Behind the Bastards - Part One: Alfred Hitchcock: The Director Who Randomly Tortured People

Episode Date: January 1, 2019

Was it worth it? In Episode 41, Robert is joined by Abed Geith to discuss Alfred Hitchcock the  brilliant director who also tortured his friends and employees. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian-trained astronaut?

That he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become the youngest person to go to space? Well, I ought to know, because I'm Lance Bass. And I'm hosting a new podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space. With no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the Earth for 313 days that changed the world.

Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello friends! I'm Robert Evans, and this is Once Again Behind the Bastards, the show where we tell you everything you don't know about the very worst people in all of history. Now, my co-host today who is going in cold in this hail of a bastard is Abed Gaith. Abed, how are you doing, man? I'm great, thanks for having me. And you are with the podcast Gone Riffin on Starburn's Audio currently in its second season. Yes, I am.

That's right, and every Wednesday you can find us at wherever you get podcasts. And you are also generally, you would say, a creative, a story consultant or whatnot in the industry, so to speak? Yes, mostly for animation, I consult on my friends' shows, and before their shows, they have me come in and kind of like, I just know every TV show and animation. I'm really into media or a lot of stuff, so it's like, I can be like, well, that's too much like this, or maybe try that, and it's helpful to people. And you are a big fan of today's big bastard, Alfred Hitchcock. Honestly, without question, one of the greatest directors.

Yeah, there's no doubting that, like there's no underplaying the guy's influence. His sheer versatility is really amazing. Yeah, he was a remarkable director with a remarkable impact, and unlike most of the bastards we talk about on our show, guys like Hitler, Stalin, Saddam, Stephen Segal, you know, these people are monsters who left the world with nothing but misery, pain, death, and a couple of mediocre 90s action movies. Alfred Hitchcock is a much more complicated character to talk about when we're sort of parsing out his legacy. And so the question that you and I have to answer today is in essence, was it worth it?

Was what we as a society got out of Hitchcock worth what the man did to some of the people around him? I mean, I hope so, but I don't know exactly what we're going to find out. Yeah, and there probably won't be a clean answer, but you know, it helps to set up a question like that at the start of the podcast, even if we never address it again, and hopefully the audience won't notice. I shouldn't have brought that up because we just rolled on through it, but now we're committed together. Oh yeah, we're locked in arm-in-arm. Let's tiptoe arm-in-arm to Oblivion? I don't know, I should just move on to the story. Let's do it! Alfred Hitchcock was born on August 13th, 1899, so he's a 90s kid.

Me? I'm an 80s, 90s kid. Yeah, I'm an 80s, 90s kid, but mostly 90s. So already we got a lot in common with Hitchcock. I'm sure. His dad's side of the family was mostly a bunch of small business owners, and his mom's side of the family were laborers. So he comes from a pretty working class background, cockney background. Alfred's dad, William, moved the family into the lucrative grocery store owning trade when he was just a baby. The family lived on premises at the Greensgrocers they worked at, and in general seemed to have lived ideal lives as quiet productive subjects of the Crown. Pretty normal turn of the century British family. So while family circumstances were comfortable enough, Father William was a strict disciplinarian.

Alfred was the youngest of three children, and his dad seems to have singled him out for a particular ire. Throughout his life, Hitchcock was fond of relating this story. I'm going to quote Alfred here. When I was no more than six years of age, I did something that my father considered worthy of reprimand. He sent me to the local police station with a note. The officer in duty read it and locked me in a jail cell for five minutes, saying, This is what we do to naughty boys. I have ever since gone to any lengths to avoid arrest and confinement. To you young people, my message is stay out of jail. Now it's debatable as to whether or not that story is true. I do want to believe that there was a time when you could just whimsically send your kid to the police station and have him locked up for a couple of minutes.

My dad almost did it to me when he caught me with pot. Really? He threatened to call the police. I've been there. Nowadays, I don't think most parents would do that because you'd be like, I mean, cops shoot people sometimes. Well, my dad was like a fanatical Muslim. He was against any kind of drugs. And that's a complicated police relationship there too. It is. And Hitchcock's family would not have had that kind of, you know, it was the 1890s, they were all British and very cockney caucasians.

Yeah, and they probably trusted the police more than we do now. It was a different era. Although this does seem to have given Hitchcock kind of a lifetime hatred of police officers and all authority figures. Oh, we share that. Yes, ditto, ditto. And it's also a pretty ever-present theme in his work. You know, the police generally are not portrayed as particularly on the ball in Hitchcock films. No, in a way they represent sort of like an opposition. Yeah, yeah.

And that seems to have been his very much attitude. He stated in a number of interviews actually that it must be said to my credit that I never wanted to be a policeman, which is like the polite 1950s equivalent of having ACAB tattooed or stuck on the back of your shirt or something. He definitely had a little bit of that punk attitude going. I can imagine. Yeah, Donald Spotto, who wrote the biography The Dark Side of Genius, notes that it's impossible to confirm or deny Hitchcock's story about being locked in a cell for five minutes. Whatever the case, it's telling that he would go back to the story repeatedly in interviews,

and definitely says something about him as a person. Hitchcock grew up into an anxious child. He did not deal well with being left alone and was prone to flights of wild paranoia. Quote, I remember when I was five or six, it was a Sunday evening. The only time my parents did not have to work. They put me to bed and went to Hyde Park for a stroll. They were sure I would be asleep until their return. But I woke up, called out, and no one answered.

Nothing but night all around me, shaking. I got up, wandered around the empty dark house, and finally arriving in the kitchen, found a piece of cold meat that I ate while drying my tears. Yeah, it's a rough story. Oh man. Yeah. So far I'm with him. Yeah, so far I'm with him.

He's just a little kid at this point. Right, he's struggling. He's struggling, and he begins to binge eat. And apparently his favorite foods were fried fish and bacon, which checks out with the British stuff, very British. Okay, that is British. Yeah, a lot of fried fish, a lot of bacon. He later recalled that his goal with this was to build what he described as an armor

of fat to protect him from the world. That's kind of awesome. Yeah, that's kind of awesome. It's kind of, yeah, making it your own. As a young man, Hitchcock's favorite hobby involved studying the timetables of the brand new electronic trains that had just come to London. He was seven years old when the London area got its first electronic tram, and this was apparently something of like a local hobby at the time, is just obsessing over train schedules

and like betting how late or early a train would be. Wow. It was a boring time. Like 1907, there's not a lot to do. He's studying train schedules. That or Dickens. Well, it's kind of like model building. Yeah.

