Walt Disney’s Disneyland is surely the happiest place on earth, and it has been the setting of a couple of Hollywood films. In fact, famous director Alfred Hitchcock once dreamed of shooting one of his movies inside the amusement park.
Unfortunately, Hitchcock was banned from entering the premises of the theme park due to a number of reasons. Apart from Walt Disney hating the film Psycho, why would a murder scene happen inside Disneyland? On top of that, Hitchcock was a known abusive director.
Here’s The Lowdown On Why Walt Disney Forbid Alfred Hitchcock From Entering Disneyland
According to John Russell Tyler’s book Hitch: The Life and Times of Alfred Hitchcock, the director was approached by writer Ernest Lehman for a unique story that he wanted to bring to the big screen. The concept would run like this:
“A man blind from birth who is given sight by some sort of eye transplant only to discover that the donor, supposedly killed in an accident, was really murdered and has transmitted to him through his eyes a visual memory of the murderer.”
Disneyland has just opened its gates to the world in Anaheim, California in 1955. Lehman thought of taking advantage of the attraction’s popularity and set the film inside its premises.
“Perhaps while visiting Disneyland the hero (call him Jimmy Stewart for the sake of argument) finds himself ‘recognizing’ someone he could never have seen, then have a recollection set off by the fake gunfight. Perhaps the whole movie could be made in Disneyland. Hitchcock in Disneyland!”
While it sounded like a really thrilling concept, especially for its time, Walt Disney decided to rain on Alfred Hitchcock’s parade and forbid him from setting foot inside Disneyland.
“Hitch and Lehman began working on the idea as they had worked on North by Northwest, and for a while, everything went swimmingly. Then something appeared in the trade papers about the project, Walt Disney read it, and promptly made a statement that in no circumstances would Hitchcock, maker of that disgusting movie Psycho, be allowed to shoot a foot of film in Disneyland.”
In the end, The Blind Man eventually appeared as a BBC radio drama where Mark Gatiss finished the uncompleted script of Hitchcock and Lehman.
Alfred Hitchcock Was Accused Of S*xual Harassment By One Of His Film’s Lead Stars
Apart from Walt Disney’s hatred of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, he also did not want to involve himself in the controversy that the filmmaker got himself into. Tippi Hedren starred in the 1963 film The Birds which she claimed she experienced a lot of s*xual harassment and cruelty. In her memoir, excerpts shared by the New York Post, she wrote:
“It was an awful, awful moment. Sexual harassment and stalking were terms that didn’t exist. Which one of us was more valuable to the studio, him or me?”
She referred to the time Hitchcock allegedly threw himself on top of her and kissed her in the back of his limousine. He has also become possessive of her to the point that he would tell her male cast mates not to socialize with the actress.
In another instance, the director showed up in Hedren’s dressing room and “put his hands on me. It was s*xual, it was perverse. The harder I fought him, the more aggressive he became.”
The actress also revealed in her book how Hitchcock lied to her when he said they would use mechanical creatures to attack her character in The Birds. She later claimed they used real animals. Hedren was left so injured and severely traumatized that she started having nightmares about it. When the doctor recommended she should take a week off to recover, Hitchcock refused.
“I’ve made it my mission ever since to see to it that while Hitchcock may have ruined my career, I never gave him the power to ruin my life.”
One may say that Walt Disney made the right decision not to engage with Hitchcock when the latter wanted to use his property as a location for yet another horror thriller movie. The business tycoon might have put his image and company at risk had he sealed deals with an alleged abuser.
