Lehman with Alfred Hitchcock on location during the shooting

Today we continue with screenwriter Ernest Lehman. These excerpts from “Conversations with the Great Moviemakers of Hollywood’s Golden Era,” edited by George Stevens, Jr., are all about how Lehman worked with Alfred Hitchcock in writing the screenplay for North by Northwest.

ON WORKING WITH ALFRED HITCHCOCK

“It was fun in a way but it was extremely difficult. I recall having tried to quit that picture at least a dozen times, unknown to Mr. Hitchcock, who was off shooting Vertigo while I was writing the first seventy-odd pages. I never knew what the hell I was going to write next. I used to go my office and be scared to death because I just didn’t know what came next. I would write an opening scene and then the next scene. Some days I wouldn’t write anything. It was a lonesome and scary experience because I didn’t have anyone to talk to. Occasionally I would talk to Hitch, who was very helpful as we would bounce ideas off each other. Then I would go back to my office at MGM and call my agent and tell him, ‘I quit.’

One day Hitchcock said, ‘I’ve always wanted to do a chase across the face of Mount Rushmore.’ Terrific, I thought, and wrote it down. He told me all the ideas he wanted to do, and I wrote them down. Lots and lots of ideas. He wanted to do a sequence with the longest dolly shot in history, taking place at the assembly line of the Ford Motor company. It would start at the beginning of the assembly line. The camera follows a car being put together before it’s driven off the assembly line and they discover there’s a body in the backseat. He always wanted to do a scene in the General Assembly of the United Nations. Somebody is giving a speech to the Assembly and refuses to continue until the delegate from Peru wakes up. So someone taps the delegate from Peru, and he falls over dead. I wrote all these ideas down, but the only idea that is actually in the picture is the chase across Mount Rushmore. I also wrote out a list of possible protagonists, like a Frank Sinatra-type singer, or a famous sports announcer, or a newspaper man or a Madison advertising executive. I decided the easiest thing for me to write was a Madison Avenue advertising executive, not because I knew any, but because I know how to stereotype him.

Then we moved over to Hitchcock’s office at Paramount where he was working on Vertigo. We wasted a lot of time talking about the pleasantries of life. One day he told me something rather crucial, that a newspaperman in New York had told him that something like the CIA had once invented a decoy, a nonexistent agent, to throw the scene off a real agent. I thought that sounded good. Our hero, whoever he is, could be mistaken for this decoy. That I liked. I wrote the script page by page, scene by scene, never knowing what was coming next. The only thing I knew for sure was that we wanted to end up on Mount Rushmore, which is my least favorite part of the film, though most people remember it for that. I got only about one-tenth of the way through the story when Hitch gathered all the MGM executives together and told them everything we had. At the point where he ran out of story outline, he told them he had to go and that he’d see them at the preview. That was it.

Then Hitchcock arrived at MGM and he signed Cary Grant and fixed a starting date. Here I am, sweating my way through a first draft, and I still didn’t know what the whole third act would be. I was so desperate I called Hitch and said I needed to see him. I think he could sense how things were because he didn’t say, ‘Come down to my office.’ He said, ‘I’ll come down to your office.’ We met and I told him the truth. I said, ‘I’m totally stuck.’ I haven’t written a word in two weeks. It’s a disaster. What do we do?’ He said, ‘We’ll call in a novelist to sit with us and kick around some ideas.’ I said, ‘What will MGM say? I’m supposed to writing this movie.’ He said, ‘I’ll tell them it’s my fault.’ I felt very guilty. We went down to his office and he talked about which novelist to get. It was a very gloomy scene.

But I’m sitting there, and it’s not as if I wasn’t listening to him, but in the middle of this gloomy conversation I said, ‘Suppose he pulls out a gun and shoots him. Fake bullets. In a minute I’ll figure out why.’ My brain must have been working for months on this without my knowing it, because suddenly it became clear to me what the third act would be. Eva Marie is forced to shoot Cary Grant to draw suspicions away from herself because James Mason was beginning to wonder about her, then Marty Landau would discover the gun and the fake bullets, and only Cary Gratn would know that her life was in danger. And it sort of got easy. I left the office and never again was there any mention of bringing anyone else in. I continued writing through the shooting of the film up until Chicago. Then I went back to California and continued working on the final script. Then I went up to Bakersfield where the crop-dusting sequence took place.”

ON WHY LEHMAN FEELS LIKE THE PLOT OF NORTH BY NORTHWEST HAS HOLES

“Once I decided Cary Grant had been mistaken for a nonexistent man called George Kaplan, my first problem was how to do this. It’s a very hairy thing in this film. I once showed the film to a class at Dartmouth College. After we ran it, I asked them how many understood how he had been mistaken for George Kaplan, and only half of the students said they understood. It wasn’t really done properly in the film, either by me or Hitch. It was a little too subtle.

ON THE FAMOUS CROP-DUSTING SCENE

“Hitch and I acted out the entire crop-dusting sequence in his living room. Then I incorporated every move into the script, and that was the way he shot it.

Storyboarding is really an illustrator’s work for the director. A motion picture illustrator puts pictures on paper and puts them on boards. In story-boarding a script for a Hitchcock film, the illustrator is told what pictures to put on the boards by the script, which has benefited from my conferences with the director. Of course, I participate in what is going to appear on that storyboard, because even without the storyboard the script describes exactly what is going to be on the screen. Hitch would have it no other way. The script even describes the size of the shot, whether it’s a medium or a tight close-up, whether the camera pulls back and pans to the right as the character walks toward the door, whether it tilts slightly down and shoots through the open doorway, getting the helicopter as the lights go on outside. That’s why Hitch says it’s a bore for him to get the picture on the screen, because it has all been done already in his office.”

That’s some amazing stuff, especially to see how a professional screenwriter with numerous hits under his belt, could hit the wall creatively. Then just as remarkably, how a solution emerged: a shooting with fake bullets. And how about that image: Lehman and Hitchcock working out the entire crop-dusting scene — in Hitchcock’s living room!

Here’s my post on that Great Scene.

By the way, if you’re ever in Austin, TX, you can see “The Ernest Lehman Collection” which is housed at the University of Texas.