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Overview
In his most innovative and technically challenging film, The Birds, Alfred Hitchcock follows the success of Psycho with a modernist, avant garde horror-thriller, which has spawned many imitators and triggered the cycle for disaster and man versus nature films. Now to mark The Birds 50th anniversary in 2013 and the digitally restored Blu-Ray release, The Making of Hitchcock's The Birds is the first book-length treatment on the production of this modernist masterpiece. Featuring new interviews with stars Rod Taylor, Tippi Hedren and Veronica Cartwright, as well as sketches and storyboards from Hitchcock's A-List technical team, Robert Boyle, Albert Whitlock and Harold Michelson, the book charts every aspect of the film's production all set against the tumultuous backdrop of the 1962 Cuban missile crisis and JFK's presidency. Using unpublished material from the Alfred Hitchcock Collection, Evan Hunter files, Peggy Robertson papers and Robert Boyle's artwork, this book will be the ultimate guide to Hitchcock's most ambitious film.
The Making of Hitchcock's The Birds analyses the film's modernist underpinnings, from art director Robert Boyle's initial sketches influenced by Munch's The Scream, to the groundbreaking electronic score by pioneering German composers Remi Gassmann and Oskar Sala. The entire production process is analysed in detail, illustrated with rare behind the scenes production stills and storyboards. There is also a timeline detailing the film's production to its release at MOMA in New York, and the 1963 Cannes Film Festival.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781842439555 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Oldcastle Books |
| Publication date: | 07/01/2013 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 224 |
| File size: | 5 MB |
About the Author
Tony Lee Moral is a documentary filmmaker and writer. He is the author of two previous books on Alfred Hitchcock: Hitchcock and the Making of Marnie (2002) and Alfred Hitchcock's Movie Making Masterclass (2013) a cinematic guide to the master of suspense. Tony has produced, written and directed over a 100 hours of television for major broadcasters in the US and UK, including award winning series such as The Shape of Life, Man vs Wild, Monsters Inside Me, Naked Science, Wild Britain and The Animal Zone.
Read an Excerpt
The Making of Hitchcock's the Birds
By Tony Lee Moral
Oldcastle Books
Copyright © 2013 Tony Lee MoralAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-84344-155-7
CHAPTER 1
DAPHNE DU MAURIER'S THE BIRDS
'Nat listened to the tearing sound of splintering wood, and wondered how many millions of years of memory were stored in those little brains, behind the stabbing beaks, the piercing eyes, now giving them the instinct to destroy mankind with all the deft precision of machines' – The Birds
DAPHNE DU MAURIER
The author of the short story The Birds was Daphne du Maurier. She was born in 1907 in London, the daughter of Sir Gerald du Maurier, an actor and theatre manager, and the granddaughter of George du Maurier, an artist for Punch magazine and author of the novel Trilby. After being educated at home with her sisters and then in Paris, Daphne began writing short stories and articles as a teenager. Her father's and grandfather's connections gave Daphne's literary career an initial boost, and an uncle published one of her short stories in his magazine The Bystander when she was still a teenager. In 1931, at the age of 24, her first novel The Loving Spirit was published, a family saga of four generations of Cornish ship builders and mariners.
By the summer of 1932, Daphne had married Major Frederick 'Boy' Browning, a military officer 11 years her senior who had sought her out after admiring her work. Daphne and Browning spent considerable time apart as he rose to the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel in 1936 and commanded the British First Airborne Division during World War II. When he eventually left the army he become comptroller and treasurer to the household of Princess Elizabeth and the Duke of Edinburgh, later becoming treasurer of the office of the Duke until his retirement. During this time Daphne (Figure 1) continued to write. In 1936 she wrote Jamaica Inn, a story about pirates and smuggling on the Cornish coast which soon brought her critical acclaim and financial success. Daphne quickly became known as a creator of atmosphere and her novels and short stories often had a twist of the macabre. She hired a nanny to help take care of their son, Christian 'Kits' Browning, and two daughters, Tessa and Flavia.
