Hitchcock's Notebooks: An Authorized And Illustrated Look Inside The Creative Mind Of Alfred Hitchcock

This jumbled collection of studio memos, storyboards, meeting transcripts, script revisions, and personal notes pertaining to dozens of Hitchcock films is both fascinating and frustrating. While it presents lots of hard evidence of how the Master of Suspense dealt with everyone from Darryl Zanuck (a derisive letter in response to criticism of the ''Lifeboat'' script, signed ''Your obedient servant'') to Tippi Hedren (a verbatim record of their preproduction talk about ''The Birds'' that shows Hitch at his most thoughtful), ''Hitchcock's Notebooks'' offers disappointingly little narrative interpretation. Film critic Auiler rightly focuses on less-venerated projects like the aborted Kaleidoscope, which later became ''Frenzy,'' but he leaves the dizzying task of deciphering most of the material to the reader.