Bodega Bay and "The Birds"

by Simone Wilson

The nearest movie house was 20 miles away in Sebastopol, but Rose had never bothered to go that far to see a movie

In the early 60s, Alfred Hitchcock needed an out-of-the-way coastal spot for a horror film. He had filmed the thriller Shadow of a Doubt in Santa Rosa in 1942, and he was so satisfied with his Sonoma County experience that he returned 20 years later to film The Birds, based on a short story by Daphne DuMaurier. He needed a coastal location where trees and mountains wouldn't interfere with shots of the sky, and Bodega Bay fit the bill. DuMaurier specialized in bleak and macabre short stories, and the original story was set in an isolated village on the English coast, where inhabitants are besieged by psychotic songbirds, ravens and gulls. Hitchcock and screenwriter Evan Hunter shifted the action to the California coast, shooting in western Sonoma County and in the town of Marshall on Tomales Bay. Scouting around for a house that would do for the main characters, Hitchcock picked the bayside home of Rose Gaffney, a feisty local rancher who had just achieved local notoriety in a successful crusade against PG&E's proposed nuclear power plant. Gaffney's friend, Don Howe of Salmon Creek, recalls, "A limousine pulled up to Rose Gaffney's house, and a messenger said that Mr. Hitchcock would like to speak to her." Gaffney's reply was simple and blunt: "Who?" The nearest movie house was 20 miles away in Sebastopol. Rose had never bothered to go that far to see Shadow of a Doubt -- or any other movie. "Hitchcock was taken by the fact that she didn't know him and didn't go to the movies," Howe recalls. "They later became such friends that he invited her to the premiere of The Birds in Sebastopol. The Birds may have been the only movie she ever saw in her life." The crew essentially built a different house around Gaffney's and added a dock and some outbuildings. They also shot exterior footage at the Tides Restaurant in the town of Bodega Bay and around the Potter School, five miles away in Bodega. Interior shots were largely shot on sound stages at Universal Studios. Hitchcock must have hit a stretch of good weather, because his on-location footage looked too cheerful for the gloomy tone of the film. Technicians altered the footage in post-production, subduing the colors of hills and sky to create an eerier effect than nature had supplied. Originally Hitchcock planned to use mechanical birds and spent $200,000 on automated crows and gulls. The final cut did include a few wind-up birds, like the ones struggling frantically in Jessica Tandy's hair. Most of the bird footage features live birds, some of whom spent off-camera hours in pens near Bodega Bay, where they consumed $1,000 worth of bird seed, anchovies and shrimp. Local gulls were apparently too mellow to serve as extras. Hitchcock's cameramen travelled to the San Francisco dump, where they raked together a mound of garbage and then photographed gulls diving and squabbling over the reeking pile. Ub Iwerks, the film's technical wizard, then optically added gull close-ups to background shots of Bodega Bay. DuMaurier's story (which ends on an even bleaker note than the movie) never explains why the birds turn on people and try to peck them to pieces. "Birds make excellent heavies," Hitchcock later explained. "After all, they've been put in cages, shot at and shoved in ovens for centuries. It's only natural that they should fight back." "I think Hitchcock is putting on the world when he pretends there is anything meaningful about The Birds," screenwriter Evan Hunter said in later years. "We were trying to scare the hell out of people. Period."

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