Check that memo again: Selznick versus Hitchcock, aka the struggle for Rebecca
I just came across about the nth reference to how Alfred Hitchcock, in his first American movie, "Rebecca" (based on Daphne du Mauriers novel), had to suffer from interference by the producer, David O. Selznick, how Selznick wanted to sentimentalize and hollywoodify the film and distorted the book and Hitch saved it singlehandedly, in short, the old cliché of interfering money minded producer and genius auteur director. Except, well. Not so much if you check the actual facts. Because in this case we have Selznick's memos - he had the habit of dictating extensive memos to whomever he worked with, and they're very vivid and give a great impression of not only the project but Selznick's personality - and the one he fired off at Hitchcock apropos Rebecca as soon as he got the first treatment for the fim from him is a fascinating document, worthy to quote in full length. Among other things it shows that between the two of them, the one actually in love with the novel was Selznick, not Hitchcock. It also documents the exact reverse ofthe cliché that it's the producer who wanted standard Hollywood scenes, and the director who wanted something fresh. So, have a look at Hollywood production in the year 1939:
June 12, 1939
Dear Hitch:
It is my unfortunate and distressing task to tell you that I am shocked and disappointed beyond words by the treatment of Rebecca. I regard it as the distorted and vulgarized version of a provenly successful work, in which, for no reason that I can discern, old-fashioned movie scenes have been substituted for the captivatingly charming du Maurier scenes. This is particularly true in the Riviera squence.
We bought Rebecca, and we intend to makeRebecca. The few milion people who have read the book and who worship it would very properly attack us violently for the descecrations which are indicated by the treatment; but quite a part from the feelings of these few million, I have never been able to understand why motion-picture people insist upon throwing away something of proven appeal to substitute things of their own creation. It is a form of ego which has very properly drawn upon Hollywood the wrath of the world for many years, and candidly, I am surprised to discover that the disease has apparently also spread to England.
I don't hold at all with the theory that the difference in medium necessitates a difference in storytelling, or even a difference in scenes. In my opinion, the only thing that is justified by the difference in medium is a difference in the manner in which a scene is told; and the only omissions from the successful work that are justified are omissions necessitated by length, censorship, or other practical considerations. Readers of a dearly loved book will forgive omissions if there is an obvious reason for them; but very properly, they will not forgive substituions.
Nor do I hold with the theory that stories should be changed for motion pictures because they fall into a so-called narrative cliassification. I have made too many classics successfully and faithfully not to know beyond any question of a doubt that whether a film is narrative or dramatic it will succeed in the same manner as the original succeeded if only the same elemnts are captured and if only as much as possible is retained of the original - including alleged faults of dramatic construction. No one, not even the author of an original work, can say with any degree of accuracy why a book has caught the fancy of the public; if it were this easy, the author of the original could duplicate these elements and duplicate the success, which we know very few authors of successful works are able to do. The only sure and safe way of aiming at a successful transcription of the original into the motion-picture form is to try as far as possible to retain the original, and the degree of success in transcribing an original has always been proportionate to the succcess of the transcribers in their editing proccess and the qualities that are gotten into the casting, performances, direction, settings, etc. - as well, of course, as the proper assembly for motion-picture purposes of the original elements.
(...) This is the process that I had hoped was being engaged in on Rebecca. This is why I have kept warning you to be faithful. I have my own ego, and I don't mind letting my own creative instincts run wild either on an original, as in the case of A Star is Born, or in the adaption of an unsuccessful work, as in Made for Each Other. But my ego is not so great that it cannot be held in check on the adaption of a successful work. I don't think I can create in two months or two years anything as good with the characters and situations of Rebecca as du Maurier created; and frankly, I don't think you can, either. I want this company to produceRebecca, and not an original scenario based upon Rebecca.
