One of the sections in Brendan Dawes’ book is about generating images from music. Whilst messing about with the “North by Northwest” images (see previous blog post), I began to wonder if you could create music from images? Anyway, here’s the first 90 seconds of my replacement soundtrack for “North by Northwest” :-) It was created by grabbing a frame from the movie every half a second and working out the average colour of the… (read more)
Some great news for Hitchcock fans in the UK — Network are planning to release a 10 DVD set of early Hitchcock films (all licensed from Granada International) in early 2008 (probably in February). Full details haven’t been confirmed yet, but the set should contain: The Pleasure Garden (1925) The Lodger (1927) Downhill (1927) The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934) The 39 Steps (1935) Secret Agent (1936) Sabotage (1936) Young and Innocent (1937) The… (read more)
After reading Brendan Dawes’ “Analog In, Digital Out“, I’ve revisited the colours of “North by Northwest” (see earlier blog post). Rather than squish every frame to a single horizontal line, this time each frame is squished vertically — see if you can spot the “crop duster” sequence: ( full sized version on Flickr )
Okay — so I forgot to include a few memorable baddies (like Bruno in “Strangers on a Train“), but here’s the results from last month’s poll: Interesting to see that neither Vandamm or Elster (who was surely the most cold-hearted of all Hitchcock baddies) picked up any votes. So, ladies and gentlemen, I give you the winner of this round — Joseph Cotten as evil Uncle Charlie! You think you know something, don’t you? You… (read more)
News is starting to spread that actress Laraine Day, who starred in “Foreign Correspondent“, died on Saturday (10/Nov/2007). Curiously, the news reports are split on Day’s year of birth — some list it as 1917 and others as 1920. IMDB, which is often used as a source by journalists, says 1917.
A quick update — the two US DVD sets of “Psycho” and “The Birds” that were due for release in September are now slated for a release next year.
Over at MacGuffin, Ken Mogg’s latest entry in “The Editor’s Week” (27/Oct/2007) discusses “Young and Innocent“. A little bit of trivia from that film — in the mine shaft sequence, Nova Pilbeam later said in interviews that the hand that reaches out for hers didn’t belong to the hero (Derrick De Marney) but to her future husband Penrose Tennyson, who was an uncredited Assistant Director on the film.
Over at MacGuffin, Ken Mogg’s latest entry in “The Editor’s Week” (20/Oct/2007) continues his in-depth discussion about “Frenzy“. Just picking up on the theme of “waste”, in his interviews with Truffaut, Hitchcock said: I’d like to try to do an anthology on food, showing its arrival in the city, its distribution, the selling, how it’s fixed up and absorbed. And gradually, the end of the film would show the sewers, and the garbage being dumped… (read more)
Just catching up with more movie news… The Lodger (IMDB) David Ondaatje (IMDB) is directing a contemporary version of the Marie Belloc Lowndes novel (available to download at Project Gutenberg). Number 13 (IMDB) Not a remake of Hitchcock’s unfinished film, but a film in which “the director gets caught up in a Hitchcockian dilemma when he ends up in a love triangle with two crew members while making the film — when the lead actor… (read more)
The rumours have been circulating for what feels like a couple of years now that Michael “Pearl Harbor” Bay was wanting to produce a remake of “The Birds“, along with actress Naomi Watts. I’m sure I also read that Bay was intending to go back to the original short story by Daphne du Maurier for the remake, even though none of the characters in the story even remotely resemble Melanie Daniels. Du Maurier’s story instead… (read more)
