Hitchcock and Storyboarding

Abstract

Alfred Hitchcock in many ways presents a comparable case to that of William Cameron Menzies. Indeed, the careers of the two men were intimately connected: Menzies worked with the director on Foreign Correspondent (1940), and took particular responsibilities in designing aspects of the surrealistic dream sequence in Spellbound (1945), for which Salvador Dalí was the more visually obvious collaborator. Several of the designers who subsequently achieved success with Hitchcock, such as Dorothea Holt, learned much of their craft under the tutelage of Menzies. Each man is at the centre of one of the major controversies that has helped to bring the role of storyboarding into critical prominence: Menzies as purportedly the creator of a complete set of storyboards for Gone with the Wind, and Hitchcock for the still-complex debate about the storyboarding of the shower scene in Psycho (1960).