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The Making of Vertigo (1958)

Alfred Hitchcock’s 1958 film Vertigo is loosely based on D’Entre les morts (From Among the Dead), a French novel written by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac which was published in 1954.   Some sources suggest that, aware that Hitchcock had unsuccessfully attempted to buy the rights to their earlier novel Celle qui n'était plus (She Who Was No More) (filmed by Henri-George Clouzot as Les Diaboliques in 1955), Boileau and Narcejac specifically wrote the novel with Hitchcock in mind.   If true, their strategy succeeded, Paramount purchased the rights for Hitchcock on 20^th April 1955, before the book had even been translated into English.   Hitchcock read the studio treatment of the book while scouting locations in South Africa for a proposed screen adaptation of Laurens van der Post’s Flamingo Feather, which was subsequently abandoned. 

Credit for the writing of the film is shared between Samuel A. Taylor and Alec Coppel but, as is so often the case, the screen credit only tells part of the story.   Three other people, including Hitchcock, are known to have contributed to the screenplay to varying degrees.

On 14^th June 1956, Maxwell Anderson, a playwright who had previously worked with Hitchcock on The Wrong Man (1956), was commissioned to adapt the novel into a screenplay.      Anderson’s draft, entitled ’Darkling, I Listen’ was submitted in September 1956.   Although it contained some elements that made it into the film - the San Francisco location and a three-part structure based on falls from high places - Anderson’s work was swiftly rejected by Hitchcock.   The director immediately called on his friend, Angus McPhail, the Scottish writer of such British classics as It Always Rains on Sunday (1947) and Whisky Galore! (1949), to step into the breach.   McPhail agreed, but quit within days ‘due to illness'.   Although studio records from the time suggest that McPhail completed no work on Vertigo, recent sources claim he produced a brief outline, including the opening rooftop scene explaining how Scottie became acrophobic .   However, conflicting sources suggest that Alec Coppel wrote this sequence.

Hitchcock turned to Coppel , a writer who had worked on the director’s TV programme and in an uncredited capacity on his 1955 film To Catch a Thief, on the advise of Paramount’s head office.   In a series of meetings, Hitchcock outlined the film in nineteen scenes, a number which had grown to fifty by November 1956, but which still failed to produce a filmable screenplay.   Although he received a screen credit, there is no evidence that Coppel actually provided any dialogue used in the film, other than possibly the coroner’s inquest speech; the reason he shares the screenwriting credit with Taylor is that, when he learned that Taylor was attempting to receive sole credit, Coppel successfully protested to the Writer’s Guild.

 By now, Hitchcock was growing concerned by the problems he was encountering, and briefly attempted to talk Maxwell Anderson into returning to the project to revise Coppel‘s script.   When this proved fruitless, he followed the advice of Kay Brown, a story editor for David O. Selznick, and hired Samuel A. Taylor, a native of San Francisco who had written Sabrina Fair (1954)

 Taylor didn’t read the original novel.   Of Coppel‘s script he explained to Hitchcock that the problem was 'a matter of finding reality and humanity for these people. You haven't got anybody in this story who is a human being; nobody at all. They're all cut-out cardboard figures.’   Taylor realised that he would need to create a new character that would ‘bring Scottie into the world, establish for him an ordinary life, make it obvious that he's an ordinary man. So I invented Midge.’   Working to Hitchcock’s outline rather than Coppel’s script, Taylor also made the crucial decision to reveal the film’s key plot twist two-thirds of the way through the film.  

On 22^nd February 1957 Taylor delivered a partial screenplay entitled From the Dead or There’ll Never Be Another You to which he jokingly attributed the deceased satirist Ambrose Bierce as co-author.   Hitchcock considered Taylor’s script to be a vast improvement on Coppel’s effort, although studio records also credit the director with making a considerable contribution to the screenplay.    By now, nothing but the basic plot of the original source material remained.

 Leading man James Stewart, who had delayed signing on to make the film because of Hitchcock’s struggles to come up with a suitable script - was also delighted with the Taylor script, reportedly exclaiming to Hitchcock: ‘Now we have a movie, now we can go ahead!’

Hitchcock originally had Vera Miles, whom he had under an exclusive contract, in line for the twin roles of Madeleine and Judy, and make-up and hairstyle tests took place in November 1956.   Designer Edith Head also started work on Miles’ costumes, which she completed on 18^th February 1957.   On 11^th March, Hitchcock underwent surgery to have his gall bladder removed, and while recovering in bed after the operation he received a telephone call from Miles who told him that she was pregnant by her screen Tarzan husband Gordon Scott, and could not therefore appear in Vertigo.   Hitchcock saw this as a major betrayal by his protégé, costing him ‘several hundred thousand dollars’ - although he still cast her as Janet Leigh’s sister in Psycho (1960).   He was also reported to have tartly commented that the actress ’should have taken a jungle pill.’

