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Walter Raubicheck and Walter Srebnick. Scripting Hitchcock: Psycho, The Birds, and Mamie. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 201 1. 131 pp. $65.00 hardcover. $22.00 paperback.
The promise of Scripting Hitchcock is enticing: an exploration of Alfred Hitchcock and the diree screenwriters involved in the scripting of three of the director's most well-known films. Raubicheck and Srebnick's monograph is a mere four chapters, sandwiched between a preface and an afterword. Chapter one overviews Hitchcock's relationship with writers, focusing on Joseph Stefano, Evan Hunter, and Jay Presson Allen, die three writers under examination for their literary contributions to Psycho, The Birds, and Mamie. Chapter two deals with the source materials for the three works (Robert Blochs Psycho, Daphne du Maimer's "The Birds," and Winston Graham's Mamie). Chapter three is tided "From Treatment to Script" and Chapter Four is tided "Final Drafts: The Shooting Scripts"; both of diese chapters overlap and deal largely with die same material involving the relationship among die writing processes, professional relationships, and the resulting films.
The short volume relates to adaptation and screenplay studies and provides some insights into Hitchcock's method. To its credit, it is fluidly written, which makes it accessible to a broad audience, particularly a general readership interested in glimpsing behind the screen at Hitchcock and his writers. However, critical analysis of the scripting of Hitchcock's three films is scant. A brief discussion in chapter four about Allen's infusion of "animal imagery" into the Mamie screenplay stands out as the most engaging critical examination in the four chapters. Here the authors offer...