Sight and Sound (Jun/1997) - Me and Hitch, by Ed McBain - part 3
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(c) Ed McBain, Sight and Sound (June 1997)
Me and Hitch - part 3
by Evan Hunter (Ed McBain)
To tell the truth
At the elementary school not far from Hitch's house, a television reporter was interviewing children who were being evacuated, among them my three sons.
"What's your name?" the reporter asked Mark.
"Mark Hunter."
"What do you think of this fire, Mike?"
"Mark."
"What do you think about the school being evacuated, Mark?"
"To tell the truth," Mark said, "I was hoping it would burn down."
Hollywood in flight
Cars were backing out of garages. Birds were everywhere in the air. People were fleeing with their valuables. In this house we were renting, there were none of our own valuables. We packed some clothes, my typewriter, and the almost finished script of The Birds, locked the front door, got into the two cars, and drove across Sunset Boulevard to the high school.
That night, we returned to the house.
The fire had not done any damage on our street.
That week, I finished the first draft screenplay.
10 November, 1961
Dear Mr Hunter:
This is to confirm that today, Friday, 10 November, 1961, you have completed the screenplay of The Birds. However, Mr Hitchcock will require your services in connection with The Birds for an additional two weeks - probably sometime in January 1962.
Sincerely, Peggy Robertson
Assistant to Mr Hitchcock
Various problems
In a five-page letter from Hitch dated 30 November, 1961, after he'd gone over the first draft a couple of times and shown it to some eight or nine of his technical and production personnel, he went into elaborate detail on the various problems he and his people had found.
The problem most frequently cited among them was that Melanie and Mitch seemed "insufficiently characterised". The next problem -- and this seemed particularly to concern Hitch -- was that there were too many "no-scene scenes" in the script. "By this I mean that the little sequence might have narrative value but in itself is undramatic. It very obviously lacks shape and it doesn't within itself have a climax as a scene on the stage might." He went on to detail these scenes at great length: a scene between Melanie and her father in his newspaper office; two scenes in Bodega Bay where Melanie goes to buy some temporary overnight clothes and later tries to rent a room at a fully booked hotel; and lastly, a scene inside the local church, where she runs into Mitch again. None of these survived the final draft; none was in the completed film.
In a long and masterfully detailed paragraph, Hitch went on to suggest how we could begin foreshadowing the bird attacks from the very beginning of the film. Lastly, he wondered whether we shouldn't start thinking about giving the script a stronger thematic structure, and wrote, "I'm sure we are going to be asked again, and again, especially by the morons, 'Why are they doing it?'"
On 14 December, I sent 52 revised pages to him, among them a new scene between Melanie and Mitch, during which they try to understand what's happening. The scene takes place after Lydia has gone off to the Fawcett farm. It is light-hearted at first, echoing the screwball comedy that had opened our story. Melanie proposes that this all must have started with a malcontent sparrow preaching revolution, attracting other sparrows to his cause, inciting them to unite, his followers growing larger in number until now they were a force to contend with. They both laugh at this absurd notion, and then fall silent. Seriously, Mitch suggests that perhaps the birds are merely hungry; it's been a bad summer, no berries or nuts in the burned-out hills. Everything is deathly still. They realise it is the same lull that occurred yesterday, before the finches attacked. They try to joke about the attacks again, but now the humour falls flat and there is the chill of horror to Melanie's words when she says those finches came down that chimney in fury - as if they wanted everyone in the house dead.
Melanie: I'm frightened, Mitch.
Mitch: No, no...
Melanie: I'm frightened and confused and I... I think I want to go back to San Francisco where there are buildings and... and concrete and...
Mitch: Melanie...
Melanie: - everything I know.
(She looks up at him suddenly.)
CLOSE SHOT - MELANIE
Melanie: Damn it, why'd you have to walk into that shop?
(they kiss suddenly and fiercely)
No climax
Which is how Lydia happens to discover them in an embrace when she drives back after finding Dan Fawcett with his kitchen a shambles and his eyes pecked out.
