Hitchcock & Selznick

by Norman B. Schwartz

The irresistible force paradox, a law of physics, states that when an immovable object meets an unstoppable force, each is indestructible. When that happens, as the law was later interpreted by Miss Doris Day – well, something’s got to give. Without doubt, the most immovable clash in Hollywood’s long military history was between two unusually gifted and stubborn combatants – the American producer David O. Selznick and his English director Alfred Hitchcock. In a contractual period that lasted for seven tumultuous years, 1940 to 1947, the American and the Englishman made three films together – the unforgettable Rebecca, the puzzling Spellbound, and the easily forgettable The Paradine Case. Theirs is an object lesson in how films, good, bad, and indifferent, got made.

David O. Selznick – the “O” added in later life to distinguish him from an uncle – was the second son of one of the motion picture industry’s Jewish pioneers, Lewis J. Selznick, born in 1869 or 1870 in Anykščiai, part of the Kovno Governate in Czarist Russia (now the Republic of Lithuania). Young Lewis arrived in America at eighteen. After a brief period as an itinerant salesman, Lewis discovered that producing silent movies was far more lucrative than hawking jewelry.

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In 1920, Lewis moved to Hollywood. What happened to him there had also occurred to many similar immigrants before him. Carl Laemmle, B. P. Schulberg and Wilhelm Fried Fuchs, the man who added the Fox on to Twentieth Century, began their film careers by producing a series of money-making successes which brought fame and fortune and celebrity, inevitably followed by an equal number of money-losing disasters, leading to banishment to the minor leagues of filmmaking.

Lewis Selznick, however, differed from his demoted contemporaries in one salient way – unlike the others, too busy with their projects and their love affairs to pay any attention to children, he was a devoted paterfamilias, fanatical about two of his sons, Myron (born 1898) and David (born 1902), who even as teenagers he invited to observe their good-cop bad-cop father negotiate deals and intimidate stars.

As only children can, both young men instantly understood their father had preordained their destiny: one day they would inherit the family store. Sadly, by 1925, what they witnessed instead was their father’s bankruptcy. In 1933, he was dead. His loss did not deter the younger son from putting on his father’s mantle and following in his footsteps. David O. was not a young man to be deterred by something as banal as a death in the family.

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Hitchcock (born 1899) came from a more modest background. His hard-working Catholic father, Walter Edgar Hitchcock, who had once run a fish and chip shop in Limehouse, led a very conventional life. From fish and chips to greengrocer to poulterer. Not as ambitious for himself as he was for his son, Father Hitchcock had saved enough money to ensure Alfred received a good middle-class Jesuit education. He had hoped as did so many men of his class, that his son would become an engineer or of some other profession more respectable than his own.

One day, however, young Alfred, being rather artistic, saw and answered a newspaper ad from a film studio that Paramount pioneer Jesse Lasky, one of Poppa Selznick’s contemporaries, had opened in Islington in 1919. The studio hired young Alfred, a skilled artist, as a title designer for silent films – the first of many challenging jobs he would undertake in the growing English film industry. In 1922, one of his producers, Michael Balcon of Gainsborough Pictures (one day to be famous for his Ealing Studio comedies) having observed Hitchcock’s versatility, offered Hitchcock a chance to direct. Hitchcock shot his first film in German, and although he needed a translator, he quickly mastered the country’s state-of-the-art camera moves and editing techniques. He did so by watching F. W. Murnau, Germany’s greatest film grammarian, at work. Murnau directed one of silent film’s masterpieces, The Last Laugh (1924), a film so visually explicit that it required no title cards. In 1929, Hitchcock made the first talkie in England, Blackmail.

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In the United States, Poppa Selznick’s ambitious son started his equally rapid ascent. Starting as a junior story editor at MGM in 1926, David quickly moved into producing smaller films. In 1928, he made two excellent career moves: (1) he married the boss’s daughter, Irene Mayer, and (2) soon left his father-in-law’s studio for a better paid job at its competitor, Paramount. (His first choice lasted nineteen years, the second only one year and three months.)

He next abandoned Paramount to become head of all production at the nearby RKO studios in 1931, where, with his genius for discovering talent, Selznick put several unknowns under contract – composer Max Steiner and Broadway director George Cukor; he also discovered two future movie stars, Katharine Hepburn and King Kong, and made a screen test of the lesser half of a brother and sister dance act, Fred Astaire, who had never made a movie. All this impressed his father-in-law, looking for a standby for the ailing boy genius Irving Thalberg. Mayer offered his son-in-law his own unit at the studio. Selznick left RKO and stayed at MGM until 1935, making his last leap by opening his own studio, Selznick International Pictures, in Culver City. In less than a decade, Lewis Selznick’s son had gone from the bottom to the top of the shaky ladder from which his father had fallen.

