Suspense With a Camera
Page 20
Age 60: Academy Award-nominated Best Director, Psycho
Age 73: Golden Globe-nominated Best Director, Frenzy
Age 76: Directed last film, Family Plot
Age 80: Knighted by Queen Elizabeth II
Death: April 29, 1980, of kidney failure
FILM PERIODS
Since his career spanned several decades it’s fairly easy to demarcate his important creative periods. He directed fifty-two feature films, twenty TV episodes, and one documentary.
The “Hitchcock 9” (1926–1929)—His nine silent films.
British Talkies (1929–1939)—His British sound films. This is where he begins to home in on the suspense genre.
B&W Hollywood Period (1940–1948)—His classic Hollywood movies, most with David O. Selznick.
The Golden Period (1948–1960)—His first color films. His busiest period and full of his best works.
The “Hitch 20” TV Episodes (1955–1962)—the twenty largely forgotten gems of TV suspense that he directed.
Post-Psycho Period (1963–1976)—After peaking in popularity with his 1960 film Psycho, he moved away from his brand of cartoonish violence and into more stark realism.
FURTHER READING
IMDB.com
Kapsis, Robert 1992. Hitchcock: The Making of a Reputation, University of Chicago Press, Chicago.
McGilligan, Patrick 2003. Alfred Hitchcock: A Life in Darkness and Light, Harper Collins, New York.
TCM.com, Turner Classic Movies website.
Wt-henley.com, WT Henley website.
APPENDIX II
THE “HITCH 20”
WHILE HE DIRECTED more than fifty feature films, Alfred Hitchcock also directed twenty episodes of television, which we affectionately refer to as the “Hitch 20.” Most are available on DVD.
Revenge (1955), Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Season 1, Episode 1—A housewife is attacked by an intruder and suffers paranoia, leading to the husband’s accidental revenge on a random person.
Breakdown (1955), Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Season 1, Episode 7—A ruthless businessman gets into a car accident and is paralyzed. The only way to alert the paramedics that he’s still alive is by tapping his finger.
The Case of Mr. Pelham (1955), Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Season 1, Episode 10—A nervous man believes a look-alike is slowly taking over his identity, prompting him to change his own life to such a degree that nobody believes he’s the real Mr. Pelham.
Back for Christmas (1956), Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Season 1, Episode 23—A man murders his wife and buries her in the basement. He goes on vacation and all is great until he gets the bill for his wife’s Christmas present—excavation for the basement wine cellar he always wanted.
Wet Saturday (1956), Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Season 2, Episode 1—A rich family tries to cover up a murder by their crazy daughter, except she has a penchant for spilling the beans.
Mr. Blanchard’s Secret (1956), Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Season 2, Episode 13—A housewife grows paranoid about a missing neighbor and snoops around where she shouldn’t.
One More Mile to Go (1957), Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Season 2, Episode 28—A man hides his wife’s body in the trunk and goes for a drive, interrupted by the nicest policeman ever.
The Perfect Crime (1957), Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Season 3, Episode 3—A retired detective must kill to cover up the worst mistake of his career.
Four O’Clock (1957), Suspicion, Episode 1—a man gets tied up in the basement with a bomb and hopes for rescue.
Lamb to the Slaughter (1958), Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Season 3, Episode 28—A housewife kills her husband with a frozen leg of lamb, and then cooks it for the hungry detectives’ dinner.
Dip in the Pool (1958), Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Season 3, Episode 35—A man on a cruise is losing his bet on the ship’s travel time and jumps overboard to win the bet. Unfortunately, nobody notices that he jumped.
Poison (1958), Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Season 4, Episode 1—A man is scared of a poisonous snake in his bed, and his friend doesn’t believe it’s there.
Banquo’s Chair (1959), Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Season 4, Episode 29—To solve an old case, a retired detective stages a ghost haunting to elicit the suspect’s confession. It doesn’t go as planned.
Arthur (1959), Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Season 5, Episode 1—A chicken farmer kills his ex-wife and hides the crime from the police by grinding the body into chicken feed.
The Crystal Trench (1959), Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Season 5, Episode 2—A man slips in the Alps and is buried alive in a glacier. His wife waits forty years to see his preserved body emerge.