From what I understand, Hitch shot this scene. But he never used it, and its absence is sorely felt.
Without this scene, no one in the film ever really questions why the birds are doing this, and if our leading characters aren't even looking for answers, then the audience will demand them. Moreover, without the only scene in the picture that would have shown our screwball lovers finally kissing seriously and passionately, there is no climax - you should pardon the expression - to all their nutty sparring and running around. We haven't the faintest clue as to why Mitch is suddenly calling her 'darling' for the rest of the film. We are utterly baffled.
It all goes by too fast for them, Evan.
But in this case, it didn't go by too fast at all. It simply wasn't there.
People are still asking
Hitch's response to my revisions came a week later, in a four-page letter dated 21 December. He ended with the words, "Well, Evan, there it is -1 pray I am not giving you too much to think about over the Christmas holidays. Perhaps it would be nicer if you took this letter and put it under the tree and then on Christmas Eve you could pull it out and say, 'Oo look, a present from Hitch.'
"P.S. People are still asking, 'Why did the birds do it?"'
27 December, 1961
Dear Peggy:
It was good talking to you today, and I shall look forward to seeing Hitch on 4 January. At that time I'll discuss the further revisions he wants in the script...
17 January, 1962
Dear Hitch:
I am enclosing herewith the final version of The Birds, incorporating the changes we discussed when you were in New York. The two biggest changes in the script were the scene between Annie and Melanie, and of course, the meeting in the Tides. You will find in this scene an alarmist, a pacifist, and various other types. On the whole, I think it plays very well and serves our needs beautifully.
I have carefully gone over each of the bird attacks and the reactions of our principal characters following these attacks. I honestly do not feel we now have a simple reaction of terror. It seems to me that the characters now are changing throughout the entire length of the screenplay and that each change is a logical one following the change before it. I am glad we decided to introduce a romantic interest between Mitch and Annie. This seems to provide more dramatic strength and helps to answer a great many questions regarding Lydia as well. You will notice that I have gone through the script and tightened dialogue wherever I felt it was redundant, vague, and unnecessary. I am rather pleased with what we now have, and I shall be anxious to hear your reactions.
I hope to hear from you soon. Please give our love to Alma.
Room for improvement
What I did not know was that Hitch had already solicited comment on the script from Hume Cronyn, an actor who had received 'adaptation' credits on two of Hitch's previous films, Rope in 1948 and Under Capricorn in 1949. Mr Cronyn's comments had arrived before my revisions. In his letter of 13 January, 1962, he suggested that there was "still room for improvement in the development and relationship of the principal characters. The implied arrogance, silliness, and selfishness of the early Melanie may need heightening, so that the change to consideration, responsibility, and maturity are more marked - and more enduring."
He was merely the first who - without my knowledge or consent - stuck his finger in the concept and his foot in the whorehouse door.
Regarding actors
"I ask you, Evan, how can anyone have respect for a man who earns his living by putting makeup on his face?"
Final version
On 29 January, 1962, Peggy Robertson wrote to tell me that the mimeo'd final script of The Birds would be ready that week.
"Would you like to return the leather-bound copy Hitch gave you so that we can have the bookbinders insert this final version?"
My leather-bound copy of the mimeo'd final script included the last seven pages of the screenplay, detailing the car moving through the devastated town and the final harrowing attack of the birds on the small canvas-topped convertible.
Hitch never filmed those pages.
Writer on-set
Back in 1962, it was an axiom of the trade that when a writer finished his screenplay, the best thing he could do for all concerned was get lost. This has changed to some extent, but I recently heard a famous director tell a group of professional screenwriters that a director should of course be willing to sit down and discuss with a writer the 'intent' of his script but when it came to the actual shooting of the picture, there could be 'only one captain of the ship' and the writer should stay away from the set and the actors. I was on location while The Birds was shooting in Bodega Bay, and later on while Hitch was filming some interiors on the Universal lot in Los Angeles. But although I was there by invitation, in a sense I was there merely by accident: Hitch had hired me to write his next picture, Marnie, based on the novel by Winston Graham, and we were discussing our approach to the film.
