Some of us research our miniature settings extensively, making a point to understand the story and the people behind the scenes we are creating. This is actually one of the great pleasures of doing a miniature setting, the chance to research a place or character and then make it in a scale model for others to see. Here is my research on Annie Hayworth in The Birds. I will be creating Annie’s garden.

Annie Hayworth

AnnieTeaching — She is the teacher of the one-room school in Bodega Bay, California, 60 miles north of San Francisco.

Annie used to live in San Francisco where she fell in love with a hunk of a guy named Mitch Brenner.

Annie lives in Bodega Bay because that is where Mitch spends his weekends. They are no longer a couple but as Annie explains to the wealthy and classy socialite, Melanie Daniels, who is in town pursuing Mitch, she still wants his friendship:

A production memo describing Annie is quoted in the book The Wrong House: The Architecture of Alfred Hitchcock. It describes Annie and her house in Bodega Bay:

Annie Hayworth is about 27, or at most 28. She taught when she was somewhat younger, at a private school in San Francisco. For emotional reasons, She has moved into Bodega Bay and has secured the job of teaching at the local school. Again, we have a literate person in a modest setting. Her one story home would contain a large number of (a) books that she had from home and school, (b) recently acquired paper backs, the reason for the latter is that economically she might not be able to afford to buy hard cover books in any great quantity. She has one or two prints on the walls of her living room. They would be Braque, maybe something Mexican from the Museum of Modern Art, and perhaps even, she might be catholic enough in her taste as to have a Grant Wood print. She might have on the mantel some pre-Columbian pieces. Her furnishings would be quite modest but very tasteful, perhaps a little chintzy. There ought to be a photograph on the wall of Annie and her parents when she was much younger. Then, perhaps, also in the room are again college pictures. Perhaps, even a picture of herself with the children at the private school in San Francisco.

The research of Annie’s interior should be sought:

(a) at the school teacher’s house in Bodega Bay

(b) a slightly up-graded teacher’s home in San Francisco, and perhaps,

(c) a female professor’s room at Berkeley or Stanford

and the setting should take advantage of the combination of these backgrounds.

One should add, of course, that there is a television set in both the Brenner home and in Annie Hayworth’s home.

Some thought should be given to music in Annie’s house. This should consist of a player and piles of records.

Some of these ideas made it into various drafts of the script and into the final movie. This conversation with Melanie Daniels about her past in San Francisco was in one of the drafts of the script but was not included in the final film:

ANNIE: I came up here for two reasons. To begin with, I was bored with my job in San Francisco. I was teaching at a private school there… well, you know, you probably went to one yourself.

MELANIE: I did.

ANNIE: Then you know. Little girls in brown beanies. Deadly. Here I have a life. I’ll go into that classroom on Monday morning, and I’ll look out at twenty- five upturned little faces, and each of them will be saying, ‘Yes, please give me what you have.’ (pause) And I’ll give them what I have. I haven’t got very much, but I’ll give them every ounce of it. To me, that’s very important. It makes me want to stay alive for a long long time. (she sighs) That’s the first reason.

Annie is a transplant from city life and her home in the tiny hamlet of Bodega Bay, what she calls a”collection of shacks on a hillside,” is filled with contemporary art, modernist furniture, and classical music. Several film scholars have noted, as Ken Mogg did in a book review on Hitchcock’s architecture, that, “Hitchcock seems to have vastly enjoyed making his characters lovers of the arts and then working out with his production designers and set decorators how to depict those characters’ lifestyles iconographically.” Steve Jacobs, author of the book on Hitchcock’s architecture, stated plainly, “…artworks illustrate personality and social position of the occupant.” In Annie’s case, both music and paintings are displayed in her living room. Reproductions of paintings, including what appear to be a Modigliani portrait of a woman, a Braque still life, a print of a cable car scene from San Francisco, an image of a knight on a white horse, a Mondrian abstraction, and a Cezanne still life, and perhaps a Diego Rivera. It’s hard to see any of them clearly and none show up in searches of these artists’ works.

What, you may ask, is the point. Since this is not a project about the interior of Annie’s house but one that will reconstruct her garden, isn’t it silly to spend any time on Annie’s history or art inclinations? The answer to that is that while Hitchcock paid attention to the interior setting, the garden seems somewhat neglected and poorly designed. But they should have the same personality that Annie’s interior has. So I plan to give Annie the garden that matches her interests, her life, and he fate. When Melanie and Annie first meet, Melanie is gorgeous in her trendy clothes, upsweep hairdo, and fur coat. Annie, on the other hand, is in her garden, a smudge of dirt on her face which she tries to wipe off before Melanie sees it.

