The director Martin Scorsese called a one-man franchise: “It was electrifying”
Before Martin Scorsese was one of the most respected filmmakers of his generation, he was a scholar of cinema. He wasn’t a university lecturer or a film critic or the author of tomes about film history. He simply watched an enormous amount of movies and internalised them with the specificity and organisation of a scientist filing away formulas.
His love of certain filmmakers is widely known. He adores Powell and Pressburger, the directing duo who brought the world The Red Shoes, A Matter of Life and Death, and The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp. Orson Welles, François Truffaut, and Federico Fellini were also important influences on him.
Scorsese’s adoration of cinema has put him in hot water in recent years because of his insistence on upholding the medium as an art form in the face of rampant Hollywood cash-grabbing. As a director who cut his teeth in the late 1960s and early ‘70s, he was part of the first cohort of filmmakers who were taken seriously as artists rather than mere entertainers. His dismissive comments about studio franchises not being cinema prompted pushback, and in an op-ed in The New York Times, he defended his position. For him, he explained, there is nothing wrong with franchises or filmmakers who stick to a similar formula as long as the results are not led with focus groups in mind.
“I suppose you could say that Hitchcock was his own franchise,” he said, adding, “Every new Hitchcock picture was an event. To be in a packed house in one of the old theatres watching Rear Window was an extraordinary experience: It was an event created by the chemistry between the audience and the picture itself, and it was electrifying.”
The issue, he argued, was that franchises are now made by a committee that has vetted every line in the script, done market research to figure out exactly what the consumer wants to see, and tried it out on test audiences until there is nothing new or unexpected about it.
For him, the fact that Hitchcock churned out movies with a similar look, feel, and cast of characters isn’t as important as the fact that he always added an element of surprise. As an audience, you could never be quite sure exactly where his films were headed, even if you’d seen all of his previous movies.
Scorsese claimed that even Hitchcock wondered at times whether his movies were too formulaic. He had a penchant for casting icy blondes, and it can be easy to forget whether it was Grace Kelly, Tippi Hedren, or Eva Marie Saint in any given one of his films from the ‘50s. The fashion is similar, the plots often follow a similar pattern, and he collaborated with a familiar cast of behind-the-scenes talent. Bernard Herrmann defined many of his films with his music, Robert Burks was his go-to cinematographer who helped shape the look of classic Hollywood, and John Michael Hayes helped write his screenplays.
As Scorsese argues, however, Hitchcock’s version of a franchise was far from what we expect from Hollywood today. Driven by a group of artists rather than data-driven studio executives, his movies feel like they were born out of creativity rather than commercial strategy and audience placation.