The medium of the radio is certainly no closer to the novel form than is the motion picture. And yet Orson Welles, throwing together a radio script on Rebeccain less than a week's time, had one of the greatest dramatic successes the radio has ever knkown by simply assembling ten or fifteen scenes from the book word for word - thereby proving that du Maurier's Rebecca in any form has the identical appeal that it had in book form. A clever showman, he didn't waste time and effort creating anything new but simply gave them the orignal. I hope that we will be equally as astute. If we do in motion pictures as faithful a job as Welles did on the radio, we are likely to have the same success the book had and the same success that Welles had. If we create an original script, we can only pray that we'll get something that is as good and as appealing as what we had and threw away.
Now the lecture having ended, let's get down to individual instances - some very minor, some very important - of what I am talking about. I will make this comments, trivial or important, in the order of scenes to which they apply in the treatment.
I hope that it is not our intention to use the name Daphne or any other name for the girl. Next to the fact that the title character Rebecca never appeared, one of the most talked about things in connection with the book was that the principal character had no name. Again, Welles shrewdly capitalized on this point, and the ten or fifteen million people who were fascinated by the story on the air also know that the leading character never appeared by name. We certainly would be silly to give her a name in our picture. This is not a point of storytelling but simply of showmanship.
I think the scenes of seasickness are cheap beyond words, and old fashioned into the bargain. If there is any humor left on the screen in seasickness, let's for God's sake leave it to the two-reel comedies and not get our picture off on a low note by indulging in such scenes. And the first portrait of Max smoking a cigar that makes the other passengers ill is not my idea of an introduction for a romantic and mysterious figure. On the contrary, it would be a good introduction for a boor.
And quite apart from this, I don't know what we gain with our principals on their way to the Riviera, and I know a great deal that we lose: in the first place, we lose the idea of the brooding, introspective man who has for some time been away from England, trying to forget and wipe out the past. In the treatment he has apparently only just left England. In the second place, we lose the idea of the girl who has been living on the Riviera for some time with her vulgar employer, apparantly having led a miserable existence for at least months. In the treatment, she has no background of existence at all with her vulgar employer because she meets de Winter the very night she leaves England.
The opening of the book is excellent, and why it requires any change for motion pictures or any other medium I am sure I don't know - with its picture of snobbish Mrs. Van Hopper and her unhappy companion, and the every-so-slight and romantic first hint of de Winter in the distance...
And Max in a speedboat, driving out his friends on an anchored yacht - what in God's name does this do to the portrait of a man who is wondering alone, trying to get away from everything? (THe repeat of the seasickness isn't even worthy of comment.) Whatever happened to the construction that we discussed and agreed upon - that we were going to follow his moods and his being difficult and distant exactly as in the book until the honeymoon, when for the first time we saw a gay man, snatched out of his depression and his bitterness and his sour humor at long last by his new young wife, and returning to his old mood as Manderley obtrudes into his life on their return?
Even such wonderful little things as the girl tearing out the page of the book, trying this early and in this futile fashion to erase Rebeca; an dhte little scene in which Mrs. Van Hopper predicts doom to the girl - at the end of Chapter Six: these are wantonly thrown away too, for what reason I don't know.
So much for the Riviera sequences. As for Manderley, every little thing that the girl does in the book, her reactions of running away from the guests, and the tiny things that indicate her nervousness and her self-consciousness and her gaucherie are all so brilliant in the book that every woman who has read it has adored the girl and has understood her psychology, has cringed in embarassment for her, yet has understood exactly what was going through her mind. We have removed all the subtleties and substituted big broad strokes which in outline form betray just how ordinary the actual plot is and just how bad a picture it would make without the little feminine things which are so recognizable and which make every woman say, 'I know just how she feels... I know just what she's going through...' etc.
It would take too long to go into the details of my resentment toward the other changes. Obviously there are sections of the book which are repetitious, and which need to be telescoped. But this is no excuse for making Max' sister into another Mrs. Van Hopper; for throwing away the wonderfully etched and extremely entertaining portraits of his sister and her husband; for substituting some slapstick comedy about her hole-in-one on a golf course for the mood of the walk through the estate, with a very human little argument about the dog running over the rocks, and Max' curious reactions to little things - all these have been distorted in a lesser or a greater manner, and it would take days to comb through them and see just where point after point has been lost, just as they have in the Riviera sequence. I would rather say very flatly that I think the treatment is pretty bad, and that it is easier to do a new one than to repair this one.
