The Twelve Lives of Alfred Hitchcock by Edward White (an ebook reader txt) 📗

studios. Or, perhaps what stung was the fear that it was he, not the writers, who was the dependent in these relationships.

Of course, the origins of Hitchcock’s stories shouldn’t lead anyone to doubt his talent or distinctiveness as a filmmaker. Indeed, his achievement in creating such a recognizable cinematic style is all the more impressive considering the discrete origins of his raw material, and that he had so many parties—actors, producers, audiences, critics—to navigate. There’s also the issue of time: between 1925 and 1960, he made forty-seven feature films, on a treadmill of development, production, postproduction, and publicity, not including any of his radio, television, or print endeavors. With that schedule, it would have been virtually impossible for Hitchcock not to have collaborated with a host of writers. At least part of the reason for his coolness toward source material was that he didn’t seek a book or a play to fall in love with, just something to heave the propeller of his imagination. That needn’t be a narrative, but a character, a situation, or simply a particularly arresting image.

North by Northwest began in just this way. Ernest Lehman, best known at the time for having written The King and I screenplay, had agreed to work with Hitchcock on adapting Hammond Innes’s novel The Wreck of the Mary Deare for MGM. Lehman was keen to work with Hitchcock but was stumped on how to turn the novel, much of which is set in an English court of law, into Hollywood entertainment. “The first scene was good: ‘ship found in a channel with nobody on board,’ ” Lehman recalled, but “that was the only good scene in the whole novel.” Still, he pushed those doubts to one side, persuaded by Hitchcock’s confidence that all the problems could be sorted.

Hitchcock had no hard-and-fast system when collaborating with a writer. Depending on the type of source material being adapted, the writers he could find, and the time available, the process could be tweaked. Usually, however, there was a crucial initial period during which Hitchcock and his writer would meet day after day to thrash out the story they wanted to tell and block its key scenes. Hitchcock believed the best way to solve a script problem was to allow oneself to stumble on it. Frequently, that meant abandoning the writer’s room for a pub, or cocktails at home, a restaurant, an expedition down the Thames, or a drive into the California countryside. “Certain writers want to work every hour of the day. . . . I’m not that way. I want to say, ‘Let’s lay off for several hours—let’s play.’ ”

It was in this circuitous way that work on The Wreck of the Mary Deare began. They convened daily for meandering discussions about any number of subjects, anything other than how to turn this uncinematic novel into box-office gold. Lehman began to worry that he would soon be left to bash out a two-hour movie script without the faintest idea of what would go in it. When he shared his concern, Hitchcock told him to relax: he would charm MGM into letting them get to work on something else altogether. They began afresh, working around a single idea: a chase finale across Mount Rushmore, a notion that Hitchcock had toyed with for some time. Six years earlier, the journalist Lawrence Greene reported that Hitchcock’s “unrealized ambition is to have Good contend with Evil in the shadow of Mount Rushmore.” With the working title In a Northwesterly Direction—and, for a time, The Man in Lincoln’s Nose—they pieced together an adventure story about a man who is mistaken for a spy and is forced to go on the run after being framed for murder, that took its protagonist from New York to South Dakota. Hitchcock pitched countless unconnected ideas. In one scene, he envisaged an Eskimo fishing in frozen waters, when a hand suddenly jabs through the ice. Another would track a car being built piece by piece on a production line, with a dead body rolling out of it at the end. “They were all wonderful,” said Lehman of Hitchcock’s torrent of ideas, “and I took them all down, and I never used most of them.”

Hitchcock performing for the camera, 1942.

When constructing a script from their jumble of scenes, Lehman “tried to develop a Hitchcock frame of mind. I became like Hitchcock, and I tried to think like him.” His aim was to achieve the Platonic ideal of a Hitchcock film, adventurous, suspenseful, witty; “a Hitchcock picture to end all Hitchcock pictures.” Lehman told the press that his script had been written not for Cary Grant, but for another “very special kind of star—the director, Mr. Hitchcock.”

Even so, Lehman came to resent that his part in one of Hollywood’s greatest movies had, in his view, been obliterated by the legend of Hitchcock’s lone genius. Before his death in 2005, he made something of a habit of upbraiding those whom he felt hadn’t given him his due. He told an interviewer in 1999, forty years after the film was released, that he was in the midst of “writing a bitter letter to Peter Bogdanovich for writing a paean of praise to North by Northwest . . . and mentioning everybody connected with the picture, except me.”

Beyond what Lehman and Hitchcock remembered, there is no detailed record of those scripting sessions. But, seventeen years later, when the pair worked on Family Plot, Hitchcock recorded their conversations; the transcripts are a privileged insight into a collaboration between two legends§ of mid-century Hollywood. The project wasn’t as happy or successful as North by Northwest had been, but the basic dynamics that defined their relationship are on display: Lehman constantly trying to hold the structure of the film in his head as they move from one scene to the next; Hitchcock firing out thoughts as they come to him, enjoying the occasional digression into Watergate, or some other bit of news or gossip. Images frequently flash