Hitchcock's Repeated Compositions

We were discussing the similarity of the technique used in creating these two "trick shots" which reveal simultaneous action from The Man Who Knew Too Much and Vertigo at the WWH Facebook page, and it got me thinking about other images and juxtaposed shots that Hitchcock repeated in his films—kind of like the second Mrs. De Winter's father who liked the paint the same tree over again.

Here are just a few that come to mind:

Of course Hitchcock used stairways so very often, but the framing he used in The Lodger, Blackmail, and Vertigo were strikingly similar.

Designer Saul Bass had a hand in both the Vertigo title sequence and the shower sequence in Psycho, but it was a design that Hitchcock chose in two of his key films.

The Catholic Hitchcock repeated variations of his own Pietà, but the images in The Lodger and Topaz are most similar.

As Hitchcock's films progressed in the 1950s he explored more deeply the frailty of the human psyche. Notice how these two scenes in consecutive films—The Wrong Man and Vertigo—are nearly identical. Here a desperate Manny goes into Dr. Banay's office to ask about Rose's condition. Dr. Banay leans back on his desk, arms crossed, explaining the healing will take time. Later Manny departs, walking away from the camera down the long corridor of the sanitarium. Below, an equally desperate Midge goes into the office of Scottie's doctor and departs down a similar corridor after telling the doctor Mozart isn't going to help.

In each of these scenes from The Wrong Man and Psycho as the discussion turns to someone being institutionalized or being "put someplace", both Rose Balestrero and Marion Crane begin clutching and rubbing an arm.

In both of these scenes from The Man Who Knew Too Much and Topaz, the listener is receiving information he'd probably rather not have heard.

It doesn't matter whether it's the police or a couple of henchmen, on the front steps of your own home or through the lobby of a New York hotel in broad daylight, Hitchcock knew that being taken into a car against your will could be equally frightening and filmed these scenes from The Wrong Man and North by Northwest in much same way.

Then, of course, there's the way Hitchcock filmed kissing scenes, but we covered that already!

The Real "Rear Window" Courtyard

To mark the 58th anniversary of John Michael Hayes beginning work on Rear Window I decided to visit the actual Greenwich Village courtyard that was used as the model for the spectacular set of that was built on Paramount's Stage 18. Here you will how the architectual details and the proximity to the neighborhood police precinct inspired the setting and were incorporated into the set sketches, the finished film, and how this location has inspired other filmmakers to use the spot as well. Of course, full details on the writing and production of Rear Window and the selection of this location are in Writing with Hitchcock.

Hitchcock Loglines

Early in his career Hitchcock said that his method of preparing a screenplay with his writers generally stripping the story down to the bare essentials which he would outline on a single page. The next step involved fleshing out that outline into a prose treatment of about 60 to 90 pages, from which the final screenplay with dialogue developed. Hitchcock said, if he was successful in the process, someone creating a synopsis from the finished film would have essentially the one-page synopsis he’d created at the beginning.

With that in mind, I thought we’d start an on-going thread on our Facebook page where I will pitch a logline for each Hitchcock film—a concise, one-line description of the movie including its essential hook—then we’ll discuss how successful Hitchcock and his writers were in carrying it out.

Some loglines will be as simple as "Acting in concert, birds start attacking people for no apparent reason" and others a bit less so, like today's for Family Plot: 

A bogus spiritualist and an amateur actor hope to con a wealthy woman out of $10,000 by locating her sole heir—a nephew given up for adoption under shady circumstances—but find they are in deep water as the nephew turns out to be a kidnapper who’d rather not be found.

Critique or defend the finished film, the story elements, the dialogue, the performances, or whatever you like. And if you'd like, write a logline of your own, I think it will be interesting to see just how many ways we all come up with to capture the essense of the same story. 

Join the conversation and enjoy!

