Unmade Hitchcock

The Industry Episode 37:

Unmade Hitchcock

[00:00:00]

Dan Delgado: One of the many aspects of the industry that fascinates me is the what ifs and the things that never happened. For example, in 1982. When E. T. was first released and was a box office sensation, director Steven Spielberg was fully preparing to do a sequel. But as soon as he realized that E. T. was a special movie to people, that it was something different, something that didn't need a sequel, he let the idea go.

However, that is after he and screenwriter Melissa Matheson had already come up with a sequel idea and wrote a treatment for it. E. T. 2. Nocturnal fears would have had Elliot and his friends find another downed spacecraft. But, here's a plot twist. Instead of it being a friendly E. T. looking to go home, the kids find some very unfriendly aliens who decide to kidnap them.

And then it's up to E. T. to rescue them. Honestly, it sounds way too intense for an E. T. movie, and it doesn't even sound all that good. [00:01:00] So, the fact that it never happened, I'm okay with that. Even if a part of me would like to see that movie. And that's just one of an endless number of examples. There's something extra tantalizing about movies that almost but never happened, especially when you're talking about a major filmmaker like Steven Spielberg.

Or let's say, Alfred Hitchcock.

In the 1960s, Alfred Hitchcock was a man who seemingly could get any movie made. Yet, had as many movies not get made as he did get made, if that makes sense. And, I can't help but ask, why that was?

Joel Gunz: So, I think there are a lot of, there are a lot of answers to that question. It's a complex, you know, situation.

Dan Delgado: This is Joel Guns, and if you have a question about Alfred Hitchcock, Joel is the man to ask. For one thing, he was an

Joel Gunz: older guy, and I think he was just like, you know, his, his energy, he [00:02:00] didn't have as much fight as he did as a younger man to get all of his His projects brought to the screen, but, but along with a lot of these issues that were sort of facing him like headwinds, here's, here's the whole situation.

So by, by the early 1960s, he was one of the most powerful men in Hollywood, right? So he had brought in, he'd been brought into universal pictures and he was their third largest shareholder. So he was on the board. And no other director had an ownership stake in the studio that they worked for. He was the first ever to do that.

And, and so he had artistic freedom. He had like outright raw power within the company. And it also made him like, took him from being rich to being like, well, healthy, right. Fabulous, like super rich. His, he was a household name by that time. And so like his name on a movie was, was going to guarantee ticket sales.[00:03:00]

You know, even, you know, in a, in a second best scenario. And so, and then you look at like how he'd even gotten there, like for years he'd been fighting for, you know, creative control and creative power. Remember all those fights he had with Selznick over control of the films. And so finally he gets into his, his golden years.

He's got, he's in the, he's in the seat of power. And then, you'd think he could do anything he wanted, but instead, he just like, biffs it, big time, several times. And, and so it's really, it's a conundrum.

Dan Delgado: So the question is still there. Why? As it turns out, there isn't just one reason. But maybe there's two. My name is Dan Delgado, and in this episode, we're taking a look at the master of suspense, Alfred Hitchcock, and the films he didn't make.

Welcome to The Industry.[00:04:00]

Alfred Hitchcock, as mentioned before by Joel Guns, had a lot of power in Hollywood by the time the 1960s rolled around. He seemingly had trouble getting a number of films made. Films that he really wanted to make. Keep in mind that in the early half of the 1960s, Hitch had two of his biggest hits, Psycho and the Birds.

So what was the issue? Was he willingly selling out to Universal and MCA by only doing the types of movies they wanted him to do?

Joel Gunz:  One question that you could raise is, well, okay, so what? He, he got so, uh, mired, you know, deeply mired in, in the, in the front office and money issues that he was a sellout. And.

Maybe, but that, that doesn't really scan, right? Because he had envisioned the birds as an art house film. He had envisioned Marty as an art house film. So he was like, he was really committed to [00:05:00] pursuing his, his artistic vision.

Dan Delgado: That again is Joel Gunz.

Joel Gunz: And he'd always been that way anyway. He'd always, you know, been very concerned about, uh, making sure that his movies were profitable because he knew that that would get him, you know, open doors to, to make the next movie he wanted to make.

So, calling it a sellout isn't, I don't think that's right. I don't think that's the right answer.