In 1943 the Browning family moved to Cornwall, into a house named Menabilly, a seventeenth-century mansion. Daphne had seen the house with its ivy-clad walls on one of her earlier trips to Cornwall and had fallen in love with it. Owls hooted in the surrounding woods at night where a path led down to the coast. The owner leased the house to Daphne and she restored it from neglect, spending the next 25 years living there. Daphne's most successful novel was directly inspired by Menabilly, as the house became the model for Manderley, the setting for Rebecca (1938). Suddenly Daphne became one of the most popular authors of the day, as Rebecca was printed in 39 English impressions over the next 20 years and translated into more than 20 languages. Although Daphne went on to write 17 other books, including Frenchman's Creek, The King's General, My Cousin Rachel, Mary Anne and The Scapegoat, all republished by Penguin in 1962, Rebecca and Jamaica Inn remained her two most popular novels, inspired by her Cornish home and Cornwall. The surrounding landscape was also to be the inspiration for her next most popular work. However, it wasn't a novel, but a short story, and its genesis came about one late autumn morning.
INSPIRATION FOR THE BIRDS
Every day Daphne would walk from Menabilly down to Polridmouth beach along a well-worn country path (Figure 3). Over the coastline and rugged hills of Cornwall, birds wheel and dive, eking out an existence in the harsh landscape. Here nature is unforgiving, gale-force winds blow, coastal fog creeps in and temperatures plummet.
On her walk down to Polridmouth beach, Daphne would pass Menabilly Barton farm, where farmer Tommy Dunn often ploughed his fields in a tractor. One autumnal day, above Dunn's head, she saw a flock of seagulls. Daphne was immediately struck by the clamour of the gulls following the tractor. As it 'traced its path up and down the western hills, the figure of the farmer silhouetted on the driving-seat, the whole machine and the man upon it would be lost momentarily in the great cloud of wheeling, crying birds'.
Tommy Dunn died at the age of 85 in 2010 and the farm was passed on to his son Richard. He described his father as 'a local character, a farmer who kept grass and corn which he ploughed. Winters are harsh and the farm is exposed to tremendous gales, wet thaws and coastal fogs. During these storms, the seagulls come in and land until they pass.' A similar line was later used in Hitchcock's film when Melanie Daniels asks the pet-store owner in San Francisco what brings the seagulls in and the answer is a 'storm at sea'.
'Daphne saw my dad ploughing in the autumn and the birds were wheeling above him,' Richard remembers. 'If you do any cultivation work you get earthworms ploughed up – and the seagulls come from the sea looking for the worms. That's what Daphne saw, the seagulls dive-bombing for worms. She was watching and imagined them to be more aggressive than they really are – of course, they are a proper pain in the towns now, and more so than in the country.' So the gulls were in fact looking for earthworms that had been exposed by the plough, and they were circling above Dunn's head. But, from Daphne's perspective, they looked like they were attacking him.
An idea began to form in her mind. She always had a macabre imagination and began to think how awful it would be if the birds started attacking people and took over. Returning to Menabilly, she conceived the idea for The Birds and wrote the story quickly, in two months during the winter of 1951, on a typewriter in a hut at the end of her lawn. There was nothing inside the hut except a desk and chair and the window had a view of the sea.
Local farmer Tommy Dunn became the inspiration for Nat Hocken, the central character, and the story developed into his struggle to protect his family from the birds, set against a wild Cornish coastline where gales sweep across the stark hills, fields and isolated farmhouses. Because of the rural characters and the harsh landscape, the story has an elemental tone, where nature is omnipresent.
Daphne's story covers only a few days in the life of the family and examines what would happen if animals traditionally regarded as symbols of peace and freedom began to ruthlessly attack humans. There is an element of claustrophobia in the work, which is similar to other stories such as Rebecca, which features the heroine isolated at Manderley. The story opens with a cold bitter wind from the Arctic that has turned the autumnal English countryside into a place of winter cold. With the wind come the birds, restless, but strangely silent, different species flocking together in great numbers. More than usual this year, tenant farmer Nat remarks to his employer, who shrugs off the birds' numbers, as well as their increasing boldness. Nat awakens in the middle of the night to a tapping at the window, first by one bird, and then by half a dozen of them which attack him.