Hitch-Collaborators I've Encountered, Part II — Or Why I Didn't Call This "The Man Who'd Spew Too Much"

Before deciding to make this a two-part entry and include a few words about screenwriter Joseph Stefano, I had intended this piece to be strictly about Hitchcock's assistant director and associate producer Herbert Coleman and was going to title it something along the lines of The Man Who'd Spew Too Much. But thinking twice, I know that Coleman was merely trying to salvage his own reputation, albeit at the expense of someone else's, namely John Michael Hayes.

Henry Bumstead, Doc Erickson, Hitchcock and Herbert Coleman during production of The Man Who Knew Too Much.

I have mixed feelings about my experience with Herbert Coleman. I think Doc Erickson said it best when he told me that, "Herbie was probably the greatest assistant director who ever lived." I believe that to be true. The extent to which Alfred Hitchcock and Alfred J. Hitchcock Productions relied upon Coleman during those six years from 1953 to 1959 is undeniable. The speed and the quality of Hitchcock's output during that period is due in no small part to the fact that Coleman was able to deliver Hitchcock what he wanted and needed in a timely and cost-effective manner. But speed and efficiency as an assistant does not make one a creative force or someone with a vision—at least not at Hitchcock's level. Herbert Coleman had a gift for assisting others achieve their vision and that gift meshed with Hitchcock best.

Coleman hoped to spread his wings as a director and felt he'd never get the chance if he continued with Hitchcock.

That said, it appears to me that Herb Coleman had long held the dream of becoming a producer-director in his own right. And after six faithful years as part of the Hitchcock troupe he felt that he deserved that chance. But the problem was he possessed a very different skill set than William Wyler or Hitchcock. A look at Posse From Hell and Battle at Bloody Beach, Coleman's two feature films as director, reveal a talent for B-pictures at best.

Before the publication of his own memiors, Herb Coleman told me that he felt a backlash from those closest to Hitchcock as a result of Donald Spoto's biography, The Dark Side of Genius. The statement to which he was referring most concerns his decision to not continue with Hitchcock through the production of Psycho: 

[Hitchcock] just couldn't understand me, and he wouldn't even talk to me for weeks afterward. I think he felt he owned me and my family for life. He felt this way about others, too. He just couldn't imagine that we'd want a change in our careers, or the chance to broaden our experience. I said I wanted to remain a friend, but for a while he made that difficult. I don't think Hitch ever really formed any lasting friendships. He was afraid that if he did, he would have to give of himself, and he simply didn't know how to do that in any way except in a movie. (The Dark Side of Genius, p. 417, Coleman to Donald Spoto interview conducted July 31, 1981)

There seems little wrong to me with what Coleman told Spoto. Nevertheless Coleman related to me during our interview, "That book caused me a lot of problems. I lost some friends in England. I lost some friends at Universal. People who read it, who didn't really know me very well, who were not friends, but were business friends, just couldn't believe that I would say such things about Hitch."

In later years Coleman sought to mend those fences by revising his story and trying to rewrite history and his own statements by seeking to get his memiors published. Coleman told me at the outset that he would be guarded in our interview so he wouldn't reveal any of the "bombshells" he was planning to include in his own book. Nevertheless he ended up tipping his hand to what I felt would be the most damaging outright fabrication in his then yet-to-be-published book, and this allowed me to obtain and include documented proof to refute his claims. This was one of the reasons I went into such detail on when and how and to whom John Michael Hayes delivered his completed treatment for Rear Window in Writing with Hitchcock. Yes, I was writing to refute something that hadn't even been published yet.