Dan Delgado: And I'm with Joel here. It doesn't seem likely that he was selling out, which isn't to say I don't think Hitch didn't like money. There's something else at play here, or perhaps I should say someone else.

Joel Gunz: I do think that this is where Lou Wasserman comes in.

He had been hit's agent since I think around 1948. He'd been with them for, for a long time. At that time, in 1948, Hitch had his own production company called Transatlantic Pictures. And, uh, that was the company that produced Rope. He had signed, he had been working with Cary Grant to, to take the role of [00:06:00] Rupert Caddell in Rope.

And finally, Cary Grant said, nope, I'm not gonna do it. And it was Wasserman who saved the day on that film. Because he also had James Stewart as a client. And he was able to go to Hitch and say, I got Jimmy! We can make the movie. So, right from the beginning of the relationship, Hitchcock was, like, very indebted to this guy for, you know, like, bringing the goods, delivering.

And in that case, he really saved the film. And so they became good friends, Hitch came to really trust his judgment and his loyalty on

Dan Delgado: things. The casual film fan may be asking themselves right now, who was Lou Wasserman? And I understand, he's not a household name.

Joel Gunz: The fact that we don't know his name, commonly is by design that they had written it into their, into their corporate culture that they would not be, you know, that they would not, you know, take the spotlight. So even like their corporate offices were a big [00:07:00] black glass cube, right? And then they had these, what they call the rules of the road that they had written.

Rule number one was don't talk to the press. Let our clients, the talent, let them talk to the press and get the spotlight, but our agents are going to stay in the background in the shadows. And another one was no nepotism rule. Don't hire your nephew. Right? And then the third one, this is a, this is, this one sets the imagination aflame.

They had a uniform dress code for all of their agents.

Dan Delgado: And really, we're underselling Lew Wasserman. And not just his importance to Hollywood overall, where he loomed large in the background, but his importance to this story in particular. So I'm going to sidebar for just a minute or two, because I want you to get an even better picture of who Wasserman was.

To do that, I've brought in Shawn Levy. Sean is one of the great showbiz non fiction writers of our time. He's also the host of the limited series, Glitter and Might, a podcast that tells Wasserman's story. So, for our purposes here, he's going to be our Lew Wasserman [00:08:00] expert. So, let's ask him. Who was Lew Wasserman?

Shawn Levy: Okay, if you picture a Hollywood agent in a dark suit, with a big tan, and maybe the old time guys with the big glasses, Lew Wasserman created that look. Lew Wasserman was sort of the first Hollywood agent of the modern era. He came up in the old era, but he invented the look where every agent looked like a shark and everyone at the agency looked identical, so they were almost like robots.

He did this in the 1930s and 40s. He was so far ahead of his contemporaries that he was able to out business them. There were moguls who wouldn't meet with this guy after lunch. Because they felt too sleepy after a full meal and they thought he would get advantage on them. And he did. Lou Wasserman broke the studio hold on acting talent with Jimmy Stewart.

Instead of being under contract, he was on a per picture basis and he got a percentage of the gross that had never happened before. [00:09:00] He created a TV network to provide programming. He didn't have a network, he had a production company. As a talent agent, he was producing more television than any Hollywood movie studio.

So he was always ahead of the competition. He had his fingers in political parties, both the Democrats and Republicans favored him. And he was just sort of a visionary and a power broker and a master deal maker.

Dan Delgado: Now that we have an idea of who we're talking about, let's get back to Hitchcock. And the films he didn't make

Joel Gunz: And by the way, this isn't even everything.

Dan Delgado: That's right. in the opening. I said in the 60s hitch had just as many films not get made as he did get made, but that's not really true. He actually had a few more films not get made than we're going to look at here. And for the record, he had five films released in the 1960s and we're going to look at five that he didn't make.

Okay. So first up is…

Joel Gunz: yeah, the three hostages. [00:10:00] So this would have been, uh, it just. It tantalizes the mind to imagine what could have been with this one because this was, um, this would have been his follow up to the 39 steps. So this is 1964 and it's based on a novel by John Buchan, The Three Hostages, and it features Richard Hannay, who is the main character in the 39 steps.

