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

Episode Date: January 3, 2019

In Part Two. Robert is joined by Abed Geith to finish discussing Alfred Hitchcock. 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. Whoa, Sophie, you talked over me while I introduced you. We're leaving this in. Hello, friends. We're leaving this in. You did an Orson Welles kind of hello, friends. Hello, friends. We're leaving this in and I'm Robert Evans.

This is Behind the Bastards, the show where we tell you everything you don't know about the very worst people in all of history, one of whom is my producer, Sophie, who is flipping me the bird right now. Because I demand honesty in my podcast, which means we leave in the 20 seconds before I introduce the show when we're just talking over each other. That's because we're professionals! I'm Robert Evans. This is Behind the Bastards.

We talk about bad people. Today we're continuing to talk about Alfred Hitchcock. My guest, Abed Geith. Hello. How are you doing? Hi. Hi. Hi. I stepped your...

No, it's fine, as long as we leave it in because it's honest. Yeah. Yeah. Don't edit that out because that was perfectly timed. This is the audio equivalent of cinema verity. Yes. I don't know what that is. It's a style of filmmaking.

Thus, yeah. So I used it right. Yeah, you did. Fantastic. Yeah. I love saying things right. When people say cinema variety, I get mad. No, that's the shows that are talked about on the famous magazine Variety.

Yeah. Right? I think so. Yeah, they did that terrible list of the best horror movies that had World War Z on it. World War Z. World War Z. It's got Brad Pitt in it, it's not a horror movie. Ugh.

I don't know, seven. Although he was... I just saw him on Growing Pains and he was pretty good. Growing Pains? That must have been a while ago. Yeah, I think that was his first gig. Good for him. Kind of like how...

What was his name? The guy... The Batman that people don't like. Michael... Oh. Oh, you mean Val Kilmer? No, no, the new one. The new Batman.

Oh, the new Batman, Christian Bale? Oh, no, Ben Affleck. Ben Affleck? You got to Christian Bale before you get to Ben Affleck? Sorry. The Batman people don't like... Some people don't like him. That's true.

Every Batman has his lovers and his haters. Yeah. I think my brother's not a Christian Bale fan. That's fair. Ben Affleck was on that Voyage of the Mimi thing that we had to watch in high school before he was Ben Affleck. Oh, shit. Where he says, holy chickens, that's all peanut butter, which is still my favorite line. Wait, wasn't that...

Oh, I remember that show, but I don't think I ever watched it. All the men have to huddle naked together for warmth and everybody in your high school class laughs. Wait, was that a movie? Oh, no, it was like a TV series type thing. We had to watch in class to learn about the sea. Let Ben Affleck take you on the waves. Well, he was like nine. He was like the show's Wesley Crusher.

Oh, God. I know. He was a bad pick. I could just imagine. Wesley Crusher wasn't a great pick for Wesley Crusher. No. No. Not really.

He had his moments. He had his moments. Speaking of people who had their moments, Alfred Hitchcock. He had actually a lot of moments, very influential director. So when we last walked here, we talked about his early life, his armor of fat, his controlling mom, his kind of dangerous bordering on torturous love of pranks sometimes. His fear of women being successful. His fear of women.

His pretty good sense of humor when it didn't get mean. He was a complicated man. And one of the more important things about sort of his life is he had this sort of desire to create the perfect actress. He wanted to mold. And so he worked with a lot of great actresses, but most of them didn't quite fit that bill because they were already well established and they moved on after him. Most actresses don't want to work with one guy forever.

You want to do cool stuff. You want to do a bunch of stuff. Unless you marry them like Helen Bonham Carter. Or like Sarah Connor. Yeah. Yeah. Although she's about to be in another one of those movies, I think. She's really good.

She's one of the few actresses that actually topped the star. Yeah, absolutely. Like I thought in T2 she was better than Arnold. She's a way more impressive action star in that movie. That scene when she breaks down is the best. And the scene when she is just taking apart that mental hospital and just destroying those men. Oh, that's the best. It's so good.

I love that movie. Let's talk about the opposite of that. Alfred Hitchcock's career with Tippi Hedron. So Alfred Hitchcock first saw Tippi Hedron in 1961 when she appeared in a commercial that he watched for like a weight loss supplement thing. Hedron was a veteran model and at 32 a mother, but she had no real experience in the film industry. She in fact had no particular ambition to be an actress. But Hitchcock saw her real and wasn't chanted by her. He offered her a three-year contract and even though the contract was for less money than she'd been making modeling,

she considered three years of guaranteed income a more stable move than continuing to act in commercials. You know, she's a mom, so she's like, okay. Well, it's the natural progression. Natural progression. This seems smart. I'm going to do this. So she agreed to meet Hitch and talk about the job. During that first meeting, Hitchcock basically just bragged to her about his own life,

talking about the great restaurants he'd eat in Latin cities around the world. He offered her the gig and she took it, thinking that he'd be using her as a recurring actress on his TV show, Alfred Hitchcock Presents. I used to watch that as a kid. Great show. Yeah. So she started to realize that Hitchcock's plans for her were much more involved when he sent her to Edith Head, the famed fashion designer. Ooh, she was very talented.

Yes. And the Incredibles, the little lady who makes the costumes for the characters based on Edith Head. She died recently, right? Maybe. I'm not sure. But I love old movies. You always see her name in the credits. Yeah.

She was one of those like, yeah. She was like on every film. Foundational in sort of Golden Era Hollywood. So Edith Head crafted a whole wardrobe specifically for Tippi Hadron. And in fact, she made two wardrobes, one set for screen tests and another set for her to wear out in the world. So kind of a nice gift, you know, you're having, but also kind of controlling because this is Hitchcock being like, I'm not just going to pick out what you'll wear when you're doing screen tests and whatnot. I want to pick out what you wear when people see you.

Wow. So again, not the kind of thing you'd immediately, if you're Tippi, you'd pick out as weird because like, you might be like, oh, this guy's going to pay to have the greatest designer in the world make me all that. Cool. You're blinded by the fashion coolness of it. Yeah. But something a little bit weird there. Yeah.