I feel like this is the 1906 version, like the people who would have been doing that in 1906 grew up reading Star Wars extended universe novels in the 1990s. Oh, I did. Yeah, same here. I mean, yeah. Air to the empire, right? Yeah. It's something cool and new and futuristic, so you obsess over it for a while.

Well, because we didn't get Star Wars sequels, so that was the closest we got. Yeah, that was the closest we got. It was our electronic train schedules. Yeah. I think I was made fun of for that. Yes. Yes. Yes.

I would say it made me a stronger person, but it made me better. Well, it did make me better. Yeah. And damn, I'm going to guess, maybe he didn't take shit for the electronic train thing. That might have just been so cool at the time. He was probably ahead of the curve. He was probably ahead of the curve. Yeah, I think he influenced a couple of train hobbyists.

Hitchcock went to high school or primary school, I guess they call it. It's Saint Ignatius, which was a Catholic school that took a traditionally and expectedly Catholic attitude towards discipline. Kids were whipped on their knuckles for being bad, but discipline there was not the sort of ad hoc affair that it's usually portrayed as being in like movies about Catholic schools. Kids would be sentenced by their teachers for particular acts of misbehavior and they'd have to schedule time to go get whipped by their school's disciplinarian. I actually grew up in a school like this.

You did? Yeah. My elementary school in Oklahoma had corporal punishment and it was all, your teachers would sentence you, but the principal had to do all of the paddling. Was that movie, is it Taps? I don't know. Were they in the military school and they take over? Oh, shit.

No, I haven't seen that. I don't know if it's Taps. It's something, but it's the similar thing where the kids are whipped and then one day they sort of like overrule the teachers. Well, we didn't ever overthrow our teachers. It was more like you'd schedule a thing with the principal and he'd hit you in the butt like five times with a paddle and then you'd sign the paddle. Yeah.

Anyway, so I don't know, Hitchcock and I had this in common. It wasn't very scary at our school. It was almost more of a joke, but Hitchcock, this seemed to really leave an impact on him and it seemed to be something that he related to with horror and it almost seems like- Well, how old was he again? He would have been, you know, 12, 13. Yeah, that's really scary. And it seems like what really had an impact on him was the sort of inevitable nature of

once you get sentenced, like you have to go schedule the time. It doesn't happen immediately, so you've just got this dread approaching, which is again something that's really present in his movies. Yeah, like he's the master of suspense. Exactly. So it seems like you can kind of see these little bits of him getting programmed as he's young by sort of these experiences. One of his best methods in his filmmaking is where the audience knows something's coming,

but the main character doesn't. So in a way, that's similar. Yeah, he likes to torment you with it. He learned that. Right. And yeah, here's what he said about it later. It was not like they give the boys the cane in other schools. This was a rubber strap.

If by chance you had gone as bad as to be sentenced to, shall we say 12, you would have to spread it for two days because each hand could only take three strokes as it became numb. I was actually hit by my mom, not my dad, and she would do that where she would count during the day how many hits I would get. Oh, wow. Yeah. And if I was really bad, she'd use like a spatula. Yeah.

This was on my bum. Yeah, but that's like horrifying, like that knowledge that it's like. That knowledge that you got, I think the most was 17 were coming my way. And yeah, I relate there. It seems like it was 12 for him, but like, yeah, that's that clearly left an impact on this guy, too. This idea that it is terrifying. Yeah.

Yeah. Exactly. And makes you hate your mother. Yeah. Well, exactly. Uh, I don't think Hitchcock grew up super fond of authority figures, partly as a result of this and as a result of this. Yeah.

So of course we're seeing the man sort of come together here as a child spot. Oh, also his biographer also thinks that this had a major impact on the content of his movies. Hitchcock was described at the time by other kids in his primary school as being different from the beginning. One of his schoolmates later described him as a lonely fat boy who smiled and looked at you as if he could see straight through you. Oh, Jesus.

Yeah. So he's, I mean, that's a movie right there. That is. Yeah. He sounds like he's a little bit children of the corn or something. Yeah. Yeah. I was about to say it's kind of like that.

Yeah. Uh, now Mr. and Mrs. Hitchcock called their son Fred. Uh, he hated this name. He also hated his nickname cocky, which he received during his time in Catholic school. Well, with the news today, when you hear that he got nicknamed cocky at Catholic school, it is natural to assume the worst, but actually it's a little bit less messed up than it might otherwise be. I don't really understand where cocky came from this nickname, so I'm going to read that

the story a classmate gave his biographer about how he got his nickname cocky. Hitchcock became a notorious perloiner of eggs from the priest's hen house on the forbidden side of the Presbytery Garden. He loved to steal the eggs and throw them on the windows of the Jesuit residence. When an angry priest ran out to manage to know who had dirtied the glass, cocky offered an innocent look, glanced at the sky, shrugged and said, I don't know, Father, it looks like the birds have been flying overhead. That's how he got the nickname, even to junior boys, of cocky.

Now, this egg story is particularly interesting to me in light of another Hitchcock quote I found in an article on the Telegraph, quote, I'm frightened of eggs, worse than frightened, they revolt me. That white round thing without any holes, have you ever seen anything more revolting than an egg yolk breaking and spilling its yellow liquid? Blood is jolly, red, but egg yolk is yellow, revolting, I've never tasted it. Oh, that's cool. That's so weird.

That is like the coolest. That's so weird. But it's so cool. It's like kind of like, I've never heard anyone like say that about an egg, it blows my mind actually. He definitely has. But see, that's what makes him interesting is his perspective is so strange, you know, like right there, you can see it.

He's clearly coming at the world from a different angle than everybody else's. Even his lie about like a normal kid would lie like somebody else was throwing eggs at the priest's house. He's like, no, no, no, the birds were flying overhead and they blame it on the birds even at like age 12. He didn't like birds back then. No, no, never liked birds. I agree with that one.

I kind of don't trust him either. Because you don't know what they're saying. No. And they're definitely planning something. Oh, all that chirping, there's like a, there's like a plot. He tried to warn us. Now Hitchcock preferred to use his own chosen nickname, Hitch, and he preferred that to cocky or Fred or tragically, Fredcock.

