Waitin’ for the bus. Due any minute.
THORNHILL
Oh…
MAN
(idly)
Some of them crop-duster pilots get rich, if they live long enough…
THORNHILL
Then your name isn’t … Kaplan.
MAN
(glances at him)
Can’t say it is, ’cause it ain’t.
(he looks off up the highway)
Well--here she comes, right on time.
Thornhill looks off to the east, sees a Greyhound bus approaching. The man peers off at the plane again, and frowns.
MAN
That’s funny.
THORNHILL
What?
MAN
That plane’s dustin’ crops where there ain’t no crops.
Thornhill looks across at the droning plane with growing suspicion as the stranger steps out onto the highway and flags the bus to a stop. Thornhill turns toward the stranger as though to say something to him. But it is too late. The man has boarded the bus, its doors are closing and it is pulling away. Thornhill is alone again.
Almost immediately, he HEARS the PLANE ENGINE BEING GUNNED TO A HIGHER SPEED. He glances off sharply, sees the plane veering off its parallel course and heading towards him. He stand there wide-eyed, rooted to the spot. The plane roars on, a few feet off the ground. There are two men in the twin cockpits, goggled, unrecognizable, menacing. He yells out to them, but his voice is lost in the NOISE of the PLANE.
In a moment it will be upon him and decapitate him. Desperately he drops to the ground and presses himself flat as the plane zooms over him with a great noise, almost combing his hair with a landing wheel.
Thornhill scrambles to his feet, sees the plane banking and turning. He looks about wildly, sees a telephone pole and dashes for it as the plane comes at him again. He ducks behind the pole. The plane heads straight for him, veers to the right at the last moment. We HEAR two sharp CRACKS of GUNFIRE mixed with the SOUND of THE ENGINE, as two bullets slam into the pole just above Thornhill’s head.
Thornhill reacts to this new peril, sees the plane banking for another run at him. A car is speeding along the highway from the west. Thornhill dashes out onto the road, tries to flag the car down but the driver ignores him and races by, leaving him exposed and vulnerable as the plane roars away and another series of SHOTS are HEARD and bullets rake the ground that he has just occupied.
He gets to his feet, looks about, sees a cornfield about fifty yards from the highway, glances up at the plane making its turn, and decides to make a dash for the cover of the tall-growing corn.
SHOOTING DOWN FROM A HELICOPTER about one hundred feet above the ground, we SEE Thornhill running toward the cornfield and the plane in pursuit.
SHOOTING FROM WITHIN THE CORNFIELD, we SEE Thornhill come crashing in, scuttling to the right and lying flat and motionless as we HEAR THE PLANE ZOOM OVER HIM WITH A BURST OF GUNFIRE and bullets rip into the corn, but at a safe distance from Thornhill. He raises his head cautiously, gasping for breath, as he HEARS THE PLANE MOVE OFF AND INTO ITS TURN.
SHOOTING DOWN FROM THE HELICOPTER, we SEE the plane leveling off and starting a run over the cornfield, which betrays no sign of the hidden Thornhill. Skimming over the top of the cornstalks, the plane gives forth no burst of gunfire now. Instead, it lets loose thick clouds of poisonous dust which settle down into the corn.
WITHIN THE CORNFIELD, Thornhill, still lying flat, begins to gasp and choke as the poisonous dust envelops him. Tears stream from his eyes but he does not dare move as he HEARS THE PLANE COMING OVER THE FIELD AGAIN. When the plane zooms by and another cloud of dust hits him, he jumps to his feet and crashes out into the open, half blinded and gasping for breath. Far off down the highway to the right, he SEES a huge Diesel gasoline-tanker approaching.
SHOOTING FROM THE HELICOPTER, we SEE Thornhill dashing for the highway, the plane leveling off for another run at him, and the Diesel tanker speeding closer.
SHOOTING ACROSS THE HIGHWAY, we SEE Thornhill running and stumbling TOWARDS CAMERA, the plane closing in behind him, and the Diesel tanker approaching from the left. He dashes out into the middle of the highway and waves his arms wildly.