Like there's a sliver of. There's a sliver of. Like, oh, that's strange. It's almost like a Hitchcock movie, you know, that first thing that you get from Norman where you're like, oh, maybe there's something like that scene when they're eating the sandwiches and you get a couple moments where you're like something. Yeah. Something's a little bit off. Yeah.

Just like that. Now, as soon as Tippi Hadron signed on the dotted line to work with Alfred Hitchcock, he believed he owned her. She was not like Ingrid Bergman or Grace Kelly, an independent star who might have had a deal with a specific studio, but was generally able to pick her own roles. Hadron's contract made her Hitchcock's actress. And in Hitch's mind, this made her his property. While Hitchcock in the studio worked on doing the rest of the casting and prep work for what would become 1963's The Birds, Tippi basically had a couple of months off with pay to move into Los Angeles and get used to being in California.

Hitchcock ordered her to gain weight during this time. He thought she was too skinny. So he sent her several bushels of potatoes over to her house with a note reminding her that insufficient amounts, they had a lot of calories. He sent her Dom Perignon on Christmas Eve and a Telegram on Christmas. So far. Yeah, he's a nice guy. Nice guy. Yeah.

Sending a bunch of potatoes over to him. Potatoes is weird. Little weird. It's not like fancy food. She's probably making enough money for potatoes. Right. Than being the basic food stuff. Well, unless he sends them over mashed.

No, I think it was just sending her bushels of potatoes. Okay, they were just raw. That is weird. Raw potatoes is a weird gift. Yeah. Now, in the new year, Alfred decided to change Tippi's name. Sort of. She'd gone by Tippi for so long that it had replaced her birth name Natalie, but it wasn't her original name.

Hitchcock decided that from now on, whenever her name was printed in films, it had to be surrounded by single quotation marks. He just wanted it to be clear that it was a nickname. He thought that that would be better for her mystique or career or whatever. I will give him that because Tippi's very memorable. Yeah, it is a memorable name. Kind of a weird choice, but, you know, I'm not. Again, so far. Okay.

Yeah, it's not so suspicious. He's getting really involved in this lady. He is getting involved, but I mean, he's probably just, he cares. He cares. He just cares, right? Next, he ordered two members of his crew to watch Miss Hedrin whenever she left the set and make notes on what she was doing. You know, that's weird.

Who she saw, what she did when she wasn't working. Like an investigator kind of following around. Yeah, like, yeah, he had two people basically follow her around everywhere and keep things on her life. That's weird. To these guys' credit, after a few days of this, they realized it was weird and just started lying to Hitchcock and stopped following her. So they're not bastards. They did the right thing.

Keep taking the money. Just don't do the job. That's the right thing because otherwise you would have just hired a private investigator. True. You lie to the guy. Yeah. Smart. Another member of the cast to avoid touching or even talking to Tippi Hedrin.

Rod Taylor, her co-star in The Birds, recalled, She was like a precious piece of jewelry he owned. Little by little, no one was permitted to come close to her during the production. Don't touch the girl after I call cut, he said to me repeatedly. Getting a little weirder? Yeah, he's treating her like she's like an object. Yeah, exactly. Now, early on in the production, Hitchcock sent a basket of bread to Tippi Hedrin's house.

It came with a note that said, eat me. Tippi later stated, he was developing this obsession and I began to feel uncomfortable because I had no control. I had to be very careful. He tried to control everything. What I wore, ate and drank. Oh, yeah. So this progresses.

Yeah. It progresses. This stuff I'm familiar with. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And we're about to get... Oh, I guess we'll see how much you're familiar with as we get into the process.

Oh, I know one thing that's pretty crazy. Oh, yeah. It's a common. It's a common. Now, according to a write-up in The Express, quote, Not long after, writing in a limo, Hitchcock attempted to embrace Hedrin, just before the door opened in front of a crowded hotel. Hedrin approached Alma, Hitchcock's wife, asking for help.

Her exact words were, Tippi, I'm so sorry you have to go through with this, Hedrin remembers. I looked at her and said, but Alma, you could stop it. And her eyes sort of glazed over and she walked away. That's not great. It's like he had his wife in check. Yeah. Yeah, it is. And it's a little bit, you see shades of the Weinstein stuff here.

A little. You see some messed up stuff going on, but nobody's quite willing to get involved. Nobody's saying anything. Yeah. But also, see, back then it was different. It's not like now. Yeah. It's like, you know, people kind of just didn't gossip.

Yeah. And women had a lot less power in the workplace period. Right. You know, Hollywood was actually probably more progressive than most places in terms of that, just because like you've got a little more marketability when you're, but even then like. But also Hitchcock was like super famous. Hitchcock was fucking Hitchcock.

Yeah. So it's like no one wanted to really fuck with him. Psycho had come out. He did the slasher, John. Yeah. Like he was big. He was big. He was as big as a director's ever been.

Literally and figuratively. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. I mean, there's no dream warriors without psycho. That's true. That's true. My favorite Nightmare on Elm Street movie.

It's easily of the Nightmare on Elm Street movies. It's the one with the best rap. It's. Yeah. Absolutely. And Dawkins is on the soundtrack. Dawkins on the soundtrack. I mean, what more do you want?

I was in, I was in Big Bear, California recently. And I was at like a random cafe in Big Bear and they were advertising that Dawkins had been there three days earlier. And I had the same thought that I think everyone has when they hear about Dawkins playing somewhere, which is, oh, they're alive. I would have assumed the Coke would have gotten them years ago, right? Good on you, Dawkins. Nice livers.

Really impressive. Now, most of the cast and crew seem to have been well aware that something sketchy was going on between the director and his leading lady, but no one actually took any action to defend her or tell Hitchcock that he was being a total creep. And so as they continued to film, Hitchcock grew more obsessed and even bolder. Here's the dark side of genius. He began to take unusual care in the rehearsal and preparation of every shot, directing her down to the movement of an eye and every turn of my head, she remembered.