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Meanwhile, back in the United Kingdom, Alfred Hitchcock was mounting another ladder but at a somewhat slower pace. He directed The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934), The Thirty-nine Steps (1935), and in 1938 The Lady Vanishes, films so essentially English and yet so universal in their box-office appeal that when Selznick saw them he offered Hitchcock a lordly sum (today worth about $900,000) to come to Hollywood to make four pictures for his independent studio. Hitchcock refused, insisting upon a seven-year guarantee. When Selznick consented in 1939, the same year his production of Gone with the Wind became the highest-grossing film of all time, Hitchcock bade the England film industry goodbye. Once established in the sun, becoming a US citizen in 1955, Hitchcock rarely returned to the place he was born unless the film required locations the director thought impossible to reproduce in a studio.

At first appearance, Hitchcock and Selznick seemed an ideal team. They had both started at the bottom of the industry and had learned everything there was to know about the language of film. Selznick had an added talent: he knew how to sell movies after production. But what Hitchcock was not aware of, or chose to ignore when he bade England adieu, was something that all those before him who toiled in the big American studios understood without being told. In Hollywood, the producer, not the director, was the star. It had been Hitchcock’s experience in England that once Michael Balcon approved the script and its budget, he left his directors alone.

Selznick, as Hitchcock was soon to learn, was not Balcon. He could not and would not stop interfering. A natural born micromanager, a control freak – terms as foreign to Hollywood vocabulary then as the word auteur would become – Selznick rewrote his writers and directed his directors, either bombarding them with daily memos or constantly visiting their sets.

This unholy alliance between Selznick and Hitchcock, doomed from the start, lasted seven long years and three films. Although their association brought both men additional fame and many dollars, it was not to be a happy one.

Hitchcock’s first film for Selznick under contract was his adaptation of Daphne du Maurier’s best seller Rebecca. As Hitch and his wife had done with many a script based on books they had filmed in England, they began by submitting a rough scenario recommending how the novel’s structure could be rebuilt to conform to what they believed were the requirements of film narrative. Selznick was not pleased. He had paid $50,000 for rights to the book and considered their suggestions “distorted and vulgarized” his property. Selznick demanded that they not stray too far from his property. With his obstinate belief that he alone knew what the public wanted, the producer saw Rebecca as a woman’s picture, a modern-day Cinderella story. The director, however, saw it as a thriller and a sly satire on English upper-class manners.

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If Selznick had accused Hitchcock of being the vulgarian, it was Hitchcock’s turn to say the same of his producer. When the Englishman read the final screenplay approved for production by the American, he disapproved of the producer’s glamorization of English country life. Selznick’s Cornwall, so Hitchcock contended, could have existed only in the imagination of an American schoolboy who had never been to the southwestern part of the United Kingdom, but had read too many inferior English novels. Hitchcock, far from home, continued to view his homeland through the lens of his middle-class upbringing; he saw Rebecca as an opportunity to send up the upper classes.

A hallmark of Hitchcock’s style was injecting comedic and satirical scenes amidst suspenseful moments, thus amplifying the overall tension. An audience who had come to see a Hitchcock film knew that if they laughed one moment, they were going to be terrified the next. Selznick, an Anglophile down to the cut of his bespoke clothes, was not used to ridiculing his overseas cousins, and objected to what he considered Hitchcock’s heavy hand. But once on set, Hitchcock realized he could overcome his producer’s reluctance by using another device. The actor. His alter ego, suave George Sanders, the cynical bounder, sneered at all he observed. “We must be careful not to shock Cinderella, mustn’t we?” he said. A Sanders snarl was worth pages of dialogue.

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At the last scene of the film, Hitchcock won his battle. When the mansion Manderley, the symbol of a sacrosanct past where tradition rules, burns to the ground, Selznick asked his special effects crew to show smoke from its chimney spelling out a huge “R” in the evening sky. Hitchcock felt that excessive, even unintentionally comic. After their usual arguments, Selznick gave in to Hitchcock’s suggestion to substitute a burning monogrammed negligée case lying atop a bedroom pillow instead. From the overblown to the understated. England one, America zero. If the devil is in the detail, Hitch and David O. went on fighting devilishly for the next seven years.

One of the classic myths of moviemaking, one that endures to this day, is that the producer, the money man, is the villain. Out of envy and ego, he is the vulgarian smoking a big cigar, squeezing the purse strings, humiliating and shattering the director’s artistic vision. The truth, as Rebecca shows, is that this very symbiosis often produces an extraordinary effect: not exactly a meeting of minds, but a spiky collaboration. With Selznick and Hitchcock, it seems to have inspired the best in both men.

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Norman B. Schwartz is the author of the comic novels ‘ALL THINGS small‘, Paradise Now, Don Juan in Space, True (Cinema) Confessions, Hollywood: Below and Beyond, and the DIY guide, The Art Of The Schnoorr. He spent over forty years working on films in Hollywood and Rome. Norman was the first ADR sound editor / director to be admitted to Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in Los Angeles.

Norman B. Schwartz’s essays will appear in sequence monthly in each issue of Ars Notoria Magazine with a view to Centre House Press publishing the entire collection of essays in book form in Fall 2025