Bruce Dern on why Hitchcock avoided Spielberg

By Stone Martindale Jan 29, 2007, 0:54 GMT

Allegedly a disappointment in director Steven Spielberg's life was Alfred Hitchcock's repeated refusal to meet him, according to Page Six.

In Bruce Dern's new memoir, "Things I've Said, But Probably Shouldn't Have," due in May from Wiley, the Master of Suspense had a strange excuse for avoiding Spielberg.

Dern writes that he tried to convince the director of "Psycho" to say hello to Spielberg, who had just pulled box office gold with "Jaws." "

Dern said, 'You're his idol. He just to sit at your feet for five minutes and chat with you' . . . He said, 'Isn't that the boy who made the fish movie? . . . I could never sit down and talk to him . . . because I look at him and feel like such a whore,' "

Page Six reports that Dern, who appeared in two Hitchcock flicks, finally pinned the director down: "I said, 'Why do you feel Spielberg makes you a whore?'

Hitch said, 'Because I'm the voice of the 'Jaws' ride [at Universal Studios]. They paid me a million dollars. And I took it and I did it. I'm such a whore. I can't sit down and talk to the boy who did the fish movie . . . I couldn't even touch his hand."

Dern doesn’t disappoint lovers of Hollywood inside stories. He writes candidly about working with Alfred Hitchcock, John Frankenheimer, Claude Chabrol, Jack Nicholson, Paul Newman, Bob Dylan, Matt Damon, Charlize Theron, Jane Fonda, John Wayne, and many more.

Readers will discover why he turned down potentially career-making roles in The Godfather, Marathon Man, and Gandhi; why his prestigious family disowned him over a typo in the New York Times; and why, after he was already famous, he agreed to star in The Incredible Two-Headed Transplant, the second best two-headed transplant movie of 1971.