The day Anita and I arrived on the set, they were rehearsing the scene outside the Tides Restaurant, where a gull swoops down on the service station attendant pumping gasoline, knocking him down and causing him to drop the hose. A man lighting a cigar drops his match into the stream of flowing gasoline and the subsequent explosion attracts a squadron of gulls who dive-bomb the town.
(After I saw the film, it always amazed me that no one ever questioned how Hitch had got the gulls to do that. Was he up there in an aeroplane, shouting "Now, boys!" into a megaphone? It never occurred to anyone that the birds were animated cel by cel onto footage of the gasoline station burning below. It was merely accepted that somehow Hitch and his bird-trainer had managed to get those gulls to peel off on cue.)
Hitch shook hands with me and then embraced Anita cordially. Rod Taylor was sitting in a director's chair with his name lettered on the back of it, watching the rehearsal. Hitch turned to him, and with elaborate Cockney disdain, said, "Mr Taylor, can't you see there's a lady on the set? I'm sure you'd like to give her your chair, wouldn't you?"
Rod leaped to his feet at once.
In an aside loud enough for Rod and every bird in northern California to hear, Hitch whispered to me, "Cattle, Evan. They're all cattle."
The stuffed gull on its guy wire swooped down and hit the service station attendant on the head yet another time.
Please stop
Every day we would ride in a limo from San Francisco to the Bodega Bay location, leaving the Fairmont Hotel very early in the morning. Schoolchildren lined the roads north, holding up makeshift signs lettered with the words "MR HITCHCOCK, PLEASE STOP!"
Hitch always directed the driver to stop the car.
He spent 15 minutes, sometimes half an hour, graciously signing autographs.
The trouble with Marnie
We discussed Marnie.
We discussed Marnie on the 60-mile ride to and from location. We discussed Marnie during lulls in the shooting and during lunch and during dinner every night. We discussed Marnie interminably.
There was one scene in the book that bothered me.
"Which scene is that?" Hitch asked. He knew which scene it was.
"The scene where he rapes her on their wedding night."
"Oh, don't worry about that," Hitch said. "That'll be fine."
I knew it wouldn't.
The frigid princess
There was no doubt in my mind that Hitch had decided to film the Winston Graham novel only because he saw in it a vehicle for Grace Kelly. Who better to play a compulsive thief who also happens to be frigid because of a childhood trauma? Grace Kelly committing burglaries? Grace Kelly riding a horse after each theft? Grace Kelly being blonde and elegant and glacial and elusive? Grace Kelly being Grace Kelly? Perfect.
In fact, when I asked him who would be playing the lead, he winked and mouthed the single word "Grace."
Apparently he didn't mouth it softly enough.
"You'll have to ask him"
Perhaps because I had behaved so responsibly while writing in Brentwood, or perhaps because Hitch was shooting and didn't want me underfoot, he raised no objection to my writing the Marnie screenplay in New York. When I got off the plane at Kennedy, a horde of reporters and photographers rushed to the gate. I wondered who it was they were there to meet.
"Mr Hunter?" one of them asked.
"Yes?"
They were there to meet me.
"Is it true that Grace Kelly will be starring in Hitchcock's next film?"
"I don't know," I said. "You'll have to ask him."
"Did he tell you she'd be playing the lead in Mamie?"
"You'll have to ask him."
"Does that mean yes?"
"It means you'll have to ask him."
I don't know who they asked.
But on 20 March, The New York Times reported that Princess Grace would be coming out of retirement to play the leading role in Marnie, and the story was reported in the British press the very next day. The Prince and his loyal subjects obviously disagreed. Hitch's preferred star withdrew from negotiations on the film, and Tippi Hedren got the role by default.