That would have been what I would have picked, Fredcock. But he preferred Hitch. Hitch was an odd kid and from the beginning he was insecure about his weight. But if you're picturing young Hitchcock as a troubled, bullied loner, well, that might not quite be fair. Primary school seems to be where Hitch first ignited his love of pranking people. And he did this in a way that I think was definitely bullying. I'm going to read a quote now from the dark side of genius.

In the early afternoon, between a lecture class and a quiet study time, the boys were free to gather in the schoolyard near the church. Gould, who was one of his classmates, then nine, was suddenly yanked away from his peers by Hitchcock and an accomplice and dragged off to another forbidden area, the basement boiler room of the school. Before he could cry out or struggle, not much use in any case against two bigger boys, Gould was bound hand and foot. Once he was immobilized, he was preyed to a carefully planned psychological torture

that could have ended disastrously. His trousers were pulled down and Hitchcock quickly stepped behind him. There was the sound of a scratching noise and the two bullies raced up the stairs. Young Gould must have thought he was attacked by a firing squad. At once the sound of gunfire exploded, but it was a string of firecrackers that had been pinned to his underwear and ignited. It was a good job I wasn't burned, Gould remembered. I stood there shaking and crying for I don't know how long, until someone finally found

me and set me free. Of course I was too frightened to tell anyone who had done it. I was afraid of recrimination and they knew it. I guess you could say Alfred Hitchcock had a sense of the macabre even at school. Jesus. That's kind of going a little far, right? I think I used to join in with the popular kids teasing. We all did some shit we're not proud of.

Nothing that just horrific. Tying a kid up and pinning firecrackers to his underpants is that's a step. That's nuts. That's a step beyond acceptable. I mean, if anything is going to get you into film school, you can tell that story. If this was a movie, Gould would have been the one who became a great director. I know isn't it funny, one of the tormentors became the director. If you're going to be a heart, like I'm going to bet Eli Roth was pretty rough to be in

high school with. Oh, and David Lynch. Can you imagine? Oh, my God. Him torturing insects. We should see if there's some kids missing from David Lynch's elementary school. That should be your next guy to go after. As a teenager, Alfred Hitchcock grew enthralled with crime literature, starting with the works

of Arthur Conan Doyle and moving on to what were essentially early true crime books, accounts of actual criminal cases and investigations. Spado says Hitchcock came to think of the murderers he studied as his heroes rather than their victims or the people who caught them. When he did focus on details of the victim's experience, the thing that interested him most was how much they'd suffered. Alfred left school in 1913 when he was 14 and spent the next seven years doing a mix of odd jobs, artistic experimentation and occasional rough attempts at some kind of

secondary education. He attended many plays and grew enthralled by the young art of filmmaking. But he had no time at the moment to consider that as a career option. On December 12th, his dad died. Hitchcock was only 15 and suddenly found himself caretaker to a very demanding mother. Quote. Psycho. Maybe a little bit.

My mother was meticulous about our home and her person. She never left the house without presenting herself at her best. Her posture, her demeanor, her dress, her shoes perfectly polished, a well-kept handbag, inside as well as outside, and gloves whenever possible. While he was still at school and as a young man, Hitchcock's mother expected him to come by her bedside every evening and describe in excruciating detail what he'd done that day. When he was married, his mom accompanied him and his wife on vacations from the time they

got married up until her death. Unfortunately there's not as much detail on their relationship as I'd like, or at least I was not able to find it. But every detail I was able to find makes it seem like it's a little bit weird. She was a bit of a demanding lady. Right. Especially since he kind of took over for his dad, that's kind of weird. Almost like, you're my new husband.

You know what I mean? There's that creepy thing happening. It's kind of what you have happening in Psycho where they run this, I mean, I don't think his base is taking, well, okay, because his dad gets murdered in Psycho. I don't remember that detail, but it is sort of a controlling mother and a sort of son that has to manage the business. Yes, and he's almost like the face while she just hides. While she just hides.

It's one of those things where it is easy if you're going back into someone's life after the point and trying to come up with things that might have inspired their art to pick on stuff like this. But at the same time, you really do see some of this coming together. Even in that line that he was always more sympathetic to murderers because Psycho is very much Norman's story. It's from Norman's side of things. But I was also, I think in the movie, I don't think they even mention the father.

Yeah, I don't remember off the top of my head. Right, right, right. It's been a while since I've seen it. Yeah, I mean, I don't think there's... They're definitely alone. Yeah. They're both alone. Yeah.

And it does seem like he had that kind of, not obviously to that extent because Hitchcock very much lived his own life after a while, but there's some weirdness going on there. Was she with them all the way with Alma? With his first wife? Yeah, yeah, with Alma. Yeah, that was that relationship. So while the family business provided some revenue, Hitchcock was forced to get a regular job in order to do his part in taking care of his mother, which seemed to be most of

the part. Like at least the stories I've read really emphasize Hitchcock was the one taking care of him, even though he was the youngest. In 1915, he found a gig at the Henley Telegraph and Cable Company. He appears to have instantly impressed his supervisor and was transferred to the advertising department. So when somebody recognizes this kid ought to be doing something that is presenting our business to people, he recognized this guy's got a creative gift.

It seems like it was immediately obvious to the people. He had the eye. He had the eye. So Hitchcock spent most of his time at the Henley Telegraph and Cable Company drawing, laying out ad brochures, and he focused mostly on visual presentation, how to deliver a message to an audience in the most impactful way. One of his first jobs was to make an ad to convince churches and other institutions to install electrical lights, quote from Hitchcock.

I'd write church lighting on the cover of a brochure and then draw two candles, and there would be darkness all around, suggesting that church lighting by candles alone won't be enough to light any service. So he's already playing with light. He's already like we can see the evolution of this thing that's going to go into being his great talent. So Hitchcock and his family weathered the Great War better than most families in England. He worked hard and he moved up the ranks of the ad world.

By the time he was 20, he was still a virgin and by his own description an uncommonly attractive young man, but he was ambitious and talented, and when he saw that an American film company was about to open a studio in England, he knew he had to be a part of it. Quote, he quickly found out what film they were planning, and with the assistance of Henley's advertising manager, who helped him arrange a portfolio and with whom he agreed to split any fee, he went along to the Islington offices. So Hitchcock presents his portfolio and this executive takes, like he's just got all these sketches that he's drawn of Londoners, like people around the city, and they're really,

they're described as being grotesque. It doesn't survive, but Hitchcock had just spent days drawing pictures of people traveling through public transit in London. And he presents them to this advertising manager at this film company and the guy hires him like that. He's like, you've got whatever kind of eye it is that we need. Film's a new medium at this point. Right, silent film is just starting.

