ALFRED HITCHCOCK

"Although one aspect of Alfred Hitchcock's rhetoric drastically privileged the image over the word, he also insisted that it was during the screenwriting that his most serious work was done. He defined the screenwriting process as the space where all fundamental directorial decisions have already been made; he did not think of "writing" apart from the work he planned for the camera to do. Screenwriting meant not only creating the imagery that would be the bone-structure of the story but also forming a total system where the literary and visual elements of the movie would be designed in a dynamic interaction" (Gross, 1999, p. 34). In other words, Hitchcock was so involved in the creation of the script- not just the words per se, but how they would be spoken, and from what angle they would be filmed, that he was literally a one-man production "crew" in the planning stage. Even from his earliest films, he never gave the actors or other crew members more than a puppet status. Does this make him what the French refer to as "aute

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hn Gielgud, the star, "recalls that Hitchcockàoverhauled this material considerably in shaping the screen story" (Phillips, 1984, p. 77). "Sabotage", according to Hitchcock himself, had some scenes where he "wrote" scenes without dialogue. The climax, a stabbing scene caused consternation in the leading lady. "Sylvia Sidney was initially upset by the director's insistence that this scene be shot without recourse to dialogue" (Phillips, 1984, p. 82). In fact, to prove the thesis of early Hitchcock as "writer" regardless of who actually wrote the original screenplay, Hitchcock himself proclaimed that "the screen ought to speak its own languageàand it can't do that unless itàcan be woven into an expressive visual pattern" (Phillips, 1984, p. 77). Then came two of his classics, "The Thirty-Nine Steps" and "The Lady Vanishes" both fast-paced anti-Nazi films. "The Thirty-Nine Steps" is another good example of how Hitchcock took someone else's screenplay and remade it to fit his needs. "The original author was at first affronted, but later confessed Hitchcock's version was better" (Perry, 1965, p. 49). There is more evidence about Hitchcock as "writer", as in the case of "The Thirty-Nine Steps": In overhauling Buchan's story for
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Approximate Word count = 1562
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page)