Hitchcock’s ill-health during this period would mean a period of fifteen months would pass between his first commissioning the script and the start of filming, and while such delays may prove costly, they gave Hitchcock time to plan camera movements and fine-tune the musical arrangement to provoke the desired emotional response from the audience at specific moments in the film.   The script also underwent numerous revisions while Hitchcock recuperated.

Hitchcock chose Kim Novak to replace Miles as the film’s female lead.   Paramount negotiated a deal with Harry Cohn’s Columbia to get her: $250,000, plus Stewart’s agreement to co-star in Columbia’s comedy film Bell, Book and Candle (1958) with Novak.   According to Dan Auiler in his book Vertigo: The Making of a Hitchcock Classic, Novak herself earned only $1,250 per week while she was working on the film, and claimed in an interview with Bob Thomas of the Associated Press that her actual take-home pay was only about $250 per week.   ‘I was unable to buy sufficient clothes for myself, she declared.   ‘When I wanted to go to a party, I’d have to borrow a dress that Rita Hayworth had worn in a picture . . .. The studio was making a great deal of money off me, and I was seeing little of it..

Novak did herself no favours by questioning Hitchcock and Edith Head’s decision to dress the character of Madeleine in a prim grey suit.   Hitchcock and Head felt it looked unusual for a blonde woman to be dressed completely in grey and gave her something of an eerie appearance.   Novak felt it was at odds with her character, and also found the costume physically confining.   When Head called Hitchcock to tell him that Novak had rejected the suit he replied, ‘Handle it, Edith.   I don’t care what she wears as long as it’s a grey suit.’   Novak’s attempts to initiate discussions regarding the psychological motivation of her characters were met with an equally dismissive ’Let’s not get too deeply into these things.’   Perhaps most famously, when Novak tried to delve too deeply into such matters, Hitchcock exclaimed with exasperation, ’It’s only a movie you know!”   Hitchcock was happy, however, to acquiesce to Novak’s suggestion that Judy should not wear a bra.    Although Novak would receive critical praise for her handling of the dual role of Madeleine and Judy, Hitchcock stubbornly refused to give her credit for her work.   He told one interviewer: ‘The thing that fascinated me was the idea of Jimmy Stewart trying to turn the girl into someone she once had to play as part of a murder plot and is later trying not to be—and I'm not sure Kim Novak had the ability to put that across.’

While principal photography of Vertigo – under the working title of From among the Dead – did not officially begin until 30^th September 1957, second unit shooting began on 28^th February.   This involved the use of doubles for Stewart and Novak driving their cars or walking with their backs to camera, with much of the exterior shots at Mission San Juan Batista; Cypress Point, Muir Woods National Monument in Marin County and Big Basin Redwoods State Park being captured by the second unit under the direction of either Herbert Coleman or assistant director Daniel McCauley.  These shots were filmed by William N. Williams, ASC, Wallace Kelley, ASC or Irmin Roberts, ASC.

While the second unit was at work filming these scenes, Taylor was reshaping the script.   His first full draft, in which the character of Midge first appears, was completed on 3^rd April 1957.   The timing of the key plot twist was confirmed as taking place two-thirds of the way through the film in a meeting between Taylor and Hitchcock on 6^th May 1957, and by July some early expositional scenes had been dropped.

At around 4pm on Monday 26^th August, Robert Burks and second unit director Herbert Coleman positioned their equipment on a rooftop location in downtown San Francisco within site of Coit Tower and the Golden Gate Bridge.   Having spent the entire day filming street scenes of Madeleine’s green Jaguar and Scottie’s DeSoto, they waited for dusk to fall, and between 7.50pm and 8.05pm shot footage for the film’s opening chase sequence.  Of course, Jimmy Stewart wasn’t present – he wouldn’t begin shooting the movie for another five weeks, so his scenes would be added much later on a process stage – and the sequence would be merged with shots filmed on the rooftops of the Directors Building at Paramount and Security First National Bank at Hollywood and Highland Boulevards.

 The following day, John Ferren submitted his idea for animating the nightmare sequence which heralds Scottie’s mental breakdown.   The idea was officially approved a week later on 4^th September.   Ferren also created the important portrait of Carlotta Valdes used in the film – or, more accurately, repainted the portrait after having first created it in the likeness of Vera Miles.   Midge’s joke portrait was painted by Henry Bumstead, the film’s Production Designer.

As the deadline date for the start of principal photography approached, the final shooting script was completed on 12^th September 1957.   It included a ‘foreign censorship ending’ in which Scottie and Midge hear of Gavin Elster’s arrest over the radio – a scene which was added for the European market, which still wouldn’t permit a guilty man to get away with his crime.