Clearly this guy's got what they're looking for, so they bring him on, and now Hitchcock is in the film industry. So when we come back, we're going to talk about what else happens in Hitchcock's early film career. We're going to talk about how his love of pranks came to sort of dominate his early career. But first, we're going to talk about, do you like ads, Abed? You know what?

I'm a fan of 80s commercials. Oh, okay. Well, do you want to advertise for a product from the 80s for free before we break for ads? Yeah. Crossfire, it's an excellent game. Oh yeah, Crossfire, that had a great commercial. Yeah.

Right? And I was at Target not too long ago and they brought it back. Oh shit, well I'm going to advertise Laundarts since we're doing 80s stuff. Oh cool. Yeah, Laundarts. I remember that commercial. Yeah, take a kid's eye out. Yeah.

Fuck it. Too many eyes in the world today. Alright, ads. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations and you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI sometimes, you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy.

Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. But the center of this story is a raspy, voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark. And not in the good and bad ass way, he's a nasty shark.

He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to heaven. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories.

But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991 and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your

podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. The wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday.

I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus. It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.

And we're back. Great ads. Really good ads. Almost as good as Lawn Darts. But I mean, Lawn Darts people. I even remember the Crossfire song. Crossfire. We'll get caught up in the Crossfire.

Crossfire. Crossfire people. We are accepting sponsors if you want to be the official game of terrible people. I should have bought it. You're such an idiot. We're all fools for not buying Crossfire. It'd be worth millions today. I know.

Speaking of millions, Alfred Hitchcock. So when we last left him off, he's just kicked off his career, gotten hired with like an American film company that had opened a studio in England. So he works with them on three movies, helps to produce them. He works a bunch of different jobs. He's assistant director, art director, script supervisor, and he basically gets a chance to learn the fundamentals of filmmaking on several different projects. I'm not going to go into detail on the individual movies because they were like weird little

early British films and stuff. Yeah. Yeah. It's not Hitchcock's vision or anything. Right. Right. He's getting an eye for the details. Yeah.

So what's important for our story is that while he was working on the third of these films titled The Prude's Fall, Alfred Hitchcock found himself a lady. Whoa. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Look at you. I mean him.

Yeah. Look at him. Alma Reveley. I think Reveley. Yeah. Yeah. Was a freelance editor with the company and apparently 1921 Alfred Hitchcock's way of flirting was to completely ignore her even when she was right next to him and never so

much to speak to her. He ghosted or snubbed her. Yeah. He snubbed her. He like refused to acknowledge her existence for like months and months and months. And that worked because back then I don't think anyone did that. Yeah. Yeah.

I mean if you liked a lady you would kind of serenade her. Yeah. I think yeah. No one had tried. This is almost like negging. So he's like. Yeah. He's really.

He's a pioneer. A pioneer of pickup artistry. Yeah. So he ignored her for months and months and months until one night he gave her a call at home. Is that Miss Reveley? This is Alfred Hitchcock. I have been appointed assistant director for a new film.

I wonder if you would accept a position as Cutter on the picture which is what they used to call editors. Right. Which was it? Yeah. Once she took the job and they began working more closely together he explained to her that he was very shy when it came to women but he still more or less ignored her. It turned out that this is because he viewed her position editing is higher than his own

and quote it was unthinkable for a British male to admit that a woman has a more important job than his. And I waited until I had the higher position assistant director. So he's going to hit on this girl where she's got a better job than he does. Oh boy. Yeah. So it's like a power thing. We're starting to get into the sketchiness now.

Yeah. So I mean it's hard to say if that's that weird at the time. Because at the time men were you know that was the common thinking I guess. Yeah. So this still may be him more in line with like you know the sort of values at the time. Yeah. He proposed to her while they were on board a ship from Germany to England in the middle of a dreadful storm at sea so it was very very romantic and dramatic proposal.

On a ship. Wow. Yeah she's sick and everything. They got engaged in 1921 but they didn't get married until 1926. Why? Because Hitchcock didn't want to get married until he had directed three feature films. No. Here's how he described it.

An odd rule. Well here's his explanation for why he had this rule. I had wanted to become first a film director and second Alma's husband not in the order of emotional preference to be sure but because I felt the bargaining power implicit in the first was necessary in obtaining the second. Geez. It's a little weird. It's not enough to for her to like him you know he's got to like add to the pie.

You got to have some bargaining power. Yeah. Yeah. Every relationship is about that. Yeah it seems like it because she had a pretty good career of her own going at the time. I guess he wanted to like outmatch her. Yeah. Yeah exactly and it does seem like because she worked with him for his whole career they

were collaborators but it does seem like she kind of gave up having like her own independent career in order to sort of make his better. Being a fan of his films I would say that a lot of her collaboration with him it's like some of the best. Yeah. He's done. Yeah. Yeah.

Now Hitchcock would direct something like 24 British films. He's known in the industry as an American style European director. Yeah. So he's famous for directing like an American when Europeans are you know a couple of years behind Americans. Yeah. He was like one of the first. Yeah.

To come out strong. Yeah. Now among his colleagues he grew well known as a dick who played unbelievably aggressive pranks. Spotto his biographer suspects his motivation for these vicious pranks came from him not being where he wanted to be yet in his career and basically trying to gain control in his personal life by fucking with people. This run through several a lot really of his greatest hits.

At one point he was given an assistant who in his opinion overdressed. This made Hitch feel like he had to take the young man down a peg. He asked why the fellow always wore such nights clothing and the man said that it was a hold over from his time in the Royal Navy during World War One. He just sort of been trained to always dress well. That night Hitchcock asked the young man to come with him on a trip across the Thames. He made certain that the boat they took was uncovered so that when it rained it would drench his young assistant and fuck up his nice outfit ruining much of it permanently.

That part's funny. It starts funny. Yeah. Young Alfred seemed to have a peculiar hatred of other people having nice things or at least doing what he saw is bragging about it. On another instance after one of his cameramen talked about having an all new all electric kitchen Hitchcock had two tons of coal dropped in front of the man's door. Still it's funny.

It's funny but you can see like the proportions are off two tons of coal. It's almost like he went to the extreme with his pranking. The footprint of a large truck worth of piles of coal. Yeah. He's kind of like the original jackass. Yeah. He's got a little bit of that going on. So he considered these to be moral lessons but they seem to lack any sense of proportion.

