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• 1 2019-05-09T15:12:05-07:00 Eat the Chicken 5 plain 2019-05-09T15:20:31-07:00

  In December of 2018, I spent a week in Austin, Texas at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin, home to the archives of David O. Selznick, and thus nearly every document one could imagine pertaining to Rebecca. I walked into the archives prepared to write about film adaptation. I had requested boxes and boxes of screenplay drafts, treatments, and other notes and documents pertaining to the novel’s transformation into film. However, on my second to last day, I decided to review a box of press photos simply out of pure love for the film. This is what I found:
  
  I gasped. Where had a scene such an image before? I remembered:
  
  What do we have here?

• 1 2019-05-13T07:32:59-07:00 V. The Hitchcock Moment 4 plain 2019-05-13T08:15:38-07:00

  As I sat in the Ransom Center, I began to put the pieces together. I had the screenplay draft and the image of Fontaine eating chicken. However, one thing didn’t make sense: if that scene was never filmed, why was the press photo taken? I couldn’t figure it out. I flew back to Vermont unsure of what to make of what I found.

  
  A few weeks later, as I prepared to write this Scalar book, I sat down and popped in the Criterion Blu Ray of Rebecca. As I watched the honeymoon scene, I found the moment I was looking for. At the close of the honeymoon scene, Maxim and “I” enjoy a picnic, in front of a car, and appear happy. In the scene, “I” is wearing the same outfit as the one she is wearing in the press photograph. Thus, the chicken-eating scene from the screenplay draft does, in a way, make it into the final film. Watch the honeymoon scenes final moments (top right) and compare them to the photograph of Fontaine (bottom right).

  Hitchcock scholarship on Rebecca often examines this scene in particular because it is his own. In Hitchcock: The First Forty-Four Films, Chabrol and Rohmer note that the honeymoon scene was one of very few added scenes, and that it “has the triple advantage of summing up the honeymoon, underscoring Maxim’s strange reactions, and being a comedy festival” (Chabrol and Rohmer 1979). Maxim’s strange reactions are what I explored in my video essay that preceded this chapter; they are indicative of his inability to escape the past and his want to start anew. As far as humor is concerned, I will have to disagree with Chabrol and Rohmer. Nothing about the scene is funny to me. In fact, I would say it is this scene that best illustrates not only the instability of their relationship, but of both Maxim’s and “I”’s psyches. Later in their discussion of Rebecca, Chabrol and Rohmer note that with the film the “‘Hitchcock touch,’ which has previously been merely a distinguishing feature, becomes a vision of the world. Spontaneity submits to a system. This is a critical moment for an artist, for he must not develop tics, a pedagogical fury.” Thus, Chabrol and Rohmer see Rebecca, as I do, as an essential film to understanding Hitchcock as an auteur. It is with moments like the honeymoon scene that Hitchcock’s establishes his view of the world. He comments on the nature of relationships, how they are often unstable and unpredictable, and dominated by the past and one’s own insecurities. While Chabrol and Rohmer were most likely unaware of the chicken eating sequence, a fun coincidence is that a press photo of Maxim and “I” on the very same picnic is used in the book. 

  However, there is something more. In her essay, “Daphne du Maurier and Alfred Hitchcock,” Maria DiBattista writes of the honeymoon scene, “The movie within the movie is mean, of course to call attention to the fact that we are watching Rebecca the film, not reading Rebecca, the novel”  (DiBattista, 2014). DiBattista says this is enhanced by the flickering light of the projector. I agree with her observation, and the fact that Hitchcock added the scene himself only enhances her claim. Thus, the honeymoon scene not only becomes about “I” and Maxim’s relationship, but the relationship between film and literature, about the one between Hitchcock, Selznick, and du Maurier, and about film adaptation itself. By inserting the deleted chicken eating scene into the home movie sequence, Hitchcock asserts his authorship by forcing a Hitchcockian touch into the smallest of places. The is auteurship. Furthermore, his doing so can be read as a commentary and critique of film adaptation and the studio system; of valuing the source text more than the director’s vision. Thus, by inserting his directorial vision into a small movie within a movie, Hitchcock asserts his auteurship by showing what Rebecca could have been, just as the honeymoon scene shows what life at Manderley could be if it were not for Rebecca. The moment brings us one step closer to understanding why Hitchcock felt the way he did about Rebecca.
• 1 2019-05-13T07:32:03-07:00 III. Eating Chicken? 4 plain 2019-05-13T07:45:46-07:00 In December of 2018, I spent a week in Austin, Texas at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin, home to the archives of David O. Selznick, and thus nearly every document one could imagine pertaining to Rebecca. I walked into the archives prepared to write about film adaptation. I had requested boxes and boxes of screenplay drafts, treatments, and other notes and documents pertaining to the novel’s transformation into film. However, on my second to last day, I decided to review a box of press photos simply out of pure love for the film. This is what I found:
  
  
  
  
  
  I gasped. Where had a scene such an image before? I remembered:
  What do we have here?

  The image of Joan Fontaine’s “I” eating a piece of chicken can explained by an early screenplay draft of Rebecca, one that I reviewed at the Ransom Center. The script is originally dated July 29, 1939, and is by Joan Harrison and Michael Hogan, with continuity by Alma Reville, Hitchcock’s wife. The version I reviewed also had pages and pages of handwritten annotations and edits, which were made through August 22, 1939. On the script’s cover page, written in pencil, are the words, “Robert Sherwood Chgs (sic).” Who is Robert Sherwood?

  In his biography of Hitchcock, The Dark Side of Genius, Donald Spoto writes that Sherwood, who shares co-screenwriting credits with Harrison (Hogan and Phillip McDonald share credit for adaptation), was the man that Selznick brought in to clean up the “thorny bit of narrative” where Maxim admits to killing his wife — “accidentally” in the novel, on purpose in the film (Spoto, 1983). Spoto notes that Sherwood played a relatively minor role in the script, only making a handful of changes and writing the famous scene in which Maxim confesses. While this may be true, there is one key change that Sherwood made that helps us understand Hitchcock’s auteurship and Rebecca.