In 1959, Bond creator Ian Fleming dashed off a long telegram to novelist novelist Eric Ambler, proposing that Hitchcock direct the first Bond film with Ambler writing the script. Hitchcock passed on the project (which later became Thunderball, led by legendary Bond director Terence Young). Instead of steering his career into the Bond franchise, Hitchcock directed Psycho as his next project.

Here’s more from Letters of Note: “Have written Bond movie treatment featuring Mafia stolen atomic bomber blackmail of England culminating Nassau with extensive underwater dramatics … Would Hitchcock be interested in directing this first Bond film in association with Xanadu? Plentiful finance available.” (Image via)

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The excellent Letters of Note site has posted a bitter note that private detective novelist Raymond Chandler mailed to Alfred Hitchcock, an angry sermon punctuated with this zippy line: “if you wanted something written in skim milk, why on earth did you bother to come to me in the first place?”

The letter focused on the script for Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train (trailer embedded above), a book that Chandler helped adapt from a Patricia Highsmith novel. The eventual rewrites infuriated Chandler, producing this scathing letter.

Check it out: “What I cannot understand is your permitting a script which after all had some life and vitality to be reduced to such a flabby mass of clichés, a group of faceless characters, and the kind of dialogue every screen writer is taught not to write—the kind that says everything twice and leaves nothing to be implied by the actor or the camera.”

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On May 9th, Munoz will be at the Wilmette Theatre in Illinois for a Psycho screening, signing copies of What You See in the Dark and talking about how the Hitchcock film influenced his book.

Here’s more about the book: “The setting is Bakersfield, California, in the late 1950s. A dusty, quiet town, too far from Los Angeles to share that city’s energy, yet close enough to Hollywood to fill its citizens with the kinds of dreams they discover in the darkness of the movie theater. For Teresa, a young, aspiring singer who works at the shoe store, her dream lies in the music her mother shared with her, plaintive songs of love and longing. And in Dan Watson, the most desirable young man in Bakersfield, she believes she has found someone to help her realize those dreams.”

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