And, and so it just takes that character and it puts him in a whole new set of capers. And so what could have been, right? And so, and this is like, so this is 1964, um, James Bond had just, you know, has come out and, and is kind of stealing a little bit of his thunder, but it's also kind of an homage to his work and, and so this would have been his chance to sort of regain control of the, you know, the spy film genre.

So I'm sure he had that in mind, you know, that he was like, that's, this is the competition. This is where the winds were blowing. So. Anyway, so that was the basic idea behind it, but [00:11:00] it's, there were some problems with it. The novel is really set in the 1930s, and adapting it to the 1960s would have been a pretty difficult move.

One of the key scenes, the main, one of the main reasons he wanted to film the, this novel, was because it includes a scene in which the, the villain's blind mother hypnotizes Richard Haney, and puts him in a hypnotic trance, and... You know sort of manipulates him and he felt that was kind of a dated idea this idea of hypnotism and you know that he felt it just didn't really translate well to film he couldn't find a good uh work around for that so so the

movie was left behind.

Dan Delgado: Let's put this one in the category of an artistic decision, or better yet, let's call it an artistic drop on Hitch's part.

From the three hostages, we move on to RRRR. And that's four R's, [00:12:00] mind you. And no, this had nothing to do with everyone's favorite movie from India from last year.

Joel Gunz: Alright, this is a personal favorite of mine that got away, and I would have liked to see this happen, because Hitch was really good with this kind of setup.

Okay, so first of all, this is 1965. And he has been binge watching Italian neorealist cinema. He just can't get enough of Michelangelo Antonioni. Blow up, Red Desert, all of that. And he himself was just completely obsessed with this new Italian wave of cinema and their use of color and their approach to storytelling.

And he was feeling kind of like his, I think he had realized, he was starting to realize that his style... Was becoming a little bit old hat. In other words, you know, if in 1959 he can make North by Northwest, and it changes, it opens up a whole new genre of [00:13:00] filmmaking, but now, you know, James Bond franchise comes along and is doing the same thing.

He's realizing that he's been imitated. He doesn't want to just, you know, keep doing the same old hat himself. So he's kind of like casting around, fishing around for new directions to go in. And he settled on this Italian, you know, new wave, right? Okay. And so, so the story is about this, it's an Italian story.

And it's about a, and it's set in, I believe it's set in New York. Yeah. And it's about a hotel manager, unbeknownst to him. He, his family is running a crime ring right under his nose and they steal things and then they fence it and make their money. So, and that's where the title comes from. So RRR is the highest rating that you can give a collector coin.

Dan Delgado: Okay.

Joel Gunz: So there's your Miguel, right? Yes, and so and so this the story would have been, you know, rather than Featuring necessarily [00:14:00] a starring actor or starring character It would have been more of an ensemble piece about everybody in this family engaging their little At the same time, the hotel manager is running the hotel, so we get to see the inner workings of how hotels get, you know, how they get operated, how the kitchen works, the disaster in the kitchen that becomes a gourmet meal in the dining room, the chaos in the laundry room that turns into these well appointed hotel rooms.

Uh, he was really into all that. It would have been much more exciting. It would have added more action. It would have, uh, lots of room for comedy. Uh, you can already hear the, you know, you can already see those comedic scenes working out.

Dan Delgado: Now, I personally think this movie sounds very cool. So why didn't it happen?

Joel Gunz: So he had hired a couple of, a pair of Italian writers who were, they were a team, Aghe and Scarpilli. I think it's pronounced, and they started working on it, but their work was great. They're fantastic. They're beloved in Italy, but their [00:15:00] English wasn't so good and Hitch’s Italian was even worse.

And so language barriers kept them from really making the connection that they'd hoped for. Plus the writers just didn't get their hands around the story. So it just wasn't. Didn't develop, but he kept pushing on it and he could have made it gel if he had a project that he worked on and the writers weren't working out, he needed to just fire the writers and, uh, hit his black book and get the next one online.

That was standard operating procedure for him, right? I would think so. Yes. But he faced resistance from Universal Pictures rather, and Lew Wasserman was not into it.

Dan Delgado: So let's put this one in a separate category. If The Three Hostages was an artistic drop, then this was The Wasserman Influence. And how big of an influence was Wasserman on Hitchcock anyway?

What was this relationship like?