(...)
I can't think why you avoid showing the interior of the cottage on the beach. Nor can I understand particularly why you want the grandmother in the tower of Manderley. If for no other reason, she and her own home have value as something to break the monotony of always being in the Manderley settings. However, this value may not be important, since we have plenty of sets within Manderley, its ground, etc., and there may, on the contrary, be a value in staying entirely within Manderley. In this case, I am not sure that grandmother serves any purpose at all, and perhaps she ought to be eliminated from teh story.
Other little things I miss are the many comparisons between the girl and Rebecca which the girl observes and which make her feel her own gaucherie. I refere to such things as the comparison of handwriting between her own and Rebecca's.
Also, in the book more than in the treatment, I understand why Max puts up with Mrs. Danvers, and this is weak even in the book.
I don't know why you have changed the converted boathouse into a small stone cottage. This, to me, is just a gratuitous change which is for no reason unless it is to annoy the readers of the book.
I don't think the breaking of the china cupid in violence is as good as its being broken through awkwardness. In the one case it is fortuitous, and in the other case it is in character.
Max's scolding of the girl in front of Mrs. Danvers, while it may be a little ill-bred, is much more heartbreaking than after Mrs. Danvers leaves.
I don't know what Max is doing in Rebecca's room when the girl visits these rooms. I think this is cheating the audience. Du Maurier accomplishes the result of having her readers and the girl think that Max is still in love with Rebecca without such cheating.
Also, Mrs. Danvers's appearance in this room turns the readers' blood cold, and I don't think the substitution of Max is comparably good. In fact, I don't think that Mrs. Danvers comes through in the treatment half as well as she does in the book! (...)
It is my regretful conclusion that we should immediately start on a new treatment, probably with a new writing set up.
If you've ever seen this particular film version of Rebecca, you'll know that all of Selznick's criticisms were accepted and incorporated. The one big plot change that's still in the film wasn't due to either Hitchcock of Selznick but the censorship conditions of the time, which demanded that Rebecca's death had to be accidental instead of a deliberate murder on Max' part because murderers weren't allowed to GET AWAY WITH IT. Now you can argue about Selznick's general ideas about book adaptions, but the success of this particular one was doubtlessly in no small part due to him. I'm fond of most Hitchcock films, including this one, but I do wish his more partisan fans would acknowledge that.
This entry was originally posted at http://selenak.dreamwidth.org/959366.html. Comment there or here, as you wish.
June 12, 1939
Dear Hitch:
It is my unfortunate and distressing task to tell you that I am shocked and disappointed beyond words by the treatment of Rebecca. I regard it as the distorted and vulgarized version of a provenly successful work, in which, for no reason that I can discern, old-fashioned movie scenes have been substituted for the captivatingly charming du Maurier scenes. This is particularly true in the Riviera squence.
We bought Rebecca, and we intend to makeRebecca. The few milion people who have read the book and who worship it would very properly attack us violently for the descecrations which are indicated by the treatment; but quite a part from the feelings of these few million, I have never been able to understand why motion-picture people insist upon throwing away something of proven appeal to substitute things of their own creation. It is a form of ego which has very properly drawn upon Hollywood the wrath of the world for many years, and candidly, I am surprised to discover that the disease has apparently also spread to England.
I don't hold at all with the theory that the difference in medium necessitates a difference in storytelling, or even a difference in scenes. In my opinion, the only thing that is justified by the difference in medium is a difference in the manner in which a scene is told; and the only omissions from the successful work that are justified are omissions necessitated by length, censorship, or other practical considerations. Readers of a dearly loved book will forgive omissions if there is an obvious reason for them; but very properly, they will not forgive substituions.