Meanwhile, back at the ranch...
Second opinion
Unknown to me, Hitch had already sent the script of The Birds to an old friend of his, V. S. Pritchett, a short story writer who used to be the book review editor for the New Statesman.
On 16 March, before the Times story broke - and while I was busily dissecting the Graham novel scene by scene and beginning my own research into banking (Marnie robs banks) and big business (she robs businesses, too) and psychiatry (she's a little nuts, you see) - Pritchett wrote back. He said that audiences of The Birds would "get the impression that they are in two different stories - in this case a light comedy and a terror tale - that do not weld together."
While Hitch pondered this startling revelation that merely defined the entire approach to the film, he asked me to take another look at the final scene, with an eye toward giving it a deeper meaning and a stronger purpose.
In a letter to Hitch dated 30 March, 1962, addressed to the Fairmont in the hope that I would still catch him there, I suggested some locations that Robert Boyle (Hitch's production designer, who'd first begun working with him on Saboteur in 1941) might want to look at for Marnie and promised that the revised last scene of The Birds would be coming Hitch's way the following week. "I want to tell you," I wrote, "that it's a little difficult to be poetic when the roof of an automobile is slowly being shredded to bits by attacking birds."
I wrote further:
My session with our psychologist proved most rewarding. I now understand a great many of the things happening in the book (Winston Graham was either using a case history, or else was intuitively correct) and can cope with our dear Marnie very well indeed. You will be interested to learn that our psychologist felt the ending we worked out -- concerning Marnie's trauma -- was a more valid one than the one in the book. So it's full speed ahead with our drunken sailor and our intervening mother and, oh, all sorts of Oedipal undertones and overtones.
I am picking up a book on screen memory this afternoon. I understand the phenomenon quite well in its simplest terms, but I want to go into it a little more deeply just in case I decide to explain it to an audience at some point in the picture. In any case, I learned some exciting things which will provide us with a double twist on the trauma. I'm not anticipating any trouble at all.
No trouble at all
Famous last words.
Screen memories
There is a trauma.
Dream work reveals what appears to be the true memory of what happened long ago.
But the revelation is a false one.
A screen memory (not as in movie screen but as in something behind which one retreats to change one's clothes) is a false memory of the trauma. It hides the real memory which the traumatised victim cannot face. I did indeed explain all this to an audience, in highly dramatic scenes Hitch never used in his movie. In the picture that was finally made from Jay Presson Allen's screenplay, for which she received sole credit, Hitch discarded the complicated screen memory concept altogether, opting instead for a simpler bargain-base ment explanation of Marnie's compulsive thievery and frigidity.
It was the frigidity that would cause the problem later on.
Final pages
I delivered the final pages of The Birds on 2 April, 1962, the day after my twin sons' tenth birthday. In my accompanying letter, I wrote:
I have taken the liberty of transposing several of your outlined shots in order to present the menace as a growing and cumulative one. For example, I didn't feel the shot showing "only a few gulls" in the road would cause the consternation it did in your outline. Considering the number of birds they have already seen, their reactions to those few seem a bit excessive. Too, I feel it necessary to provide a trapped feeling when they approach the hundreds of gulls sitting in the middle of the road. In other words, there is no choice they are literally surrounded and must go through the centre of the waiting birds.
Concerning our 'poetry', as I told you in my earlier letter, it was a little difficult to wax literary when the roof and the whole damn world are falling to bits, but I think I have managed to give the end of the picture an uplift that was sorely needed.
Clear up ahead
TWO SHOT - LYDIA AND MELANIE
(On the back seat. Melanie begins sobbing in a sudden release of tension. Lydia, in compassion, and tenderly, cradles Melanie's head on her shoulder. Melanie, her eyes glistening, looks ahead through the windshield.)
FULL SHOT - THE CAR INTERIOR
(All their faces visible.)
Cathy: Mitch? Do... do you think the lovebirds will be all right? In the trunk? Can they breathe?
