(Man) Back in the 30s, | used to go to the movies.
And after trial and error of going to various theatres,
| discovered that there were certain writers,
certain directors, certain producers
who always gave you a good product in the theatre.
And Hitchcock was on my list.
So | was conscious of Hitch very early.
Hitchcock combined humour and suspense.
And | have a feeling
that that's why Hitchcock selected me to do Rear Window.
Because he had listened to my radio plays
which | did prior to writing movies.
And a lot of them were tongue-in-cheek detective stories,
The Adventures Of Sam Spade,
in which we had a mixture of humour and suspense.
And when | went to do Rear Window,
it was appropriate that 1 used humour and natural
because | had been doing it for a long time.
(Stewart) Since when do flowers grow shorter in two weeks?
- There's something buried there. - Mrs Thorwald.
You haven't spent much time around cemeteries, have you?
Mr Thorwald could scarcely put his wife's body
in a plot of ground about one foot square.
Unless, of course, he put her in standing on end.
And then he wouldn't need a knife and saw.
No, my idea is she's scattered all over town.
- A leg in the East River - - Oh, Stella, please.
(Hayes) Hitchcock's agents sent me the story, Rear Window,
And | was to read it and meet Hitch for dinner on Friday.
1 got it on Monday, late, | would say.
And, you know, [| was apprehensive about meeting Hitch,
because he was the great Alfred Hitchcock
and | didn't know what in the world he was going to ask me at this dinner.
And so | virtually memorised the story of Rear Window , page by page.
| think it was a 35-page short story in a small book.
And | went to dinner with him
which was awash with wine and liguor,
Martinis and brandy and everything else.
And food - fish, steak, hors d'oeuvres.
Hitch prefaced the dinner by asking me if I'd like a Martini
and I said, "Well, I guess so.”
And he said, Il like a man who drinks.”
So | figured if that's what Hitch liked, that's what | was gonna do.
And the incredible thing was,
the whole dinner, he never mentioned Rear Window once.
He never brought it up.
He asked me instead if | was familiar with his pictures,
and to give him one in particular with which I was familiar.
So I mentioned Shadow Of A Doubt,
not knowing that Hitch had always regarded it as his favourite picture.
I had been in the army and temporarily | would handle theatre projects
And they needed a projectionist when | went in.
Temporarily , | acted as a projectionist ,
and the only film we had was Shadow Of A Doubt.
And | showed it three times a day for 30 days.
I gather | saw it more times than Hitch did.
So when he said, "Name a picture,” 1 named Shadow Of A Doubt
And the whole dinner was taken up with Shadow Of A Doubt,
wherein | told him the mistakes | thought he had made in it.
You know, that was the wine and the Martinis.
And of course it almost got out of hand.
But we had a wonderful dinner.
| volunteered to drive him home.
And, shrewdly, he decided to take a taxi.
And | went home to my house in Encino and told my wife,
"| had a great dinner, but I'll never work for Hitchcock again.
| might never work for anybody.”
Monday, the phone rang, the following Monday.
It was a Friday when we had dinner
and | still had a hangover.
| jumped three feet in the air.
And it was Hitch's agents,
Arthur Park and George Chasen and Herman Citron, who said,
"Hitch loved you.
You start tomorrow.”
When | went to work for Alfred Hitchcock, 1 didn't know what to expect.
No one had told me how he worked or what his sentiments were on anything.
The only thing | knew about him was what | read in the press.
And | found out from my standpoint, from a writer's standpoint,
he was an absolute delight.
Hitch was filming Dial M For Murder.
And | was told to meet him on the set at Warner Bros.
And | sat down next to him in his director's chair
while he was directing a scene with Grace Kelly.
And he said to me, "What do you know about Grace Kelly?”
| said, "Very little."
He said, "Well, | want you to spend some time with her and get to know her,
because I'm gonna use her as the girl in the picture.”
And there wasn't any in the short story.
So | spent some time with her, a week and a half or so,
and got to know her and her style and liked it very much,
and thought it would be pleasant to write for.
So | went back to my house in Encino and wrote a treatment.
| had given him some inkling of the ideas | had.
But he was so busy with Dial M, he hadn't worked it out yet.
He hadn't worked out Rear Window yet.
And | wrote a treatment, about 35 pages double-spaced, | think,
And | brought it to him and he liked it very much.
He sent it to Paramount,
who had said if he could get a good screenplay out of Rear Window,
they would make a commitment to the project.
Well, they committed on the treatment.
