Hollywood Tales

“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 Grant 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.”

 — screenwriter Ernest Lehman on writing the screenplay for North by Northwest, excerpted from “Conversations with the Great Moviemakers of Hollywood’s Golden Age,” edited by George Stevens, Jr.

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