And he also started to take her aside for longer story conferences about the film, which made her increasingly uncomfortable. And off the set, he was always staring at her, as she and others vividly recalled. So, by the time they got well into shooting the birds, Hitchcock was in full blown, creepy abusive boyfriend mode with the woman he was not dating, who was roughly 30 years his junior. Not that any of this would have been cool if they were dating in the same age, but you catch my meetings.

Yeah. It's weird. The fact that this guy was her boss makes it weirder. Right. Now, if you've seen the birds, you know that it's a movie that involves a lot of birds. These animals were scrupulously cared for. Crewmen and assistants were scratched and pecked with regularity like you'd expect with a movie that uses a bunch of birds, but the Humane Society was on set and they made sure that

all the animals were well fed and never forced to work for too long. So the animals retreated very well on the set of the birds. The film's leading lady was a little bit of a different matter. During her 20 weeks of shooting, Tippi Hedron had only one day free during the entire production. She was not actually needed on set the entire time, but Hitchcock was insistent that her presence was necessary. Now, this was not entirely a bad thing. Tippi herself even recalled, quote, he gave me the best education an actor could have.

With any other director, it would have taken 15 years, but he had me involved in every part of the film. Script completion, wardrobe design, special effects work, dubbing, it was his film from start to finish and he wanted me to learn how to put it together. So he's taking it seriously, this idea of crafting the perfect artist. He's diligent about it. It's not all creepy, which probably makes it more difficult from Tippi's side because she's getting this incredible introduction.

It's like that's the trade-off. Yeah, that's the trade-off. You get to meet this master and work really closely as he, you know, the birds is one of the great masterpieces of horror still to this day. It's very influential. Yeah. And so having that opportunity, I can see how that would make it easy to not push back more at the weird stuff.

Right, right. You've got this incredible, nobody gets this chance. I mean, he's also giving her her career. Well, that's what he saw it as, although she would argue, this has never been my ambition. Right. So anyway, but he does believe, you know, I'm giving her her career. So the other members of the cast and crew were very supportive of Hedron, even when they wouldn't push back against Hitchcock.

And so she soldiered on. But as things went on, Hitchcock began to push for more and more control over the life of the film's leading lady. He started telling me what I should wear on my own time, what I should be eating and what my friends and I should be seeing. He suggested that such and such a person was not good enough for my company or that someone I might have a social engagement with was not right. And he became angry and hurt if I didn't ask his permission to visit friends in the evening

or on a weekend. That's well out of bounds for a boss. I mean, it's almost like he's like an overbearing father. Yeah. And I think that's his attitude. Right. Like, I'm making you. I'm building you.

I am your father. Do you think that comes from his mother and his relationship in a way? I think it might. Yeah. I think this because he... If I'm a therapist, I'd say it stems from that. Yeah. A control thing.

If I'm a therapist with the information I have right now and me not being a therapist also. Right. If I'm pretending to be a therapist. Let's put on our therapy hat. Let's put on our therapy hat. I definitely draw a line between those two things. Yeah.

Therapists hit us up on Twitter if we're wrong about this and you think we're being irresponsible. Our Twitter name is atBastardsPod. So therapists, you know, hit us up. Get at us. Get at us. Yeah. Slide into our DMs. Is that...

That's what the kids say? Sophie's giving me the thumbs up. She wouldn't give me bad advice. Now, when Tippi would express her totally understandable discomfort at some of the creepiness that was coming out of Hitchcock, the director would respond with anger, telling her that he had pulled her out of the trash heap. That was one of the ways he'd phrase it. He had made her into a star, so she should just be happy to do what he told her to do.

He repeatedly told her that thousands of girls could have replaced her, which Tippi would have been fine with. She'd never really wanted this life, but now she was under contract, so there was nothing to do with the job she'd signed up for. Quote, he could be two different men. He was a meticulous and sensitive director who gave so much to each scene and who got so much emotion into it, and he was a man who would do anything to get a reaction from me.

Now, one of Hitchcock's favorite ways to get a reaction from Tippi was to whisper something obscene or pornographic to her, the instant before calling action, and this is something he did his entire career, particularly to the women he worked with, is he would whisper something sexual to them right before yelling action, just because he wanted to get them off balance and stuff. There's another director that did that. I can't remember who it is, but it wasn't as sketchy. Yeah.

And it's the kind of thing... There's just a way to sort of throw the person off and do the reaction you want. I can see the artistic justification for it. I can also see that crossing the line into sexual harassment very easily. Oh, I mean, that is sexual harassment. Yeah, it is sexual harassment. Because it's unwanted sexual talk. Exactly.

Anyway, Alfred Hitchcock considered this, his prerogative as a director, getting the sort of reaction of someone. He thought it was his duty, or at least that's how he would have justified it. He also took to trying to force Tippi to drink martinis during rehearsals. Tippi, who herself was a Hitchcock fan before this point, saw a similarity in how the great director treated her and how he treated the women in his films. I had always heard that his idea was to take a woman, usually a blonde, and break her apart to see her shyness and reserve broken down.

But I thought this was only in the plots of his films. Now, one of the most iconic scenes in The Birds and in all of horror cinema comes when Miss Hedrin's character is brutally attacked on screen by a horde of birds. Still a really compelling scene to say. We're going to talk about that scene in a little bit and how it was even more horrifying behind the scenes. Oh, I know about this. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

This is probably the most well-known Hitchcock story. We're going to get very granular. But I'm going to tell you right now, not the most fucked up thing he does. No, there's something worse. There's a couple things worse. Right, right. Yeah, yeah. So we're going to get into that in a whole lot more.

But first, do you love products and services? I already asked you this question, but you're going to answer again. Yeah, I still do. Well, before we break to products and services, I'm going to yell something obscene and sexual into your ear to provoke a good reaction from you. Oh, fine. Moist. That was a good facial reaction.

