Sight and Sound (Jun/1997) - Me and Hitch, by Ed McBain - part 2
From Alfred Hitchcock Wiki
(c) Ed McBain, Sight and Sound (June 1997)
Me and Hitch - part 2
by Evan Hunter (Ed McBain)
Brittle dialogue
Grace Kelly goes into a bird shop to buy a mynah bird for a prissy aunt of hers. She intends to teach the bird some profanities that will shock her aunt. Cary Grant comes into the shop, mistakes Grace for a salesperson, and enquires about lovebirds he wants to buy for his young sister. Ever the prankster, Grace pretends she does indeed work there, and Cary goes along with the masquerade, even though he recognises her as the madcap socialite daughter of a prominent newspaper publisher. The brilliant brittle dialogue between them sets the tone for all that follows, paving the way for uncontrolled laughter that pervades until the first of the bird attacks.
Even though there was and continues to be a sometimes wild blend of humour in the '87th Precinct' novels - and even though I later wrote two unabashedly comic novels (A Horse's Head in 1967 and Every Little Crook and Nanny in 1972) - back then in 1961 I was not particularly known for my antic comic flair. Moreover, as I was soon to learn, screwball comedy demands a very special kind of writing that derives more from situation than it does from character. The funny lines in my novels were not gags. The humour came in the innocent utterances of people who didn't know they were saying anything funny. But just as the pulp magazines were the forerunners of today's genre fiction, so were the screwball comedies of the 40s the ancestors of today's television sitcoms. Blithely unaware, fast approaching my thirty-fifth birthday and earning five grand a week, I confidently proposed - and Hitch enthusiastically accepted - a concept I had no idea I could actually bring off.
Picking holes
Melanie: (solicitously) Yes, what was it you were looking for, sir?
Mitch: (deadpan) Lovebirds.
Melanie: Lovebirds, sir?
Mitch: Yes. I understand there are different varieties, is that true?
Melanie: Well... yes, sir, there are.
Mitch: These are for my sister's birthday. She'll be 11. (lowering his voice) Frankly, I wouldn't want a pair of birds that are too demonstrative.
Melanie: I understand completely, sir.
Mitch: At the same time, I wouldn't want birds that are aloof, either.
Melanie: Of course not.
Mitch: Do you have a pair that are just friendly?
"When does he realise she's not a salesgirl?"
This from Hitch. Sitting in his big leather chair, eyeing me like a wise old owl. I had not yet written a line of dialogue but I had just told him the story so far, and now he was picking holes in it. This would become our working routine. I would tell him the story, and he would ask questions about it, and I would try to answer them, and then accommodate them. In this way, he edited the script before any of it was actually written, commenting on character development and comic effect in these early scenes of the film. We knew that once the bird attacks started, the audience was ours. But would we be able to keep them sitting still while a Meeting Cute romance between an impetuous young woman and a somewhat staid San Francisco lawyer developed?
From the beginning, Hitch had decided that he would shoot the picture in Northern California. He had shot Shadow of a Doubt in Santa Rosa, and was familiar with both the chicken-raising country around Petaluma, and the little coastal town of Bodega Bay. He thought, too, that San Francisco would make a sufficiently sophisticated hometown for The Girl. He invariably referred to the Grace Kelly character (whom I had temporarily named Melanie) as "The Girl". Later, when Tippi Hedren was cast for the role, he referred to the actress herself as "The Girl". In an odd coincidence, Tippi's then infant daughter was named Melanie. I vaguely remember seeing her at a cocktail party Tippi gave for the Hitchcocks. I had no idea she would grow up to be Melanie Griffith. Neither did Tippi, for that matter.
"Has The Girl called her father yet?"
"Well, no, she hasn't."
"Well, does he know she's gone up to Bodega Bay to deliver these lovebirds?"
"No, he doesn't."
"Shouldn't she call him then? So he won't be worried?"
"Yes, she should."
"Good. You have to remember, Evan, that even though it all goes by too fast for them, they notice little things like that and start wondering about them, and stop paying attention to the story."
In much the same way, Hitch questioned The Girl's every move. He said in interviews later (when he was trying to justify the film as a great work of art) that The Girl represented complacency. "Generally speaking," he said, "I believe that people are too complacent. People like Melanie Daniels tend to behave without any kind of responsibility, and to ignore the more serious aspects of life. Such people are unaware of the catastrophe that surrounds us all. The birds basically symbolised the more serious aspects of life."
