Can you believe that?
Today’s Chicago Sun-Times breathlessly reports that "the director’s claim to sole authorship of his movies comes in for heavy scrutiny" in the exhibit, which allegedly "reveals Hitchcock as a master collaborator who relied, often heavily, on crack creative teams to help bring his suspenseful visions to life."
This is one of the biggest duhs I’ve ever heard.
Everyone who knows anything about movies knows that Hitchcock worked closely with top film professionals in creating his films. That’s how movies are made. All kinds of people contribute their expertise, and they’re paid a great deal of money because the production companies believe these experts do in fact contribute to the success of the project.
Hence, when the museum’s curator, William Schmenner says that the exhibit "Gives the lie to some of [Hitchcock’s] more incendiary public comments," he’s not just exaggerating the importance of his exhibit, he’s actually deceiving people about one of the greatest film directors of all time. Hitchcock never claimed that he worked entirely alone and did not use the talents of the people around him. It would have been perfectly silly for him to suggest such a thing. And it is perfectly silly for Schmenner to suggest that Hitchcock failed to give appropriate credit to his collaborators:
Hitchcock himself described the process a few years later: "We went into a huddle and slowly from discussions; arguments; random suggestions; casual, desultory talk, and furious intellectual quarrels as to what such and such a character in such and such a situation would or would not do, the scenario began to take shape."
The fact that Hollywood filmmaking involves a huge amount of collaboration with experts in various aspects of production is widely known, and Hitchcock never pretended to be an exception to that rule. He only characterized himself as the ultimate creative force behind his films, and he most certainly was that.
The important thing in establishing authorial responsibility in moviemaking is that the vision in each film was his, and the museum’s curator admits this:
"In fact, for Hitchcock to make the movies he wanted to make, he had to be able to do both things: to be ultimately responsible for the film and to shepherd his vision through the collaborative process," Schmenner says. "That’s why he was a genius."
Alfred Hitchcock was a great filmmaker who fully used all the tools and talents at his disposal. That’s the real truth about Alfred Hitchcock.