Sophie had a good one, too. I don't like that word. Nobody likes that word. That's why it provokes a good reaction. I'm just a genius trying to do a good lead-in to these ads. Well, this will be good for our movie. Yeah, this will be good for the movie that we're filming right now. Yeah.

Buy stuff! 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've 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-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 happen.

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. 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. 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. Sophie's telling me that she is not bothered by the word moist, which if Dan O'Brien, my

old boss is listening right now, he's not listening anymore because he hates that word. But yeah. It's not a good word. It's not a great word. Not my least favorite word. No, there's worse. Yeah. There's worse words.

I don't like milk. The word milk. Milk? Milk? Because the way you say it, you go milk. It bothers me. Milk. Yeah.

It doesn't sound right. Milk. Okay. Milk is uncomfortable. When I say it, I say it. It's like when people say it, they go milk and it's like, it creeps me out. I don't know why. They used to call it white meat.

Oh, that's worse. Yeah. Well, no, because it's very, it's very, it's got a lot of the attrition and protein in it. It's not meat though. If you're like a poor peasant in the 1800s, it's like, it's, it's like a meat. Right. It'll keep you alive like a meat.

Fair enough. You know, yeah, you have no, no dog in this fight. Yeah. Sophie doesn't like it when I talk about dog fights. I said I didn't have a dog in this fight. That makes me a hero. You give me a look. You give me a look and you're, you're, you're feeding your dog a dog treat.

She probably didn't like that scene in the wire when Method Man's dog dies. Oh, that's a rough scene in the wire. I know. It's tough. Yeah. Poor Method Man. Poor Method Man. Anderson would do good in the fight.

Anderson's a good name. Good name for a dog. I got him a switchblade for Christmas. Ah. Good present. Yeah. Where do you buy a switchblade? A dog size switchblade?

Yeah. From the dog switchblade store. Oh, okay. Yeah. Yeah. Dogswitchblades.com. Wait, is it, is it something else? It's not really a knife?

No, no, it's a knife. No, no, no. You go to dogswitchblades.com. They'll give you, they have a box program where for $49.99 you get a different dog switchblade every month. Geez. There's like everything now. Yeah.

There's a lot of different, that's my favorite of the box subscriptions. Switchblades are so cool. They're great. They're great. Especially when they're wielded by dogs. I used to have a comb one. Yeah. Great way to comb your hair.

Yeah. Great way to comb your hair and get mistaken as having a knife by police officers. I know. Yeah. I'm sure people buy that way. $2. Remember? Now, we were talking about Hitchcock, we were talking about the filming of the birds

in one of the most iconic scenes in all of horror cinema, when Ms. Hedren's character is attacked on screen by a horde of vicious birds. They tear into her flesh, nearly killing her. If you watch the scene today, it's remarkable for how realistic it looks, how compellingly terrified that woman seems. This is because everything happening in the scene was more or less real. Didn't he like not tell her? Oh, he did a bunch of stuff.

That's what we're getting into. Hitchcock's well-established pattern of fucking with leading ladies might be part of why no one really stood up for Hippie Hedren at the time. He was certainly more obsessed with her than he'd been with his other actresses, but nothing about his behavior stood out until the point when it became time to film the infamous climax of this movie. The final great attack of the birds was to involve the leading lady herself. She would be caught in a room full of crows and gulls and ravens that would tear at her

until she collapsed in the state of shock. Hippie Hedren had been told before the week shooting began that, of course, mechanical birds would be used for the scene, since anything else would be practically impossible, but when she arrived on the set that Monday morning in June, the assistant director James Brown informed her that mechanical birds would not be used, because it had been determined that on film they would look like artificial props. An hour later, the new approach began. Did that guy slip up?

Oh no. Oh no. It was Hitchcock's plan for this to be a surprise to her. For them to be like, it's going to be fake birds, fake birds, fake birds, and then she shows up the day they're filming and they're like, actually, it's going to be real birds. The way they filmed it is they just had two guys with protective gloves and huge boxes filled with birds positioned on one side of the camera, one on each side of the camera, facing the actress, and Hippie stood with her back to a wall, and the whole set was

in a cage. These people are all in a cage with the birds, and while Hedron panics and waves her arms, live birds are thrown at her while the camera is rolled. These men are just chucking live animals at her, while she stands there. I cannot imagine what that was like. So this is obviously a step behind making someone stand in a shower for six days, or handcuffing someone for a few hours. Hitchcock was literally having this woman assaulted with birds.

Tippi later said, there was no precedent for anything like this, and no one knew what to expect. All of us thought it could be done very quickly, and no one hoped so more than I. We thought maybe after one or two takes, they'd have all the film they'd need. It went on the entire day. Jesus. Tippi would endure birds being thrown at her. They'd reset the scene, and then they'd fling more birds on her, over and over again,

for hours. Wow. At the end of the first day, they still weren't done. You want to guess how many days it took them to get this shot? Oh, probably like four. Five. How close? Five full days of having birds thrown at her.

I mean, after day three. You feel like you got all the shots you need, right? I think we're done here. I think we got enough shots of this woman having birds. We can use what we got there, right? Come on. For five days, they're doing nothing but throwing birds at Tippi Hadron. Now the close-up.

Eight hours a day, at different angles. They need to use less and less stage makeup as the days go on, because her face is now covered with real scratches and real blood. She's got scars on her face still, just throwing birds at her. Kerry Grant was reportedly stunned by Hadron's courage. People on set began to whisper. I am stunned. I am stunned.

I'm Kerry Grant. Hitch, you are amazing. I'd never. Throwing birds at a woman. Birds at a woman? I would never. I've heard of throwing glasses at a woman, because it's the 60s, but birds. Birds?

Wow. I love doing impressions of him. He's got that classic Hollywood voice. People on set whispered that Hitchcock was lucky that Tippi Hadron was new to show business. No veteran actors would have put up with anything like this. Ingrid Bergman, you're not going to throw birds at me for five days. No, she's not having it. Hitchcock might have had enough cachet to get a day.