This was utter rot, a supreme showman's con.
While we were shaping the screenplay, there was no talk at all of symbolism. There was talk about character depth, but Hitch's real concerns about the shallowness of the people we'd chosen did not emerge until after I'd delivered the first draft and he'd solicited opinions from everyone but his barber. The inherent problem, of course, was that the characters in a screwball comedy have no depth. They merely represent conflicting attitudes. We were trying to tell a story lighter than air. The irony was that the terror later comes from the air. As far as I was concerned, everything that preceded that first gull hitting Melanie on the head was pure gossamer.
Hitch had a different agenda. Hitch wanted respectability.
Getting serious
In his book, Hitchcock, The Making of a Reputation - published 30 years after the movie had its first press screening at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City - Robert E. Kapsis wrote, "The Birds represents the first, the most ambitious, and certainly the most expensive project the film-maker undertook for the purpose of reshaping his reputation among serious critics."
Had I but known.
Getting respectable
I once asked him why he'd hired me for the film.
He replied, "I make it my business to know what's going on, Evan."
I had no idea what he meant.
He later told a journalist, "Hunter wasn't the ideal screenwriter. You look around, you pick a writer, hoping for the best."
I suspected at the time that he'd hired me to 'open up' the basically internal du Maurier story, just as I'd done earlier with Appointment at Eleven. I suspected that he'd hired me because he recognised in the '87th Precinct' novels someone who knew how to write suspense. It never occurred to me that he was hiring me because I was the man who'd written The Blackboard Jungle. Never mind the later movie with its skewed emphasis on juvenile delinquency. The book itself had received serious critical appraisal. In Hitch's mind, I had respectability.
Tell that to my kids.
Peach-pit rings
In August 1961, a month before I went out to work on The Birds, my oldest son, Ted, had just turned 11. His twin brothers, Mark and Richard, were nine years old. The house I'd rented in Brentwood was the closest thing to a city street they'd ever seen. I was born and raised in New York, and knew its mean streets, and had learned, among other things, how to make rings from peach pits. You scrape the pit on the sidewalk until it is flat on each side. You round out the sharp edges the same way. Then you carve out the centre with a sharp knife. Voild, une bague! The things you learn when you're underprivileged.
There were no sidewalks on our Brentwood street. I taught the kids how to make peach-pit rings on the rough surface of the concrete driveway sloping up to our garage, where Anita's rented station wagon sat alongside my red T-Bird convertible. A high-priced entertainment lawyer named Harold Berkowitz lived in the house next door. Across the street lived Norman Katkov, who'd written a powerful novel titled Eagle at My Eyes; coincidentally, he also wrote the first-draft screenplay for Strangers When We Meet, before he was replaced by me. My kids were enrolled in the Bella-gio Road Elementary School. When they told the other kids I was writing a screenplay for Alfred Hitchcock, none of them blinked an eye. Small wonder in a school where Burt Lancaster's wife was president of the Parent-Teacher Association.
Character depth
Work progressed.
Day by day, I told Hitch the story so far.
I realise now that I was uncomfortable with the character of Melanie Daniels from minute one. I would have much preferred a frightened schoolteacher as my heroine. Even the schoolteacher who survived as Annie Hayworth wasn't much to my liking. Suzanne Pleshette later tried to rescue her from jilted spinsterhood, but the character never did work, not in our discussions, not on paper, and eventually not on the screen. It didn't help that Hitch dressed this beautiful woman like a grocer's wife, lighted her badly, and shot her from the most unflattering angles. Three minutes after we'd been introduced on the set, the first words Suzanne said to me were, "The blonde, he gives a mink coat. Me, he gives wedgies and a house dress." I fell in love with her at once.
Early on in our discussions, Hitch and 1 tried to justify why a man of Mitch Brenner's age was still effectively living at home with his mother and kid sister. We had him practising criminal law in San Francisco and then commuting to Bodega Bay on weekends, an odd thing for an eligible young bachelor to be doing. It became Annie's burden to define the mother's possessive behaviour in a heart-to-heart talk with Melanie, who at this point in the script seemed to be in more danger from Lydia Brenner than from any of the still quiescent birds.
