Vertigo: the Making of Hitchcock Classic Special Edition

VERTIGO:

The Making of a Hitchcock Classic

by Dan Auiler

Foreword from Martin Scorsese

Copyright 2013 Dan Auiler

Smashwords Editions

Foreword copyright 1998 Martin Scorsese

Vertigo images used with permission, all rights reserved the Alfred Hitchcock Estate and Universal Studios

Publication history

First Edition 1998 St. Martin's Press

Paperback 2001 St. Martin's Press Griffin

UK Editions 1998 Titan Books

This special edition is published by the author and has substantial changes from the original publications

First Edition

Dedication

To Rose and Maya

Smashword 2011 edition

Dedication

To all of us who stand in the tower

Preface

What do you think about the prominence that Vertigo has assumed for your European critics?

H: I think they understood the complexities of the situation.

But do you agree with those among them who say the film refers to you....?

H: No, there's nothing in that.

(Alfred Hitchcock to Charles Thomas Samuels, 1972)

...I think that in all artistic domains we attempt to create an emotion. The importance of a work of art, no matter what sort, is to evoke a reaction. It doesn't matter what sort of reflex is stimulated. As soon as one says I like or I hate that signifies that one is no longer indifferent. I very much like the story of the young couple in a museum of modern art. They stop, perplexed, in front of an abstract painting. Suddenly a hand with a finger pointing at them emerges from the frame and says, I don't understand you either.

(Hitchcock to Nicoletta Zalafi, 1972)

When St Martin's published this book in 1998, Vertigo was still very much a niche film. Loved by the few who had seen it. The book's success was that lucky convergence of author, timing and cultural phenomenon. The book was conceived and completed as Harris and Katz were finishing their restoration of the film. It was a lucky coincidence. When I arrived at the Academy's research library, I knew that I had to have a project to justify seeing any of Hitchcock's personal files. I had decided that I needed to know everything there was to know about Vertigo. The film had intrigued, perplexed, bothered. I needed to work through what about this film in its inception might inform my profound reaction to each viewing of the film.

15 years on, the film has been voted the best film ever made by the international film critics polled by the British Film Institute and published once a decade by Sight and Sound. Vertigo unseated Orson Welles' Citizen Kane which had held the top spot since the 1960s. Vertigo did not even make the list until the 1980s.

Late July 2012, the BBC called with the news that the BFI was likely to announce the prestigious list with Vertigo at the top on Aug. 1st. I was asked to come into Hollywood to do an interview about the choice, this film. I didn't go. I wasn't sure what to say.

And, as the day arrived, as Vertigo arrived, its most profound chronicler left.

Chris Marker, whose work is discussed in the book, died on the eve of Vertigo's ascendancy. His departure, the film's arrival like a time confused dance of the insane memory he describes in the Vertigo sequence of San Soliel. Marker understood Vertigo.

Robin Woods understood also and Woods is gone, too. These two men were my guides to that dreadful climb up the tower. They now rise as shadows to encourage. To provoke.

Vertigo, its profound nature, its absurd success, this book can only run at, fail, and then make another run, on and on. No book can explain or pin down the quickening that makes a masterpiece.

In this special edition, I have made many corrections, added some details, tweaked statements that were once true and added back in much of the art that was in the St. Martin's edition. It is the best eBook version possible of the original. The book will always be a thing of beauty impossible to recreate in the virtual world.

I'm certain that Hitchcock would be honored, touched even, by Vertigo's success today. But I'm certain he would also be speechless at this turn of events. Hitch, Alma, they too stand in that tower's dark corner. Those left living, well, we stand in wonder still.

Dan Auiler, 2013

To Chris Marker and Robin Woods

They took notice. We take notice.

FOREWORD

It's difficult to put into words exactly what Vertigo means to me as both a film lover and as a filmmaker. As is the case with all great films, truly great films, no matter how much has been said and written about them, the dialogue about it will always continue. Because any film as great as Vertigo demands more than just a sense of admiration-it demands a personal response.

A good place to start is its complete singularity. Vertigo stands alone as a Hitchcock film, as a Hollywood film. In fact, it just stands alone, period. For such a personal work with such a uniquely disturbing vision of the world to come out of the studio system when it did was not just unusual--it was nearly unthinkable. Vertigo was and continues to be a real example to me and to many of my contemporaries, in the sense that it demonstrates to us that it's possible to function within a system and do work that's deeply personal at the same time.

Vertigo is also important to me-essential would be more like it--because it has a hero driven purely by obsession. I've always been attracted in my own work to heroes motivated by obsession, and on that level Vertigo strikes a deep chord in me every time I see it. Morality, decency, kindness, intelligence, wisdom--all the qualities that we think heroes are supposed to possess-desert Jimmy Stewart's character little by little, until he is left alone on that church tower with the bells tolling behind him and nothing to show but his humanity.

