Shattering Hitchcock's Kaleidoscope: An Interview with Howard Fast

Given the value of hearing directly from Alfred Hitchcock's collaborators, many of whom the director did not always properly credit, I was privileged to interview Howard Fast, the screenwriter for what Hitchcock himself thought would be a particularly consequential picture, but one that was never produced. Of the many "lost" or unfinished Hitchcock projects, Kaleidoscope has grown in importance to scholars and has tantalized Hitchcock fans for years, and it was the main topic of discussion (transcribed below) when I met with this author-screenwriter on August 10, 2000, at his home in Old Greenwich, Connecticut.

Some background about both the film and Howard Fast are in order first. Kaleidoscope holds a special fascination for those interested in Alfred Hitchcock for many of the reasons Fast brought up in our talk. During the last two decades, more attention has been paid to the latter part of Hitchcock's career and to his unrealized productions. Other than his final, unproduced film, The Short Night (circa 1980), Kaleidoscope is the most significant "lost," late period Hitchcock.¹ Kaleidoscope, the story of a young serial killer, was conceived in the mid-1960s, and considerable pre-production work was done before the film was abandoned—much more than on other unproduced Hitchcock projects. Actual locations were selected and photographed and test footage was shot (in New York City, using unknown actors and models). Why the film didn't proceed any further is a sad but fascinating chronicle, revealing that even filmmakers with the most clout could not be truly independent within the Hollywood system.

As Fast confirmed when we spoke, Hitchcock wanted to create something completely different from his prior work, breaking with his own past. Though Hitchcock enjoyed "reinventing" himself throughout his career, this desire might not have been foremost in his mind at the time of some of his most groundbreaking and successful works, such as Psycho (1960) and The Birds (1963) in particular. After the commercial and critical failure of Marnie (1964), however, Hitchcock felt at a crossroads and was attracted to what was occurring in the free-form New Wave movements of Europe, particularly the Italian films of Antonioni and Fellini. By creating his own "new" Hitchcock film, he was prepared to breach several Hollywood norms. (Keep in mind that the Production Code, though severely weakened, partly because of Hitchcock, was still in effect, and the Ratings system was a few years away).

Hitchcock wanted to again upset generic expectations of the thriller, just as he already had done with Psycho several years earlier. But now, he was ready to disturb or disrupt cinematic norms even further by including a graphic depiction of murder, the explicit use of nudity, and a political critique of the military—something that would have been especially sensitive around the time of America's increasing presence in Vietnam. One other broken norm that would have been more subtle was the way Hitchcock sought to emphasize, more than he had done in the past, a bold visual style over the story itself (very much the Antonioni influence).

During our talk, Fast described the narrative of Kaleidoscope, some of the plot elements, and how the project came about, but very little about his own background, which deserves to be at least briefly mentioned in introducing the interview. Howard Fast (1914-2003) was born in New York City and became a noted writer of historical novels, publishing his first at eighteen-years-old, and his breakthrough, Citizen Tom Paine (1943), at age twenty-eight. His work in the genre continued until he was blacklisted and sent to prison for contempt of Congress in 1950 during the dark days of the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) investigations for refusing to name the names of Communist Party members.

Fast, like so many fellow writers who were targeted by the government for either their left-wing political views or defiance of HUAC, was forced to write using pseudonyms following his prison release: e.g., Walter Ericson (Fallen Angel, 1952) and E.V. Cunningham (Sylvia, 1960). Under these names, he was...