As I'm doing research on "Hollywood Gone Wild," the sequel (I hope) to "Writers Gone Wild," I thought I'd share with you my impressions of the books I run across in my work.

Excerpts from "Me and Hitch": Why "The Birds" Failed

When I first suggested "Screwball Comedy Becomes Terror," Hitch should have said, "That is the worst idea I have ever heard in my life. Let’s move on." Instead, we marched ahead confidently, blithely trying to graft upon Du Maurier’s simple tale of apocalyptic terror a slick story about two improbably lovers confronted with an even more improbably situation ─ birds attacking humans.

The trouble with our story was that nothing in it was real. In real life, birds don’t attack people and girls don’t buy lovebirds to schlep sixty miles upstate for a practical joke. Hitch had bought a bizarre novella about plain people attacked by the gentlest of creatures. He had then hired a realistic novelist from New York to change these people into the sort of beautiful, sleek, sophisticated characters Hitch himself enjoyed seeing on the screen, the Cary Grants and Grace Kellys of the world. Even if the script had worked ─ which it didn’t ─ Tippi Hedren and Rod Taylor were no Grace Kelly or Cary Grant.

But Hitch never gave it an honest shot.

Hunter On the Rape Scene in "Marnie"

I told him that I did not want to write that scene as he had outlined it. I told him we would lose all sympathy for the male lead if he rapes his own wife on their honeymoon. I told him we can see the girl isn’t being coy or modest, she’s terrified, she’s trembling, and the reasons for this all come out in the later psychiatric sessions. I told him if the man really loved her he would take her in his arms and comfort her gently and tell her they’d work it out, don’t be frightened, everything will be all right. I told him that’s how I thought the scene should go.

Hitch held up his hands the way directors do when they’re framing a shot. Palms out, fingers together, thumbs extended and touching to form a perfect square. Moving his hands toward my face, like a camera coming in for a close shot, he said, ‘Evan, when he sticks it in her, I want that camera right on her face.”

Many years later, when I told Jay Presson Allen how much his description of that scene had bothered me, she said, ‘You just got bothered by the scene that was his reason for making the movie. You just wrote your ticket back to New York.”