When I interviewed Coleman he claimed that one morning Hitchcock had told him to have a chair and a typewriter set up in his newly occupied office at Paramount. Coleman said he arranged for this and then when John Michael Hayes came in, Hitchcock began dictating what was to become the treatment for Rear Window. Coleman's claim for how and why he remembered this so clearly and so distinctly is that the treatment is dated September 12, 1953. Coleman went on to tell me that when he was deposed for the 1990 Rear Window lawsuit and asked if he remembered when the treatment was turned in, he said:

September the 12th at 5:30 in the afternoon. And they said, how in the world did you remember a thing like that? I said, "You know, all the years of our marriage, one thing I always insisted on was a party for my wife on her birthday." And I said, "September the 12th is her birthday, and the year before was the only time in all those years that I missed having a birthday party for her was when I was in Rome on Roman Holiday with Willy Wyler. That was in 1952. And I was determined that in 1953...so I arranged a big party for her that night, and here I was stuck in the studio. And I lived in Newport Beach which is sixty miles away. And I was fuming because I knew it was coming in and yet it wasn't coming so my assistant and I were sitting there waiting for it. And finally it came at 5:30. I don't know if it was exactly the minute, but about 5:30 in the afternoon, and I sent my assistant up to the mimeograph with that story right then." Those two lawyers, the ones that were suing, the story people, and the Hitchcock people, both of them sat there with their mouth open.  

That makes a great story. But there are a few holes in Coleman's tale. Ones which I couldn't dismiss as icebox talk. First of all, a simple look at the production correspondence showed that John Michael Hayes had actually turned in his completed treatment on September 11, 1953, a Friday. He turned it in to his and Hitchcock's agency at the time, MCA Artists. The agency then delivered the treatment to the story department at Paramount where the studio typing pool retyped it on September 12, hence the date on the "official" treatment.

Why all this handing off from writer to agency to departments at the studio? Quite simply, Hitchcock hadn't yet taken up residence on the Paramount lot. Hitchcock wasn't busy dicating the treatment to Hayes under the observation of Coleman as he was eleven and twelve days behind schedule at Warner Bros. filming Dial M for Murder.

Dial M for Murder Production Report for September 11, 1953

Dial M for Murder Production Report for September 12, 1953.

I finally did get a chance to read Coleman's memior The Hollywood I Knew, and as I suspected it's full of instances where Coleman paints himself as the hero. Wherever things went well, he credits himself with advising Hitchcock to take that course of action. When Hitchcock makes a mistake in casting or on a production matter, Coleman says Hitchcock had ignored his advice.

Funny thing, Coleman claims he wrote his book to undo damage to Hitchcock's reputation he felt had been done by Donald Spoto. Yet, to me, Coleman's memoir paints a portrait of Hitchcock far worse. Did he really expect the reader to come away wondering how Hitchcock was able to get as far as he did before meeting Coleman?!?

The Hitchcock Kiss

Recently on our Facebook page we discussed our favorite kisses in Hitchcock's films, and so here we have the Hitchcock Kiss, with a nod to Joel Gunz whose recent posts on hit Alfred Hitchcock Geek blog have pointed to the influence of sculptor Augusts Rodin on Hitchcock's work. Well worth your time to check out!

A Look Back at Some of Hitch's Collaborators I've Encountered

Thirty-one years go yesterday, Alfred Hitchcock passed away. I do not think he would be at all surprised to know that the mark he left on cinema and on pop culture continues and shows no signs of waning. Earlier this week I made a return appearance on The Radio Dan Show where regular guest Joel Gunz (you know him as Alfred Hitchcock Geek), host Dan Delgado, and the "super-hot" intern-extraordinaire (she likes me to call her that) Jessica Pac talk about all-things-Hitchcock in a segment of the show each Monday. You can listen in or view a video of the show here (the Hitchcock segment starts at about the 38 minute mark).

Joseph Stefano, screenwriter of Psycho and the first writer engaged to write Marnie.

This week I was going to talk about some of the Hitchcock collaborators and associates I've encountered in my work. I'd planned to talk about Ernie Lehman, Evan Hunter, Doc Erickson, Henry Bumstead, Joseph Stefano, Herbert Coleman, and others. But as usual the clock wound down far too quickly and I only got to speak about the last two. Both of which I feel made significant contributions to Writing with Hitchcock—one because it was just part of his generous nature, and the other in spite of himself, as he admitted to a reluctance to provide me with anything worthwhile, and possibly had an ulterior motive in providing what he did.