Nor do I hold with the theory that stories should be changed for motion pictures because they fall into a so-called narrative cliassification. I have made too many classics successfully and faithfully not to know beyond any question of a doubt that whether a film is narrative or dramatic it will succeed in the same manner as the original succeeded if only the same elemnts are captured and if only as much as possible is retained of the original - including alleged faults of dramatic construction. No one, not even the author of an original work, can say with any degree of accuracy why a book has caught the fancy of the public; if it were this easy, the author of the original could duplicate these elements and duplicate the success, which we know very few authors of successful works are able to do. The only sure and safe way of aiming at a successful transcription of the original into the motion-picture form is to try as far as possible to retain the original, and the degree of success in transcribing an original has always been proportionate to the succcess of the transcribers in their editing proccess and the qualities that are gotten into the casting, performances, direction, settings, etc. - as well, of course, as the proper assembly for motion-picture purposes of the original elements.
(...) This is the process that I had hoped was being engaged in on Rebecca. This is why I have kept warning you to be faithful. I have my own ego, and I don't mind letting my own creative instincts run wild either on an original, as in the case of A Star is Born, or in the adaption of an unsuccessful work, as in Made for Each Other. But my ego is not so great that it cannot be held in check on the adaption of a successful work. I don't think I can create in two months or two years anything as good with the characters and situations of Rebecca as du Maurier created; and frankly, I don't think you can, either. I want this company to produceRebecca, and not an original scenario based upon Rebecca.
The medium of the radio is certainly no closer to the novel form than is the motion picture. And yet Orson Welles, throwing together a radio script on Rebeccain less than a week's time, had one of the greatest dramatic successes the radio has ever knkown by simply assembling ten or fifteen scenes from the book word for word - thereby proving that du Maurier's Rebecca in any form has the identical appeal that it had in book form. A clever showman, he didn't waste time and effort creating anything new but simply gave them the orignal. I hope that we will be equally as astute. If we do in motion pictures as faithful a job as Welles did on the radio, we are likely to have the same success the book had and the same success that Welles had. If we create an original script, we can only pray that we'll get something that is as good and as appealing as what we had and threw away.
Now the lecture having ended, let's get down to individual instances - some very minor, some very important - of what I am talking about. I will make this comments, trivial or important, in the order of scenes to which they apply in the treatment.
I hope that it is not our intention to use the name Daphne or any other name for the girl. Next to the fact that the title character Rebecca never appeared, one of the most talked about things in connection with the book was that the principal character had no name. Again, Welles shrewdly capitalized on this point, and the ten or fifteen million people who were fascinated by the story on the air also know that the leading character never appeared by name. We certainly would be silly to give her a name in our picture. This is not a point of storytelling but simply of showmanship.
I think the scenes of seasickness are cheap beyond words, and old fashioned into the bargain. If there is any humor left on the screen in seasickness, let's for God's sake leave it to the two-reel comedies and not get our picture off on a low note by indulging in such scenes. And the first portrait of Max smoking a cigar that makes the other passengers ill is not my idea of an introduction for a romantic and mysterious figure. On the contrary, it would be a good introduction for a boor.
And quite apart from this, I don't know what we gain with our principals on their way to the Riviera, and I know a great deal that we lose: in the first place, we lose the idea of the brooding, introspective man who has for some time been away from England, trying to forget and wipe out the past. In the treatment he has apparently only just left England. In the second place, we lose the idea of the girl who has been living on the Riviera for some time with her vulgar employer, apparantly having led a miserable existence for at least months. In the treatment, she has no background of existence at all with her vulgar employer because she meets de Winter the very night she leaves England.
The opening of the book is excellent, and why it requires any change for motion pictures or any other medium I am sure I don't know - with its picture of snobbish Mrs. Van Hopper and her unhappy companion, and the every-so-slight and romantic first hint of de Winter in the distance...
And Max in a speedboat, driving out his friends on an anchored yacht - what in God's name does this do to the portrait of a man who is wondering alone, trying to get away from everything? (THe repeat of the seasickness isn't even worthy of comment.) Whatever happened to the construction that we discussed and agreed upon - that we were going to follow his moods and his being difficult and distant exactly as in the book until the honeymoon, when for the first time we saw a gay man, snatched out of his depression and his bitterness and his sour humor at long last by his new young wife, and returning to his old mood as Manderley obtrudes into his life on their return?
