Hollywood harnesses Dali
Here’s a picture of Dali’s five-by-six-metre canvas used in the 1944 film by the famed British freakout director Alfred Hitchcock, “Spellbound”. The piece is currently on display at London’s Dali Universe exhibition. The movie’s in your local video shop. Read on to discover how it all came together.
It’s 1944, and Alfred Hitchcock needs to make another movie quick, because his cameo-acting talents are getting a bit rusty with all this world war nonsense going on. The fighting has made everybody a little schizo, including big-shot producer David Selznick, who’s already had a year in analysis, so Hitch cottons onto this novel called “The House of Dr Edwardes” by the tiringly named Hilary St George Sanders, about a shrink who takes charge of a cuckoo’s nest but turns out to be more than a little woo-woo himself, if you can bear catching my drift. He gives the book to screenwriter Angus MacPhail and tells him to ignore 90 per cent of it (Hollywood adaptation rules) and jazz up the rest for the box office. We’ll call it “Spellbound”!
But he still needs something else catchy, something crazy, something people will still be talking about long after they’ve realised what a senseless bucket of codfish his movie is.
Gee, he thinks, I wonder if that lunatic Salvador Dali has ever been to Hollywood? See the rest.
