2012 Shaping up to be Major Year for Hitchcock Fans


Over the next year or so, there will be so many Alfred Hitchcock-related events, it will be hard even for die-hard fans to keep up.

For starters, researchers and scientists at the British Film Institute are working feverishly to restore Hitch's nine surviving silent films, including The Pleasure Garden (1925), The Lodger (1926), The Ring (1927), Downhill (1927), Easy Virtue (1927), The Farmers Wife (1927), Champagne (1928), The Manxman (1929) and Blackmail (1929). These frame-by-frame restorations will be released with brand new, custom-made musical scores. (If you're a fan of silent movies, you know how annoying those "canned" musical scores can be.) The release will timed to coincide with the 2012 Olympics in London.

Also, after several years of languishing in development, it looks as if Steven Rebello's fantastic book Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho has finally been green-lighted for a trip to the big screen. Anthony Hopkins has been signed to play Hitch, while Helen Mirren will play his wife, Alma. The biopic will cover the travails (and there were many) Hitch endured to bring one of cinema's most outstanding -- and profitable -- films to life.

Several Hitchcock films are also slated to be brought to Blu-Ray in 2012, most notably Dial M for Murder (1954) in 3-D! If you have a Blu-ray player and a newer TV that can handle 3-D, you'll finally be able to see this amazing film the way Hitch originally intended.

Another biopic about Hitch, called The Girl, is in production. This BBC production will star Sienna Miller as Tippi Hedren and Toby Jones as the director. With story consulting from Ms. Hedren and Hitchcock biographer Donald Spoto, the film promises to be the Hedren-authorized chronicle of this difficult chapter in her life.

I've got a book ready for press as well. Titled Notes from an Alfred Hitchcock Geek, it culls some of the best posts from this blog and adds in totally new content to demonstrate once and for all that Alfred Hitchcock is indeed the Shakespeare of the 20th century. I'm looking for a publisher and 2012 would be the perfect year to bring this fascinating study of Hitch's films to the public!  If you can help, or of you'd like to review my proposal, please contact me at joel.gunz (at) gmail.com.

Comments

Hopkins as Hitch--is he gonna gain some weight. It'll be interesting to see Mirren as Alma, though.
Joel Gunz said…
Either that or a prosthetic pillow! ;)
Anonymous said…
I'm very excited as this is the first I'm hearing about Mirren's casting.
Wendy P. said…
Excited to see the Hopkins film, indeed.
Re: Hitch as Shakespeare - one night over drinks, when a friend started on the old "No one man could know as much as Shakespeare, must be a committee," line, I trotted out: not Hitch, but David Thomson. Whose encyclopedic (literally) knowledge of film, actors, and elegant writing on them all strikes me as impossible for one man.