In the script as it evolved, this emphasis on the 'deeper' aspects of our leading characters came only after the initial bird attack, as if to signal no more fun and games, kiddies, the real show is about to start. Moreover, not only would we be dealing with rampant birds, we'd also have on our hands a jealous widowed woman clinging to her only son. Jessica Tandy played the part of the mother like a deer caught in a truck's headlights, one of the few bad performances she ever gave in her life. One of the lines I wrote for Annie was, "Lydia's not afraid of losing her son, you see. She's only afraid of being abandoned." Watching Ms Tandy sleepwalking, I got the feeling that she really had been abandoned. By the script and by the director. But Hitch liked that line. It was later expanded upon in a terrible scene that handed Lydia's entire theme of 'being abandoned' to none other than our ditzy screwball socialite.
When I first suggested 'Screwball Comedy Becomes Terror', Hitch should have said, "That is the worst idea I have ever heard in my life. Let's move on." Instead, we marched ahead confidently, blithely trying to graft upon du Maurier's simple tale of apocalyptic terror a slick story about two improbable lovers confronted with an even more improbable situation - birds attacking humans.
The trouble with our story was that nothing in it was real. In real life, birds don't attack people and girls don't buy lovebirds to shlepp 60 miles upstate for a practical joke. Hitch had bought a bizarre novella about plain people attacked by the gentlest of creatures. He had then hired a realistic novelist from New York to change these people into the sort of beautiful, sleek, sophisticated characters Hitch himself enjoyed seeing on the screen, the Cary Grants and Grace Kellys of the world. Even if the script had worked - which it didn't - Tippi Hedren and Rod Taylor were no Grace Kelly or Cary Grant.
But Hitch never gave it an honest shot.
Straight into her face
I can remember the morning I related the scene toward the end of the film where Melanie goes up to the attic to investigate some odd sounds and is attacked by what appears to be an entire aviary. I had asked Hitch early on how much latitude I could have in the bird attacks. He told me to write whatever I wished and then let him worry about getting it on film. In what I visualised as the movie's penultimate attack, I had a mixed assortment of birds in that attic, starting with an owl who sits peering at Melanie in the dark, and then spreads his enormous wings and comes flying straight into her face.
"We see all kinds of birds here," I told him. "Eagles, hawks, owls, crows, gulls, small birds, big birds, all of them, Hitch! This is where we realise this isn't just some finches coming down the chimney or some gulls attacking a gas station, this is the whole damn bird population, this is a united attempt to annihilate the human race!"
Hitch looked at me with a blank expression I would later come to recognise as his personal 'take'.
"Why does she go up to the attic?" he asked. "Because she hears sounds up there." "Bird sounds?"
"No. The sound of something falling, or dribbling down, sifting down. Actually it's plaster. She's hearing plaster falling, but she doesn't know what it is. So she goes to investigate."
"Why doesn't she wake Mitch?"
"She tries to. She can't wake him. He's dead asleep."
"So, as I understand this," Hitch said, "we've just come from the Tides Restaurant where the gulls have devastated the place, and we've just had a massive attack on the house here, with Mitch fighting off birds who try to come in the windows and doors, and now Melanie hears some strange sounds and she goes to investigate? Is she daft?"
I said, "Well."
"Don't worry," he said, "we'll take the curse off it. Just have her check everything in sight till she's satisfied nothing's wrong. Then she gets hit."
FULL SHOT-MELANIE
(As she goes through the house, checking. She stops in the entry hall, plays the flashlight over the furniture piled against the door. Everything seems all right. She goes into the kitchen, again checks the door, and then plays the beam on the boarded windows. Satisfied, she goes down the corridor outside the bedrooms. She opens the first bedroom door, enters, goes to the windows, plays the beam on them. Everything's all right. She comes out into the corridor again, opens the second bedroom door, again checks the windows, and leaves.)
FULL SHOT - MELANIE
(Climbing the steps to the attic. She stops outside the first door upstairs, opens it, goes into the room, plays the light on the windows. Nothing. She comes out into the corridor, goes to the second bedroom, opens the door, enters, walks to the windows. They are boarded securely. She is starting back toward the door when she stops.)
CLOSE SHOT - MELANIE
(Looking.)
CLOSE SHOT - THE FLOOR
(A pile of chipped and broken plaster.)
MEDIUM SHOT - MELANIE
(Turning the flashlight up toward the ceiling.)
CLOSE SHOT - THE CEILING
(A huge hole in it, showing a moonlit sky outside.)