Shawn Levy: Wasserman became Hitchcock's agent in the 1940s. Wasserman's first client was Ronald Reagan. And Reagan was a B movie actor. And a terrible B movie actor. He had charisma, but no talent. And Wasserman cut a deal in the early 1940s for Reagan at Warner Brothers.

And he asked for an unusual length of time on the deal.

Every deal was for like 45 weeks a year and Wasserman wanted 47 weeks a year and Warner Brothers didn't understand why. And when the ink was dry, Jack Warner said, why did we just cut a deal for 47 weeks? And Wasserman said, because it's now a million dollar deal when you look at all the money and all the years.

And when that first million dollar deal got signed for Ronald Reagan of all people, major talent went toward MCA. And Alfred Hitchcock was one of those people who dumped his previous agency and went to MCA on the back of the Reagan deal. The two became friends. They socialized together frequently with their wives.[00:17:00]

And when Wasserman started producing television shows, he went to Hitchcock and said, Get into this. This is the future. This is where the money is. And instead of paying you a salary, we're going to pay you an MCA stock. And when Alfred Hitchcock died, he was the third or fourth largest shareholder in MCA universal as it then was.

He was worth, you know, eight figures based on that agreement with Wasserman. There's a very famous story about people walking through. The MCA office is complaining that television was taking over for the movies. And Hitchcock was in with Wasserman, and he stuck his head out the door and said, Would you all please be quiet?

We're busy counting our money in here. So, you know, Wasserman brought Hitchcock from Paramount to Universal, where he made Psycho and the last movies of his career up through Family Plot. Um, he physically brought Hitchcock. Hitchcock's offices [00:18:00] were located on the Universal lot once Wasserman owned the lot.

And they, they truly were friends. When Wasserman was given the, um, Gene Hersholt Humanitarian Award at the Oscars in 1973, Alfred Hitchcock presented

it to him.

Dan Delgado: Okay, now let's get back to the movies. Next, we're going to look at

Joel Gunz: Mary Rose. This is the one. This is like, you know, this is his rosebud from Citizen Kane.

You know, this is the one that really got away, that hurts, that cuts deep. Donald's photo and his biography said that this was perhaps the single greatest disappointment of his creative life.

Dan Delgado: All right. First, let's discuss what was the movie going to be about? What was the plot? How far along did it get?

Joel Gunz: Yeah. Okay, so he had first seen it in 1920. He was 20, 21 years old when he saw it, he probably saw it alone and on stage because it's based on a play by J. M. Barrie who wrote Peter Pan. And [00:19:00] so I think that's like the way into this story and the way into like how it captures your imagination is to think of it as sort of a an alternative telling of Peter Pan.

You've got this mysterious island that people disappear off to where time collapses. You've got, it's got this misty mood about it. It's about memory. So on the subtitle of the play, it was the island that likes to be visited and it's set in Sort of on the mainland or in real time around this haunted mansion and this young couple with their son They go off to to visit one of the islands.

It's so it's set in in Scotland and they go Hop in the boat go to a small island to go visit and have a picnic and the husband wife and their small son the wife wanders off to go for a little walk and And she disappears into the mist and she's gone forever. She's gone for decades. And then [00:20:00] a years later, she shows up and she's the same age that she's always been.

So she's, you know, young and beautiful in her twenties, let's say, and her husband, though, has died and her son has grown up and now her son is older than she is, and now they have to figure out what to do about that. So that's the basic idea of the plot. So it's very much about this notion of ambiguous loss.

You know, losing someone, but not really knowing if they're dead or alive. Also these stories of memory. And so Hitchcock, imagine I'm 20 years old. He's already very much in a dreamy. You know, romantic, metaphysical, you know, frame of mind, like, like we all are at that age, ready to believe in our dreams, right?

And it just got under his skin. And so he tried to get it made in the mid 40s while he was working on Lifeboat. He went [00:21:00] to 20th Century Fox and said, okay, I've got my follow up film for Lifeboat. Which also, by the way, kind of has a misty mood about it at times. And they said, nah, we're going to pass. It's, you know, you're known as a master of suspense.

