IIt’s Los Angeles in the early 1970s, and critic John Russell Taylor is driving around the San Fernando Valley checking out merchandise at various yard sales. Locals usually display their purchases on the lawn to raise cash. But what’s less unusual is the bounty Taylor found with his one yard. It’s his panel from a series of storyboards for his 1945 Alfred Hitchcock-directed thriller film Spellbound, about a psychoanalyst starring Ingrid Bergman and Gregory Peck.
Taylor recognized it immediately. He is a Hitchcock scholar and plans to write the following works in the future: Director’s certified history. Upon closer inspection, he noticed something else. One of his panels depicts the film’s famous dream scene and appears to have been painted by a different artist than the other panels. The world-renowned surrealist was employed when the series was first conceived as a 20-minute featurette rather than the final three-minute segment. Of the nine storyboards Taylor bought that day, he took home one that was probably drawn by Salvador Dali himself.
“I don’t remember how much I paid, but I think it was $50 for the lot,” Taylor said when we met at his home. Step inside this unassuming terraced house on the outskirts of London and you’ll discover a treasure trove of works of art. Nine Hitchcock panels are proudly displayed above the fireplace in the living room, with Dali’s panel taking center stage.
At the time of the purchase, Taylor was having lunch with Hitchcock almost every week. He said the director assured him it had to be Dali’s original, and recalled that the surrealist used watercolors to hastily correct some angles. Hitchcock also storyboarded a series of other storyboards created by art director James Basevy, who was hired to condense Dali’s ambitious vision into something more traditional (and certainly easier to film). admitted that it was from. “You can actually see some sketches of Hitch in the margin,” Taylor pointed out, showing the panel.
The story of the director and his storyboards is a fascinating one, as told in the new book Alfred Hitchcock Storyboards by Tony Lee Morrall, who is at Taylor’s home today. While other directors might sketch out very rough scenes to guide their films (or not care at all), Hitchcock was particular about his attention to detail, which translated to the screen almost like a Xerox. I created the picture by paying for it. In fact, Hitchcock considered storyboarding to be his main creative task and the directing process to be just a donkey’s job, sometimes claiming that it was so boring that he didn’t even bother looking through the viewfinder.
“He always insisted that anyone could direct their own movie,” Taylor laughs. “Because he had everything sorted out in his head beforehand,” he recalls of their first meeting in London in 1972, when Hitchcock was filming a river scene in the film. are doing. frenzy. “It was freezing mid-winter, and Hitch said, ‘If it gets any colder, I’ll call you.'” Of course, it’s not true that anyone could have stepped in and given instructions. Several times I saw him add or change something during filming. But that’s what he wanted to say anyway. ”
Detailed storyboards also helped Hitchcock avoid something he hated: clichés.when he made shadow of doubt, he was keen to move film noir away from the stereotype of dark alleys and lurking strangers, so his storyboards reflected a radical use of light and shadow. The sketches for Vertigo, on the other hand, show the action happening from the character’s point of view, a perspective that is very difficult to capture on camera, so Hitchcock had to create new lens effects specifically for it. there was.
His distaste for clichés was on full display in Spellbound’s dream sequence, which is central to the film’s plot. While other directors liked to rub Vaseline on their camera lenses to create a hazy night vision, Hitchcock created something as bright and clear as our most vivid dreams. I aimed for it. To accomplish that, he paid Dali his princely sum of $4,000 to design the film’s unique centerpiece.
“Hitch was very knowledgeable,” Morrall said. “He knew Dali was a big name to promote this film.” And Dali was anxious to break into Hollywood, so he jumped at the chance. When he was asked to work on Spellbound, he had already made several art films with Luis Buñuel (Un Chien Andalou and L’Age d’Or), and was involved in the production of Spellbound. I started. destino Shortly after, Disney’s animated short was finally released in 2003.
The problem is that Dali’s idea for “Spellbound” was a little different. Too Individual. Among other things, his storyboards included Bergman turning into a statue and then splitting into ants. “It was basically impossible to make into a movie,” Morrall says.
That was certainly the opinion of producer David O. Selznick, who was so concerned about cost that he considered scrapping the film entirely. Eventually, he asked Basevi to create a more practical version based on Dali’s sketches. “I think Dali played a big role in the finished sequence, but there was some distance,” Taylor says.
The artist may have been disappointed – his credits ended up reading “Dream Sequences Based on Salvador Dali Designs” – but the finished film certainly owes much to Hitchcock for the dazzling sequences. fulfilled the vision.
Taylor was living and teaching in Los Angeles when her friendship with Hitchcock began. In fact, Hitchcock’s personal assistant Peggy Robertson once told Taylor that Hitchcock considered him like the son he never had. “I was of the right age and I was British,” Taylor says. “As Cary Grant once told me, at least I knew what Licorice Allsorts was!”
Taylor recalls the pranks that earned Hitchcock a reputation for pulling pranks. For example, when Hitchcock brought a live horse into his actor friend Gerard du Maurier’s dressing room. “They were more fantastical than cruel,” he says. I’m not sure you could say that about the time Hitchcock handcuffed one of his film technicians overnight at his studio, secretly giving him a laxative before leaving for the night. “I don’t think it’s a very good joke. He did something terrible in the middle of the night,” Taylor admits. “But when I talked to the people who worked on that movie, they said they didn’t like the character and it was the right thing for them to do.”
Of course, Hitchcock had a reputation for having a darker side than just pranks. Tippi Hedren claimed in his 2016 memoir that she was sexually assaulted by the director while making The Birds and Marnie.
According to Taylor, Hitchcock described himself as “the shyest, most timid man in the world,” the kind of person who hid and ate dinner with his family in a special restaurant enclave. He also had a cynical view of friendship, once jokingly telling Taylor that she only had two friends. ” Almost all of Hitchcock’s intimate relationships were with women, Taylor says, “so I think I had an advantage there.”
One thing he is adamant about is that Hitchcock is very much a one-off. According to him, the director typically shot one scene multiple times in long shots, close-ups, and medium close-ups, so producers had a variety of editing options. However, Hitchcock hated people who interfered with his films. Perhaps that’s another reason why he relied so heavily on storyboards. It meant he could capture exactly what he wanted and nothing more. That way, even a meddlesome producer like Selznick would have a hard time interfering too much with the finished result.
“He always found a way to take full control of his movies,” Taylor says. “He wasn’t a fool, he was Hitchcock.”