Mitch: (with the faintest smile) I think they'll be all right, honey.
(There is hope on their faces as the car streaks into the wind. Not a wild exuberance, but a relaxation of tension. They stare ahead through the windshield, and then they squint their eyes against the sudden sunrise ahead, and Mitch reaches up to turn down the sun visor.)
Mitch: It looks... it looks clear up ahead.
FULL SHOT - THE CAR
(Moving away from the camera fast into the magnificent sunrise over the crest of the hills. Further and further into the distance it goes.)
FADE OUT
THE END
Let me know
"I think this does the trick," I wrote, "but since there is still time before you shoot this scene, please let me know if anything about it troubles you."
It was all a pointless exercise. Cooler heads were about to prevail.
I should be grateful
Not a week had gone by before Hitch fired off the new script to his good old pal, V. S. Pritchett. I never saw the letter of 9 April, in which he asked Pritchett to add to an earlier scene in the film the information that, when Melanie was a young girl, her mother had run off with another man. Toward that end, and to reinforce this pointless piece of exposition, he suggested that the moment the convertible top shreds away Melanie should fight her way out of Lydia's embrace and shout something like, "Let me out! Let me go back! Mother, I want you, I want you. Come back to me, please - please come back to me."
I suppose I should be grateful that the final scene in the car was never shot. Otherwise those lines would have been attributed to me as the writer who received sole screenplay credit. To Mr Pritchett, however, must go the credit (or blame) for urging that the film end on a gloomier note, with the people in the car "looking backwards at the village with fear, rather than forward to the hope of escape". (You will remember that in my first draft, Mitch Brenner expressed the fear that the birds might be in San Francisco when they got there.) But it was Pritchett's suggestion that translated itself into what became the final scene of the film.
When I saw the movie for the first time at the Museum of Modern Art's invitational screening a year later - and realised that Hitch had sacrificed my ending in favour of what he called "the most difficult shot" he'd ever done, a composite of birds requiring 32 separate exposures against a matte painting - I was appalled. The very hip and sophisticated black-tie audience was, to say the very least, somewhat glacially polite in its reception. A stunned silence greeted the final complicated mosaic of what appeared to be 3,407 pieces of bird film. Later, when I saw the movie in a commercial theatre, people actually turned to each other and mumbled, "Is it over? Is that it? Huh?" I left before they realised I was the man who'd written the screenplay and mistakenly assumed the ending they had just seen had been concocted by me.
Hitch later said that he hadn't filmed my last pages because he felt they were superfluous. "Emotionally speaking," he said, "the movie was already over for the audience. The additional scenes would have been playing while everyone was leaving their seats and walking up the aisles."
No.
Hitch didn't film the scene I wrote because then he would have made a movie with a thrilling, sus-penseful ending.
He wasn't going for that.
He was going for high art.
20 April, 1962
Dear Hitch:
Just a short note to tell you that Marnie is moving along nicely. I now have about 90 polished pages with only one possible problem in sight: that of length.
I am delighted with the way all the characters (even the minor ones) are shaping up. I hope you are having as much fun with our little feathered friends.
7 May, 1962
Dear Hitch:
Anita and I returned last night from a long weekend in Puerto Rico, and today I reread the screenplay to date and made some minor additions and corrections. It was good getting away from it for a few days because it allowed me the opportunity of seeing it in a fresh light. I must say I am absolutely delighted with the way it is going.
A red-breasted grosbeak, sir, was just sitting outside my study window, tapping at the glass. I told him the picture had already hired its full complement of actors, and was indeed now shooting in LA. He turned away with a distinctly hangdog expression.
Mitch: Are they moulting now?
Melanie: Some of them are.
Mitch: How can you tell?
Melanie: Well... they get a sort of hangdog expression.
CLOSE SHOT - A CAGED BIRD - MITCH'S POV
(The bird is wearing a distinctly hangdog expression.)
...this article concludes in part 4