The tension and horror quickens as Nat's family suffers several vicious attacks by flocks of swarming birds, seemingly bent on destruction. When writing, Daphne didn't have Hitchcock in mind, because she never had that sort of commercial mindset. She wrote what she wanted to write about and didn't think it was a project that would interest Hitchcock. She had been very disappointed with the film adaptation of Jamaica Inn (1939) but liked Rebecca (1940), mainly because of David O Selznick's involvement. And, at the end of filming, the original script for that film had been sent to her.
'My mother's and Hitchcock's paths never crossed because she lived in Cornwall, and he lived in California,' explains Daphne's son Kits Browning. 'But he knew my grandfather from the London theatre.' Although Hitchcock and Daphne never met, Hitch did know her father, Gerald du Maurier, socially and had worked with him on a film called Lord Camber's Ladies in 1932.
Both Hitchcock and Daphne shared something else in common. They were both animal lovers and kept dogs. In Daphne's case she kept West Highland terriers and Hitchcock owned a pair of Sealyham terriers, a rare Welsh breed. He named them Geoffrey and Stanley and they made a cameo appearance at the beginning of The Birds when Hitchcock walks out of the pet shop. He loved his dogs and they would go everywhere with him. They would ride in the car, with Hitchcock's wife Alma driving, and Hitchcock also brought them to his office every day. As Alma drove, Geoffrey would bark at the back of the car. 'Quiet Geoffrey!' Alma would say. 'If you were driving you wouldn't bark so loud.'
For Daphne, her love of nature extended to birds, especially small birds. 'She had a great affection for all wild things,' remembers Kits. 'One time I discovered a seagull with a broken wing. I was only 14 at the time, and I went and told my mother and father. My father shot it to put it out of its misery – which was quite horrifying for me. It was the first time I saw a seagull in such a state and, after the shooting, all you see is a whole shower of white feathers everywhere.'
Daphne was very against animal cruelty, a sensibility she also shared with Hitchcock. There are a couple of sentences towards the end of The Birds that hint at the abuse man has inflicted over millennia and how nature would take its revenge: 'Nat listened to the tearing sound of splintering wood, and wondered how many millions of years of memory were stored in those little brains, behind the stabbing beaks, the piercing eyes, now giving them the instinct to destroy mankind with all the deft precision of machines.' The words suggest hidden and pent-up emotions stored in the brains of the birds over millions of years. Later, Hitchcock seized upon this analogy, and man's complacency, when writing his trailer for the film, which is expanded on in Chapter 9 of this book.
As well as nature taking revenge upon man, other readings of The Birds have been put forward. In the 1950s, the Cold War was at the forefront of people's minds and some reviewers have detected an undercurrent in Daphne's writing. The story presents an unrelenting portrait of terror and a compelling analogy of the atmosphere of fear generated in America and Europe during the Cold War. Asked about this, Kits Browning believes that his mother was more concerned with the psychology and physics of nature, such as the turning of the tides, than with anything political. Nat, for example, discovers that the birds time their attacks in conjunction with the tides, at six-hour intervals, and he uses this information to board the house up between attacks.
The story in The Birds has also been compared to the air raids that devastated Britain during World War II. Indeed, the du Maurier family did have direct experience of the air raids that bombed Plymouth where the family lived. Kits remembers going into the cellar when the raids began, and admits that his mother does draw analogies in the short story, such as battening down the hatches. 'He lights his last cigarette, switches on the silent wireless and waits' – so the story ends. Hitchcock may have picked up on these analogies when adapting it.
In his review of The Birds, Daphne du Maurier biographer Richard Kelly, writing for Twayne's English Authors Series Online, picks up on the claustrophobia of the air raid shelters: 'By limiting the focus of her story upon Nat Hocken and his family, du Maurier manages to convey the effect of a believable claustrophobic nightmare'. This sense of claustrophobia is heightened by the story's references to the bombing raids Britain endured during World War II and the paranoid atmosphere created by the threat of nuclear holocaust during the middle of the twentieth century.