The Diesel tanker THUNDERS down the highway towards Thornhill, KLAXON BLASTING impatiently.
The plane speeds relentlessly toward Thornhill from the field bordering the highway.
Thornhill stands alone and helpless in the middle of the highway, waving his arms. The plane draws closer. The tanker is almost upon him. It isn’t going to stop. He can HEAR THE KLAXON BLASTING him out of the way. There is nothing he can do. The plane has caught up with him. The tanker won’t stop. It’s got to stop. He hurls himself to the pavement directly in its path. There is a SCREAM OF BRAKES and SKIDDING TIRES, THE ROAR OF THE PLANE ENGINE and then a tremendous BOOM as the Diesel truck grinds to a stop inches from Thornhill’s body just as the plane, hopelessly committed and caught unprepared by the sudden stop, slams into the traveling gasoline tanker and plane and gasoline explode into a great sheet of flame.
In the next few moments, all is confusion. Thornhill, unhurt, rolls out from under the wheels of the Diesel truck. The drivers clamber out of the front seat and drop to the highway. Black clouds of smoke billow up from the funeral pyre of the plane and its cremated occupants. We recognize the flaming body of one of the men in the plane. It is Licht, one of Thornhill’s original abductors. An elderly open pickup truck with a secondhand refrigerator standing in it, which has been approaching from the east, pulls up at the side of the road. Its driver, a farmer, jumps out and hurries toward the wreckage.
FARMER
What happened?
The Diesel truck drivers are too dazed to answer. Flames and smoke drive them all back. Thornhill, unnoticed, heads toward the unoccupied pickup truck. Another car comes up from the west, stops, and its driver runs toward the other men. They stare, transfixed at the holocaust. Suddenly, from behind them, they HEAR the PICKUP TRUCK’S MOTOR STARTING. The farmer who owns the truck turns, and is startled to see his truck being driven away by an utter stranger.
FARMER
Hey!
He runs after the truck. But the stranger--who is Thornhill--steps harder on the accelerator and speeds off in the direction of Chicago.
I suppose, along with the shower scene from Psycho, this is the most famous sequence Hitchcock ever shot. When you see the movie, it all seems so seamless it feels like the creation of it must have been pretty much the same way.
But no.
Lehman and Hitchcock knew each other a little, wanted to work together. MGM had just bought their first property for Hitchcock, a Hammond Innes best-seller, The Wreck of the Mary Deare. Briefly, the plot concerned a ship floating in the English Channel with nobody aboard, followed by a huge naval inquiry.
For weeks, Lehman would drive to Hitchcock’s house on Bellagio Road in L.A. and they would spend the day talking. Which was when Lehman noticed that every time he brought the conversation around to The Wreck of the Mary Deare, Hitchcock would look anxious and change the subject.
Soon it was obvious neither of them wanted to do it, but they liked the time they spent together, so, without telling MGM, they decided to find something else they wanted to do together. Hitchcock had a lot of stuff he wanted to shoot, and he would spitball them to Lehman.
One of them was the longest dolly shot in history, without any cuts, which would take place at a Detroit auto factory and you would start at the beginning of the assembly line and slowly watch the car being put together and when the car is completed and ready to be driven off the assembly line there is a dead body inside.
Lehman in those days was very tough and famous for leaving projects as soon as he could. He was constantly quitting (he quit North by Northwest twice), only to be brought back soon after.
The car shot does me no good, he said.
Another Hitchcock moment: we are in Banff, Lake Louise, a religious group having its a
nnual spiritual retreat—and a twelve-year-old girl takes a gun out of her baby carriage and shoots someone.
Does me no good, Lehman said.
Okay—this: in Alaska, two men who hate each other, sworn enemies, walk toward each other across a frozen lake where a hole has been cut. They walk slowly, closer and closer, and when they get close, they fall into each other’s arms and hug.
Wonderful bits, sure, but no more than that.
One day Hitchcock says, “I’ve always wanted to do a chase across the face of Mount Rushmore.”
That was the start of everything.
