Evan Hunter

and in the movie, but not as the lead character.

One of the ideas he had was that she was a newspaper reporter coming up from San Francisco to examine, to look into some reported bird attacks, and this went by the by, but it survived as her father being the publisher of a newspaper.

We...

We kept flipping around, looking for a handle on it.

And then one day I was on my lunch hour, and when I came back I said to Hitch, why don't we do a screwball comedy?

And suddenly it turns to terror.

We have a bird attack in the middle of some nonsense, and we know we're serious here.

We're talking about bird attacks.

And he liked that idea very much, and that's what we went with.

Yeah, I thought it was a successful idea, but I'm not so sure how successful it turned out to be in execution.

It was a very difficult premise to bring off to begin with, and I think it required enormous skill.

all along the way, and perhaps I had not the skills, and I know Hitch had the skills because he dealt with comedy very often in the past, but I don't think he ever dealt with emerging comedy with terror.

And, of course, it takes a great deal of skill on the part of the performers.

Yes, there was no question.

There were, at the forefront of both of our minds while we were talking the script, a Grace Kelly, Cary Grant team.

And, of course, it was impossible, you know, because Grace was already in Monaco, as Hitch said, being a princess, you know.

And Cary Grant wanted 50% of the picture, and Hitch would never give him anything like that.

It came up frequently because...

We didn't want to make the movie a science fiction film.

We could have said, well, you know, the birds are attacking me because there's a strain of virus 21-7 going around, and this is probably from another planet, or any such nonsense as that.