A blast from the past

Writing recently about my touching gift from John Michael Hayes (screenwriter of Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window, To Catch A Thief, The Man Who Knew Too Much, The Trouble With Harry, many more), I remembered two articles I wrote about Alfred Hitchcock's system of creating films a couple years ago when I was a screenwriting columnist for ScreenTalk international screenwriting magazine (headquartered in Denmark).

They're based on a lecture he gave in 1939; we can't find the original published articles, so here are the columns in pdf format as they were originally submitted to the editor without photos and terrific layout for which editor Eric Lilleør is so famous.

ScreenTalk went on to become movieScope international filmmaking magazine, for which I was the camera acting columnist until I became a full time filmmaker last year. If you'd like to read other columns I wrote for ScreenTalk, go to my "writer" page to read them as they appeared in the magazine.

At any rate, the columns analyze how Hitchcock assembled his films successfully early on with his wife and lifelong collaborator Alma. Later he would abandon these steps to create much less than successful projects; I'm not sure why but biographers indicate he abused alcohol and developed other personality problems that would interfere with his art.

Here they are:

The Enduring Insights of Alfred Hitchcock Part I

The Enduring Insights of Alfred Hitchcock Part II