Not five days. Maybe five minutes. Yeah, maybe five minutes. Not five days of bird assault. She would keep you on to him. She'd fling the birds back at him. Now Hadron later said, the week was perfectly dreadful, really the worst week of my life. Each day I thought, and they told me, just one more hour, just one more shot as it goes

on for five days. On Thursday, when it should have been fucking done, after four days of bird assault, Hitchcock reviewed the dailies and determined that a new angle was necessary from the early shots. At this point, he's just having fun. At this point, he's just having fun. This is Tippi. And so on Thursday, the wardrobe mistress took me into my dressing room, where elastic bands were tied around my body with nylon thread that was pulled through tiny holes

in my costume. I soon found out what this was for. One leg of each bird was tied to each piece of clothing, so that when I lay on the floor, they couldn't fly away, but would bound and perch all over me. This went on for the rest of the day while they tried to get the shots that they wanted. So after throwing birds at her for four days, they tie birds to her body and leave the birds panicking and flipping out on her for days. Oh my god, it just gets better.

On Friday, they did the same thing again, so they could get close up shots at different angles. By then, the birds were clearly losing their shit as well. One in particular flipped out and attacked Tippi Hadron's left eye, leaving a deep tear on her lower lid and coming pretty close to blinding her. This was finally too much for Tippi, and in all fairness, I think a lot of Navy SEALs would have broken under five straight days as the team was burr-finally-burr-sauced. I can't imagine she went that long.

She's a tough lady. She was given the weekend off and set to come back on Monday and have more birds thrown at her. Quote, when she came back to work Monday morning, she was in such a distraught state that she could not be roused from a brief nap in her dressing room. She awoke to find herself under sedation, back home. Hitchcock was told by her physician that she could not possibly return for at least a week, and when he replied that she was needed for every shot, the doctor insisted that in her

present condition, she would not be able to sustain work at all. And so production on the birds closed down for a full week, which is an extraordinarily expensive thing. They did eventually finish shooting the film, obviously. Hitchcock moved on to his next production, and Tippi Hadron got some time to relax and recover from a full week of sustained bird assault. During this interim period, Hitchcock proved unable to turn down his creepiness. He sent Tippi Hadron's daughter-

This is the story I know. The gift that he sent to his daughter? The gift. It's pretty bad. Yeah. He sent Tippi Hadron's daughter a handmade doll, a perfect- But this wasn't Melanie Griffith though, or was it? I think it was Melanie.

Oh, it was Melanie. Yeah, I think it was Melanie. He sent her a handmade doll that was a perfect representation of her mother, dressed as her character in the birds, and placed in a tiny coffin. Well, and the doll had scars. Yeah. Like her. On its face.

Yeah, that's nuts. He sends her daughter- Why? She sends all of her mom's corpse. But see, now he's reaching over to the daughter's life. Yeah. Which is crazy. It's insane.

When Melanie was asked about this later as an adult, she said, he was a motherfucker, and you can quote me. So I did. Wow. Great quote. Great quote. It's probably why Melanie did so much coke in the 80s. Yeah, it probably didn't help.

That's gotta fuck up a kid. I know. And I'm sure that just seeing her mom in that state, not great. Yeah. Not great for you. No. After sending her daughter a replica of her corpse, Hitchcock had Tippi Hedren come in for what he said was a deep makeup session to prepare for their next film, Marnie.

Instead of doing a makeup test, a plaster cast was taken of Hedren's face and used to make a perfectly life-like mask of Tippi Hedren asleep or dead. The mask had no use in the film. Hitchcock kept it in his own office. Oh, God. Yeah, that's fucking creepy right there. Why? Because he wanted, he wanted a perfect mask of his leading lady looking like she's dead

to keep in his room. I mean, at this point, like, what kind of mind is this? I mean, the guy who makes the birds in Psycho. Yeah, it sounds like a James Bond villain. He does a little bit, right? Yeah, yeah. He's got that kind of air to him. And that kind of profile.

I must have a mask of you looking dead. I must have a mask of your corpse. So while he was mired in pre-production for Marnie, Hedren enjoyed a very well-earned holiday. Alfred continued to send her increasingly strange letters, some of which were clear examples of sexual harassment and others of which were just weird. He designed a special trailer just for her to use during the filming of Marnie. He stocked it with his favorite wines and stationery that matched the stationery he

kept in his office. Her trailer was located right next to his private office with a designated door that led straight to his office so that he could enter and accost her whenever he wanted without anyone else seeing. When they started filming, Tippi had to invite friends over to her trailer at the end of the day just so Hitchcock would not find her alone. God. Yeah.

I think she has a very disturbing scene. Oh yeah. We'll be getting to that. As a general rule though, my advice for men in the entertainment industry, if people start inviting their friends over so that they're not alone with you, you may have creeped them out. I know. You may have done something messed up.

I think at that point it's time to kind of move on. Get away from this maniac. Peel back. Peel back. Yeah. She's about to. So the famous director started sending letters and party invitations to Tippi Hedren's parents as if he was trying to court her favor romantically.

As Hitch's obsession grew deeper, he sat down with his screenwriter and demanded that the man add a scene to the movie Marnie where Hedren's character is raped. This is bad. Yeah. The screenwriter said, quote, I didn't want to write that scene for him and I told Hitchcock so. I thought it would break sympathy for the character of the man and it's totally unmotivated, but Hitch said he wanted it in the film and he insisted that at that exact moment of the

rape he wanted the camera right on her shocked face. Jesus. Yeah. It's also Sean Connery. It is Sean Connery. Yeah. It's a different light. You do.

Yeah. It's kind of impossible not to in a scene like that. And it seems like I'm not a great film buff, but other people say the scene feels weird. No. That was a movie that I watched that I was kind of like, I can't watch this again. This is awful. Yeah. Now, Hitchcock grew more possessive, if that's even possible, as time went on.

He started demanding his cameraman focus on Tippi Hedren's face and body with almost pornographic obsession. He banned visitors and guests from the set. Eventually, Hitchcock's horniness overwhelmed him. Here's the dark side of Jesus. That's funny. I mean, it's what happened. Quote, by November, he was telling her his recurring dream.

