Krohn posits that it began in 1942, when Universal’s publicity department placed an article in Theatre Arts magazine that reproduced drawings from Hitchcock’s latest picture, Saboteur, as a behind-the-scenes peek at the Hitchcock methodology. But, even earlier, in publicizing the very first Hollywood Hitchcock movie, Rebecca, the New York World-Telegram ran an article featuring four sketches that Hitchcock had made during the making of the film, hailing Hitchcock as “a Pattern Designer,” whose movies skip from the chambers of his imagination to the page, then onto the screen, in quick, clean strides. Many years later, drawings from Saboteur’s Statue of Liberty sequence were put on display by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which those who worked on the film believed had actually been drawn after production had wrapped.

Hitchcock clearly had an impressive visual imagination. Farley Granger declared himself amazed when he visited Hitchcock’s office before filming Rope. “Every wall was covered by eight-by-ten-inch drawings from ceiling to floor. I was completely absorbed in this visualization of the script.” Yet it is going too far to say that Hitchcock had a film edited in his head, down to the last camera angle, before filming began—not least because by the time he was experienced enough at filmmaking to have developed such a skill, he would have also been experienced enough to understand the advantages of embracing the unexpected, which is a part of the creative process in every medium. Robert Burks confirmed that Hitchcock