The collaborative nature of filmmaking is obvious to anyone who's ever sat through a credit sequence. If Hitchcock's films were no exception, why did Truffaut, Chabrol, and Éric Rohmer (in France), and Andrew Sarris, Peter Bogdanovich, and Vincent Canby (in the United States) choose Hitchcock to be the poster boy of auteurism?

Perhaps they fell victim to Hitchcock's crafty publicity machine. If cineastes saw in Hitchcock an auteur, Hollywood saw a brand, one it was more than happy to promote if it meant bigger box-office returns. Promotional shots like this one cast Hitchcock as the author of his many screenplays. Other efforts were more sinister. On at least one occasion, publicists resorted to trickery to burnish Hitchcock's reputation as a master planner. The Block exhibition catalog, Casting a Shadow, contains a revealing memo regarding North by Northwest. "I'm sending about 13 stills from which I would like Mr. Hitchcock to make the sketches I discussed with him before he left for Europe," wrote Hitchcock's publicist, Rick Ingersoll. "As a reminder, they are for Coronet magazine—and theoretically sketches he made before the scenes were filmed. This is for a layout in which his sketches and the resultant scenes would be compared, to show how he maps out every detail of his productions before the scenes are photographed." Hitchcock may have made precise sketches of his scenes, as his Times obit claimed—but apparently not always before he began filming.