Spado's depiction of his life makes that very clear. Other Hitchcockian mischief however inflicted some real inconvenience or embarrassment on the victims for no particular reason. A featured actress received 400 smoked herring for a birthday present and had the unpleasant task of deciding how to dispose of what was left after two days living with an all pervasive odor. After shooting The Farmer's Wife Hitchcock gave a reception for the cast and crew. About 40 people in all but the Tupper was served in the smallest room of a West End

restaurant where Hitchcock brought in aspiring actors as waiters. One to each guest and instructed them to serve with appalling rudeness and incivility. Just to get what he wanted on film. Yeah. Well no. I mean I think just this was after it was done filming. Oh wow. Yeah.

I think this was like it was a reception for the cast and crew. So he just hired. Oh my gosh. Yeah. It's just weird. That is weird. It starts like kind of making sense but he clearly seems to just have been compelled to do this and to set up these kind of dramatic scenes to see how people would react.

You know because I would watch him being interviewed and he was always really funny. You know like very witty and kind of like I was shocked at how hilarious he could be. But I guess like he had a darker kind of sense of humor. He did have a darker kind of sense. I think he would defend it by saying he was trying to teach lessons to people and he sort of did that in the same way that he would have to a character in a movie. Like he did that like just in his actual life. Here's a quote from Alfred himself on one of his practical jokes quote the best practical

joke I ever played was at a London hotel where I gave a dinner party for Gertrude Lawrence. I always thought blue was such a pretty color but none of the food we eat is blue. So at this party all the food was blue. I had the soup dyed blue the trout the peaches the ice cream how would the guests react. How far would manners and propriety take them. That he just wants to see he wants to tweak people to see what they do. Yeah. Yeah.

Which is that makes very much sense. Like these days he would get his own show. Yeah. And it would be probably really good. He would be Nathan for you right now. Yeah. He would be the modern Nathan or if you know previous he would be like you know what's that show with Aston Kutcher.

Oh punked right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It is that kind of thing. Right. Now I do want to note that like these weren't all people who had done something to offend him.

They were friends with his friends this way. Sir Gerald du Marier who was a prominent actor at the time was a friend of Hitchcock's. One day he came into his dressing room after a performance to find a live adult horse sitting and presumably shitting in his dressing room. I mean I'm entertained with these. Yeah. They're funny so far. Yeah.

A few weeks later Hitchcock invited Sir Gerard to a costume party and told him to dress in a ridiculous get up. So Sir Gerard shows up at this party with his face painted and dressed as a Scotsman. As you probably guessed the party was really a black tie affair not a costume party and Sir Gerald left immediately feeling very embarrassed. Now again a little whimsical fun. Yeah. Elsie Randolph was an actress who worked with Hitchcock on a number of films.

She came to trust him and at one point confided in him that she was absolutely terrified of fire. As you might guess. This is where it gets dark. This is where things take a turn. Yeah. Yeah. I'm seeing the term.

Yeah. This could be the worst person you could ever tell about a fear. Oh God. Yeah. Don't don't confide in Hitchcock if you have a fear. See that's on her. A little bit. Right.

Yeah. Because if word got around it what he does. But here's what he does. He waits until she goes into a telephone box like the TARDIS you know like one of those like that's what they did back then. Yeah. The ones that you can't get out of. So once she's in it he locks it from the outside and starts pumping smoke into the box

in order to hilariously convince her she's about to burn to death. Wow. Isn't that a fun? Isn't that a funny? That is fun. Yeah. Yeah. You know like old telephone boxes.

Oh man when you can't get out. I know. You're trapped and you don't know that it's a joke. You just think you're going to die? Oh that is a joy. That's better than Disneyland. Yeah. That's better than Disneyland.

Oh God. I love a fake. Burning to death. It's just. There's no better way to get a good laugh out of somebody. It's my favorite thing about Disney World when you're on the space mountain and then it stops and it fills with smoke and you're strapped in it like that's why everyone loves space mountain.

I know. Because you think you're going to die. The director's like just kidding. So Hitchcock's usual targets were people he worked with, generally people who worked under him and thus could not really do anything about it if they'd wanted to. He often spent tremendous amounts of money just to screw with people. For one example, one Christmas he bought the entire crew of the movie he was working on enormous pieces of furniture.

Sounds nice, right? Sounds like a fancy gift. But beforehand he went to the effort of checking out each of their homes individually to make sure none of them lived in houses that would fit the gifts he was buying. What the fuck? Who does that? Oh man. Who spends thousands of dollars just to do that.

Oh, your house is too small for that. I mean his pranks are almost as brilliant as his movies. Yeah, yeah. They're not lazy pranks. No, that's very interesting. We're going to keep going. There's a lot more pranks. Oh man.

Now from what I can tell it seems like Hitchcock spent a lot of the money he made, especially during the early part of his career really taking off, playing increasingly aggressive pranks. He had custom whoopee cushions, sofa cushions made for his home furniture, which he would put out in lieu of regular cushions, whenever he had a guess that he thought was too fancy. Hitchcock would then spend the entire night giving that person shit for farting at his party. He once sent a series of gifts and he did love notes to a married woman he knew.

Now this woman was one member of a couple who hosted a radio show together. He did not like their radio show and so Hitchcock decided to ruin their relationship. I wanted to see what this would do to the husband. At one point she ran after the driver who'd brought a gift to try and figure out who the cinder was and finally the husband said, on the air one day, I can't go on with the show. She's run out into the street. So I had the pleasure of breaking up that show. So he just like, you know, that's kind of messed up, yeah, a little too far there.

Yeah, it was not uncommon for Hitchcock pranks to veer into abusive territory. Some of them were straight up acts of torture. One time during the production of a film, Hitchcock found boring. He bet one of his crew members a full week's salary if the man could spend the night chained to a camera in the empty, darkened studio. So he handcuffs this guy inside and leaves him with a bottle of brandy, which he said was to ensure a quick and deep sleep. Ovid, you want to take a guess at what the prank was here?

Oh, gosh, I mean, who knows? That furniture thing is still throwing me. Well this actually, there's a little bit of a relation to that. He drugged the brandy with powerful laxatives, causing the man to shit himself uncontrollably the entire night. Wow. I should have predicted that. Yeah.

That he poisoned somebody. The fart jokes were a clue. The rest of the crew found their coworker the next morning, weeping, ashamed, badly dehydrated and surrounded by a wide pool of his own diarrhea in the middle of the room. Oh, gross. Yeah, that's that's really bad. Oh, man. That's not like a fun time.

