Scripting Hitchcock

Psycho, The Birds, and Marnie

Walter Raubicheck, Walter Srebnick

• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780252078248, 9780252036484
• eBook ISBN: 9780252093517
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

Scripting Hitchcock explores the collaborative process between Alfred Hitchcock and the screenwriters he hired to write the scripts for three of his greatest films: Psycho, The Birds, and Marnie. Drawing from extensive interviews with the screenwriters and other film technicians who worked for Hitchcock, Walter Raubicheck and Walter Srebnick illustrate how much of the filmmaking process took place not on the set or in front of the camera, but in the adaptation of the sources, the mutual creation of plot and characters by the director and the writers, and the various revisions of the written texts of the films.

Hitchcock allowed his writers a great deal of creative freedom, which resulted in dynamic screenplays that expanded traditional narrative and defied earlier conventions. Critically examining the question of authorship in film, Raubicheck and Srebnick argue that Hitchcock did establish visual and narrative priorities for his writers, but his role in the writing process was that of an editor. While the writers and their contributions have generally been underappreciated, this study reveals that all the dialogue and much of the narrative structure of the films were the work of screenwriters Jay Presson Allen, Joseph Stefano, and Evan Hunter. The writers also shaped American cultural themes into material specifically for actors such as Janet Leigh, Tippi Hedren, and Tony Perkins. This volume gives due credit to those writers who gave narrative form to Hitchcock's filmic vision.

CHAPTER 1

The Triptych and the Screenplays

I plan out a script very carefully, hoping to follow it exactly, all the way through, when shooting starts. In fact, this working on the script is the real making of the film, for me. When I’ve done it, the film is finished already in my mind.

—Alfred Hitchcock, “Direction”

I emphasize the work of Hitchcock’s writers partly because they can stand as partially representative of the whole cluster of key collaborators whom criticism is accustomed to marginalise, and partly because they have such a clear and, surely, indisputable role in creating the structure within which others then work.

—Charles Barr, English Hitchcock

Orson Welles once said that his essential talent as a film-maker was his instinctive ability to know exactly where the camera should be placed for maximum dramatic impact when he arrived on a set with his cast and crew. In fact, while shooting Citizen Kane he once sent everyone home because his instinct had failed him and he had no idea how to approach the shoot.¹ This reliance on visual intuition, especially when surrounded by other professionals waiting for direction, is precisely the opposite of Alfred Hitchcock’s attitude toward the preparation necessary for effective filmmaking. “I plan out a script very carefully”: this understatement serves as the basis for our study. In a very real sense, the creation of the screenplay, and ultimately the shooting script, constituted the essence of the art of filmmaking for Hitchcock. And this art necessarily entailed a close, complex collaboration between the director and his screenwriters.

Our focus is this process as it was carried out for three films and three writers and their work with the director. These films constitute what we call the “triptych” formed by Psycho (1960), The Birds (1963), and Marnie (1964), a grouping of films produced at a time when American culture and filmmaking were changing and the director was eager to move his films in a new direction in terms of content and technique. Technically and thematically they echo each other, and they are each centered on a female protagonist—Marion Crane, Melanie Daniels, and Marnie Edgar. Significantly, each of the three screenwriters also worked on creating the narrative of the last of these films, Marnie, a fact that affords a special opportunity to examine the different hands and visions that contributed to the final product. Hitchcock and his screenwriters based each screenplay on a work of popular fiction that presented excellent material for adaptation to the screen and specific individual challenges that make the process of creating the screenplay an excellent basis for the study of adaptation in Hitchcock’s work.