Whole books could be written about so many individual aspects of Vertigo--its extraordinary visual precision, which cuts to the soul of its characters like a razor; its many mysteries and moments of subtle poetry; its unsettling and exquisite use of color; its extraordinary performances by Stewart and Kim Novak-whose work is so brave and emotionally immediate--as well as the very underrated work of Barbara Bel Geddes. And that's not to mention its astonishing title sequence by Saul Bass or its tragically beautiful score by Bernard Herrmann, both absolutely essential to the spirit, the functioning, and the power of Vertigo.

Of course, we can now hear Herrmann's score with a clarity and breadth that it's never had before, thanks to Bob Harris and Jim Katz, the men who worked on the beautiful, painstaking restoration of Vertigo. I'm happy that the Film Foundation was able to play a part in making this important work possible, and I'd like to thank Universal and Tom Pollock for allowing it to go forward and, of course, I'd like to thank the American Film Institute for their invaluable contributions.

-MARTIN SCORSESE

1998

INTRODUCTION (1998 edition)

Why does Vertigo affect us so deeply?

Why isn't Alfred Hitchcock's 1958 psychological thriller, just coming off its third major rerelease in four decades, and available in gorgeously restored home-video editions, just another Hitchcock and bull story, as Time callously described it upon its initial release?

Doesn't that description better fit the other films Hitchcock created during his last great period? Why? Because Vertigo, like other films that reach somewhere within us and grab us firmly by the entrails, is not the typical Hitchcock film, even as it represents the highest realization of so many of the director's career preoccupations.

Seen today, Vertigo can seem like the best of films and the worst of films: At moments throughout, its images shimmer with an incandescent beauty that few films in history could pretend to match, even as other moments---awkwardness’s in the script, longueurs in the storytelling---induce discomforts not originally intended by the director or his crew. Vertigo is not the perfect, pure cinema of Rear Window. Yet who is haunted, dogged, pursued by Rear Window? If Hitchcock, as the critic Robin Wood has argued, is the cinema's Shakespeare, then Vertigo is his Macbeth. Not in theme, plot, or structure, perhaps, but in its status as a flawed gem---whose imperfections somehow make the work all the more effective. Macbeth does not possess the perfect unity and exquisite poetry of A Midsummer Night's Dream, but surely this terrible couple's anguish moves us far more deeply than the foolish lover's lament. Vertigo is a classic of the heart-Hitchcock's and ours. It is a film that writes directly on our souls. Who knows the consequences ultimately of such art? I don't feel damaged after watching the film, as Scottie so painfully and permanently is at its conclusion. What I do know is that I've seen and felt something painfully true.

Those final moments in the tower: Scottie confronting his own illusion, his face leaning out of the shadows as its textures seem to ripple and convulse in deep torment. Oh, Madeleine, Madeleine, I loved you so-oh, Madeleine. This quiet moment, following the Sturm und Drang of the famous tower-climbing scene, is the Lear howl of the film. Scottie has loved and lost and loved and lost again. That final, shocking image of Scottie alone in the tower is what seals the heart and our fate-what binds us to the film, brings us back to countless screenings, drags us to the locations to walk their steps like hungry ghosts, what compels the writing of essay after essay and batters us in each new audience with question after unanswerable question.

Readers of this book, paradoxically, will have a different kind of surprise in store for them:

What many Vertigo aficionados will find perplexing are the systematic, businesslike, matter-of- fact circumstances under which this odd, obsessional, very un-matter-of-fact film was created. This is the nature of nearly all great films: They seem more accident than purposeful creation. As Martin Scorsese notes in his foreword, it is almost astonishing that so idiosyncratic and personal a work could be crafted within the confines of a studio system that, by the late 1950s, had come to seem monolithic, even prehistoric.

By nature, Alfred Hitchcock preferred smooth surfaces to rough. He preferred people to believe that his films were the easy, casual exercises of a genius. Yet the truths behind Hitchcock's glittery storytelling are more complicated. Peering into the written record left behind by Hitchcock, and into the memories of those who worked with him, we come to see a different filmmaker: Not the mad Svengali of Donald Spoto's biography, but the troubled artist at work as more accurately painted by Patrick McGilligan in his recent biography..

Was it coincidence that Hitchcock should choose this more irresolvable of all his stories just as he and his wife had begun to confront their first serious health problems? Would anyone still attempt to argue that the film's fascination with shaping the image of a woman has nothing to do with Hitchcock's own failed attempts to re-create Grace Kelly in another actress, or with the idea, so widely discussed at the time, of creating competing blond bombshells the very process that had molded Kim Novak?