You're not known for ghost stories. And so then he got into the fifties and he pitched Paramount on it and. Grace Kelly was attached to it. We could have seen Grace Kelly go off in the mess, slam dunk, right? Nope. Didn't happen. He wanted to get this film made. So finally we needed, Oh, go ahead.

Dan Delgado: Well, what happened with the Grace Kelly attempt? Did they, did Paramount pass?

Joel Gunz: Yeah. So Paramount passed. They said, wow, not our kind of film.

Dan Delgado: And I want to quickly interrupt here to say: Paramount Pictures. How dare you?

Joel Gunz: So it's 44 years later. Right. And he's still trying to get this damn movie made. So he's working on Marty and he's got J. Press and Alan writing the screenplay for Marnie.

And he's really having a great time working with her. She's working out great. She's just a lot of fun to be with. They get each other. She gets his jokes. And so he. You know, makes the pitch to her. Hey, do you want to work on this next string play? And she says, yeah, sure. Let me give a shot at give it a shot.

So she starts noodling around some ideas on it and hitch and Alma. They take off for a 2 week trip to Scotland. They're scouting locations in Glasgow and the isle of sky and all these little islands beyond. And they're like, he's They're working on Marnie and he's already planning his next film. He's ready to go on Mary Rose.

And then, you know, wouldn't you know it, he gets it into the pitch phase. The Black Suit Mafia says, Nope, not going to do it. Not only was it a nope, it was a hard nope. They said, not only can you not do it, but Hitch claimed for the rest of his career that they actually wrote it into his contract that he could make any movie he wanted [00:23:00] except Mary Rose.

Dan Delgado: No kidding! That is quite the right into a contract. You can make any movie, but not that one. Do we know why? I mean, I'm guessing they just thought it wasn't going to sell. They just didn't believe in it.

Joel Gunz: Right. That was the bottom line, you know, money, but again, they felt it was off brand for them. They didn't see him as a ghost.

story director. He made down to earth suspense films, not ethereal ghost films. So this is the one that this one hurts. This one hurts a lot. You know, he really took that one to his grave as a loss.

Dan Delgado: Mary Rose was made as a British TV movie in 1987. And again, as a low budget feature in 2016. As far as Hitchcock's version, though, this is definitely the Wasserman influence at play here.

This brings us to Kaleidoscope. And Kaleidoscope was a movie that was also known by the title of Frenzy as well. But since Hitchcock did eventually make a movie called Frenzy in [00:24:00] 1972, we're just going to stick with Kaleidoscope as the name.

Joel Gunz: So the story that would have been Kaleidoscope was, it's a, it's another serial killer story.

And in his pitch to it, he's described it as a sort of, he didn't use the word prequel, but as the story behind Uncle Charlie in Shadow of a Doubt. So, in Shadow of a Doubt, he plays a serial killer who kills wealthy widows for their money, and this would have, but we don't see him kill any widows in Shadow of a Doubt.

In Kaleidoscope, we would have seen that backstory where he kills three young women for his, you know, for financial gain and also for, you know, his reverse pleasure.

Dan Delgado: Alright, on a scale of 1 to 10, Joel, how messed up would this have been?

Joel Gunz: Okay, that's the problem with Kaleidoscope, because everybody was saying that this is like an 11.

That's, and that was the primary pushback that he got. He was having a hard time, you know, finding people to collaborate with him on it because they just [00:25:00] thought it was too squeamy. You would have had, to be clear, the three women that he kills would have been young women and it would have been a murder rape situation.

And it would have had lots of nudity in it. And so it just would have been very hard to, but, but it's interesting to see how he would have worked out those problems. So maybe just back up a little bit. It's a serial killer story set in New York City. And the, and it's set in iconic locations in New York City.

So first of all, the first murder takes place in Central Park. And it's a young woman who works on Wall Street. Then, you know, the second murder, or excuse me, the first murder takes place by a waterfall in Central Park. Second place takes place by, on the Mothball Fleet. of ships that is or was outside New York City, and it was kind of a big deal.

It had been very picaresque. There was a scene that was supposed to take place at Yankee Stadium, so they were really going to make use of the city, and you can kind of, I think the way in to think about this is this would have [00:26:00] done for New York City what he had done for London and San Francisco in his other films.

Dan Delgado: Kaleidoscope was an example of Hitch pushing the envelope, and it definitely turned some people off. But this wasn't the first time that had happened to him.