In beginning this study of Alfred Hitchcock’s collaboration with the three writers, it is important to note that entire books have been written on Hitchcock’s films without once mentioning writers’ names or mentioning them only in passing, as if all the stories, characters, and themes of the films were solely determined by Hitchcock himself. Of course, the average moviegoer assumes Hitchcock wrote everything; otherwise, why would we call them “Hitchcock pictures”? And the director downplayed the importance of the written word and of dialogue, in particular, when he said on many occasions that he did not want to “make pictures of people talking,” a term of opprobrium he used for many contemporary Hollywood films. As he explained to Truffaut, “To me, one of the cardinal sins for a script-writer, when he runs into some difficulty, is to say, ‘We can cover that by a line of dialogue.’ Dialogue should simply be a sound among other sounds, just something that comes out of the mouths of people whose eyes tell the story in visual terms.”² Perhaps even more significantly, during interviews Hitchcock was loath to give credit to the individual screenwriters who wrote the scripts of his films, describing John Michael Hayes, his writer for Rear Window (1954), for example, as a “radio writer,” and Joseph Stefano, the writer of Psycho and one of the subjects of this book, as someone who essentially contributed only dialogue to that project.³

But students of the cinema and filmgoers cannot ignore the screenwriter’s vital contribution to the success or failure of a Hitchcock film, contributions that extend beyond dialogue. While Hitchcock was not generous with his praise, some writers, such as Stefano, have reported that in unguarded moments he would praise the work and abilities of some of their predecessors. He had, by common consent, a special talent for picking his writers, and the ledger of Hitchcock’s scriptwriters is as impressive as that of any director in Hollywood, or elsewhere. Beginning with Eliot Stannard and Charles Bennett in his British period, through figures such as Thornton Wilder, Dorothy Parker, Ben Hecht, Arthur Laurents, Raymond Chandler, John Michael Hayes, Maxwell Anderson, Samuel Taylor, and Ernest Lehman in America, his screenwriters were among the most accomplished authors who wrote for the movies, and many produced textbook screenplays during their collaboration with him.

Hitchcock and His Writers: A History

Hitchcock first encountered screenwriters at Islington Studios in London in the early 1920s as a young title-card designer. Many of them were American women imported from Hollywood who specialized in adding melodramatic flourishes to the source material of a film to enrich emotional plot complications and enhance the roles of star performers. While he was finding his way within his future profession, Hitchcock tried his hand at scriptwriting, using what he learned from them. When he began to function as a director in the mid-1920s, he already had a philosophy of how to adapt a source to the screen that emphasized the audience’s emotional reactions: “Hitchcock always plucked out the dramatic elements that spoke to him. Then he found ways to stage these dynamic situations that would magnify their emotional impact.”⁴ Early on, Hitchcock realized that adapting a novel or a full-length play for the screen required a restructuring of the source narrative. He told Truffaut that a movie “is closer to a short story, which, as a rule, sustains one idea that culminates when the action has reached the highest point of the dramatic curve. As you know, a short story is rarely put down in the middle, and in this sense it resembles a film.” He also makes the point that, like a play, a film must be structured by “successive climaxes.”⁵

In a 1939 talk, he had already made the short-story analogy: “Now in the shape of this thing, it is inevitable that you must design your incidents and your story shape to mount up. I always think the film shape is very much like the short story. Once it starts, you haven’t time to let up. You must go right through, and your film must end on its highest note. It must never go over the curve. Once you have reached your high spot, then the film is stopped.”⁶ Thus, as he worked closely with the writers he hired, he guided them by insisting that the script be unified by “one idea” that is developed through a series of climactic scenes, each one surpassing its predecessor in its capacity to stir the audience’s emotions. From The Lodger (which the director considered the first “true” Hitchcock film) to Family Plot, the narrative structure of each of his movies can be characterized this way.

Using the short-story paradigm, Hitchcock from the beginning assumed that the successive climactic scenes should be built on images, not words. Inspired by his direct experience with the visual innovations of the revolutionary German cinema of the 1920s, he learned to create screenplays that would tell a story purely in visual terms, especially when the raw material of the story suggested rich emotional possibilities and complications. As a young director, he also found a superb confidant who understood the mechanics of screenwriting in his wife, Alma Reville, an experienced film professional who shared his cinematic vision, with its focus on emotional impact, and wrote screenplays for him in England during the late twenties and early thirties and then in America during the forties.⁷ Commentators, such as the biographer Patrick McGilligan, have described her as one of “the three Hitchcocks” who created each film’s screenplay, with the director and the writer as the other two.⁸

