Who wrote “Vertigo”?

dog walk, may 22, 2009

The books are yours.  The plays are, each production, a new living thing … an animal you can hear breathing in the bush. The films … they are, to varying degrees, the director’s.   And the episodes of television, something else again. I thought about this, to what degree is the writer responsible for the work, when I was (admittedly in haste and with lack of due consideration) choosing the film and television clips to post on this site.

Each case is different.  Secret Nation was written at the behest of Mike Jones, its director.  I gave him more or less what he wanted, then there were changes, lots of back and forth.  It was a very enjoyable process. I had something a little drier in mind, Mike thought I was over estimating the dramatic potential of musty old documents and he was probably correct.  In the case of “Rare Birds” I departed from the book in the first draft and its director, Sturla Gunnarson, came back with a dog-eared copy of the source novel with sections highlighted for inclusion in the film.  So the film was his call, but that call was to be more loyal to my own book.

You deal less with the directors in television and more with the producers and showrunners, though they weren’t calling them “showrunners” when Made In Canada was in production.  Peculiar to the continuing series is how, by the fourth and fifth season, everybody knows everybodys’  strengths and weaknesses.  I would get instruction from the producers to come up with something for a returning character with whom I had good luck in the past.  I’d pitch a story, there would be some cursory feedback and I was more or less set free. Everybody pretty much knew what to expect from everyone else and the producers were self-confident enough not to meddle just for sake of demonstrating their control.

I worked on a show called “Dooley Gardens” and was essentially tossed out of the room by the director who, having fallen in love with the actors,  invited them to remake the thing.  The people that took over called me at one point but it was too crazy in there to go back.  And I didn’t  believe they were genuinely soliciting my input. I saw one or two tiny threads of things I’d done in the final product but it wasn’t mine.  I got paid but the show went nowhere.  You learn more from the projects that go on the rocks than the successes. In that case it was the necessary limits of actors’ involvement.

I’ve titled this post “Who wrote “Veritgo”?” in reference to the Hitchcock film.  Nobody outside the industry really thinks of films and television shows as having writers, they are the province of actors and directors.  Despite the aggravation this causes writers in those mediums that is probably how it should be.  I know that we are very quick to take the credit when the film or television show works out but even quicker to shift blame when it doesn’t.

Writing The Great Eastern was something else again, an intensely collaborative process, with revisions happening right in the studio and the edit suite.  That was a fever dream about which I should post some time in the future.

So who did write, “Vertigo”?  Alec Coppel and Samual Taylor, that’s who.  Maxwell Anderson had a hand in as well, but was uncredited. The source material was a French crime novel by Pierre Boileau and Pierre Ayraud (Thomas Narcejac), writing as  Boileau-Narcejac.  Hitchcock, Jimmy Stewart and Kim Novak you’ve heard of.