Hitchcock had also always wanted to do a sequence at the United Nations where somebody’s addressing the General Assembly and he stops and says, “I will not continue until the delegate from Peru wakes up.” The page taps the delegate from Peru on the shoulder—and he’s dead.
By now, Hitchcock has to leave to shoot Vertigo—for me, the most overrated movie of all time—but Lehman is aware that whatever the story is, it’s moving in a northerly direction.
As well as being famously pessimistic, Lehman is also not the fastest writer around. He constantly criticizes himself, ditches stuff, but eventually sixty pages are shipped off to Hitchcock, who sends Lehman a rave four-page handwritten letter of approval, and they meet again.
With both Cary Grant and Jimmy Stewart anxious to come aboard.
(Can you imagine what that must have been like—two of the very greatest stars ever panting to join the team. Personally, I cannot. I don’t believe we have stars like that anymore. Probably we know too much about them now. Anyway, I haven’t spotted a lot of them in the movies I’ve seen lately.)
Lehman is writing this with no knowledge of what comes next but he’s got Cary Grant on the train where he meets Eva Marie Saint. He and Hitchcock are spitballing again.
Hitchcock muses: Do you know what I’ve always wanted to shoot?
What?
I always wanted to shoot a scene where a man is alone. Totally alone. No matter where you shoot, all 360 degrees, nothing.
Lehman listens.
And then the villains try and kill him.
How? asks Lehman.
With a tornado, Hitchcock says then.
And Lehman is dying, he’s got half a sensational script, and he says, Hitch, how do they get a tornado to kill him at that moment?
Hitchcock grumbles, goes silent.
Lehman too.
More silence.
They were used to it. They would sit through these incredibly long silences, staring at the walls.
Then Lehman says these words: maybe a plane. A crop-duster plane.
And suddenly they were both jabbering away, and then they were both acting out the scene, and then Lehman went home and wrote the scene faster than he ever wrote anything before.
Remember that—Lehman wrote it. It is an Ernie Lehman scene, filmed exactly as he wrote it. Hitchcock shot it—and not that well. Look at the shot when the plane hits the truck. Awful.
Lehman gets insufficient credit for it now and, I suspect, will get less in the future. It feels like such a great Hitchcock scene. And it is. And that is a great tribute to Lehman.
We all have limitations. We all have confidence with stuff that’s in our wheelhouse. When I work with a director for the first time, here’s what I do: look at every movie he’s ever made. So I can have a sense of what he does well, where he is helpless. And I will never willingly write a scene I know he can’t shoot.
Hitchcock, elevated to God these days (though I have my doubts), was terrific with funny/scary. He could deal with a few people in a room. Period. But you could not give him size.
David Lean, yes, you could give him size. But I doubt Lean would have been happy shooting North by Northwest. I think he would have found it uninteresting. As Hitchcock might have snoozed through Bolt’s great script for Lawrence.
Did Lehman “create” the crop-dusting scene? Yeah, for the most part. He wrote the shit out of it. He handed what you read to Hitchcock. And the next time some failed professor’s learned book comes out detailing Hitchcock’s Symbolic Use of Catholicism in the Crop-Dusting Scene, of course don’t buy it. But you might check the index. I’ll bet Ernie Lehman’s name isn’t there.
Action-adventure and comedy are brutal to make work. And the easiest to make badly. As the saying goes, “Dying is easy, comedy is hard,” but action-adventure runs right alongside.
I think because you are placing the character into situations where mere mortals never tread. And that can become ludicrous so easily. Great ones, like Errol Flynn as Robin Hood or North by Northwest, are diamond-rare.
These days, we are happy (I am, anyway) with two-thirds of a terrific action-adventure flick. The Fugitive—saw it twice, but please forget the last part, when you’re at the doctor’s convention. Men in Black—loved it, even if Act III was in very deep shit indeed. Critics rarely honor these two genres. “Oh,” they might say, “The Fugitive will certainly pass a pleasant evening for you.” But that’s as far as they go.
I think if someone could figure out a way to make a medicinal action-adventure flick, one the critics could say was “important,” they would own the world.