FIRST PUBLICATION OF THE BIRDS
The Birds was first published in cloth in a 1952 short story collection entitled The Apple Tree by Victor Gollancz publishers. Other stories in the compilation included Monte Verita, The Apple Tree, The Little Photographer, Kiss Me Again Stranger and The Old Man. There is a supernatural element in many of these stories, especially in The Apple Tree, The Little Photographer and Kiss Me Again Stranger. In addition, the long mystery story Monte Verita recalls the mood of Rebecca.
The Birds was printed in the US in the October 1952 issue of Good Housekeeping, and The Apple Tree was republished in the US as a collection entitled Kiss Me Again Stranger on 5 March 1953 by the publisher Doubleday & Company. Fortunately for Daphne, it was also selected as one of the short stories in an Alfred Hitchcock anthology, and this is how it caught Hitchcock's attention.
THE MASTER CALLS
In the summer of 1960, Alfred Hitchcock and his wife Alma were basking in the success of Psycho. This low-budget horror thriller, made for $800,000 and filmed with his TV crew, had quickly brought in $14 million. Hitchcock himself received $7 million in profits (Figure 5).
Never one prone to feelings of complacency, Hitchcock was looking for a suitable property for his next film, something to top Psycho and befitting of his reputation as the 'Master of Suspense'. Under consideration was an adaptation of the English author Winston Graham's novel Marnie, about a frigid kleptomaniac who is blackmailed into marriage by a man she robs. Hitchcock hoped that it would be a suitable plot to lure Grace Kelly out of retirement, since she had abandoned Hollywood to become the Princess of Monaco.
While reading a copy of one of the short story collections published under the Alfred Hitchcock Presents banner, Hitchcock found what he was looking for. In 1957, publishers Simon & Schuster had approached him about compiling a book of short stories to be branded with the title of his popular television series Alfred Hitchcock Presents. Other publishers were keen to get involved, including Random House, Dell and Davis Publications, and more than 100 mystery books followed in the next 40 years.
It was a Dell paperback called Alfred Hitchcock Presents Fourteen of My Favourites in Suspense, published in 1959 by Random House New York, that caught Hitchcock's attention. The collection was promoted as, 'Here are 14 of the finest terror tales by the most diabolically effective writers who it has ever been Alfred Hitchcock's perverse pleasure to present.' Among the 14 short stories was Daphne du Maurier's The Birds.
Hitchcock, of course, was familiar with du Maurier's work. His adaptation of Jamaica Inn in 1939 had also been his last British film before moving to California, with a plot focusing on orphaned Mary (Maureen O'Hara), who goes to live with her aunt Patience on the coast where she and her husband Joss run the Jamaica Inn. But the inn is actually the headquarters of a band of smugglers who cause ships to wreck so that they can steal the cargo and kill the survivors. Mary saves the life of one of the gang members who is actually an undercover officer (Robert Newton). Together they fight to bring down the ring of smugglers and their protector, Sir Humphrey Pengallon, played by Charles Laughton.
Laughton co-produced the film and clashed with Hitchcock, changing his vision. Hitchcock would often say there were three things impossible to direct – children, animals and Charlie Laughton. Daphne du Maurier herself was not happy with the project and considered withholding the film rights to Rebecca when she heard that Hitchcock was involved. Critics, too, were not fans of the film, although it was a success at the box office.
As Daphne didn't like the adaptation of Jamaica Inn, it was Selznick's involvement that persuaded her to sell the film rights to Rebecca. Selznick is quoted as saying, 'I've paid a lot of money for this book and we are going to stick to the story.' And it was also Selznick who persuaded Hitchcock to adapt Rebecca as his first American movie, which prompted his move to America. Daphne adored Rebecca, especially that they remained true to the original. She liked Joan Fontaine and Laurence Olivier and the fact that Hitchcock told George Sanders not to act. She loved the gossip behind the making of the film and of Olivier being so bored with Joan Fontaine and wanting Vivien Leigh for the part. Daphne's response was that 'Vivien Leigh would have sacked Mrs Danvers on day one'.
