Why Alfred Hitchcock thought Steven Spielberg made a “whore” of him in 1976
The DNA of Steven Spielberg contains a number of the greatest directors to ever hold a movie camera.
The vistas of David Lean. Stanley Kubrick’s control of light and shade. The remarkably ahead-of-their-time visual effects of Ray Harryhausen. However, chief among all of them might just be the master of suspense, Alfred Hitchcock.
There’s an argument to be made that, at his core, Spielberg is a horror director who just so happens to make the biggest Hollywood spectaculars ever. Think about it, the vast majority of those signature, unforgettable Spielberg moments are horror segments. The velociraptors in the kitchen in Jurassic Park. The first attack in War of the Worlds. The opening of the ark in Raiders of the Lost Ark. Hell, the first ten minutes of ET are so frightening that I never could get past them as a kid.
All of them owe a debt to Hitchcock and his way of giving the audience just enough information to make them understand what could happen, but never enough to make them sure. It’s a genuine art, and what’s more, Spielberg’s understanding of what Hitch did first was what led to his breakthrough.
No matter how many spine-chilling moments he put in later films, there are probably no better outright horror films in his work than his 1971 TV movie debut, Duel, and especially his breakout movie, the picture that invented the modern blockbuster, 1975’s Jaws.
This would go on to be the movie that made him in the eyes of almost the entire world, save for one of his greatest influences. You see, Spielberg was nothing if not a humble acolyte of his inspirations. I mean, he cast no less a figure than David Lynch to play his childhood hero, John Ford, in his cinematic memoir, The Fabelmans. He spent his early career getting the seal of approval from a number of his inspirations, but no matter how often he hung around Hitchcock sets, he could never get the time of day from the man who made Psycho.
We never knew why, either, until Bruce Dern, of all people, wrote about it in his aptly named memoirs Things I’ve Said, But Probably Shouldn’t Have. Dern worked with Hitchcock on the great auteur’s final picture, Family Plot, in 1976. The actor, who was familiar with Spielberg on a personal level, pleaded with Hitch to give Spielberg five minutes of his time, knowing it would make Hollywood’s brightest rising star’s entire life, but Hitch absolutely could not be told.
One might think it was professional jealousy. Outraged by this upstart fanboy taking his tricks and making a bigger hit than Hitchcock had ever had. Turns out, it wasn’t jealousy or anger, but shame that made Hitchcock unwilling to meet Spielberg. Dern wrote that Hitchcock said, “‘Isn’t that the boy who made the fish movie? I could never sit down and talk to him… because I look at him and feel like such a whore’.”
Dern continued, “I said, ‘Why do you feel Spielberg makes you a whore?’ Hitch said, ‘Because I’m the voice of the Jaws ride [at the Universal Studios theme park]. They paid me a million dollars. And I took it, and I did it. I’m such a whore. I can’t sit down and talk to the boy who did the fish movie. I couldn’t even touch his hand.”
Because of that pay cheque, Spielberg never got to meet one of his heroes. Ah well. Probably for the best. Since Spielberg is neither blond nor a woman, it’s likely that he would have had a much better time than those who were.