FILMING THE DREAM
Dreams are so much more beautiful than the stuff they call reality. -Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac, The Living and the Dead
The project evolved quickly. After Hitchcock returned from South Africa in August 1956 with the realization that Flamingo Feather would be impossible, he met to discuss the next project over lunch with the unit production manager, Doc Erickson, and the director of photography, Robert Burks.
A month later, From Among the Dead was the subject of a lunch discussion among Hitchcock, Jimmy Stewart, and Lew Wasserman. The trio then spent the next two days watching The Wrong Man (due for release in December), The Deep Blue Sea, and Henri Clouzot’s Les Diaboliques, the Boileau-Narcejac project that had first attracted Hitchcock’s eye.
Maxwell Anderson’s San Francisco visit during the summer of 1956 was followed by a visit from Hitchcock, Coleman, McCauley, Coppel, and Burks in October. It was during this visit that many of the final locations were determined: Mission Dolores (present in the earliest of drafts), the Palace of the Legion of Honor, Fort Point, and Big Basin Redwoods State Park (near Santa Cruz). Other locations were still up in the air. Mission San Carlos Borromeo in Carmel was originally slated as the site of the climactic church tower, but Coleman remembered that he and Burks had found the location too obviously pretty; Hitchcock wanted a location that looked abandoned, and the search would have to continue, or even be abandoned and a set on a soundstage used. Coleman was staying with his daughter, a teacher in the Salinas area, when she recommended the rather secluded San Juan Bautista.
Only a few miles from Highway 101, San Juan Bautista is approximately ninety miles south of San Francisco. The town and mission are truly a hundred years away from the city, remaining frozen in the mid-1800s-full of western storefronts and stables, a large courtyard flanked by the long cloistered mission, an old stage hotel and livery. Look at the images of San Juan Bautista in the film and you see the San Juan Bautista of both 1850 and 1998. The only thing missing, ironically, is a tower. This fact seemed to dash the scouting party’s hopes; the mission had once had a tower, but it was lost to fire in the earthquake of 1906 (the mission offers a breathtaking view of the San Andreas Fault).
In spite of this drawback, though, the mood of the mission settlement was perfect for-the film, and ultimately the decision was made to re-create the bell tower in a studio. This is an excellent example of why location scouting expeditions occur even before a script is finished: Not only do locations shape the finished screenplay but, more important to the studio, they shape the budget. The tower would be the most expensive set built for the production of Vertigo.
Hitchcock had found a trusted team when he joined Paramount. Coleman, art director Henry Bumstead, and Editor George Tomasini were loyal members of the team. Bumstead later worked on Topaz and Family Plot and Tomasini edited North by Northwest, Psycho, The Birds, and Mamie. His cameramen, led by director of photography Robert Burks, were also loyal members, whom he had kept from Warner Bros. Together; they would create in Vertigo a film of dazzling technical virtuosity.
Robert Burks’s first job as Hitchcock’s director of photography was on 1951’s Strangers on a Train, and he would shoot every Hitchcock film through Mamie with the exception of Psycho. Theirs was a long, trusted relationship; the trademark Burks lighting and camera setup defined the Hitchcock look at a critical time in the director’s career, so much so that the style was duplicated for the television series to give the shows that Hitchcock look. The few cinematographers Hitchcock worked with after Burks’s tragic death (he and his wife died in 1968 in a fire started by a smoldering cigarette) were compelled to try and re-create the Burks look; the only one who succeeded was Leonard South, Burks’s camera operator for all of the Hitchcock films, who photographed Hitchcock’s final film, Family Plot.
After returning from the Vertigo location shoot, Hitchcock sat down with Robert Burks to discuss just how the vertigo effect would be achieved. Hitchcock’s notes during the writing of the screenplay suggest that Coleman had some early ideas for producing the effect, but it was an uncredited cameraman who thought up the technique. Combining a forward zoom with a reverse track, the cameraman instinctively came up with what became known as the “vertigo shot”-one of the most innovative and imitated effects in film history.
“I’ll tell you who came up with that idea,” Coleman remembered. “Irwin Roberts, who was always used as a second-unit cameraman-I was always the second-unit director on almost everyone of the Hitchcock films [at Paramount] and we always used Roberts, but he didn’t get screen credit on Vertigo because they gave the screen credit to another close friend of ours who did all the process work on the stage [Wallace Kelley].”
During this time, Vera Miles was having her hair, makeup, and costume tests shot for the dual role of Madeleine and Judy. Miles watched the test work with costumer Edith Head and makeup artist Wally Westmore on November twelfth in Paramount’s Projection Room 5; while at the same time Everett Sloane (of Mercury Theatre fame) was being considered for the role of Gavin Elster. Miles reported to Stage 17 with Edith Head on November sixteenth for lens tests with Burks; from the end of November through the Christmas vacation, the production was on hold as Hitchcock found himself consumed with promotional activities for The Wrong Man-the film that may have helped to spell her downfall as the lead actress of Vertigo.
by Dan Auiler
Foreword from Martin Scorsese
Ebook copyright 2011 Dan Auiler
Foreword copyright 1998 Martin Scorsese
For Nook, iBooks and other readers, you may purchase the book from Smashwords.
Hitch’s Vertigo 