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Under discussion:

Number Thirteen  (2007)

Dan Fogler, who won a Tony for his work in The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee and who will soon star in ping pong/FBI spoof Balls of Fury, tells MTV he’s currently preparing to play Alfred Hitchcock in a movie about the early life of the famed director. From MTV’s movie blog:

You see Hitchcock for two weeks out of his life in [his] early 20s. He just finished his first movie, which is supposed to be a comedy, but it’s not. So he’s freaking out about it and realizes that if he just switches a few things, it can become a thriller. [And] that’s how he finds his niche… give away your trade secrets. [The movie is] cool if you’re a Hitchcock fan. Just like Shakespeare in Love, you see how he comes up with certain ideas [for future films] from events that happened during the course of the movie.

Fogler’s film is titled after Number Thirteen, Hitchcock’s actual first, never-finished film. Only a few scenes of the original were shot before the production was shut down, and those have apparently never been seen by anybody and are thought to have been melted. Hitchcock rarely spoke of this point in his career, and there’s only one brief mention of the film in Donald Spoto’s definitive Hitchcock biography, The Dark Side of the Genius:

A comedy script was prepared, called alternately Mrs. Peabody or Number Thirteen, and Clare Greet and Ernest Thesiger were singed to play the leads. Alfred Hitchcock undertook the direction, on assignment from the chief of production, but by this time the studio’s dwindling funds were being diverted from production to pay debts and salaries, and the unfinished film was shelved. To this day, nothing else is known about this aborted project apart from Hitchcock’s assertion that it wasn’t very interesting.

So it seems safe to say that, like Shakespeare, this new Number 13 is going to be a work of extremely speculative fiction. I couldn’t find an image of a 20-something Hitchcock, but based solely on my lazy Photoshop composite above, wouldn’t Fogler make a good young Orson Welles?

On Friday, I wrote a bit of a gusher over the upcoming About a Son, in which I speculated that the film and its associated soundtrack were Nirvana-free because securing rights to Kurt Cobain’s recorded output is rumored to be difficult and costly. Over the weekend, About a Son director AJ Schnack wrote a comment on that post with some further information:

Thanks for the blog love. Want to clarify one point. As crazy as it may sound, the decision to not use Nirvana music was not a financial choice, nor was it obstruction from another party. I tried to put a Nirvana song at the end, but it struck all the wrong notes in a film that is not so much about him as a musician as it is him as a man. Ultimately, I thought that Steve Fisk and Ben Gibbard’s score music worked better for the end of the film. It’s not the most commercial choice in the world, but I think it fits the movie I made. However, on your larger point that anyone can (and should) go home and listen to Nirvana (preferably In Utero as it was the album he was writing and recording at the time of the interviews) after seeing the film - I am in total agreement.

I’ve seen the film, and I would agree that it makes more sense to fill the soundtrack with music Cobain would have listened to, rather than music he made. In any case, the current soundtrack has a mixtape quality that I like a lot, and that I imagine will go over fairly well with the Pitchfork set.