Of course the former is Joseph Stefano, the screenwriter of Psycho, who I had the pleasure of meeting for the first time at NYU's Hitchcock Centennial Conference in 1999. To re-cap the story I told on Dan's show, I first saw Joe at the panel discussion of Hitchcock's screenwriters, which also included Evan Hunter and Arthur Laurents (unavailable at the time of this session, Jay Presson Allen had a one-on-one later in the conference). I had tried to get John Michael Hayes to be a part of this panel, but his vision had made travel difficult and he declined, saying that he'd be well represented by my presence and presentation. The discussion was entertaining and informative, but for the most part did not break much new ground for me. What was apparent though was that Joe was the most enthusiastic and unpretentious of the bunch. He engaged with the audience and seemed genuinely interested in the others' experiences with Hitch. On a personal level, I was impressed. 

On another morning of the conference I was to present my work on Hayes's collaboration with Hitchcock. Right before the session began, way at the back I noticed Joseph Stefano and his wife Marilyn enter. I thought, "Wow, this is so cool of him. He's not just here to tell his own stories, toot his own horn, and revel in adulation." Joe was a true lover of film. He loved talking about it, doing it, engaging with new people who were also interested in it. Then when I saw he was making his way down to two empty seats right in the front row it occurred to me, here I was about to give a presentation of what it was like being a screenwriter for Hitchcock, when one of his screenwriters was sitting not more than ten feet from me!

Quickly while the moderator was busy with the introductions of my fellow panelists, I began sifting through my notes finding places to drop in Joe's name and some insightful, praiseworthy comments about his work on Psycho. At the end of the session Joe and Marilyn Stefano introduced themselves and congratulated me. Joe said I'd nailed it, that Hayes's experience felt very similar to his own, and that we should stay in touch. Of course we did, and he provided some great material for Writing with Hitchcock, not the least of which was his very kind endorsement after reading the galleys:

"With diamond clarity, Steven DeRosa defines the art, the joy, the rewards—and the hazards—of screenwriting for a cinematic genius like Alfred Hitchcock."

—Joseph Stefano, Screenwriter of Psycho

Part II tomorrow...Herbert Coleman.

In response to news of a proposed remake of Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much

I can hear the pitch now … why remake when we can make it a sequel?

It’s 2012…and Hank Conway…um, I mean McKenna, now in his mid-60s has arrived in Washington DC to attend the Kennedy Center Honors which is being awarded posthumously to his mother Jo the following evening. After checking into his hotel suite, he telephones his daughter Joanna who is traveling by train to meet him. Joanna has a fear of flying and hasn’t been quite right since the divorce. She travels with her 7 year old son, Ben. Hank tells Joanna he’ll pick them up at the station in the morning.  

That night, as the train makes its way toward the nation’s capital, curious little Ben wanders to the empty observation car while his mother sleeps one off. Three foreign speaking men enter and Ben overhears their conversation. Parts of it in English lead him to believe they’re going to murder somebody. Inadvertently, Ben makes a sound and the men know someone is in the car with them.

When Ben goes back to find his mother, she’s vanished! The waiter, the conductors, the other passengers, have no recollection of her being there.

In the morning, Ben arrives to find his grandfather waiting on the platform…as Hank begins to ask where Ben’s mom is, his cell phone rings…

They’re holding Joanna… and she’ll be freed as long as young Ben keeps his trap shut. But being his father’s son, Hank isn’t about to let that stop he and his grandson from recovering Joanna. The action all leads to the Kennedy Center where one of the foreign men is going to assassinate the President of the United States just as Lady Gaga belts out "Whatever Will Be" during a medley of Jo's greatest hits.

Hey, you never know. But seriously, if you guys want to use this....ring my agent.