Alfred Hitchcock Festival

Opening night this year will feature Scotts Valley Mayor’s Proclamation for local resident, Alfred Hitchcock! Talk featuring Tere Carrubba, Alfred Hitchcock’s granddaughter and Jay Topping, local historian, discuss ‘Memories and local Hitchcock history’ with audience questions. Hear from Tom Lams, Hitchcock’s animal trainer on The Birds and other movies, in a video interview.

Presentation and discussion by Professor Bill Park, Emeritus Professor of Literature at Sarah Lawrence College, PhD in Eighteenth-Century English Literature from Columbia University. Park has taught at Hamilton College, Columbia University, and for thirty-eight years at Sarah Lawrence College where he co-founded the Film Studies Program.

Professor Bill Park will show and discuss Hitchcock’s 1929 film Blackmail and will speak about the very early days of Hitchcock films. After starting production as a silent film, British International Pictures decided to adapt Blackmail into a separate sound film. It became the first successful European talkie. The film is about a London woman who is blackmailed after killing a man who tries to rape her. You’ll be impressed by Dr. Park’s encyclopedic knowledge of film and literature.

Author, Aaron Leventhal will present the book, Footsteps in the Fog: Alfred Hitchcock’s San Francisco. The book is a celebration of the San Francisco films of Alfred Hitchcock. The master director’s familiarity with Northern California greatly influenced his decision to use Bay Area locations in several of his landmark motion pictures, and more importantly, was often the source of inspiration for many of these same cinema classics.

Three of Hitchcock’s masterpieces were set in the San Francisco area: Shadow of a Doubt, Vertigo, and The Birds. In addition, Rebecca, Suspicion, Marnie, Topaz, Psycho, and Family Plot utilized Bay Area locations and/or were inspired by Northern California events and settings. Footsteps in the Fog examines these famous films, taking the reader on a journey around the Bay Area, while weaving together cinema graphic intrigue, Bay Area history and lore, and the timeless elegance of San Francisco and its picturesque surroundings.

Panel discussion with Logan Walker, UC Santa Cruz Lecturer in Film & Digital Media, and Shelley Stamp, Professor of Film & Digital Media at UC Santa Cruz, discussing Hitchcock’s history as a director and films we have viewed. Audience participation is encouraged.

John Billheimer, author of Hitchcock and the Censors will discuss how throughout his career, Alfred Hitchcock had to contend with a wide variety of censors attuned to the slightest suggestion of sexual innuendo, undue violence, toilet humor, religious disrespect, and all forms of indecency, real or imagined. From 1934 to 1968, the Motion Picture Production Code Office controlled the content and final cut on all films made and distributed in the United States. During their review of Hitchcock’s films, the censors demanded an average of 22.5 changes, ranging from the mundane to the mind-boggling, on each of his American films.

Fashion Talk & Show by Christina Cree. The fashion show will feature designs inspired by both the fashions in Hitchcock films as well as the films themselves. Edith Head and Hitchcock created some of the most iconic and beautiful moments in film. Their philosophies on costume design were well matched; Edith Head saw costume design to “suit the character and advance the storyline” and Hitchcock saw it as a way “to express the psychology of his characters”. Their collaboration spanned over 20 years and 11 films.

One of the earliest noteworthy Mimosa fans was legendary director Alfred Hitchcock. He was known to enjoy Mimosas so much that some stories even credit him with inventing the cocktail in San Francisco in the 1940s. In 1925, across the English Channel, Frank Meier of the Ritz Hotel in Paris supposedly made the first Mimosa by adjusting the ratios to the classic 1:1 of champagne and orange juice. Meier published the Mimosa recipe in his 1936 book, “The Artistry of Mixing Drinks,” a guide that outlined cocktail recipes and good manners.

Panel discussion with Logan Walker, UC Santa Cruz Lecturer in Film & Digital Media, discussing Hitchcock’s history as a director and films we have viewed. Audience participation is encouraged.

Films to be shown over the three-day festival are Rear Window, North by Northwest, Birds, and Blackmail. Exact times and movie presentations are subject to change.

Exact times and movie presentations are subject to change.

Scotts Valley Cultural and Performing Arts Center
251B Kings Village Rd, Scotts Valley, CA