When Hitchcock read The Birds – and he confessed to having done so only once – he saw a film rich in cinematic possibilities, as well as both a creative and technical challenge. In the 1930s, he briefly considered filming H G Wells's The War of the Worlds. Marshall Schlom, Hitchcock's script supervisor on Psycho, recently remarked, 'After Psycho, Hitchcock didn't have the same ability to find material, and it was difficult to find material that he liked.' Schlom took over Peggy Robertson's job as script supervisor when she was elevated to story editor in Hitchcock's office. A large, heavy woman, Peggy quickly became Hitch's right hand, was very loyal to him and was liked and respected by everyone.
'Hitchcock showed me the novella of The Birds when we were filming Psycho,' continues Schlom. 'And he indicated that he was looking for his next project. He felt that the story was the most important part of making films. If the script wasn't right, the story wasn't right. He'd say to actors, "I've written it, if it's in the script I'm going to shoot it, or if it's not in the script, I'm not going to shoot it."'
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Making of Hitchcock's the Birds by Tony Lee Moral. Copyright © 2013 Tony Lee Moral. Excerpted by permission of Oldcastle Books.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Introduction 15
1 Daphne Du Maurier's the Birds 19
Daphne du Maurier 19
Inspiration for The Birds 20
First Publication of The Birds 24
The Master Calls 24
The Real-Life Bird Invasions 28
Reprint of The Birds 29
2 Writing the Birds 34
Evan Arrives in LA 37
Moving the Family to LA 41
The Bel Air Fire 44
Writing the Song 48
1962 and the Cuban Missile Crisis 49
Hitchcock Sends the Script to Other Writers 51
The Ending 53
3 The Cast and Crew 57
Introducing 'Tippi' Hedren 57
Rod Taylor 65
Jessica Tandy 66
Suzanne Pleshette 68
Veronica Cartwright 69
Robert Boyle - the Art Designer 70
Robert Burks - the DP 72
James H Brown - the AD 72
Harold Michelson - the Production Illustrator 73
Albert Whitlock - the Matte Artist 75
Ray Berwick - the Bird Trainer 76
Virginia Darcy - the Hairstylist 77
Edith Head - the Costume Designer 79
4 Pre-Production 82
Bodega Bay 82
The School House 85
The Tides Restaurant 85
Finding the Brenner House 86
Valley Ford Farm 88
Photographic Realism 89
Set Decoration 89
Costumes 91
Matte Paintings 92
Storyboards 94
Filming the Birds 96
The Mechanical Birds 97
Catching the Seagulls 99
Capturing the Crows 101
Capturing the Sparrows 102
Positive Reinforcement 103
Sodium Vapour Process 104
5 On Location in Bodega Bay 108
Filming at the Tides 110
Filming the School House 112
Filming the Crows on the Wall 113
Filming the Children's Party 115
Filming at Valley Ford Farm 116
Working with the Actors on Location 117
San Francisco 124
6 On the Sound Stage 127
The Sparrow Attack 128
The Fawcett Farm 132
The Attack on the House 133
The Attic Attack 138
Filming the Ending 143
The Sand Dune Scene 147
The Phone Booth Attack 149
The Pet Shop Interiors 150
The Crow Attack 152
First Bird Attack 154
7 Electronic Sound 157
Electronic Sounds & Natural Sounds 160
Hitchcock's Trip to Berlin 164
The Attic Attack 164
8 Postproduction and Editing 167
The Crow Attack 169
The Attic Attack 170
The Special Effects 171
Rotoscoping Techniques 174
The Ending: 'The Most Difficult Shot I've Ever Done' 175
Deleted Scenes 176
Retakes 178
Titles & Credits 179
Censors 182
9 The Birds is Coming! 184
Marketing a Slogan 184
Philippe Halsman Photographs 185
Publicity campaign 187
MOMA Screening, New York 188
Cannes Film Festival 1963 196
Reviews of The Birds 198
European Exploitation Trip 199
The 1963 Oscars 202
Public Reception: What Do the Birds Mean? 203
Afterword 207
Evan Hunter 209
The Actors 210
Timeline of Events 215
Production Credits 217
Select Bibliography 219
Index 220