Signal Booster: Alfred Hitchcock, Santa Cruz Mountains Man

Steve Palopoli of the Santa Cruz weekly Good Times examines a historical question: How did Scotts Valley acquire two of its most distinguished residents, Alfred and Alma Hitchcock? It’s not as unsolvable a mystery as in Hitch’s movies. Hitchcock had a great affinity for Northern California, and made two of his best films here. On the one hand, Scotts Valley is an area of great beauty. Partners in both life and art, the Hitchcocks liked wine, rural living, and gardening. On the other hand, Scotts Valley was remote; in those pre-interstate days it was a 12-hour drive from Hitchcock’s headquarters in Los Angeles.

Palopoli checks in with high-profile cinema history podcaster Adam Roche about the question. Roche (The Adventures of Alfred Hitchcock) suggests the move to the Santa Cruz Mountains was the result of the Hitchcocks’ love of the Swiss Alps; they'd honeymooned there in 1926. (Roche’s career is a sidebar to this article; apparently, he’s working on a biopic of one of the best directors of intellectual horror, Val Lewton, fueled by a trove of Lewton’s little-known personal papers at the Library of Congress.) Roche also notes a Monterey Bay angle on Hitchcock’s work. The Birds’ development may have been influenced by a summer 1961 news item about seagulls at the beach in Capitola going berserk from domoic acid in poisoned shellfish, causing them to make kamikaze attacks on passersby.