Yes, there is all of this in Vertigo, and much more. Great works of art are by nature mysterious and provocative. We go back to the Mona Lisa not because she provides answers, but for the questions she provokes.

We can sense on fundamental levels that in Vertigo can be found the sum of Hitchcock's contradictions-romance and disconnection, the face and the mask, the director and his legend. If we start to pull away the layers that make Vertigo, what is the personality of the filmmaker we find at its heart? The twisted, malevolent creation of Spoto's biography,the enigma of his official biographer, John Russell Taylor? McGilligan's portrait of Hitchcock (the biography that I would consider the current standard bearer) provides some answers, but no text can provide the real pulse from which the artist lived.

For, surely, what lies beneath the layers of creation that go into the making of any work of art, is a heart--not a force of cold cruelty, but one of passion and unresolved longing. A heart, in other words, like our own.

Dan Auiler

1998

Chapter 1

THE POWER AND THE FREEDOM

ELSTER

San Francisco's changed. The things that spell San Francisco to me are changing fast.

(Scottie smiles at the old prints on the wall.)

SCOTTIE

Like all this.

ELSTER (nodding)

I'd like to have lived here then. The color and excitement ... the power ... the freedom.

(Scene 22, Taylor script)

POP LIEBEL

... He kept the child and threw her away. Men could do that in those days. They had the power ... and the freedom ....

(Scene 120, Taylor script)

SCOTTIE

Oh, Judy!! When he had all her money, and the freedom and the power ... He ditched you? What a shame!

(Scene 269, Taylor script)

The drive from Alfred Hitchcock's mansion in Bel Air to the famous gates of the Paramount studios on Melrose Avenue-about twenty or thirty minutes east on Sunset to Gower-would have been long enough to give the director time to sort through the day ahead of him as he traveled to work on one spring morning in 1956. Hitchcock lived near the end of the circular Bellagio Road, and his house was adjacent to the eighteenth hole of the Bel Air Country Club's golf course; art director Henry Bumstead, who visited Hitch's house often during their days together at Paramount, remembers the director proudly displaying a box of broken glass-all the result of errant golf balls.

After each window strike, the country club sent someone over to replace the glass. His wife, Alma, returned the favor, collecting the balls and returning them to the club in buckets at the end of each month.

Africa was on the director's mind that morning. Paramount had purchased two new properties for Hitchcock-one that he had wanted, and one that Paramount had wanted for him. The latter was a big international thriller, adapted from the novel Flamingo Feather by Laurens van der Post, to be shot on location in South Africa. The other was a new novel by a pair of French novelists whose previous book had been turned into a very successful, and rather Hitchcockian film--Les Diaboliques--a few years before. Flamingo Feather would be produced by Paramount, and it would mean another African trip for the director who had made The Man Who Knew Too Much. The French story, on the other hand, he planned to transplant to San Francisco, and it was a film he would make himself-an Alfred J. Hitchcock Production.

From Among the Dead--a literal English translation of the French title D'Entre les Morts--was the Hitchcock production. Hitchcock received no upfront salary for his own productions, and he was obliged to share the development costs, but then after eight years, the picture's rights would revert to him. With his successful television series--a blessing he'd been talked into by his friend and agent Lew Wasserman--now a year into its successful run, money had never been more plentiful for him.

With cash only a minor issue, then, Hitch had the luxury of judging which of the two films he really wanted to spend a year making. Back to Africa? He had enjoyed his time there with Alma and the Stewart's during The Man Who Knew Too Much. Or would he confront the French story, which had much more personal resonance for him?

The limo drove through the DeMille gates and pulled in front of the Administration Building. Hitchcock walked to his large office on the ground floor, nearly dead center in the building. The office of Herbert Coleman, his associate producer, adjoined his; the two shared secretaries and assistants who worked in a small foyer between. Coleman, who had first worked with Hitchcock as an assistant director on 1954's Rear Window, had worked at Paramount's Hollywood studios since the days when Hitchcock was getting his start at Famous Players-Lasky in London, which was affiliated with Paramount. Friendly, competent, and efficient, Coleman handled most of the producer's tasks at Hitchcock Productions-without, and this was most important, getting in the Master's way when it came to final decisions.

Hitchcock's time had been divided recently between Paramount and Warner Bros. The Wrong Man, a disturbing, black-and-white Henry Fonda picture, was now in post production and no one, except perhaps Hitch himself, was thrilled with the product. The stark documentary-style film based on the true story of a Stork Club musician wrongly accused of