Hitch (47 page)

This is the whole of one sequence, in fact, except for a cut-in shot of a guide light flashing in the wood to go in the middle of the first shot of Karen Black. (‘Will there be enough time for it?' asks the cameraman of the way Hitch has staged the shot. ‘Oh yes,' says Hitch. ‘We don't need to leave time for it. A couple of frames will be more than enough to insert the cutaway.') The helicopter is a mock-up of the front half, placed against an incredibly tiny black screen; the wood is pocket-sized, like something out of
The Thirty-Nine Steps
. When the pilot gets out of the helicopter on the far side from the camera and walks around the front of it, there are only about six inches of the screen to spare behind him. I comment on this to Hitch, who seems very pleased—the rather complicated action of Karen Black getting out of the helicopter, after several rehearsals, has been captured on the first take, and the pilot's subsequent movement has run to two takes, the second modifying slightly the direction in which he looks and the speed of his reactions to what he sees and hears. ‘Remember', says Hitch, ‘all that matters, all that exists for the audience, is what is on the screen. It doesn't matter if the set extends no more than six inches beyond what the camera records—it could as well be six miles for all the effect it would have on the audience. The whole art is knowing what matters in each shot, what the point you are selling is.'

The wood too is just a few tree-shapes looming out of the darkness, so what point would there be in having any more on the stage than just that? The scene that takes place there is as clearly laid out in the script as the rest, but here Hitch has to explain a little further to his camera crew. ‘What are we selling in this shot? That there is a
body there, and that he's not dead. That's all we want to show, but it has to be absolutely clear.' The shots envisaged in the script are done just as planned, up to the zoom into a tight close-up, and then Hitch decides to add a shot of Adamson and Fran turning and walking off into the shadows; in the script that is covered by the pilot's reaction shot. The shot is set up instantly and done in one take, which wraps up shooting for that day an hour or so ahead of schedule.

The following week, in San Francisco, things are rather different. On location the same cloistered conditions can hardly apply. Grace Cathedral, seat of the Episcopalian Bishop of San Francisco, is on Nob Hill, right by the Fremont and Mark Hopkins hotels. It is, despite what should be its dominating position, rather tucked away among high-rises: the building itself, an elaborate essay in vaguely French Gothic, is curious in being built entirely in reinforced concrete, and the grey plaster of a curving stair brought from the studio to represent the approach to the pulpit blends alarmingly well with the concrete column it twines around, so that it comes as quite a shock to find it ending in thin air out of view of the camera. The shooting mostly takes place in one corner, but it is not possible, or perhaps no one has wanted, to rope it all off. People can wander in and out as they wish provided they stay out of camera range, though since as yet no one seems to know that Hitch is shooting there we have few purposeful visitors. Also, there are more relatively unruly elements, in the shape of a couple of hundred extras in the congregation as well as the cathedral choir.

The extras, as is the way with extras, want to act, to make the most of their few seconds' screen time with elaborate reactions, and dare to attempt discussion of motivation with the master. But if he was was not going to take that from Paul Newman he is certainly not going to take it from extras. At one point, when the abduction of the Bishop is actually taking place, some extras at the back ask him to describe what is happening so that they will know how to react. ‘Can you see what's happening?' No. ‘Then there you are. You can't see what's happening, you just have the vague idea that something is. You don't have to react beyond a slight show of curiosity.' All the same, they want to, relishing each split second of screen time and trying to cram as much reaction as possible into it. Hitch remains calm and kindly, except that at one point he turns witheringly on one chattering unfortunate: ‘The gentleman at the end of the front
row is having a very animated conversation, all the time, with his—with the woman he's living with. Now let's try and pay some attention to the movement of the picture!' The shot finally in the can (three or four takes), he walks away, shakes his head, grins and says, ‘That's what you would call directing idiots.'