You were in the living room of my house in Santa Cruz and there was a rainbow, a glow around you. You came right up to me and said, Hitch, I love you. I'll always love you. And we embraced. Don't you understand? He asked in a low voice that you're everything I've ever dreamed about. If it weren't for Alma, Tippi Hedren's feelings and intentions and her own private life seemed

of no concern to him. But it was a dream, Hitch, she told him, just a dream and she left her dressing room. Now, in public, to studio executives in the media, Hitchcock was effusive in praise for Tippi Hedren. He called her the ultimate actress, the finest performer he had ever worked with. And his praise quickly slipped into outright talking about his attraction to her. He seems to have led several film executives to believe that he and Hedren were having an affair.

She encountered this when she would talk to these people. They would essentially make comments that led her to believe they thought that she was having an affair with Hedren. And that just so he could, like, you know, bring down suspicion of him being this creepizoid. Yeah, it's not weird. It's not weird that this happening. Yeah, because they're together. Having this, you know, relationship or whatever.

Right. I mean, there was that rape scene in the movie. There was that rape scene in the movie. Yeah. Hitchcock was baffled by the fact that all of this dedication on his part had not yet been reciprocated by the object of his desire. He hired a handwriting analyst to try and determine whether or not Tippi Hedren had what he called a deceitful personality.

And then, at the end of February, Hitchcock finally crossed the line into physical violence. If we don't count throwing birds at someone for five days is physical violence. In a way. In a way. In older interviews, like this one I found in the Express in 2008, Hedren was open about only the verbal aspects of what went down, quote, he stared at me and simply said as if it were the most natural thing in the world that from this time on he expected me to make myself sexually available and accessible to him, however and whenever he wanted.

But in 2016, Tippi Hedren finally alleged that after making these demands, Hitchcock straight up assaulted her, quote, I've never gone into detail on this and I never will. I'll simply say that he suddenly grabbed me and put his hands on me. It was sexual. It was perverse and it was ugly and I couldn't have been more shocked and repulsed. The harder I fought him, the more aggressive he became, then he started adding threats as if he could do anything to me that was worse than what he was trying to do at the moment.

Oh boy. Yeah. This is hard to hear. It's rough. Yeah. I didn't know he physically did anything. Yeah. This didn't come out until 2016.

Right. Yeah. Now, so we're going to get into a little bit more about that, about what Hedren says in 2017 after Weinstein's assaults become public and sort of the end of this unfortunate tale. But first, you know, it's not a weird name, Zevia, the stevia-based diet soda beverage I'm currently sipping and in fact, Zevia is the only stevia-based diet soda beverage currently on this table.

That's a good, that's a good ad plug. Here's some products that paid us. 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. Because 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 this hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark. And on the gun, badass way. And nasty sharks. 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. 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. 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. 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. We're talking about Alfred Hitchcock's assault of Tippi Hedrin, kind of the culmination of

just so much creepy behavior. In 2017, after news of Harvey Weinstein's creepiness became public knowledge, Tippi Hedrin tweeted this, I'm watching all the coverage on Weinstein. This is nothing new, nor is it limited to the entertainment industry. I dealt with sexual harassment all the time. During my modeling and film career, Hitchcock wasn't the first. However, I'm not going to take it anymore. So I simply walked away and didn't look back.

Hitch said he would ruin my career and I told him to do what he had to do. It has taken 50 years, but it is about time that women started standing up for themselves as they appear to be doing in the Weinstein case. Good for them. Yeah. Now the bad news is that Hitchcock did ruin her career. He had her on contract for a couple more years and so she wasn't able to do anything without him for the rest of that time.

And he blackballed her in the industry. She never had the kind of career that she could have had. Well, he Weinsteined her. Yeah, he Weinsteined her. Before Weinstein was, I'm guessing he was like in elementary school at this point. Right. Well, Hitchcock created the term Weinstein. Yeah.

He did. In anticipation of the other creepy man who would take on his baton. However, he did not ruin Tippi Hedren's life. She went on to run a big cat sanctuary, which might have been tied to all the bird-related trauma and led into her being in a movie wherein she and her family lived with a number of dangerous, gigantic cats for years. And they were horribly wounded, which might be tied a little bit. That's what I was wondering.

I'm like, there's such a connection there. It may just be that because she'd had this experience on birds, she was less likely to realize things had crossed a line in the production of that film. Yeah. True. Because I mean, she subjected her family to that. Yeah, exactly. And that's kind of what happens with trauma, like you get fucked up and then you push

it on people around you if you're not careful. I heard about that with child molesters, that they were molested, so then the cycle continues. Well, and I can say, having gone through some of my own deals with PTSD and having had a part, we both pushed shit on each other and traumatized each other further. It's a thing. It's a thing. You go through something fucked up. Well, you almost do it unconsciously.

Yeah, because it resets your ideas of what's reasonable. Once you've gone through something crazy and you're more likely to... I'm not going to call Tippi Hedren a bad person for putting a family through this. Having gone through what she's... I can see how... Well, wasn't it her and her husband? Yeah, I think so. Because he was a filmmaker.

He's been working with these animals for a while. Yeah. Anyway. Well, we benefited. Because that's a great movie. That's a great movie. What was the name of that? Roar.

Roar. Exactly. Right. It was just released, I think, recently. Go watch Big Cats, fuck with Tippi Hedren's family. Get ready, because that movie will fuck you up. Yeah. It's very disturbing.

All of the times you see people attacked by animals on it are real. They're real. They are real graphical, not depictions, actual attacks of Big Cats on human beings. It's crazy. Yeah, it just is one of those things that reminds you that, like, if your house cat... I have a house cat. I love cats. Yeah.

If your house cat were 180 pounds, it would regularly injure you. Right. Without wanting to cause you pain, just because that's what cats do. That's their normal, like, routine. Yeah. They're just cats. I'm gonna go out and just kill a goat. Yeah.