And he sent it to Jimmy Stewart who committed on the treatment.
So Hitch said, "Go back home and write the first draft of the screenplay.”
Now, he made some suggestions on the treatment.
| can't recall them all.
But | went home, and | wrote the whole first treatment by myself.
Now, that's why | say it was a delight to work with Hitchcock,
simply because he let me alone.
He unleashed me and let me work without hovering over me.
And nothing is better for a writer.
Well, anyway, 1 finished the first draft. Hitch liked it.
He made some suggestions and | went home and wrote the second draft .
The criticisms of the first draft were mostly cutting,
because | have the tendency to write long.
I put all the fulsome emotion | can into a first draft script.
And then we sat down with the second draft
and broke the script up into actual shots.
| had two to three hundred numbered scenes.
When Hitch and | finished, we had 600.
He would break it up
and sketch the camera angle from his director's viewpoint,
which was Hitchcock's contribution to the pictures on which I worked with him.
Hitch thought intensely about each scene.
On the way to the studio, he'd pick one scene and think about it all the way,
on how many different ways he could do it.
And mechanically he had such an expertise with suspense.
He inserted it where you least suspected it was going to be.
(Woman Screams, Glass Breaks)
And that's, of course, what made the films good.
- | wish | could be creative. - Aw, sweetie, you are.
You have a great talent for creating difficult situations.
- | do? - Sure.
When | spent the week and a half or so with Grace Kelly,
1 discovered that she was full of good humour.
She was bright. She was snappy.
She had all the characteristics
of being able to be an actress.
But in Dial M For Murder,
| thought she was rather stiff and cool,
but she was new to the business.
And she acted like a...
a student or so, learning her craft.
And Hitch alluded to that.
He said, "She's stiff and we have to...
You have to open her up somehow.
"l don't know how you're gonna do it.
But if you create a character, it's got to have life to it”
So | gave her a lot of sprightly life and enjoyed doing it,
and she enjoyed playing it.
Oh!
What would you think of starting off with dinner at '21'?
You have perhaps an ambulance downstairs?
Better than that, '21'.
(Hayes) | saw her naturally, uninhibited at home,
and 1 gave her the kind of dialogue and things
that | hoped would make it easy for her to let this creative energy out.
| was all morning in a sales meeting.
Then | had to dash to the Waldorf for a quick drink with Madam Dufrene
who's just over from Paris with some spy reports.
Grace Kelly's performance in Rear Window was a reflection of two things:
one, of her natural temperament and her natural style,
and what | borrowed from my wife,
on whom | based the Grace Kelly character.
My wife had been a professional model and | knew the world and the jargon.
And then | added my own humour.
As a matter of fact, there were some things in the film
that my wife, on seeing the preview, would turn to me and say,
"Now, where do you suppose that came from?”
Tell me, what was Mrs Hayward wearing?
Oh, she looked wonderfully cool.
She had on the most divine Italian hand-print -
- Italian, imagine that. - Oh, you.
It was fun to write for Grace Kelly, fun to write for Jimmy Stewart.
I had worked with him in a prior film called Thunder Bay.
I got to know him and he was great to write for.
So the two of them made my task immensely easier.
In Rear Window, it was the audience
watching Jimmy Stewart watch other people.
But that was the essence of the story.
Cornell Woolrich, the original author, lived in an apartment,
and there were days on end when he was bored.
But he searched his surroundings for clues of stories,
and that's how he came up with it.
Now, we didn't have a lot of action,
being that, after all, a man's in a cast
sitting in his wheelchair looking out the window.
But you just couldn't keep him
looking at the killer all the time with his binoculars
and expect the film to develop, to go this way or that way.
So we used the people in the apartments for relief.
How's your wife?
Oh, she's fine.
And then we'd come back to the story for action, and it stretched out the film,
and it gave it several aspects that were interesting.
Now, a couple of the stories in the apartments had effects on our story,
the story with the dog and one thing and another.
So they were created because you just could not sustain our story
without going to other things.
And you couldn't just black out all the apartments around.
You're naturally attracted to movement here, or colour there,
or a puppy barking or something.
So we blended it all together.
And, | might say, that was a great part of Hitch's contribution,
the development of those sidebar stories.
Oh, Lisa!
We began to realise what a good picture we'd made
as we watched the dailies and the first cut and everything.
And after the picture came out,
the reviews were uniformly laudatory
and we got a lot of attention.
It was an instance in film making where everything seemed to work right.
just well, with a minimum of conflict and a wonderful blending of talent.