Incident at a Corner (1960), Ford Startime—A crossing guard is accused of being a danger to children and loses his job with no evidence. He must uncover the truth.
Mrs. Bixby and the Colonel’s Coat (1960), Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Season 6, Episode 1—A woman is cheating on her husband and receives a mink coat from her lover. She must find a way to convince her husband it wasn’t a gift.
The Horseplayer (1961), Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Season 6, Episode 22—A priest must raise money to fix his church’s leaky roof and falls for a gambling addict’s scheme to win the money at a horse race.
Bang! You’re Dead (1961), Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Season 7, Episode 2—A little kid finds his uncle’s revolver, partially loads it with bullets, and plays with it like a toy in public.
I Saw the Whole Thing (1962), The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, Season 1, Episode 4—A man is wrongly accused of causing a fatal motorcycle accident.
In 2014 I began producing a companion series to Hitchcock’s twenty TV works on YouTube, Hitch20, with a group of filmmakers and Hitchcock scholars. Together we examine the film techniques in each of Hitchcock’s twenty television episodes. We now have nearly four hours of analysis, theories, and insights.
Included in the series is John P. Hess (FilmmakerIQ), William C. Martell (screenwriter for HBO/Showtime), Ron Dawson (Radio Film School), Adam Roche (Secret History of Hollywood), Hitchcock scholar Susan Smith, and many others.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
JEFFREY MICHAEL BAYS has become known as a Hitchcock whisperer, teaching suspense classes at ScriptFest, The Writer’s Store, Palm Springs ShortFest, Faultline Film Festival, and the Buffalo-Niagara Film Festival, among others. He is a contributor to Movie-Maker Magazine, No Film School, and Peter D. Marshall’s ezine, Director’s Chair. Bays is producer of the docu-series Hitch20, a four-hour examination of Hitchcock’s twenty works of television, and also directed the Hitchcock homage Offing David in 2008. He completed a Master of Arts in Cinema from La Trobe University in 2012, and went on to write Between the Scenes, the first book ever written about scene transitions. Jeffrey produced the award-winning Not from Space (2003) on XM Satellite Radio, which earned the prestigious Mark Time Award and the Communicator Award of Excellence.
©2014 Courtesy of Spike Suradi
To contact the author, email: info@borgus.com or go to: www.borgus.com
BETWEEN THE SCENES
WHAT EVERY FILM DIRECTOR, WRITER, AND EDITOR SHOULD KNOW ABOUT SCENE TRANSITIONS
JEFFREY MICHAEL BAYS
Between the Scenes delivers a fresh approach to film directing, screenwriting, and editing. Once you’ve planned out your scenes, this book steps in by shifting your focus to how your individual sequences and scenes connect to each other. This is an almost secret aspect of filmmaking, capable of evoking powerful emotions in your audience, that you need to understand and employ in your films.
“Between the Scenes is the ‘missing link’ of film directing books! Jeffrey takes us on a well researched journey to prove why scene transitions are the best kept secret of storytelling — because they help us connect our stories emotionally with the audience. If you want to be a better filmmaker, this book is a MUST read!”
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— Peter D. Marshall, director, film directing coach
“As the first book to deal solely with the art of cinematic transitions, Between the Scenes encourages first-time filmmakers to think beyond scenes on a page to the cinematic conventions that bind them together.”
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“Between the Scenes breaks down how and why transitions are so important to storytelling and shows how they can be used to take a film to the next level.”
—Theresa Villeneuve, Professor of Film, Citrus College
JEFFREY MICHAEL BAYS is the director of the Australian suspense movie, Offing David, and a film scholar with an MA in Cinema Studies from La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia. He is also the writer and producer of XM Satellite Radio’s award-winning drama Not From Space (2003), recently listed by Time Out magazine as among the top five most essential radio plays of all time. He is also author of How to Turn Your Boring Movie into a Hitchcock Thriller, and offers a Hitchcockian script consulting service.
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LAURIE SCHEER is a former vice president of programming for WE: Women’s Entertainment. She has worked in development and as a producer for ABC, Viacom, Showtime, and AMC-Cablevision, and has been an instructor at numerous universities across the U.S., including UCLA and Yale. She is part of the faculty at UW-Madison’s Continuing Studies Writing Department and the Director of their annual Writers’ Institute.
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