One of the amazing things about the crop-dusting scene is that it ran eight minutes on film. Not possible today. I once read a quote from David Lean who had just been shown a fresh print of Lawrence of Arabia and was asked what he thought. Lean said he was surprised at how brave he was, holding so many shots for so long.
If you’ve seen that greatest of epics, you know immediately what he means. And no one would shoot that way today.
I think, because of MTV.
I think movies changed—not the storytelling but the manner of it—not with the coming of MTV but with the talent in the room at the time.
Meaning this—if MTV had come along in the thirties, when the great music stars could actually, gasp, perform, what you would have seen was Fred Astaire doing, say, “Dancing in the Dark,” and it might have been done in one take, or more likely, a few. And you would have seen both his head and his feet in the same shot, something he insisted on as often as possible.
Well, what the fuck can you do with Elton John? Fat and funny-looking and totally without performing instinct. Here’s what you do—you hide him.
How?
By cutting so fast no one will realize he is a studio creation. By roaring in for close-ups of glasses, or feet working the pedals, of his face mouthing words, or his hands on the keyboard, or dancing girls behind him, or God knows what—
—but the relentlessness of the cutting pattern keeps us from seeing that John, a wonderful piano player, and a decent enough singer, can’t move.
Michael Jackson can move, but I’m not sure for how long, because what you see are snippets of him in action, five seconds here, fifteen there. And then all the filler shots to hide the star.
MTV was meant clearly for teens, and teens go to the movies, and what happened was this: they got bored with longer shots, no matter how logical or helpful they may have been.
Movies today are too often a blizzard of cuts—just another reason why the ’90s are the worst decade. Sad, because I think there are occasions when fast cutting is terrific. But there are many many other occasions when pre-MTV styling would help the story much more.
And I think the crop-dusting scene, if you could write something as exciting and see it up there today, would still knock your socks off.
And look all fresh and shining and young and original. And thrill us all anew …
* * *
Adaptations
When I am offered an adaptation, the initial two questions are always the same. And I take them seriously because we are talking about six of the ever-declining number of months I have left. It will take me that long from the time I say yes till the first draft is done.
The writing itself takes maybe a month.
The thinking, figuring out the story, will take twice that (research fits into this
period).
The remaining half is simply a matter of building up my confidence.
This is always the first and foremost question:
Do I love it?
Followed hard upon by this:
Can I make it play?
I have turned down three great hits, and I would make the same decisions today, even though I liked the resulting movies a lot.
The Godfather, for moral reasons. (Only time ever for that.) This is still mystifying to me. The reason I turned it down was I did not want to glorify the Mafia. Even though Butch glorifies outlaws, I know. I loved the book so—it’s still the great novel read for me of the last few decades (Tommy Thompson’s Blood and Money is of the same quality in nonfiction). I wanted to do the Puzo. In the end, could not. The movie sure did okay without me.
The Graduate, because I just didn’t get the book.
Superman, I was most anxious to do.
I was a comic-book nut when I was a kid, and a huge collector. This was during the Golden Age, 1937–43. I mean, I had the first Superman, the first Batman, the first Robin the Boy Wonder, the first Captain Marvel. No way of remembering how many, hundreds, obviously. I remember, growing up, I had a washing machine container in my bedroom and it was filled with my comics.
Mint condition, you understand.
I still see the me of then, this miserable fucked-up kid, and when schoolwork was done, I would go to my treasure trove and kneel down and go through and take my time deciding which glorious adventure land did I want to visit then. I needed places to get to just to get through those years. Books? Sure, I was a compulsive reader. Movies? Absolutely, when I was allowed to walk up to the Alcyon. But these adventures were in my room with me.
Jesus Christ, I still know what “Shazam” stands for.
Superman was to be one of those European money deals. They had the rights, we talked. I had no idea which story I would tell from so many. The Krypton stuff, the early years, first day on the job—who knew? But I knew I could make it work. A villain would be a problem, sure, I mean a legitimate one, Supe being all-powerful. But lead me to it.
Which Lie Did I Tell? Page 18
