7/25/2023 0 Comments God tech stack for noteapp![]() He exploited a physique that most would try desperately to diminish. Television did that for him-but long before his television show he was popping up in all his own movies, those tiny cameo appearances that audiences loved. But unlike any other director, he was an identifiable public figure, as recognizable as any president or movie star. At his best, he was an inventor of part of the modem cinema’s grammar. Hitchcock had the historical good fortune to have worked from silent films through television. He was obsessed with detail and had a slow, meandering style. Sometimes the talk was without apparent purpose, but at other times some shred of casual chatter would turn out useful to our work. One minute the script, the next a story about Ivor Novello’s tailor or the Tahiti steamer schedule in the Thirties. There was always time in our work sessions for stories and anecdotes. He moved in and out of senility and yet, for all that, he seemed in no hurry to finish his work, even though his life was clearly limited. When I was working with him, he was seventy-nine years old and was sometimes lost in the solitude of great physical pain, arthritis mostly. With his high-waisted black suits-with trousers that rested above his enormous belly, leaving just a few inches of white shirt exposed and with a black tie tucked into his pants-he looked positively fictional, out of Dickens, perhaps, or a banker by Evelyn Waugh. ![]() I was aware of this and, as I came to see, so was he. Sometimes he was at the top of his form and told them well other times less so. There were times when he seemed to feel obliged to tell Alfred Hitchcock stories. He was a well-known raconteur, and some of his stories were widely known and repeated-often by him. I think he sometimes got it confused, particularly in his storytelling. Hitchcock’s public self was so distinct that it was often impossible to know if I was dealing with the corporeal man or the invented persona. You hear about it all your life, and when you finally see the damn thing, it looks so much like the postcards, it’s difficult to see it fresh. While I will try to tell you a bit about him as I saw him, I warn you that, to me at least, he was ultimately unknowable. The time we spent together was always decorous, frequently pleasant, occasionally tense. I was the last screenwriter to work with him before his death. ![]() ![]() From December 1978 to May 1979, Alfred Hitchcock and I collaborated on a script. ![]()
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