Happy prank. Oh, you gotta, the couch is too big. He shed himself for nine hours. Oh, nine hours, Jesus Christ. Oh boy. Yeah. Here's how the dark side of genius tried to make sense of this horrific behavior. To make others feel childish and dependent, this seemed to be part of his goal.

He apparently considered most people a threat. They were better looking, more intelligent, better educated, more socially acceptable than himself, and by reducing them to a sudden discomfort, perhaps he felt he was bringing them to the level on which he always lived. By thus subjugating those he resented for whatever reason and on whatever level of consciousness by submitting them to varying degrees of humiliation and danger, he was not only controlling them, he was in fact exteriorizing his own deepest fears, fears that would later be exteriorized chiefly on the screen where he could subject vast numbers of people to crisis and dread.

Wow. That's how Spado concludes all this. He makes a good case for it. I think I read some of that book because I was staying at a friend's house and it was on the shelf and because at the time I was like, I've always been a fan, but I remember just pulling it off the shelf and reading a couple chapters. Yeah. It's a good book.

It's a good book. It's a good book. There's a lot of, a lot of this is in there. There's a lot of different stories of his pranks that kind of I combed from a number of different locations. The only person I've read about who managed to turn the tables on Hitchcock was Alfred Ruhm, who was an assistant cameraman on one of his productions. Did, was he, oh no, I'm thinking of a different Ruhm.

Yeah. Yeah. After being repeatedly pranked by the director, Ruhm put a smoke bomb under Hitch's car. Quote, you never saw a fat man get out of a car quicker. Hitch never tried anything on me again. You respected you if you hit back. If you didn't, he'd have another go. So this is Ruhm's sort of how to deal with Hitchcock.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, that's awesome because it's like someone figured it out. Yeah. Someone figured it out and a few people seem to have figured it out over the course of his career. Yeah. And his name was Alfred also.

Yeah, it was. Yeah. Another Alfred. He, at the same time, seemed to think Hitchcock's hobby of sometimes literally torturing people was worth talking much about. He was rarely interviewed about it and then only near the end of his life. In one 1972 interview, he insisted his pranks were not meant to harm or denigrate their victims.

So that would be Hitchcock's attitude. Well, but shitting for nine hours. That's kind of harmful. That seems harmful and denigrate. Yeah, that can't be good for your colon. Poisoning someone's alcohol with laxative seems harmful and perhaps denigrate. Right. I mean, I bet you that guy had problems later in life.

Yeah. I mean, how could you continue working on that thing? Your coworkers all find you chained to a thing covered in shit like after, like surrounded by a pile of your own sick. That's, it's dark, man. And this all counts as light compared to what we are slowly building towards. Well, I know a couple things. Yeah.

You're right. Yeah. Hitchcock finally crossed over from Euro Cinema to Hollywood in 1939. He hit his peak in the 1950s with a string of legendary hits like Dial Infra Murder to Catch a Thief, Vertigo, and of course, North by Northwest. Interesting side note, Vertigo, I want to say rear window rope and there's one more. The man who knew too much. They were not like widely released or seen really, like until the 80s.

Really? I didn't know. Because they came out in the theaters, but were just like brief. Wow. So people hadn't seen them until the 80s, like 84. They were re-released. So I didn't know that. It was fascinating.

Yeah. I didn't know that. So that's when he like got, I guess, beloved. It was like, he was, he became well known at this point. So he was still like, yeah. He was kind of well known and, I mean, those movies like made him like an icon. But I think Psycho is what the biggest breakthrough. Yeah.

And that's what we're building up to. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We're getting up to it. So he continues pranking throughout all these years and his increasing of wealth allows him to do things like buy gigantic furniture for dozens of people just to screw with them. So like that's then.

Well, we should also say thanks to Selznick, he was brought over. Oh, yeah. I didn't know that. Yeah. Rebecca was his first American film. Excellent movie. It's on criterion. I highly recommend watching it.

It's brilliant. Selznick was like already a fan, so he brought him over to make that film. Oh, OK. Awesome. And that's kind of his intro into American cinema. And he, I mean, he did very well in American cinema. Right. So there's, women are often a focus in Hitchcock's films, often like major characters, and it

blondes in particular. And the Guardian described women in Hitchcock movies as, quote, outwardly immaculate, but full of treachery and weakness, which, you know, at least from the Hitchcock movies, I know that seems to be an accurate description of a lot of the female characters that have. A little bit. Yeah. And it's interesting to me, the outwardly immaculate, because they are always blond. They're always very put together at least at the start of the films.

And we see them sort of get degraded and picked apart and what not. Yeah. Rebecca is all about that. Yeah, yeah. I mean, that poor woman is like taken to bits at the end of the movie. And his description of his mother is that she was always very put together. You know, she would never leave the house without gloves, and he makes, like, made a big point of that whenever he talked about her.

So that's interesting to me that, like, that is, that is like his starting point with any female characters, like she hits that point where, you know, it's very much similar to how he describes his mother's always going out when she's very properly dressed and attired and what not. Find that interesting. Right. Now, his deep need for control was expressed in more and more extravagant ways. His profile grew and his brilliance was recognized by a grateful, drooling, loving Hollywood.

According to The Telegraph, quote, he cared so deeply about protecting his art, he spared no expense making sure they were viewed in the correct manner by their audiences, buying their film rights to five of his most famous films, The Man Who Knew Too Much, Rear Window, Rope, The Trouble With Harry, and Vertigo, so they could not be screened in movie theaters for after their initial run. Subsequently, they were not seen by a cinema audience for 30 years. That's why that happened. Oh, wow.

So he only wanted people seeing them in, like, the proper context. Exactly. Oh, so I didn't know that was coming from him. Yeah. So apparently that's sort of why, like, he knew that when they were in their initial theatrical run, he could make sure that they were seen in certain ways. Yeah. And then after that.

Rope is brilliant. Rope is probably one of his movies that I highly recommend you see. It's got such artistry and unique kind of style to it. It's like ahead of its time. And we see there, we see here that this is like, this is like the good side of sort of this need for control, is he's not willing to put his movies out unless they're like he can guarantee they're like being seen in the proper way. So this is like, okay, that's probably part of why he was such a good director is his

control. But we're also seeing sort of the dark side of this control. Okay. And they're both part of the same guy. And this darkness that I keep talking to, we've seen bits of it in the pranks he plays, but it becomes really, really clear when he starts dealing with his leading women and one leading woman in particular. Oh, right.

