The MacGuffin: News and Comment (01/Aug/2000)
(c) Ken Mogg (2000)
August 1
My thanks to several recent correspondents, two of whom I'll mention here. The first, though, asks to be anonymous. He has conversed with Joseph Stefano, the screenwriter of Psycho (1960), about that film and other matters. Stefano was the first writer whom Hitchcock called on to adapt Winston Graham's 1961 novel 'Marnie' for the screen, Hitchcock intending the film to be the comeback vehicle of Grace Kelly. Stefano's script followed the novel more closely than the film that was eventually made with 'Tippi' Hedren. For example, it was more of a love triangle (apparently it included a rival of Mark Rutland named Terry Holbrook); fascinatingly, Hitchcock was going to fill it with lots of three-sided objects (shades of the visual symbolism of The Lodger [1926]). About the celebrated Psycho trailer, Stefano said that this was 'improvised' on the set while he was working on another film (implying, I gather, that he and Hitchcock conceived and made the trailer very quickly). About the writing of the script of Psycho itself, Stefano claims that the association with Robert Bloch's novel ended after Stefano and Hitchcock read it and discussed it: they did not go back and refer to the novel after they started on the screenplay. (As my correspondent says, this seems consistent with what we know of Hitchcock's usual approach to his source material.) Another recent correspondent, film critic Adrian Martin, has forwarded part of an entry on director Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1946-82) contained in a 'wonderful' book edited by Judy Stone, 'Eye of the World: Conversations With International Filmmakers' (1997). It reads: 'The major influences on [Fassbinder] are [the philosopher] Schopenhauer, [the composer] Gustav Mahler and Alfred Hitchcock. "Schopenhauer says that human existence is worthless, to put it in a primitive way. Then you can make a lot out of it. To know that human existence is useless doesn't mean that one has to commit suicide. It means all the possibilities are there. You can have a wonderful time. (...) You can hear in Mahler's music all his personal problems. Hitchcock's fears and obsessions are in his films and he probably suffers under them, but in the films you can actually understand the way he lives with his wife and in his marriage."'
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