Alfred Hitchcock

From TeeVeePedia, the Internet TV Encyclopedia.

Alfred Hitchcock worked for many years, crawling his way up from designing title cards, to animal wrangling, to best boy (despite conflicts with his Catholic faith), to third unit director of landscapes and hummingbirds, to second unit a.d., to script girl a.e.i.o.u., to a full-fledged director of motion pictures. In England. (Poor guy.) But eventually he came to America. None of his films were very good, and they are barely remembered at all today. This is because all his life, the only thing "Hitch" really wanted was to produce and star in his own television show.

Finally, in 1955, he figured out a way to do it. He wasn't the most attractive or trim man out there, so he hit upon what turned out a great solution: he would "introduce" a "scary" or "suspenseful" story each week, that other people actually wrote and acted in. Then, so the audience would know who's boss, he would also do a "postscript" to each episode. Ingeniously, he decided to further play the alpha male by often having his "introduction" and "postcript" have nothing whatever to do with the content of the story that was shown in between. It was a hit, but some of the mail they got complained that Hitchcock never wrote or directed any of the episodes, so he hired Lorne Michaels (who was going through one of his vast unfunny periods) to write and direct a dozen or so episodes over the run of the show, under the pseudonym Alfred Hitchcock. This fooled and appeased viewers, and the show (very deliberately called "Alfred Hitchcock Presents Yo Mama," despite conflicts with his Catholic faith) ran for 7 years on the air.

After the end of the show, "Hitch" settled back into the boring, humdrum world of directing feature films. He died in obscurity in 1980, and has never been the subject of countless popular and scholarly books, magazine articles, or pop culture references.