Even such wonderful little things as the girl tearing out the page of the book, trying this early and in this futile fashion to erase Rebeca; an dhte little scene in which Mrs. Van Hopper predicts doom to the girl - at the end of Chapter Six: these are wantonly thrown away too, for what reason I don't know.
So much for the Riviera sequences. As for Manderley, every little thing that the girl does in the book, her reactions of running away from the guests, and the tiny things that indicate her nervousness and her self-consciousness and her gaucherie are all so brilliant in the book that every woman who has read it has adored the girl and has understood her psychology, has cringed in embarassment for her, yet has understood exactly what was going through her mind. We have removed all the subtleties and substituted big broad strokes which in outline form betray just how ordinary the actual plot is and just how bad a picture it would make without the little feminine things which are so recognizable and which make every woman say, 'I know just how she feels... I know just what she's going through...' etc.
It would take too long to go into the details of my resentment toward the other changes. Obviously there are sections of the book which are repetitious, and which need to be telescoped. But this is no excuse for making Max' sister into another Mrs. Van Hopper; for throwing away the wonderfully etched and extremely entertaining portraits of his sister and her husband; for substituting some slapstick comedy about her hole-in-one on a golf course for the mood of the walk through the estate, with a very human little argument about the dog running over the rocks, and Max' curious reactions to little things - all these have been distorted in a lesser or a greater manner, and it would take days to comb through them and see just where point after point has been lost, just as they have in the Riviera sequence. I would rather say very flatly that I think the treatment is pretty bad, and that it is easier to do a new one than to repair this one.
(...)
I can't think why you avoid showing the interior of the cottage on the beach. Nor can I understand particularly why you want the grandmother in the tower of Manderley. If for no other reason, she and her own home have value as something to break the monotony of always being in the Manderley settings. However, this value may not be important, since we have plenty of sets within Manderley, its ground, etc., and there may, on the contrary, be a value in staying entirely within Manderley. In this case, I am not sure that grandmother serves any purpose at all, and perhaps she ought to be eliminated from teh story.
Other little things I miss are the many comparisons between the girl and Rebecca which the girl observes and which make her feel her own gaucherie. I refere to such things as the comparison of handwriting between her own and Rebecca's.
Also, in the book more than in the treatment, I understand why Max puts up with Mrs. Danvers, and this is weak even in the book.
I don't know why you have changed the converted boathouse into a small stone cottage. This, to me, is just a gratuitous change which is for no reason unless it is to annoy the readers of the book.
I don't think the breaking of the china cupid in violence is as good as its being broken through awkwardness. In the one case it is fortuitous, and in the other case it is in character.
Max's scolding of the girl in front of Mrs. Danvers, while it may be a little ill-bred, is much more heartbreaking than after Mrs. Danvers leaves.
I don't know what Max is doing in Rebecca's room when the girl visits these rooms. I think this is cheating the audience. Du Maurier accomplishes the result of having her readers and the girl think that Max is still in love with Rebecca without such cheating.
Also, Mrs. Danvers's appearance in this room turns the readers' blood cold, and I don't think the substitution of Max is comparably good. In fact, I don't think that Mrs. Danvers comes through in the treatment half as well as she does in the book! (...)
It is my regretful conclusion that we should immediately start on a new treatment, probably with a new writing set up.
If you've ever seen this particular film version of Rebecca, you'll know that all of Selznick's criticisms were accepted and incorporated. The one big plot change that's still in the film wasn't due to either Hitchcock of Selznick but the censorship conditions of the time, which demanded that Rebecca's death had to be accidental instead of a deliberate murder on Max' part because murderers weren't allowed to GET AWAY WITH IT. Now you can argue about Selznick's general ideas about book adaptions, but the success of this particular one was doubtlessly in no small part due to him. I'm fond of most Hitchcock films, including this one, but I do wish his more partisan fans would acknowledge that.
This entry was originally posted at http://selenak.dreamwidth.org/959366.html. Comment there or here, as you wish.