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As always, I brought John Morris in from the beginning to craft the score, which was a tribute to Bernard Hermann, Miklós Rózsa, and all the other composers in Hitchcock’s repertoire. We wanted the audience to recognize the familiar suspenseful terrain and ambience. There was not one piece of music I could refer to from Porter, Gershwin, Bartók, or Berlioz that John Morris didn’t know. He loved music as much as I did. As he usually did, John used my title song as a main theme for the score. And when I sang it, he came up with a perfect orchestration; it was pure Nelson Riddle.
Before we started filming, I had watched every Hitchcock film over and over again. And one strange thing occurred to me: In addition to all the great characters that Hitchcock peopled his films with, he also seems to cast the camera as another one of his characters, endowing it with a mind of its own. While filming High Anxiety I tried to emulate that as well as the way Hitchcock often moved his camera in slow, stealthy push-ins, and yet still add a satiric Brooksian touch. One good example is a slow camera move from outside into the institute’s dining room through a glass door. Slowly but surely, the camera gets closer and closer to the dining room. Unfortunately, it doesn’t stop, and crashes through the glass door. Everybody in the dining room—myself, Harvey, Cloris, Dick Van Patten, etc.—all look to where the camera crashed through the glass. The camera guiltily withdraws, absolutely mortified by its mistake. The cast goes back to eating as if nothing happened. It always gets a great laugh.
Another camera twist was a scene where Harvey and Cloris are hatching a plot to destroy Dr. Thorndyke, who’s a threat to their evil scheme. It’s shot at a Hitchcockian angle from beneath a glass coffee table and the camera again develops its own personality. As Cloris puts her coffee cup on the glass table, temporarily blocking our camera’s view of the actors, the camera moves to get a better view of our villains. Now Harvey puts his coffee down and once again the camera, obviously highly annoyed, moves away to see the action. The scene continues for another minute and then finally the camera is completely frustrated when Cloris puts a huge tray of apple strudel down, which completely covers the entire table. The camera quits in disgust. （I think Hitchcock liked that one a lot.）
One of the funniest and most memorable scenes in the whole film was the “North by Northwest” corner of the Golden Gate Park scene in which I flee from a scary attack by “The Birds.” A group of them gather on the nearby jungle gym and then proceed to chase me and pelt me with droppings. Our prop department found the pigeon wrangler who actually trained the birds for The Birds, and they got fifty or sixty trained pigeons to fly on cue. They made a mixture of spinach and mayonnaise to look like bird poop, and then loaded it into squirt guns and shot at me from above the pigeons, out of frame. By the time the scene ended my suit, my hair—everything was completely covered. Unfortunately, it wasn’t just mayonnaise and spinach, some of the pigeons decided to contribute to the realism of the scene by unloading on me. Sometimes when a movie is over, I get to keep my wardrobe. Now you can understand why I didn’t take any of my wardrobe home from High Anxiety.
Strangely enough, the title High Anxiety, which I had come up with, went on to become a well-known phrase in our lexicon, as if it was a real medical term. In 1990, years after the movie came out, I saw the term splashed across the cover of Time Magazine. It was a story about Wall Street with a photo of Harold Lloyd hanging from the clock in Safety Last! （1923）。 I said to myself, “There is no ‘high anxiety.’ I made it up. It’s not real. It’s not a medical term or a psychiatric term. It’s not a real condition. It’s just anxiety with the word ‘high’ in front of it!” But I wasn’t going to upset the apple cart. If the world thinks “high anxiety” is a real thing, let it be real. Who am I to argue?
High Anxiety premiered on December 25, 1977. At that premiere screening, Hitch sat right next to me. I had my own high anxiety awaiting his reaction. He didn’t laugh. He just sat and he watched. He only broke up once. When the birds let go and plastered me with their droppings, then I could see his shoulders shaking. When the film was over, he got up and walked out. He didn’t say he liked the picture. He didn’t say he hated the picture. He didn’t say anything. He just left.
I was devasted. And really worried.
I did not take this suit home for obvious reasons. （The dry cleaning would have been too expensive!）
Not long after, when I came into the office, there on my desk was a huge box covered with silver paper and red ribbon. I tore the paper open and underneath was an impressive wooden case with a label that read: CHATEAU HAUT BRION 1961. I opened it to see six big, beautiful magnums of Chateau Haut Brion 1961. A priceless gift of one of the finest wines ever made.