Fuck with some shit. For us, that's buying a sandwich. Yeah. Let's get back to the podcast. So Tippi Hedren, after Hitchcock actually assaults her, lays hands on her, stands up for herself, and she pushes back, and Hitchcock doesn't push anymore at her, so that stays true to his character. But he also goes completely in the other direction, where he once been talking about

her as, like, the next Grace Kelly, this great star who's gonna be winning awards and stuff. He starts refusing to even speak her name, calling her only that girl. He directs her through his assistants, and he goes beyond ignoring his leading lady, and he works to actively sabotage the movie Marnie itself, making sure the final edited version was as bad a movie as he was capable of making it. It's not that good. It's not that good, because he fucked it up. Right.

On purpose. Yeah. He burned his own movie to the ground in order to hurt Tippi Hedren for not responding to his advances. You know, Kubrick kind of has the same tactics. Oh, yeah? Oh, yeah. With the shining.

You know, he put Shelley DeVall through some shit, which it's similar. And it's one of those things, there's always, if you've got a great director whose job in that case is to get traumatic acting, to get someone to act like they've been traumatized. Yeah. Yeah. There's always a degree, even like George Miller in the making of Mad Max Fury Road. There's that talk about how like. Great movie.

Great movie. Brilliant movie. There's that talk about how, what's his name? Batman. Christian Bale. Not Christian Bale. Fuckin'. Tom Hardy.

Tom Hardy. The other Batman. Bane. Yeah. Yeah, he's Bane. Yeah. Tom Hardy's like hanging beneath this truck, and his kid is watching as they do this stunt where he's underneath a truck held up by wires, and his kid asks George Miller what

happens if the wires break, and he's like, oh, they're really strong wires. They won't break. And the kid's like, yeah, but what happens if it breaks? And he's like, well, I guess your dad's gonna go under the wheels. He's like, you should've been like. He's like, get your dad's down. Son, your dad was Bane. Yeah.

He'll be fine. He'll probably be fine. Yeah, he survived that monstrosity movie. But there's always a degree, if you're a great director and you're trying to get a great performance, specifically an actor to act traumatized. There's a degree of emotional fuckery. There will always be some even great directors who aren't necessarily shitty people when you get caught up in art like that.

You'll do some things that are on the line. I think Hitchcock crosses that line. Yeah. Well, you know what it is too? It's like in Kubrick's state, he didn't have actors as good as Nicholson. So to measure up, he had to fuck with them. He had to fuck with them. And maybe that one, I don't know enough about that to say if he crossed a line or not.

It's always a risk when you're making art. There's like a making of Shining if you watch, and you can see her kind of breaking down. And it's the same thing in Apocalypse Now where you see Martin Sheen, where he injures himself badly while drunk on set in that opening scene, cuts himself and is bleeding everywhere. And Kubrick's just like, no, keep going. Oh, you mean just keep rolling. Oh, sorry.

Coppola. Yeah. That's why I'm here. I'm bad at this. I'm bad at all this, except for reading about creepy things people do. So Hitchcock's... You've got enough to deal with. Yeah.

Hitchcock's biographer, Spado, calls Tippi Hedrin, Hitchcock's last grade obsession and arguably his downfall. Spado argues that after Marnie, he never made another great movie, and that he may never even have made another good movie, that this life kind of broke him. Yeah. Frenzy is pretty interesting for the subject matter, but yeah, you're right. I mean, he's definitely going down. Yeah.

And the fact that he sabotaged Marnie is kind of like, that's sort of where this guy's mind breaks. Yeah. He's kind of losing it. He kind of loses it after that. While he would live on until 1980, his life was increasingly devoid of meaningful work filled with food, ill health, too much alcohol, and an increasingly cold and perpetually sexless relationship.

But this is also when I saw him on many interviews and he was really funny. Yeah. I mean, he's got that sort of charm. Yeah. I want to say he has a really good dick-cabbit interview around that time. But he's not producing his great films anymore. No. He's become...

He's already a legend, but he's not necessarily doing what he does best. Yeah. Yeah. He's one of those people who doesn't last a lot longer after they stop putting out good work. Yeah, it's really a shame. It is. And he dies a year after receiving the Oscar for Lifetime Achievement in 1980.

Which is the only Oscar he received. Only Oscar he received, in which he was really anxious about taking, because he, number one, knew it meant that his career was over, and number two, didn't like how he looked on screen because he was in very ill health at that point. So it was a... He was not a happy man at the end. You can see it in the films. They get really disgusting and disturbing.

Yeah. Yeah. It's kind of his mind unraveling. And we are all left here to unravel his legacy and try to figure out, how should we think about Alfred Hitchcock knowing all this stuff? Because it is clear with his work that art and abuse were inextricably tied together. Yeah. He was able to make the great films he was able to make because he was the kind of man

who would poison a cameraman and let him shit himself for hours or throw birds at a woman for five days. The shitting thing is a little more fun than the birds. They're both over a line. I know. But shitting, I can kind of be like, all right, you're still like, you're great. But it's like the birds thing, it's like, all right, what are you doing? This is crazy.

Yeah. The birds thing, and you can see when he locks that woman in a telephone box and fills it with smoke, that's over a line to me too. That is too. That's pretty bad. This is a guy who most people would have put in lines up earlier than Hitchcock did. And because he didn't have those lines, we got some great movies. But because he didn't have those lines, Melanie Hadron got a doll of her mom's corpse sent

to her house. Like it carried over into other people's lives and traumatized them to this day probably. To this day. And that's complicated. Yeah. I want to say an unknown movie of his that's wonderful is Shadow of a Doubt with Joseph Cotton. Excellent movie.

That's really good. And it's before his kind of like swan period. I mean, I went into this podcast, I've definitely seen more Hitchcock than I saw of Stephen Seagall. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Because I don't think I'd seen like Under Siege and Undeadly Ground of his. I think I've seen Vertigo, North by Northwest, Psycho and the Birds, obviously.