They talk at the front of Annie’s house and the contrast between them is obvious.

Their conversation about Annie’s garden has always bothered me because Melanie comments that it is “a very pretty garden” but in fact the garden is rather plain, maybe even neglected or merely tolerated:

ANNIE: I’ve been wanting a cigarette for the last 20 minutes. I just couldn’t convince myself to stop. This tilling of the soil can become compulsive, you know.

MELANIE: It’s a very pretty garden.

ANNIE: Oh, thank you. Well, it’s something to do in your spare time. There’s a lot of spare time in Bodega Bay.

I think Annie needs a better garden than she is given in The Birds. She clearly is a passionate, smart, funny, and very sensuous woman and if she were to put all her spare time into a garden, what would it really look like? First I will create a 3D mockup of a garden, an ideal version that in practical terms would be impossible to do in miniature. But it will be a starting point that helps me avoid a cliche cottage garden or anything too cute. If I can figure that out, that is the garden I will give Annie, the garden she deserves.

Bet you didn’t know that a lot of thought goes into creating a miniature setting. Here are my thoughts in the past week as I have begun preparing for next year’s show. They are probably not what you expected, but stay with me through the thought process and I will tell you what I am doing next year.

Right after the 2013 Philadelphia Flower Show opened, the participants in the Miniature Settings class began to speculate about next year’s displays. The theme of “Masterpiece” was announced in newspapers early in the week and this did not seem a particularly inviting theme if the show was trying to broaden its appeal. Masterpiece, as in paintings by old white guys, or still life studies in monumental museums, or Masterpiece Theatre? Don’t get me wrong, I love all three of these, but it did not seem a clever enough way to broaden a Philadelphia audience. On Thursday of Flower Show week, the meeting for the class chairs and other participants clarified the new theme. It would be called “ARTiculture,” a combination of art and horticulture. Again, that is something I personally like and spend most of my waking hours engaged with, but the coining of a neologism (new, made-up word) that combines what are perceived of as two of the stuffiest activities known to humankind—art and gardening—seems like a tricky choice.

Keep in mind that I am an anthropologist who studies and teaches (and has for more than 30 years) American popular culture, especially the movies, but also popular literature, comic books, fan culture, art, and pop culture phenomena (you know, vampires, zombies, wizards). From my perspective, the reason so many people are interested in popular culture is that it provides wonderful and accessible stories that we use to make sense of our everyday world and connect to each other. So, for example, every Sunday million of American watch the hugely popular zombie apocalypse show, “The Walking Dead,” on cable channel AMC and before, during, and after the show they exchange endless discussion about the characters, the plot lines, the divergence from the comic books, and what it would mean to live in a world where all the social rules are changed and all the landmarks of civilization are gone. There is even a live televised discussion after the new episode is aired (“The Talking Dead”) which provides intelligent and entertaining insights into the show. Sure, zombie shows are about the blood and splatter (there is a delightfully gruesome “In Memoriam” segment of “The Talking Dead” that recounts the week’s best zombie kills) but they are also about the stories that tie us together.

We love Michonne! The best zombie slayer.

Stories. That is the theme that we will be promoting in the miniatures setting class for the coming year. Because stories are what the best miniature settings provide. Like stage sets, they give you an instant placement in another world occupied by people and things that tell a story about a moment in time or a particularly fascinating or difficult human problem. They can hint at human interactions that both succeed and fail, and they can show the fallout from mistakes, human frailties, passions, triumphs, and fears. If you haven’t seen that in the miniature settings in the past year, hopefully you will in the coming ones (as I become vice-chair of the class and Ron Hoess takes on the chairmanship).

But back to the 2014 theme. Our group is assigned a sub theme and damned if it wasn’t the one thing I hate more than anything else: “The Masters.” As in, put me in a prison with all of art history that defines good art as the stuff done by a tightly defined list of Western white males who have controlled “culture” for centuries. BIG SIGH. Of course I could try to defy “The Masters” male implications by doing Frida Kahlo’s Coyoacán garden (I even made a pilgrimage there years ago and will never forget its beauty). I don’t have those old photos digitized but here is a view of Frida’s garden from a Diego Rivera (her husband) website:

But using Frida would just be applying that old 1980’s strategy of throwing one famous female artist at the male arts canon and hoping to make it crack. It’s still a possibility, still in the back of my mind, but I do have another idea.

