To Alfred Hitchcock, there was only one way to do things-his. During the filming of ”Notorious,” he quarreled with Ingrid Bergman and Cary Grant over how a particular scene should be played. Hitchcock wanted the two lovers to walk from the terrace to the telephone kissing and nuzzling all the way. ”We feel very awkward in this position,” Bergman said to the director. But Hitchcock insisted, and they argued back and forth for half an hour until Bergman finally relented. ”Very well, Hitch,” she said. ”We`ll do it your way.” In ”Hitchcock & Selznick” (Weidenfeld & Nicolson), by Leonard J. Leff, Hitch is quoted as saying: ”It`s not my way, Ingrid. It`s the right way.”
Harrison Ford has starred in 5 of the 10 top-grossing movies of all time. Yet when he looks in the mirror, he doesn`t see one of history`s biggest movie moneymakers. Instead, as he says in the April issue of Playboy, he says he sees his ”idiot twin. I see the stubble or the stuff on my tooth or the red in my eye that I looked in the mirror to see. I don`t go looking in the mirror to see who the person I`m living with is. Nobody sees in the mirror what other people see-at all. None of us has any idea how other people see us.”
Playwriting, like ditchdigging, used to be considered man`s work. In
”Women in American Theatre” (Theatre Communications Group), we get some idea of the extent to which that view once dominated the entertainment world. When Dore Schary, still unknown early in his career, sent a play over to producer Walter Wanger, Wanger immediately liked it. In fact, he liked it so much he sent a cable to Harry Cohn, head of Columbia Pictures, that read:
”Dore Schary should be signed up. She writes tough, like a man.”