And that's what we're going to start talking about. But first, we're going to talk about, I almost said it, but then I was like, no, products, products and services, like the fine products and services that support this show and or program. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what, they were right. I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys.

As the FBI, sometimes you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy-voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark. And not in the good and bad ass way.

He's a nasty shark. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to heaven. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space.

And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me, about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world.

Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. The wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole.

My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus, it's all made up? Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.

We're back and we're providing a free plug for the late 1980s GI Joe aircraft carrier toy. Oh, wow. Great toy. Yeah, no kid owned it. It was like 10 feet long. It was way too big for a toy. Can you imagine your dad brings that home?

What stupid kid got that? That was like two Christmases. Yeah. At least. And you immediately hated that kid. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I don't know why we're so into 80s ads right now, but if you make large GI Joker aircraft carriers or you make real aircraft carriers and you want to advertise on the show, we

have a lot of small nations building navies as listeners on this show. Mozambique could use a navy. They just sold theirs to Eric Prince. So I think we have a lot of Mozambique and I'm going to just move on here. That Eric Prince episode was great. Oh, thank you. Thank you. Yeah.

So if you sell navies, advertise on our show and maybe we can sell a navy to the next Eric Prince together. Yeah. That sounds like a goal. Yeah. That sounds like a nice thing. So back into Hitchcock. Hitchcock became infamous as his career really took off in the late 50s for writing his actors

and actresses hard. This was not always a bad thing. I found a telling quote from Grace Kelly in 1979. Mr. Hitchcock is often reputed to hold actors in disdain, but he actually has a special way with them and is able to get exactly what he wants in the way of a performance. His inimitable humor puts them at ease while his enduring patience gives them any confidence they may need. Of course, sometimes he merely wears them down until he gets what he wants.

So she's being very grateful there, but you can see like he has a couple of ways of working with you. She was probably less fucked with than others. Exactly because she was like room the guy who put a smoke bomb on Hitchcock's car. She pushed back. Right. You know, she was very established by the time she started working with him. Oh yeah, she was.

Grace Kelly was not some new starlet who starts working with this young director. Well, like he discovered a few. Yeah, exactly. So above all else, Hitchcock was obsessed with a quest to create the perfect actress, someone who could ideally embody the specific kinds of heroine that he wanted to write. Grace Kelly was one candidate for the role, Ingrid Bergman was another. Hitchcock fell in love with Ingrid Bergman and with Grace Kelly, neither reciprocated. Spellbound.

Excellent movie. Yeah. And Ingrid Bergman, great actress, she did not reciprocate in Hitchcock's falling in love with her. So Alfred started telling all of their colleagues a story that after a dinner party, the famously beautiful starlet had cornered this elderly obese director in his bedroom and refused to leave until he fucked her. He starts telling this to other people in the industry and spreading this rumor.

Now I think most people probably figured out it was a lie because Alfred Hitchcock had all of the game of a stale sandwich, but he repeatedly insisted that it was the God's honest truth to anyone who would listen. Bergman took it in stride. Quote, I never got angry when it came back to me. People will believe what they want to believe. I loved him, but not in his way. So she's handles it very classily and both both Grace Kelly and Ingrid Bergman spoke

fondly of Hitchcock Hitchcock and seemed to believe that his genius outweighed his more odious qualities. Right. And Bergman was also like, she worked very well with director. Yeah. Yeah. And she, and again, she was established by the time she did Hitchcock. He definitely helped her career, but she was on a pretty solid track by the time they

started working. She was also, she was pretty big in Europe before she got to America. Yeah. Yeah. So these were, and again, these were established women. These were confident women. These were people who knew their place in the industry and who knew how to like, had their own relationships with other people.

They were unhitchcockable. They were unhitchcockable. Yeah. Exactly. Which Alfred would have made that into a different kind of pun, but we're not going to do that. Now, both actresses- Women he couldn't fuck. Yeah, exactly.

And he couldn't fuck with because they would push back, like room pushed back. And that's the thing. If you push back at Hitchcock, he'll stop because he doesn't like getting pushed at. Right. Classic bully sex. Exactly. Both actresses maintained good boundaries with the director and eventually moved on from him to the rest of their lives.

Hitchcock remained obsessed with the idea of finding and molding the perfect leading lady. What Hitch wanted, what he craved, was a young woman to act as his blank slate, someone without a career separate from him and his genius, someone he could craft and control. This was not a benign desire, and in fact it seems to have been inextricably tied with a great deal of anger Hitchcock felt towards the female gender. For example, Hitchcock had a couple of quotes he was fond of dropping during interviews at this time.

I always believe that in following the advice of the playwright Sardau, he said, torture the woman. The trouble today is we don't torture women enough. What? Yeah, Hitchcock. That's the trouble with today? Yes, that's the trouble with today. You know, the problem with today is not enough women are torturing.

Not enough women are torturing. Too much. Too easy for him out there. Yeah, everybody too easy. They're all happy and doing well. That's not good. That's not going to be good for art. He was also fond of paraphrasing Oscar Wilde and saying, you destroy the thing you love.

This was particularly quoted by Hitchcock in reference to his female leads. There's a guy to quote. Oscar Wilde. Yeah, you know, he was all right. He was he was seemed like a well-balanced fellow. Hitchcock and his wife were professional collaborators for their entire lives together or for their entire relationship pretty much. Her editorial skill was a big part of his success and in fact, she essentially gave

up her own shot at a great independent career in order to embig in his. Their relationship was a long one, but it seems to have been almost entirely celibate. Hitchcock regularly claimed that his daughter, Patricia's conception was the only time he actually had intercourse since he was too obese to enjoy sex. Robert Boyle, one of his art directors, recalled, he once said to me, I have all the feelings of everyone encased in an armor of fat. He felt he was not attractive physically, but had all those same yearnings and was frustrated by what he perceived as a difficulty, if not an impossibility, which was to experience

required at love. Why, why didn't he just lose weight? I mean, like health in the 60s was butter. Okay. Yeah. That's true. Yeah. I mean, you feel for the guy.

I mean, he comes from England where it probably wasn't as like, you know, stigmatized, stigmatized as it was in America. Yeah, exactly. And I think you're right. I think around that time, Americans started thinking about it. Yeah. But it was still like very, the idea of health, like we really didn't know much about how to.