Back to popular culture. There has for decades been a struggle in the arts world between high and low culture, fine arts and popular arts, the good stuff and the bad stuff. There is a reason popular culture is “popular” and that is because it is the culture of the people, all people, not just those educated in the fine distinctions of brush strokes or difficult aesthetic theories. Popular culture, as in themes and symbols and story lines most people are likely to get from the everyday world around them.

So my choice for the 2014 Flower Show will come from popular culture and since the movies are my passion, I will have to use a “Master” of the movies to make my setting. Yes, I know, this means a male master, but you can’t have everything and I have to fight one battle at a time. Trust me when I say I did consider a Walking Dead setting but there are not really any gardens in that lost paradise (the prison garden never got planted). But there is a Master of Horror, George Romero, who made a Pennsylvania-based zombie movie that became the model for all subsequent zombie flicks: the 1968 black-and-white film Night of the Living Dead. There is a great scene in a graveyard at the beginning of the movie where Barbra (that spelling is correct) and her brother Johnny visit the grave of their father in a yearly ritual. This time they are attacked by the dead who rise from their graves because of radiation or something. I wanted to portray the scene where Johnny creeps out his sister by saying,”They’re coming to get you, Barbra!” before the zombies really do attack. It would be cool to do a black and white scene (created with filtered lights) of that graveyard moment, one of the most famous in zombie moviedom:

They're coming to get you, Barbra! — They’re coming to get you, Barbra! Notice the zombie walking in the background.

What is stopping me from doing this scene? Mainly that we have heard much this year about the judges not liking miniature human figures placed in the scenes (which this setting would require). The reasoning of the judges was that they wanted the viewers to be able to enter the scene themselves, virtually, and so be part of the story. Since that is also our goal, I will not do this for the Flower Show (but may do it just for fun). So then I had another idea.

I have a short list of favorite movies that have nothing to do with the academic cinema studies lists that favor obscure foreign films and endlessly declare Citizen Kane to be the best film (ever try to watch that thing more than once???). One film on my favorite-and-I-have-seen-it-at-least-100-times list is the 1951 science fiction classic, The Thing from Another World (commonly called The Thing). The Thing is all about what happens when we encounter an Other, a being different from us. Great movie with two remarkable gardening scenes. One would be two gruesome (dead bodies providing blood for alien plants) but another would be fun to show. In this other scene of alien plants (the Thing is a humanoid vegetable monster) the plants are being grown in a laboratory:

But if you look at the lab in this arctic setting, there are no other plants and The Thing itself is the most important plant in the whole movie. So, move on to one of my other favorite movies, Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds. Now, gardens are not a particular focus of this movie (it is about inexplicable bird attacks on the northern California town of Bodega Bay) but there is one scene that I have always loved that is about gardening and it takes place right next to the famous scene of birds gathering in a school playground.

In this scene, Annie Hayworth, the school teacher at the Bodega Bay School, is in her garden at the back of her house. The wealth socialite, Melanie Daniels, who is pursuing Annie’s ex-boyfriend, Mitch, comes to ask Annie a question. The contrast between the women is fascinating. Annie wears frumpy gardening clothes and has dirt smudges on her face. Melanie is gorgeous with her upsweep blond hair, fancy car, and fur coat.

Melanie and Annie have a discussion about the garden:

ANNIE: I’ve been wanting a cigarette for the last 20 minutes. I just couldn’t convince myself to stop. This tilling of the soil can become compulsive, you know.

MELANIE: It’s a very pretty garden.

ANNIE: Oh, thank you. Well, it’s something to do in your spare time. There’s a lot of spare time in Bodega Bay.

Later the birds gather at the school playground

And eventually attack the school and Annie's house — And eventually attack the school and Annie’s house

As the Master of Suspense, Alfred Hitchcock built one of the best suspense scenes with the birds gathering in the playground (you can view it here).

So, my scene will be of Annie’s house and garden, the school yard, and the school next door, and the gathering of birds in the playground and Annie’s house. It compresses several events into one miniature moment but I hope to contrast Annie’s beautiful garden with the destructiveness and violence of the bird attacks. By the way, have I said yet that I have already visited Bodega Bay three times, on trips I took to visit scenes from Hitchcock’s movies? More on that in a future posting.