The abduction itself is shown—again exactly as broken down in the script—by not being shown. Fran, heavily disguised as an old lady, hobbles forward and appears to fall at the Bishop's feet; he leans over her; Adamson dressed as a verger hurries forward to help, and the rest is done in a series of instantaneous flashes: Adamson's hand with a hypodermic, close-up of the Bishop's face as he passes out, close-up of Fran's head passing the camera as she leaps up, close-ups of Fran's and Adamson's hands going under the Bishop's arms as they prepare to haul him away, a couple of reaction shots from choir and congregation, a shot of Fran and Adamson dragging the Bishop to his feet, more reaction shots, and a brief flash of the kidnappers vanishing through the side door. Perfect silent technique, in fact, built on a very fast montage of detached, in themselves almost static shots. In the event Hitch simplified the script version still further: the shots of the hands going under the Bishop's arms are eliminated, and so, particularly, is that from the congregation's point of view of the two of them pulling the Bishop to his feet. On the spur of the moment he adds one more shot, of Karen Black's feet scrabbling on the floor as she struggles to rise, a little detail which catches his attention and amuses him while actually shooting. And that is all. ‘The whole point is that it happens in a flash, before anyone has a chance to see what is going on. So that is the position I want the audience in too.' Even though these shots will flash past in seconds, he still pays immense attention to getting them absolutely right, explaining carefully to the participants exactly what has to be clear from each one. As we leave at the end of the day he suddenly gets involved in explaining precisely where in the dummy arm of the Bishop the needle should enter—‘It may not look important, but get it a little off and dozens of doctors will be writing in at once to complain. In this business you have to know a little of everything!'

The first day in San Francisco it was grey and cool. But on the second there is bright sunlight, so while Hitch is at lunch they seize the opportunity to shoot Bruce Dern's arrival, seen from high up on a building across the road. The bystanders are mystified because
they can't see a camera, and a couple of ladies who look like mother and daughter ask me disappointedly, ‘Is that all—just that fellow entering the cathedral?' That fellow, I remark, happens to be the star of the film, Bruce Dern. ‘Bruce Dern,' cries the daughter, buckling visibly at the knees. ‘I'm sure he looked at me when he went in. I thought he looked familiar. Bruce Dern …!' Between takes I sit talking with Hitch and Alma, who is as usual with Hitch on location, though these days she rarely appears on studio sets. ‘I suppose it's my own background in silent cinema, where a big crew was eight or nine, but I don't find it so enjoyable with sixty people around. I always find myself visualizing the finished films from Hitch's scripts before he starts shooting, and then I like to stay away until the rough cut to see how far my visualization corresponds with the film itself.' And how far did it? ‘Pretty closely, as a rule. But there are always a few surprises.' Hitch himself was in a particularly expansive mood, and inclined to talk about all sorts of things. Some observations on the architecture around us led to his asking me about Coventry Cathedral, which he had not yet visited, and the present state of Westminster Cathedral, which he had not been into for many years (though it was the scene of one of his most famous cinematic deaths, that of Edmund Gwenn in
Foreign Correspondent
): had they finished marbling the interior yet? How did the Eric Gill Stations of the Cross look nowadays?

Shortly after the successful conclusion of the location shooting in San Francisco some unexpected troubles arose with the shooting, acknowledged in a brief press announcement dated 13 June which stated that the character portrayed by Roy Thinnes had ‘undergone a conceptual change calling for a new character concept' to be played by William Devane, an actor best known up to then for his portrayal of John F. Kennedy in the television programme
The Missiles of October
. Stories vary as to what lay behind this change, which necessitated reshooting and put the film, up to then a few days ahead of schedule, rather behind. (It was originally scheduled to take fifty-eight days to shoot, and the budget envisaged was a modest $3.5 million, of which, Hitch wryly remarked, $550,000 would go on fringe benefits of various kinds that never show on the screen.)
Variety
said Roy Thinnes was fired after differences of opinion, and elsewhere Hitch was quoted as saying, ‘When I'm directing a film,
I'm
directing a film, not some actor.' Given Hitch's absolute and abiding horror of scenes and confrontations, it seems
very unlikely that anything of the sort occurred, but rather that Hitch put into practice his often-stated principle that if he found he was not getting what he wanted from an actor his natural way of dealing with the situation would be to pay the actor off and start again with someone else. A spectator did describe to me the nearest thing to a confrontation when Roy Thinnes cornered Hitch at his regular table at Chasens' during one of his regular Thursday dinners to ask him, in some distress,
why
? Hitch, equally distressed, just kept saying, ‘But you were too nice for the role, too
nice
.'

