Screenwriter Ernest Lehman notes found re “North By Northwest”

From a New York Daily News article by Vince Cosgrove who writes about movies:

At the behest of my wife, I’m slowly wending my way through our ridiculously over-crowded garage, exploring box after box of six decades of never throwing anything out.

I discovered 20 pages of photo-copied notes from the legendary screenwriter Ernest Lehman (1915–2005) regarding “North by Northwest,” the great 1959 thriller directed by Alfred Hitchcock and starring Cary Grant, Eva Marie Saint and James Mason.

I received the notes years ago from a prominent member of the cast (no name-dropping here) who loved the fact that I was a bit fanatical about the film, having copped to a dozen viewings, owning both the script and the soundtrack, and a belief that “North by Northwest” is Hitchcock’s most entertaining movie and one of his greatest.

Eighteen pages of Lehman’s notes reveal a “riffing on various possible scenes and bits of dialogue, some making it into the film, most not.” Some highlights:

* There are references to the MacGuffin (Hitchcock’s name for the thing that motivates the action) as a painting Tomlinson/Vandamm has won at auction and secured microfilm under the frame or canvas. In the movie, Vandamm bids for a pre-Columbian statuette in which he hides the microfilm. At movie’s end, Eve grabs the statuette, thus setting off the famous chase along Mr. Rushmore.

* Lehman speculates that Tomlinson/Vandamm might have kidnapped an important scientist or the scientist’s child, a plot device obviously abandoned, perhaps because Hitchcock’s two versions of “The Man Who Knew Too Much” relied on a child’s kidnapping.

* In one possible ending, Tomlinson/Vandamm gets away in a waiting plane, but without the MacGuffin (still the painting at this point).

Eighteen pages of Lehman’s notes are single-spaced and primarily concerned with the last act of the movie, notably the scenes in which Eve Kendall (Saint) “shoots” Roger Thornhill (Grant) in the Mt. Rushmore cafeteria, their escape from the Frank Lloyd Wright-like house owned by the suavely villainous Phillip Vandamm (Mason) and the cliff-hanging (literally) climax.

Thornhill: “There goes your erstwhile playmate.”

Eve: “Yes — but without his precious painting . . .”Thornhill: “He’ll find another wherever he’s going.”

Eve: “Not like this one. You haven’t seen it under Ultra-violet light.”

Thornhill: “Secret formulas?”

Eve: “None of your business, Mr. Thornhill.”

Thornhill: “I bet you’d tell me if my head was a pumpkin.”

Wonderful stuff for fans of Hitchcock, the movie and screenwriting.

For interview excerpts with Lehman about his career and working with Hitchcock on North By Northwest, go here and here.

For more of the article, go here.

HT to @opedr for the link.