Yeah. Yeah. But that's pretty much it for my Hitchcock. Yeah, there's some. Kind of the big hitters. There's some deep cuts. Like suspicion is great. And that's Cary Grant.

And so is what's it called? Rebecca I already mentioned. Yeah. It's great. There's also a foreign correspondent is really good. He worked with William Cameron Menzies, excellent cinematographer. So where are you now as a as a huge Hitchcock fan? Like obviously this is not a guy, it's not like Weinstein where he was an influential

person in the industry, but you can pretty much cut mention of him out and not affect the history of cinema. Yeah. Because he was just a producer. He was just a producer. He wasn't like, although I've seen a movie. He directed. Oh, really?

I didn't know he directed anything. It was a movie. It was so weird. Yeah. Hitchcock, you cannot cut out of film canon without losing something. He's too influential. He's too influential and I could still watch Rebecca and love it just as much. Does it help that he's a director who made creepy movies rather than like if this was

like, I feel like if Jimmy Stewart had been doing this shit, I wouldn't be able to watch it's a wonderful life. Yeah. It's different because you're not seeing him. Yeah. On film. So that makes it easier. That makes it easier.

So Tarnish, what you're about to say is does this tarnish my appreciation of his films a little bit? Yeah. Like I don't know if I could watch the birds the same way. Right. Or even Marnie, which I haven't watched from the first time I watched it. So there's a little bit of that, but it's also like right now I want to revisit foreign correspondent just because it's a brilliant film.

Yeah. It's like espionage and like really interesting for its time. One thing I do want to bring up that I'm not enough of a film historian to say concretely but it occurred to me as I'm researching this, you know, you've got Alfred Hitchcock inventing the slasher genre and also a guy who has some serious issues with women, which are very much on display. I feel like horror as a genre has for a long time had some issues with women. Yeah.

Yeah. And I wonder how much of that is Hitchcock's DNA in the genre? He definitely is kind of the pioneer of that because Psycho is what a lot of people would agree is the first slasher movie. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It was the first time, too, that horror was like a masterpiece.

It wasn't just schlocky. It wasn't a guy in a rubber suit banging around. I mean, at the time, horror was kind of goofy and cheesy, like Vincent Price. Yeah. You know, like, oh, darkness everywhere. I can't do a movie. Scoos and skeletons. Yeah.

It wasn't corny. He made it kind of artistic. And so I wonder how much of his issues with women and his, because like we talked about the shining later, and I have to think, Kubrick's got to be a guy who's influenced by Hitchcock. Oh, of course. And Bogdanovich. Perhaps even down to the way he treats his actress to get a response, he's like, well, this would not have been a hidden story at the time.

Well, Hitchcock got a great performance out of Hadron and the Birds, and he did it by fucking with her. Maybe that's what I got to do with Shelley DeVall. Right. Right. Maybe I got to push her. Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, I can see them justifying it in that sense. Yeah. It doesn't make it OK. So here's another example of how this kind of thing gets passed down, because we see Hadron sort of maybe passing it down with her family, getting them into this production that's really a little too much. But we also see Hitchcock passing down this sort of idea that sometimes you have to push your actresses.

What did he say? Like you have to torture the woman. Torture the woman. Yeah. The trouble of today is we don't torture women enough. Yeah. That was a very odd quote, because I've never heard it put that way. And it makes no sense.

Yeah. Unless you start thinking about like, OK, well, you've got the tippy-head in the birds, you've got Shelley DeVall in the shining, sometimes that's what directors do. It comes from a place, though, of, I think, fear of women, you know, and their strength. Yeah. Where it's like you're sort of insecure about yourself. And insecure about the quality, I think, of the actresses that you're getting, too. Yeah.

Because he's not doing that. Hitchcock's not doing that to Kerry Grant. No. I was about to say, like, he would never do that to Kerry Grant. Yeah. Kerry Grant would just storm off the set. Yeah. Exactly.

Kerry Grant would not take that. Nobody's throwing birds at Kerry Grant for five days. No. No. Kerry Grant's interesting, because he loved Hitchcock. Yeah. You know, and he was also so difficult to get on board for some movies. Billy Wilder famously tried to work with him many times, but for some reason, like, Kerry

was like, no. Yeah. But with Hitchcock, he's like, yes, I'll do it. And a lot of people, like, even a lot of the women who worked with Hitchcock, really, because, you know, you made great movies with him. John Hedron has this kind of, like, complexity where she's like, this guy is someone I really don't like, really fucking do it, but also, like, you know, he can't deny what he made. Yeah.

It's tough. I can't remember. There's another story where he got some actress, I forget who, an apartment. Yeah. And then it was, like, within viewing of his apartment so that he could watch her. That's... Did you come across that? No, I didn't.

But that sounds just like Hitchcock. I think it was... I don't know if it was... Right down to it almost being part of, what was the movie? Where Jimmy Stewart's... Right. Yeah, exactly. Rear window. Rearing window, looking out at someone else's house.

Yeah. I think that's kind of where that came from. Yeah. So again, this is a guy who, everything he does in a movie is basically something he does in real life. I know. He lives his life the way he directs his films. Yeah, you know.

And he directs fucked up films. He's like a performance artist. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I think that's where we're going to land for the day. Abed, you got any pluggables to plug before we roll on out of here? Next episode I plug my podcast. I'll plug my Twitter.

It's at Abed G. Awesome. You can find me on Twitter at I write okay. You can find this podcast on Twitter at Instagram and at Bastard's Pod. You can find us on the internet at BehindTheBastards.com. You can go to Tee Public. You can buy a T-shirt. You can buy a cup.

You can buy, if you're in a military that uses T-54 tanks, we have some silk screens for those that you can put on over your tank. So if you're currently serving in the Afghan military and you're a fan of the show, you can get some Bastard's branded content there. Tee Public really has a great variety of things. So check all that out. I'm Robert Evans. And until next week, I love about 40% of you.

Bam. Oh, that was fun. Hitchcock in the Hitchcan. Yep. I have to say I'm pretty disturbed. 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 Podcasts, 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 Podcasts, 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 Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.