{"id":23775,"date":"2020-08-05T18:56:38","date_gmt":"2020-08-05T18:56:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/propstore.com\/?p=23775"},"modified":"2020-08-24T09:46:29","modified_gmt":"2020-08-24T09:46:29","slug":"vertigo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/propstore.com\/blog\/vertigo\/","title":{"rendered":"The Vertigo Effect l Entertainment Memorabilia Live Auction – Los Angeles 2020"},"content":{"rendered":"

This year, in Propstore’s first Los Angeles-based Entertainment Memorabilia Live Auction, we have a distinguished piece of movie-making history going up on the auction block, in the form of Alfred Hitchcock’s Vista Vision Motion Picture Camera. This camera, used not only on the production of Hitchcock\u2019s Vertigo, but also by filmmaking legend Cecil B DeMille when filming The Ten Commandments, was a marvel of technology in its day, and helped the Master of Suspense produce an enduring Noir classic. <\/b><\/p>\n

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Vertigo<\/em> may now be seen as Alfred Hitchcock\u2019s masterpiece, but it was not an easy film for him to make.<\/p>\n

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The script took three attempts to nail, despite being an adaptation of Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac\u2019s D\u2019entre les morts<\/em> (the first draft, by playwright Maxwell Anderson, was titled Darkling I Listen<\/em> and virtually made no sense). Filming was delayed by a frustrating double-whammy of the Master of Suspense himself requiring surgery to remove his gallbladder, and his chosen lead actress Vera Miles becoming pregnant, requiring the recasting of Kim Novak in the twin femme fatale role of Madeleine\/Judy. Its production ran over schedule and went over budget, thanks mainly to unexpectedly gloomy weather on location in San Francisco, chosen by Hitchcock for its steep streets. And on its eventual release in 1958, it received a chilly reception from critics and audiences alike, turned off by its moral ambiguity (encapsulated in a superbly layered performance by Hitchcock regular James Stewart, who people were more used to playing nice guys), its downbeat ending, and a widespread misreading of Novak\u2019s performance as \u2018stiff\u2019.<\/p>\n

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It must have been a painful experience for Hitchcock, especially given the movie is also arguably his most personal. Like lead character Scottie Ferguson, he too suffered from vertigo. But it went deeper than that: Scottie\u2019s obsession with Madeleine \u2013 who he saw fatally fall from the top of the Mission San Juan Bautista bell tower, then seemingly reincarnate in the form of Judy \u2013 and his dubious efforts to reshape Judy in Madeleine\u2019s image, were reflective of Hitchcock\u2019s own manipulative treatment of women, not least his actresses. As critic Roger Ebert wrote, the film was his \u201cmost confessional, dealing directly with the themes that controlled his art.\u201d<\/p>\n

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It took time for Vertigo<\/em>\u2019s genius to become fully appreciated, to the point where, in 2012, Sight & Sound <\/em>magazine voted it the greatest film ever made, toppling Orson Welles\u2019 Citizen Kane <\/em>from the top spot for the first time in 50 years. And that genius is multi-faceted. Not only has Vertigo<\/em> come to be celebrated for its thematic complexity and daring, it is also lauded for its sheer visual panache, including one camera technique so stunning and effective, it\u2019s become a part of mainstream cinematic language.<\/p>\n

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Vertigo <\/em>was primarily photographed using a process which had recently been developed at Paramount studios as a crisper alternative to CinemaScope and similar anamorphic formats. This was VistaVision, a high-resolution format first used for White Christmas <\/em>in 1954, and which Hitchcock and his director of photography Robert Burks had previously used to shoot To Catch a Thief<\/em>, The Trouble With Harry<\/em> and The Man Who Knew Too Much<\/em>. By running its 35mm film though the camera horizontally rather than vertically, thereby providing a larger area on which to shoot, VistaVision created a projection print with a much finer grain than CinemaScope.<\/p>\n