Principal photography of the film lasted from the end of September to 19^th December 1957, with retakes and additional footage being shot in January 1958.   During this period the film’s title was changed from From Among the Dead to Vertigo, after Hitchcock had successfully resisted such Paramount suggestions as Behind the Mask, Carlotta, Dream Without Ending, My Madeleine, Steps on the Stairs, and Two Kinds of Women.   Screenwriter Samuel Taylor also jokingly proposed the title To Lay a Ghost.   Taylor also noted how important and personal a project this was for Hitchcock.   ‘We could all feel that this was a very important project for Hitch and that he was feeling this story very deeply, very personally.’   The core of the film’s plot – the obsessive control wielded by one man over a woman – was (or would be) reflected in the real-life working relationships Hitchcock had with actresses such as Grace Kelly, Tippi Hedren and Claire Griswold.

The first 16 days of shooting was location work, including the scenes at San Juan Batista, the Spanish mission in which some of the film’s key scenes take place, and which was suggested as a suitable location by Herbert Coleman’s daughter, Judy Lanini.   The viewer could be forgiven for believing that the mission was chosen because of its bell tower, which plays a prominent part in the film, but the fact is that the San Juan Batista mission didn’t actually have a tower.   Its original steeple was damaged by fire and was demolished, so Hitchcock had to add a new one with the use of trick photography.

One of the film’s most famous effects – in which Stewart’s character is struck by vertigo as he peers down the tower’s staircase – takes place in the bell tower.   The effect – known variously as a ‘zoom out and track in’ shot, a ‘contra-zoom’ and a ‘trombone shot’ – was allegedly inspired by a time when Hitchcock fainted at a party, and was one that he had originally wanted to use in Rebecca (1940), but the technology hadn’t existed at the time.   The mechanics of the shot were devised by un-credited second-unit cameraman Irmin Roberts.   It was estimated that the size of rig required to suspend and operate the camera equipment for the shot on a full-size set would cost $50,000 – a staggering amount for one shot at the time – so a miniature model of the set was constructed, and the effect was filmed with the model lying on its side at a cost of $19,000.

Another of the film’s memorable moments occurs when Scottie finally achieves the transformation of Judy Barton into the image of Madeleine Elster and the couple kiss.   The walls of Judy’s hotel room appear to melt away, to be replaced by the interior of the stable in which Scottie shared his final kiss with Madeleine.   The effect was achieved by building a circular set that combined elements of both locations.   A cameraman then filmed a 360’ pan of the set.   This shot was then projected behind Stewart and Novak as they kissed on a turntable which rotated in synchronised movement with the projected image. 

With filming completed a week before Christmas, post-production work started in earnest in the New Year.   Hitchcock ordered cuts from the rough cut to a number of scenes, and dictated 14 pages of dubbing notes in January 1958.   At the same time, Bernard Hermann began work on the film’s compelling score. 

Hermann’s score was largely inspired by Richard Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, with which Vertigo bears a number of similarities.   It was written in a little over a month, and Hermann – as well as many critics – considered it to be his finest film score.   It was intended that Hermann would also conduct the orchestra for the soundtrack, but a musician’s strike meant that it had to be recorded outside of America.   Hermann first took the score to London, where Muir Matheson undertook the scoring sessions – but after just two days the British musician’s came out in sympathy with their American counterparts, so it was necessary for Matheson to complete the work in Vienna.

 The premiere of Vertigo took place in San Francisco on 9^th May 1958 at the Stage Door Theater at Mason and Geary, and went on general release on 28^th May 1958.   Its box office performance was little more than average, and critical reaction was mixed.   While many critics admired the mastery of Hitchcock’s directorial touch and the spectacular San Francisco scenery, they also complained that the film was too long and became mired in an overabundance of detail.    This commercial and critical indifference was a bitter pill for Hitchcock to swallow, and he would later go on record as blaming both of his leads for its perceived failings.   Stewart, he said, was too old at 49 to play a romantic lead opposite the 24-year-old Novak who, he felt, was miscast in the role of Madeleine despite her receiving a generally favourable critical response to her performance.   James Stewart, with whom Hitchcock had collaborated on a number of pictures during the 1950s, was never again cast in a Hitchcock film.   Despite its initial commercial failure, Hitchcock came to consider it one of his favourite films.

The revival of Vertigo can largely be put down to two reasons: the film’s withdrawal from circulation for decades after Hitchcock bought back the rights to this and another four of his films as a legacy to his daughter, and a critical re-evaluation by Robin Wood in his book Hitchcock’s Films in which he described Vertigo as ‘Hitchcock's masterpiece to date and one of the four or five most profound and beautiful films the cinema has yet given us’.

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