The Birds reVisited

The Birds reVisited::...... more

by Elizabeth McTaggart

Title

The Birds reVisited

Artist

Elizabeth McTaggart

Medium

Digital Art - Fractal Art And Digital Collage

Description

The Birds reVisited::...
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The Birds is a 1963 suspense/horror film directed by Alfred Hitchcock, loosely based on the 1952 story "The Birds" by Daphne du Maurier. It depicts Bodega Bay, California, which is, suddenly and for unexplained reasons, the subject of a series of widespread and violent bird attacks over the course of a few days.

The film was billed as 'introducing' Tippi Hedren. It also starred Rod Taylor, Jessica Tandy, Suzanne Pleshette and a young Veronica Cartwright.

The screenplay was written by Evan Hunter. Hitchcock told him to develop new characters and a more elaborate plot, keeping Du Maurier's title and concept of unexplained bird attacks.

Alfred Hitchcock makes his signature cameo as a man walking dogs out of the pet store at the beginning of the film. They were two of Hitchcock's own Sealyham terriers, Geoffrey and Stanley.

DEVELOPMENT: On August 18, 1961, residents in the town of Capitola, California, awoke to find sooty shearwaters slamming into their rooftops, and their streets covered with dead birds. News reports suggested domoic acid poisoning (amnesic shellfish poisoning) as the cause. According to a local newspaper, the Santa Cruz Sentinel, Alfred Hitchcock requested news copy in 1961 to use as "research material for his latest thriller". At the end of the same month, Hitchcock hired Evan Hunter to adapt Daphne du Maurier's novella, "The Birds", first published in her 1952 collection The Apple Tree.

CASTING: As Hunter and Hitchcock developed the script they imagined Grace Kelly and Cary Grant in the two lead roles. Hitchcock, however, was unable to cast them and instead used Rod Taylor and Tippi Hedren, both of whom he signed to personal contracts (only Hedren made subsequent films with Hitchcock

SOUNDTRACK: Hitchcock decided to do without any conventional incidental score. Instead, he made use of sound effects and sparse source music in counterpoint to calculated silences. Hitchcock wanted to use the electroacoustic Trautonium to create the birdcalls and noises. Hitchcock had first encountered this predecessor to the synthesizer on Berlin radio in the late 1920s. It was invented by Friedrich Trautwein and further developed by Oskar Sala into the Mixtur-Trautonium, which would create some of the bird sounds for this film.

The film earned an estimated $5 million in North American rentals.

[source: Wikipedia]

Uploaded

May 24th, 2013