As such, it was ideal for Hitchcock and Burks\u2019 requirements, facilitating Vertigo<\/em>\u2019s emphasis on bold color schemes, from the striking combinations of greens and reds, to Novak\u2019s stark, monochromatic costume ensembles. The most frequently used first-unit camera on Vertigo <\/em>was a VistaVision Motion Picture Camera<\/a> (lot 842 in the Entertainment Memorabilia Live Auction – Los Angeles), one which had previously been used to shoot Cecil B. DeMille\u2019s biblical epic The Ten Commandments<\/em> \u2013 and which still exists today, going under the hammer at Propstore\u2019s upcoming Entertainment Memorabilia Live Auction.<\/p>\n

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Vertigo<\/em>\u2019s greatest visual innovation was achieved once the production moved from its location shoot to two months of filming at Paramount Studios, where under the direction of art director Henry Bumstead, more than 50 richly textured sets were built, including a genuinely vertiginous 70-foot-high interior for the Mission bell tower (which in reality had been destroyed many years earlier and was replaced in the film\u2019s exteriors by matte paintings). In order to create the dizzying impact of vertigo on Scottie, with the world seemingly sickeningly falling away from him, Hitchcock employed a technique that has since become popularly known as \u201cthe Vertigo<\/em> Effect\u201d.<\/p>\n

This in-camera effect required the use of a zoom lens, and involved a carefully calibrated combination of a forward zoom with a backwards dolly move on a regular 35mm camera; hence its less-catchy other name, \u201cdolly zoom\u201d. The actual creator of was at first not clear. Associate producer Herbert Coleman claimed that it wasn\u2019t Hitchcock himself who devised it, and neither was it process photographer Wallace Kelley, who was credited on the film. Rather, it was an uncredited second-unit cameraman named Irwin Roberts.<\/p>\n

The film\u2019s most impressive use of the effect occurs when Scottie pauses partway up the steep bell-tower steps and looks down towards the distant ground. This particular shot required some special-effects ingenuity, as Hitchcock was informed that to create and operate the rig needed to achieve it on the 70-foot set would cost the production $50,000. Instead, a scale model version of the set was created, then laid down on its side and given the dolly-zoom treatment by special-effects cameraman John Fulton. The total cost? $1,900.<\/p>\n

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Since Vertigo<\/em>\u2019s release, this same technique has been used to astonishing effect in many other movies, most notably Steven Spielberg\u2019s Jaws<\/em>, Martin Scorsese\u2019s Raging Bull<\/em>, Quentin Tarantino\u2019s Pulp Fiction<\/em>, and Peter Jackson\u2019s The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring. <\/em>It wasn\u2019t the only in-camera effect used on Vertigo<\/em> (see also the amazing background transition from hotel room to stable while Stewart and Novak kiss, achieved using a turntable and a circular set backdrop), but without a doubt it is the film\u2019s greatest visual legacy. For Hitchcock, all the pain was ultimately worth it.<\/p>\n

Alfred Hitchcock’s Vista Vision Motion Picture Camera and over 860 more lots of iconic props and costumes will\u00a0 be open for bidding in our Entertainment Memorabilia Live Auction – Los Angeles starting July 27th. Click the banner below to view our preview gallery and don’t forget to register for bidding.<\/p>\n

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Follow us on\u00a0Twitter<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0Facebook<\/a>\u00a0to be the first to know about all current & upcoming Propstore Auctions and more!<\/p>\n

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This year, in Propstore’s first Los Angeles-based Entertainment Memorabilia Live Auction, we have a distinguished piece of movie-making history going up on the auction block, in the form of Alfred Hitchcock’s Vista Vision Motion Picture Camera. This camera, used not only on the production of Hitchcock\u2019s Vertigo, but also by filmmaking legend Cecil B DeMille […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":230,"featured_media":23844,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-23775","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-auction","category-star-wars"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/propstore.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23775"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/propstore.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/propstore.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/propstore.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/230"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/propstore.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23775"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/propstore.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23775\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":23851,"href":"https:\/\/propstore.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23775\/revisions\/23851"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/propstore.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/23844"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/propstore.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23775"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/propstore.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23775"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/propstore.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23775"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}