Hitchcock’s collaboration with Eliot Stannard, and later with Charles Bennett, in his British period established the pattern and direction of his screenplays, as Charles Barr indicates in English Hitchcock. While their contributions were largely unacknowledged by the director and marginalized by scholars until recently, their input set the narrative direction of his films, not merely in the English period but later as well. The two writers provided much-needed continuity to the various episodes the director had envisioned and essential elements of character and psychology.⁹ This can be seen in his 1926 adaptation of Marie Belloc Lowndes’s novel The Lodger, in which Stannard, working closely with the young director, expanded the role of the principal female character and her relationship with the protagonist and enhanced the visual texture of the narrative with motifs such as the blond, “golden curls” of all of the killer’s victims. Stannard collaborated on seven Hitchcock silent films,¹⁰ and he helped the young director see the emotional possibilities that could be achieved by creating substantial roles for female characters and erotic relationships. It was also with Stannard that Hitchcock initiated the practice of first conceptualizing the story in detail—going over it minutely and planning its visual highlights. Frequently Hitchcock shared the concept of the film with others working on the project, telling editors, designers, cameramen, and technical people the plot as it was evolving and then using their feedback to refine it. In this way, he established the much-discussed pattern of creating a film in his mind even before the script was written, and his imaginative conception of the film was itself the product of this kind of collaboration.¹¹

Early in his career, Hitchcock often shared writing credit with his scenarists; however, with the coming of sound and the need for more elaborate plotting and dialogue, the writers began to gain more autonomy. He would frequently use a number of them at various stages of a single film, each characteristically with a particular task or specialty, such as dialogue or continuity. Despite the growing importance of these specialists, Hitchcock stayed totally involved as a “writer” in the composition of the script, working with the scenarists to create suspense incrementally, thus facilitating the narrative’s emotional impact upon the audience: increasing the pressure, then relieving it, only to build toward a dramatic crescendo in the third act, or conclusion, of the film.

The most influential of his writers in the British sound period was the dramatist Charles Bennett,¹² a master of creating cinematic structure and sequence and constructing characters, as evidenced in films such as The 39 Steps, which was based on a novel by John Buchan. As was to be his practice with screenwriters throughout the later American period, and especially during the triptych, Hitchcock formed a close, at times intense, relationship with Bennett. Working together with the director, Bennett expanded and enriched the plot and deepened the character of the novel’s protagonist, Hannay. He linked his personal struggle to win exoneration and to save his country to a series of encounters with women that they invented and to a developing love relationship with a central female character, none of which is in the book. Such potential encounters and love stories, which would be intertwined with the suspense and the mystery, were to become one of Hitchcock’s trademarks as a director, along with his tendency to use them to develop the protagonist’s character.

So while the source material provided the essential story concept, Hitchcock and the writers took this concept in a direction that was at once cinematic and psychological, emphasizing dramatic moments and adding female characters and romantic subplots to the mix, which expanded the emotional possibilities of the narrative. Central to the latter were plot complications involving couples, their families, and oedipal relationships that dovetailed with the interplay of sex and violence. Collaborating with the writer, Hitchcock adapted the source material and wove narrative elements together into what was to become the characteristic Hitchcock narrative that established his international reputation.

This pattern within his screenplays was expanded when Hitchcock came to America, partially because of his collaboration with the producer David O. Selznick, one of whose specialties was the “woman’s picture,” which offered a rich new venue for Hitchcockian narrative. But by the time Hitchcock had arrived in the United States, in addition to having incorporated plot elements that involved vulnerable female and problematic male characters and their emotional relationships into his narratives, he was already adept at, and in control of, every aspect of creating a screenplay. In addition to what he had gained from his collaboration with writers such as Stannard and Bennett, he had developed a team of associates in England that he brought with him to America that included not only Alma but also Joan Harrison and others he met in the United States, such as Norman Lloyd, who understood the mechanics of building a screenplay and Hitchcock’s own specific narrative tendencies and signature elements. Alma and Harrison were involved in varying degrees in four of the first American features he made, from Rebecca (1939) through Shadow of a Doubt (1943).