Also, possibly, too chilly and lacking in the wildness the part requires. In this regard, William Devane proved a perfect replacement: the left side of his face, the Kennedy side, is handsome and heroic, while the right side is low-browed and sinister, so that by cunning alternation he can be shown as attractive, sexy, yet somehow uncontrolled and dangerous, Jekyll and Hyde rolled into one. With this important change the shooting continued without further mishaps, to conclude on 18 August, only thirteen days over schedule. And on the way it was given a new title: as of the beginning of July it was
Family Plot
instead of
Deceit
. Why the change? Well, said Hitch, they had made inquiries about the market effectiveness of
Deceit
and discovered that for some reason most people associated the word with marital deception and therefore expected some kind of plot involving the murder of a husband or wife.
Family Plot
(a play on words, of course, referring back to the complicated plot of family relations and to the physical plot of ground in the cemetery where Adamson is supposedly buried) was suggested by someone in the publicity department, and Hitch, if not specially enthusiastic about it, felt that at least it did not give a positively misleading impression.

After the completion of shooting there were still, naturally, many things to be done, and some decisions still to be made. The process work in such sequences as the runaway car ride had to be finished, and gave Hitch quite a lot of trouble. He had been talked, somewhat against his better judgement, into using a blue-screen matte process in which the foreground characters are visually married in the actual printing of the film with a background shot elsewhere during the post-production stage. If the match is not very exact there tends to be an ugly blue line left round the foreground action, and Hitch's last experience of the process had not been too happy. But the studio persuaded him to try it again, arguing that it had improved
out of all recognition in twelve years. However, in the event he found this overoptimistic, and wished he had stuck to tried and true back-projection instead, which would, he pointed out, have been a lot less expensive finally than the superficially cheaper blue-screen process, after the scenes concerned had been redone and redone till they finally met his exacting standards. Even when I first saw the film, on 7 January 1976, and for some weeks after, with the announced première date of 21 March getting closer and closer, the process work was not quite finished, but finally it came out right and the answer print was received on 9 March, a couple of days ahead of schedule.

More in the class of a delayed decision was the choice of composer and the writing and recording of the incidental music for the film. When Hitch was halfway through shooting the film I asked him who was going to write the music. To my surprise, considering how important the music has been in many of his films, and how exhaustively he prepares just about everything in advance, he said he had not decided: ‘Possibly Maurice Jarre—he's flexible,' and proceeded to tell me about his troubles and dissatisfaction with the score Henry Mancini wrote for
Frenzy
(which was scrapped and replaced after it had been recorded). Evidently nothing in
Family Plot
or
Frenzy
had been planned in relation to the musical score, which was slotted into a relatively small, circumscribed place in Hitch's considerations, to be supplied when the rest of the film was nearing completion, strictly to the pattern he would lay down. In the event, the choice of composer was not announced until the end of the year, when it transpired that the music would be written by John Williams, who, whether flexible or not, had the advantage of being a quick worker and composer of the score for Universal's current biggest-moneymaker-ever,
Jaws
.

Up to the very last, Hitch continued to work over details, correcting and refining. In the editing he decided to reverse the order of a couple of sequences, so that the scene in which Adamson and Fran trace Blanche and Lumley and overhear a little of their conversation now comes before the scene to which the conversation originally referred (the second meeting with Miss Rainbird) and the corresponding dialogue was blotted out and reworked. More consideration of Ernest Lehman's objections to Blanche's apparent demonstration of genuine psychic powers in the final scene led to some redubbing in the New Year when the Hitchcocks returned from their annual
pilgrimage to St. Moritz. On a shot of Adamson's back as he carries the drugged Blanche to captivity after she has tumbled to his true identity was dubbed a line referring to the diamond in the chandelier (not in the shooting script), which could just possibly explain away Blanche's final revelation—maybe she was not completely unconscious at the time or heard the remark unawares. When Ernest Lehman saw the film he was unhappy about the line, and suggested something slightly less contrived-sounding, while admitting that any line at this point was necessarily contrivance. The line was redubbed using one of Lehman's suggestions. A less involved viewpoint might well be that it was all a fuss over something quite unimportant. The final scene with its whimsical touch of mystification is really only a playful coda, not seriously affecting our understanding of what has gone before. So, if you are going to do it at all, you might as well do it shamelessly, without bothering one way or the other about putting a line in just for the record. However, the fact that even at the last moment Hitch was still modifying, still worrying, is in itself revealing.