Joel Gunz: People crapped all over Psycho when he was trying to get it made. And he could not get it made. He had to finance it himself. And that's why he owned it and that's why it made him so many piles of money because nobody wanted to touch it and it turned out to be the biggest thing ever.

Right? So same thing happened. People read the script and they just, they turned it down. They said, we don't have an appetite for this kind of sex and violence. And so that's the number one main reason. People said no to this, but he set it up for success. So like the first draft of the screenplay was written by Robert Block who had written the novel psycho.

So, [00:27:00] you know, he brought in somebody he knew that could handle the story. Well, that relationship didn't work out. And he dropped out of the project. And, uh, and then he brought in Ben Levy that he'd been working with. He'd they'd been best friends, old friends since the thirties. He had helped write blackmail and.

Brought him in to help tell the story and you know, there's, there's a wonderful transcript of bits of transcript of conversation between hitch and Alma in story conferences. And they're talking about how to handle the violence. And also there's lots of nudity and he had it worked out. He had the problem solved that they would like do it in the semi darkness.

They're going to be aboard this ship on the mothball fleet where the light from what would be coming in from outside through these. These metal grills, and so it would leave, like, striped lighting all over their bodies so you wouldn't really see the nudity as frankly. Plus, you know, you can just, you can hear his graphic mind working on this, that graphically it would have been [00:28:00] very interesting, these knives of light as he's trying to, you know, stab her to death.

Dan Delgado: Hitchcock even went around New York City and shot test footage in anticipation for Kaleidoscope. He had a photographer named Arthur Shantz take pictures as well. Here's 1999 documentary on Hitchcock, talking about his experience.

Arthur Schantz: We went to about 15 locations around the city of New York, and we went upstate New York, and we went to the Maritime Harbor, where all the Liberty ships are berthed.

We did all places where there was a great body of water. Turns out that water figured very heavily into the story. And every time this, this young boy saw water and stuff, he got turned on. And he had to commit a murder. This was a film that he was strongly believed in and really wanted to do.

Dan Delgado: You can see that test footage for Kaleidoscope on YouTube.

I'll have a link to it in the show notes. There's no sound, but it is really interesting. Also, what I find really interesting [00:29:00] is that the people in the footage, the actors that they hired, are all unknown. And when I say unknown, I mean there is literally no record of who these people are, or were. Which is really crazy to me, that there's some people out there walking around who were directed by Alfred Hitchcock in the 1960s and no one knows who they are.

So when it came to Kaleidoscope, what happened?

Joel Gunz: He finally brought it to MCA, or to Universal at that time, and Wasserman, probably at the head of the table, and he pitched it, did the script, did the dog and pony show, and not only did they say no, they promptly picked up all available copies of the script from the conference room.

They confiscated them from other people who had them and they said, not going to happen.

Dan Delgado: Okay. But Joel, correct me if I'm wrong, Mr. Hitchcock has a clause in his contract that says he can make any movie he wants as long as it's not Mary Rose. This is not Mary Rose. Why doesn't that clause apply here?

Joel Gunz: So that's the million dollar question right there. Why didn't he do it? None of these people was his superior. He had no bosses. He was the boss. So he had no claws, nothing to stop him. Nothing for him to just say, screw you. I'm going to finance it myself. He had the money. I'm going to make it myself and I'm going to make all the money myself.

He didn't do that. So I think part of it was, you know, we talked about this. Publicly, he had been talking at this time about, you know, being beholden to universal and engaging in these, you know, concerns about the financial ethics. He had no moral ethics, you know, but financial ethics, he was, he's claimed to be taking that very seriously.

But when you stop and think about it, black suit, white shirt, black tie, [00:31:00] he was just as mobbed up as everybody. Right. Yeah. And so, you know, like in that kind of a situation, he may have been equals with Lou Wasserman at this point, but there can only be one boss and everybody knew who that was and it wasn't Hitchcock.

And, you know, so when you think about it, like you can push, you can argue, you can cajole, but at the end of the day, you know, you're going to think twice about really going toe to toe with these guys.

Dan Delgado: Here comes the Wasserman influence again. And this brings up a good question. Joel uses the phrase mobbed up there, and he says that

Joel Gunz: Lew Wasserman, MCA agency, they were totally mobbed up, right?

