In the early 1960s, two giants of American entertainment butted heads, and the loser got banned from setting foot in the Happiest Place on Earth. Alfred Hitchcock, the ‘Master of Suspense,’ wanted to shoot a feature film inside Disneyland. Walt Disney said absolutely not, and made sure everyone knew why.
The story starts with screenwriter Ernest Lehman, who had just finished working with Hitchcock on ‘North by Northwest‘ in 1959. Lehman visited Disneyland and watched the staged Wild West gunfights in Frontierland, and that gave him an idea for a new thriller. According to biographer John Russell Taylor, in his book ‘Hitch: The Life and Times of Alfred Hitchcock‘, Lehman came up with a story about a man blind since birth who gets a pair of transplanted eyes, only to discover the donor was murdered and that the killer’s face now haunts his restored vision.
Inside ‘The Blind Man’, the Hitchcock Thriller Set at Disneyland
Lehman pictured the film’s hero, a role he had Jimmy Stewart in mind for, walking through Disneyland when a staged shootout triggers a fragmented memory that belonged to the eyes’ original owner. Taylor’s book says Lehman got so worked up about the idea that he ended up pitching the whole movie taking place inside the park itself.
Related: How Alfred Hitchcock Helped Shape Queer Horror Long Before Hollywood Embraced It
Hitchcock was recovering from the exhausting success of ‘Psycho‘, on a post-production holiday in Copenhagen with his wife Alma. It was at that time that he heard about the pitch over the phone and got hooked right away. He and Lehman started developing the project, called ‘The Blind Man‘, using the same back-and-forth process that had worked so well on ‘North by Northwest‘. For a while things moved along fine, with Disneyland seen as the perfect ready-made backdrop. They figured it would mean free publicity for the studio too, given how big the park was.
Why Walt Disney Banned Hitchcock
Then the word got out. Details of the project showed up in the trade papers, and Walt Disney read them. His reaction was quick and public. Taylor writes that Disney announced there was no way the director of “that disgusting movie Psycho” would be allowed to shoot so much as a foot of film inside Disneyland.
In case you missed it: How Alfred Hitchcock’s ‘Psycho’ Flushed Away Hollywood’s Weirdest Censorship Rule
The timing made a difference here. ‘Psycho‘ had come out in 1960 to huge box office numbers along with plenty of controversy over its violence and that infamous shower scene. It was about as far from the wholesome, family-friendly image Walt Disney had spent ten years building around his park and studio as you could get. To Disney, letting Hitchcock film a story about murder, eye transplants, and psychological trauma inside Disneyland threatened to taint the innocent image he had worked so hard to protect. He wasn’t interested in debating artistic merit. He just shut it down.
The Legacy of ‘The Blind Man’
Without access to the park, ‘The Blind Man‘ stalled out. Lehman and Hitchcock kept fiddling with the script for a while. However, the project never made it to production and eventually got dropped altogether, joining the list of Hitchcock films that never saw the light of day. Years later, in 2015, the BBC brought the idea back as a radio drama, with writer Mark Gatiss finishing the screenplay that Hitchcock and Lehman had left unfinished.
The rejection apparently stayed with Hitchcock, and it wasn’t the only thing that later complicated how people see him. Actress Tippi Hedren, who starred in Hitchcock’s ‘The Birds‘ in 1963, later said she endured years of harassment and controlling behavior from the director while working with him, claims that have added another layer to his legacy alongside the whole Disneyland episode.
Funny enough, Disney eventually made peace with Hitchcock’s world of film in a small way nobody saw coming. In 2021’s Cruella, there’s a clip of Hitchcock’s Lifeboat playing on a hotel television, a nod to the classic films that inspired the villain’s backstory. It’s a small, late bridge between two Hollywood legends who once couldn’t share the same square mile in Anaheim.
You might also want to read: 10 Horror Movies That Wouldn’t Exist Without Alfred Hitchcock’s ‘Psycho’