CLOSE SHOT - MELANIE
(Turning her eyes from the ceiling, determination on her face. And suddenly, her eyes open wide.)
CLOSE SHOT - AN OWL
(Sitting in the darkness, staring at her.)
Almost ready
That is how the scene reads in the final script. Which I was now almost ready to write.
Dinner with Hitch
'Dinner in the kitchen with Alma and Hitch' was considered a singular honour. I had been so informed by Ernest Lehman, who had written the original screenplay for North by Northwest and who had graciously and generously welcomed Anita and me to Los Angeles with a cocktail party shortly after she arrived with the kids. With our discussions on the script almost at an end, Hitch casually asked if Anita and I would care to join him and Alma for dinner that Saturday night. "Just the four of us," he said. "Around the kitchen table."
We arrived at 7.30, and Hitch introduced us to Alma, his wife since December 1926. In early October of 1961, they had been married almost as long as I'd been on earth. Alma was a successful film editor when he met her and later she worked on many of his films, receiving adaptation, screenplay and continuity credits. A tiny, animated woman, she fluttered about like a bird herself, amiable and warm, cordial and welcoming. Hitch asked us what we'd care to drink. Anita wasn't much of a drinker. She asked for a white wine spritzer. I asked for a Canadian Club and soda.
Hitch stood staring at me. His classic take.
Then he said, "Well, Evan, I'm afraid we don't have any Canadian Club." Beat. "But we're very well appointed otherwise."
Before dinner, he proudly exhibited his wine cellar to us. Anita innocently pulled one of the bottles partly out of its rack, and turned it to read the label. Hitch was aghast.
"Anita," he said, "do you know what you just did?"
Patiently, he went on to explain that turning the bottle caused the sediment to do something or other - again this was all addressed to Anita, and I caught very little of it.
Scolding her, a twinkle in his eye, he said, "You must never do that again."
He never took us into the wine cellar again. But the next time we went to the house, a bottle of Canadian Club was sitting on the bar.
Convincing Peggy
I followed Hitch into Peggy Robertson's office.
"Peggy," he said excitedly, "wait till you hear how we're going to end the film. Sit down, sit down. Evan, tell her the ending. Listen to this, Peggy."
Reciting the day's work to Hitch's assistant had also become something of a ritual. It was not as laborious as the morning recitations, because it did not involve weeks of work but only that day's story developments. On that particular day, we had mapped out the final attack in the film. Now, at a little past five in the afternoon, Peggy sat and listened.
I began by explaining that after the attack on Melanie in the attic, and a brief scene during which Lydia reveals her fears and vulnerability, they all come out of the house into that sort of eerie half-light before dawn. All the birds have gone. They get into Melanie's convertible and begin driving away from the house.
"This is where we see the terrible devastation in the town," I said. "This is where we realise the attack on the farmhouse wasn't just an isolated incident. This is a war zone..."
Birds are everywhere, in the trees, on the tele phone wires, perched on an overturned school bus and a derelict barge. Victims are lying in the road and in open shop doors. Merchandise and household goods are strewn everywhere. From behind smashed windows, we see frightened faces peering out. The car moves cautiously ahead through thousands of birds waiting, waiting. There is a clean stretch of road ahead. "Here we go," Mitch says, and rams his foot down on the accelerator. Instantly, thousands of birds take wing. The road is winding and twisting, the same road Melanie negotiated into town at the beginning of the movie. But the birds fly in a straight line, relentlessly attacking the car, slashing at...
"The car is a convertible, remember? With a canvas top. From inside the car, we see a single beak slashing at the top, letting in light, and then another slash, and another, letting in more and more light until finally..."
CLOSE SHOT-LYDIA
Lydia: (almost in prayer) Dear God... dear God... please, please, what have we done? Please. (and then, in anger at the roof and the birds) Can't they leave us alone? (shrieking it) Leave us alone!
MEDIUM SHOT - THE CAR INTERIOR
(All the passengers, as the roof suddenly rips back.)
FULL SHOT - THE BIRDS
(From inside the car, hovering over it the moment the roof tears back.)
"...this is too much for Melanie. She screams and turns her face into Lydia's shoulder. The car races around curve after curve..."
I had Peggy now, and I was enjoying myself.