They were tied to a Chicago syndicate known as The Outfit. You know, The Outfit that was run by Al Capone back in the day. They were those wise guys.

Dan Delgado: Let's go back to Sean Levy one more time to see how accurate that is. Just how mobbed [00:32:00] up was Lou Wasserman?

Shawn Levy: Lou Wasserman came up in Cleveland and worked in a mob run casino.

That was his first job. And that's where he was hired by music corporation of America, MCA, which was the talent agency he worked for. MCA was founded in Chicago in the twenties when Al Capone ran the town. You couldn't book an organ grinder. Onto a street corner without dealing with the Capone organization.

So MCA and the mob have been connected since MCA was formed. Wasserman couldn't put a button on somebody and have them erased, but he spoke every day of his business life. And there are telephone records and documents to prove this. With Sidney Korshak, who was the mob's lawyer in Los Angeles and Las Vegas.

So was he a mobster? No. Was he mobbed up in the sense like he had obligations? No. But did he avail himself of those connections? Yes. The mob ran labor unions and Lou [00:33:00] Wasserman, when he needed to do things like settle a writer's strike, could go to Sidney Korshak and his mob connections and say. Let's grease these wheels and get people back to work.

Dan Delgado: So that one does kind of check out. Okay, we've got one more unmade Hitchcock film to look at. Although, there's a caveat here, because this one was sort of made.

Joel Gunz: This is a bonus film, because I don't even know how far it had gotten. It may have just been in the conceptual stage and not much farther than that.

But just because this is the 60th anniversary of The Birds, The Birds was a... Originally envisioned not as a bird movie, but as an alien invasion movie. And he, he had it all worked out. He had, I don't know how far down the road he had gone, but he was trying to follow up psycho and he needed something. He wanted something out of this world.

And so, yeah, it was going to be an alien invasion movie and it would have followed the same apocalyptic storyline that eventually became the [00:34:00] birds.

Dan Delgado: And do we know what compelled him to change course?

Joel Gunz: Yeah, I think part of, part of what's going on with, with some of these. Films that get canned are, he had also boxed himself in with the kinds of movies that he made.

So he said that he could never make a Disney movie because he could never direct Cinderella because people would be looking for her mother in the trunk. And so same thing, like he wasn't really known for doing sci fi. And so that's what, that's what persuaded him eventually to introduce this element that is also based on a Daphne du Maurier story.

And of course he'd already filmed. Yeah. He actually made two other films based on her work, so it was more in his wheelhouse.

Dan Delgado: So this sounds more like an artistic drop. Maybe instead of calling it an artistic drop, this one could be a Hitchcock pivot.

Dan Delgado: Thank you for listening to this episode of the industry [00:35:00] presented by Movie Maker. Visit moviemaker. com for more great podcasts, articles, and information about movies. If you love movies. Want to make them or you're already a moviemaker yourself, then there's something for you at moviemaker. com. This episode was written, edited, and hosted by me, Dan Delgado.

Special thanks to my guest this week. First, Joel Guns. On October 7th, 2023, just a few days after this episode is being released. Joel will be running HitchCon 23. Yes, an Alfred Hitchcock convention taking place at Mercy University in New York, but it's also going to be online as well. Head on over to hitchcon.

org for more information. Also, thanks to Sean Levy, our Lew Wasserman expert. I highly recommend you check out Sean's limited series on Wasserman called Glitter and Might. You can get it wherever you got this podcast from. And if you can't, there's a link to it in the show notes. Music in this episode is from Epidemic Sound.

There's a transcript and links to [00:36:00] all sources used for this episode, and anything else I can think is relevant at my website, IndustryPodcast. org. While you're there, you can leave me a voicemail, and if you're so inclined, you can even buy me a coffee. If you enjoyed this episode, feel free to leave a 5 star review on Apple Podcasts, Podchaser, or wherever else you can leave a review.

If you'd like to contact me, you can. You can email me, it's dan at moviemaker. com. I'm also on Twitter at TheIndustry13, Instagram at industry underscore pod, and Facebook at TheIndustryPod. Thanks again for listening. I'll be back again soon with another story of the things that went on in the industry.