As Leonard Leff has shown in Hitchcock and Selznick, a reluctant Hitchcock, working in concert with his longtime assistant Harrison and a number of different screenwriters, shaped a screenplay for Rebecca that ultimately followed the producer’s conception of an extremely vulnerable female protagonist that Selznick believed would appeal to a female audience. In this and in subsequent Selznick International Hitchcock films, the producer insisted upon an even more heightened attention to character and psychology than Hitchcock was accustomed to. With Spellbound (1945) and Notorious (1946), Selznick was adamant that the director and his principal screenwriter, Ben Hecht, move the narratives as much as possible in the direction of melodrama and romance and deepen the emotional lives of the characters.¹³

Hitchcock’s work with established literary figures such as Thornton Wilder and John Steinbeck, and his subsequent collaborations during the 1940s with skilled Hollywood writers such as Jo Swerling and Ben Hecht, expanded his awareness of the possibilities of narrative as well as his control over the screenwriting process. Swerling, who wrote much of the screenplay for Lifeboat (1943), considered Hitchcock an original artistic creator who was truly the author of the narratives of his films, especially in the ways he envisioned characters, dramatic situations, and scenes.¹⁴ With Hecht, who worked on several of Hitchcock’s later films and received credit for the screenplays of Spellbound and Notorious, the director spent weeks researching and working out stories and scripts. On Notorious, Hitchcock even did some preliminary scriptwriting, which Hecht would then rewrite, and the two of them tailored the script to the actors who had been hired, Ingrid Bergman and Cary Grant, and keyed the dialogue to camera angles and camera positions that the director planned for crucial dramatic moments: practices that were to enrich later films, such as Psycho.¹⁵

Later in the 1950s, working with John Michael Hayes at Paramount, the director continued the same pattern of intense involvement in creating the narrative and script. On Rear Window, for example, Hitchcock already had decided to expand the source material before the writer began work, increasing its characterological, dramatic, and visual possibilities. Together with Hayes, he transformed the protagonist into a photographer and envisioned a rich, stylish girlfriend, who does not exist in the Woolrich story, as a love interest.¹⁶ As Steven De Rosa shows in his treatment of the Hitchcock/Hayes collaboration on Rear Window, at the same time as the writer fleshed out the main character’s psychology and added other characters for him to observe, he soon realized that the director’s main concern was creating a love relationship for the protagonist where none exists in the source story. Hitchcock had also already selected James Stewart and Grace Kelly for the leads. The writer and the director developed the story, and while Hayes composed the dialogue, the director made clear how it should sound to suit Stewart and Kelly, and how to make their characters real and believable for the audience. In fact, when a screenplay failed to make the characters sufficiently real for him, as was the case with the initial script for Vertigo by Alec Coppel, Hitchcock would bring in a new writer to rewrite it. On that film, this was the task of Samuel Taylor, who added the character Midge to ground the narrative more fully in everyday reality and rewrote the dialogue to highlight the film’s psychological motifs, intensify the character of Scottie, and enrich the eerie San Francisco background to the Scottie/Madeline romance. But in all of this, the writer did not work alone. Taylor maintained that he worked closely with the director on every aspect of the screenplay and always followed his lead.

Hitchcock’s writers, from Charles Bennett to Ernest Lehman, have further maintained that while his films contain distinct narrative patterns, he did not always conceptualize individual films in terms of themes or even complete, fully articulated plots but as a series of scenes, situations, or “touches” that he would expect to integrate into a coherent and organic narrative.¹⁷ Samuel Taylor characterized Hitchcock as a “short story” writer who initially thought of his films’ narratives in terms of a linking of scenes and situations, and he worked with his writers to develop the screenplays within this framework.¹⁸ In the British films, according to Taylor, one of these “situations” can be found in the poignant sequence that Charl...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• 1 The Triptych and the Screenplays
• 2 The Sources
• 3 From Treatment to Script
• 4 Final Drafts: The Shooting Scripts
• Afterword
• Notes
• Index
• Illustrations