It didn't come along in probably till the late 70s. Yeah. Yeah. That's why there's that joke in Anchorman where he talks about like jogging as if it's this weird thing. Because people really didn't like the idea that you would just go run, like. That's a funny joke. It is a funny joke, but it was like also a real thing.

That was, people had to be like, no, actually, this stops us from dying as soon. All this bacon's killing our hearts. There's a, there's like an Altman movie not seen called health where it made fun of health conscious people. Oh, wow. Showed them as like fanatics. Well, and that's why you even get a little bit of Donald Trump because he believes that like exercising is bad for you and your body only has so much energy over the course of

your life and you're just wasting it by any, like it's one of those things like you get raised in that sort of time before it's common, you always think it's weird. If you don't trust doctors. So for years, Hitchcock replaced sex with the joy he got from torturing women who starred in his movies, or at least that's one way to look at things. In 1935, while filming the 29 Steps, Hitchcock, 39 Steps, 39 Steps, sorry. My mistyping. This is why you're here.

This is why I'm here. Yeah. Hitchcock handcuffed Madeline Carroll to her co-star with cuffs that were purposely tight enough to cause her pain. He claimed he'd lost the key, forcing him to stay that way for hours. He also had Carroll repeatedly dragged across the ground, probably more than was really necessary to get the shots he needed for the film. Wow.

Now I can't watch it the same way. Yeah. During filming, he called the lead actress the Birmingham Tarte and said, during an interview after the movie, nothing pleases me more than to knock the lady likeness out of them. Oh my God. Yeah. I mean, that's a good film too, but yeah, I mean, he never made, I mean, he made good films.

Yeah. In the 1960s, while filming Psycho, he forced Janet Lee to spend six straight days standing in the shower underwater for hours at a time, presumably because he thought that was necessary to get a truly believable performance out of her. Shower acting. Yeah, shower acting. And I mean, it's a great scene. To this day, Lee refuses to take showers only using baths because she's.

She's still alive? I think so. At least she was when I read this. Okay. I mean, she may have died since. I'm not sure. I don't know. Yeah.

I think she might still be alive though. Maybe. Tippi Hedrin's still alive. Yeah. Cutthroat symbol. Yeah. So then we don't look like more. When did she kick off?

2004. Oh, 2004. Jesus. Well, up until the end of her life. Yeah. She did. Well, I mean, it's because like nowadays you hear about it everywhere. Yeah.

And back then you probably didn't. 2004. Yeah. Yeah. And we were invading a couple of places at that point. Right. Probably got kicked to the back burner. So by 1961, Alfred Hitchcock had a well-established reputation of being particularly brutal to

his female characters and sometimes the actresses who portrayed them. This would all reach a boiling point when Alfred finally met the perfect focus for his dream of creating the perfect actress, a 32-year-old model named Tippi Hedrin. And that's what we're going to talk about in part two. You know who she's the mom of, right? Tippi Hedrin? Yeah. No.

Melanie Griffith. Melanie Griffith. Okay, cool. She was also in the movie where everybody got attacked by lions. I love that movie. Which this will tie into. Oh. Yeah.

That movie is amazing. It is incredible. Yeah. You saw it? Yeah. So tense, that movie. Yeah. Well, like 30 lions attacking a family.

Well, there were like 100-something serious injuries during the filming of it. I know. It's great. Well, she got her face torn up. Yeah. Yeah. They needed major reconstructive surgery. Yeah.

Yeah. Great movie. Great movie. Great movie. Absolutely entertaining. We're going to hear about something that happened to Tippi Hedrin that's worse than filming the movie where 100 people got horribly injured by big cats. Oh.

It's bad. But that comes next week. So, before we kick off and come back on Thursday, you want to plug your plugables, Abed? Sure. I have a podcast on Starburn's audio network called Gone Riffin with Rich Fulcher. And where every Wednesday you can find us wherever you find podcasts. Podcasts. That's right.

It's not like there's no theme. Yeah. He gets mad when I talk about movies. Well, yeah. I mean, that sounds great. Yeah. Well. But his anger is funny.

Yeah. Anger is almost always funny. Hitchcock taught us that. You should always chain your friends up and feed them dangerous doses of laxatives. Oh, yeah. I mean, nothing more fun. Watching them shit. Nothing more fun than that.

Oh, my God. All over the place. What a good time. Oh, right. Now we have cameras. You can... Get all the angles. Get all the angles.

Really get like a good look at this person just breaking. Kind of like the Matrix, right? On the inside. Yeah. It's like the spinning. The best pranks are almost indistinguishable from the things done in Bashar al-Assad's prison cells. That's...

I've always said that. Yeah. I'm Robert Evans. You can find me on Twitter at IWriteOK. I have a book called A Brief History of Ice where I experiment on myself with dangerous drugs and send one of my friends to the hospital. Really? Check that out.

Oh, it's a hoot. That sounds interesting. Thank you. It is interesting. I did that once with that drug, Salvia, where I let people film me while I was on it. That sounds like a bad idea, man. It was a very bad idea. That sounds like a bad idea.

Well, anyway, that's a whole other story. I mean, I've got a great video of me doing the same. It's great. I love it when people take drugs on cameras. It's awesome. Yeah. Well, one friend, he freaked out and ran down the street screaming. Did you get it on camera?

I don't think so. Oh, man. We did get him before he screamed. Okay. Yeah. I'm a big believer that we should do that to presidential candidates. Oh, that would be a show. Instead of having a debate, we've just given you both acid and now you're going to sit

under cameras while it comes up and we're all just going to pick you apart as human beings. You know, that sounds like an awesome futuristic movie. Yeah. It would be a great way to run presidents. Like running man. Yeah, we have the t-shirts, phone cases, we sell prefabricated bunkers for waiting out the apocalypse, branded bunkers, all on tpublic.com, behind the bastards.

Sophie, you were signaling something, that drink mugs? We have drink mugs. We have mugs that you can put drinks in, in your bunkers that you also buy from us. So check all that out, behind the bastards, tpublic. We're on Twitter and Instagram at atbastardspod, we have a website, behindthebastards.com with all the sources for this. And that's all I'm going to say until we say part two, which is going to come out on Thursday for you, but we're going to record right now.

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your

podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian-trained astronaut?

That he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become the youngest person to go to space? Well, I ought to know because I'm Lance Bass. And I'm hosting a new podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the Earth for 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your

podcasts.