"...the canvas top streaming tattered ribbons behind it. But they can't shake the birds flying above. Until finally the road ahead straightens, and the small car begins to outdistance them. Another flock attacks from the side of the road, but the car speeds into them and through them..."
CLOSE SHOT - LYDIA
Lydia: We're losing them.
CLOSE SHOT - MITCH
(Only a nod, his face streaming tears.)
TWO SHOT - CATHY AND MITCH
(Side by side on the front seat.)
Cathy: Mitch? Will they be in San Francisco when we get there?
Mitch: (grimly) I don't know, honey. I don't know.
"...and the car rides into the sun coming up over the crest of the hills, racing further and further into an uncertain distance."
Peggy was silent for a moment. Then she said, "Bravo."
Smiling, Hitch nodded and said, "Yes." Later on, he remembered his agenda.
No problems
I wrote the screenplay on a portable Smith-Corona (my own) in a small bedroom on the second storey of the house. As I typed away, birds chirped in the big oak tree outside my window. Now that our discussions had ended, I rarely spoke to Hitch.
Instead, he called Anita every morning, and chatted with her on the phone, asking how the children were doing in school, asking if she'd yet found a tennis partner or a good hairdresser; warm and genuine concerns, for he was truly fond of her. Never once did he ask her how the screenplay was coming along. Nor on our frequent social outings did he ever ask me how things were progressing. He offered me the respect of a fellow professional. He knew I was working. He knew I would yell if I ran into any problems.
I had no problems.
And I foresaw none.
Win or lose
One Saturday, he took us to Santa Anita. As we entered the track, he took out his billfold and handed Anita a $100 bill...
"This is for you, Anita."
...and handed me $100 as well.
"And this is for you, Evan."
"What for?" I asked.
"Why, to bet."
I explained that if we accepted the money we'd feel no pain if we lost, and if we won we'd feel obliged to turn over the winnings to him. Hitch did his straight-faced take.
"In that case, give it back to me," he said, and snatched the bills from our hands.
Golden Age
He told me he felt he was entering the Golden Age of his creativity. He told me The Birds would be his crowning achievement.
But after he'd had too much wine, he would take Anita's hand between both of his, and pat it, and tell her he was nothing but a big fat slob.
Enraged
He called Anita one morning to ask what time we'd be meeting for dinner together that night. Baffled, she said, "I didn't know we'd made plans, Hitch. I'm sorry, but we're busy."
There was a stunned silence.
Then Hitch, enraged, shouted, "What the hell are Alma and I supposed to do?"
We cancelled our plans.
Happy Halloween
On Halloween night, they arrived to pick us up in a limo. Hitch himself got out, came to the front door, and rang the doorbell. My son Ted answered his ring.
"Which one are you?" Hitch asked.
"I'm Ted."
"Happy Halloween, Ted," he said, and handed him a personalised and autographed copy of his recently published collection, Alfred Hitchcock's Haunted House. "Where are your brothers?"
He waited on the doorstep while Ted went to fetch them. Sorting out the twins, he handed a second similarly inscribed copy to Mark and yet another to Richard.
"Happy Halloween," he said. "Now would you please tell your parents we're here?" And went back to the car.
Hollywood on fire
On a Tuesday morning, 6 November, there was a noisy gathering of birds in the back-yard. Watching them through the window, from the desk where I was writing the final scene of the film, I figured that somehow they had learned what Hitch and I were up to and were coming to get us.
The phone rang some five minutes later.
It was Hitch calling to report to Anita that the hills behind his Bellagio Road house were on fire.
"Well, don't worry," she told him. "Just call the fire department."
"Anita," he said - very patiently, considering that this was to become the enormous brush-fire that burned down hundreds of homes in Bel Air and threatened to leap Sunset Boulevard to create a true holocaust - "Anita, you don't understand. Everything is on fire. Alma and I are going to carry all of our things down to the wine cellar. Or do you think we should throw them in the pool?"
"What things?" Anita asked.
"Our silver, Alma's fur coats..."
"Well, I wouldn't throw the coats in the pool," Anita said.
"Anita, please be serious. We're thinking of moving into a hotel."
"Do you think we should leave here?"
"Go take a look outside," he said.
We took a look outside. All of our neighbours were on the street, peering toward the end of the block, where flames were already edging their way over the brow of the hill.
Hands on his hips, Norman Katkov said, "We may not be much on story out here, but we sure know how to do spectacle."
...this article continues in part 3