“Once it was, ‘See somebody, get excited, get married.’ Now it’s, ‘Read a lot of books, fence with a lot of four-syllable words, psychoanalyze each other,’ until you can’t tell the difference between a petting party and a civil service exam.”
—Rear Window
Meet the cast
Host Joel Gunz
An independent scholar known worldwide as the Alfred Hitchcock Geek, Joel is an award-winning filmmaker and editor & publisher of HitchGeek Magazine. His fascination with the Master of Cinema commenced at age 12 and never stopped, eventuating in hundreds of scholarly articles, chapters and essays, and he was among the first to call out Hitchcock as the Shakespeare of the 20th Century. His on-stage career took off in 2010, when he was invited twice to New York’s Helen Hayes Theater to speak to audiences following performances of The 39 Steps on Broadway.
More recently, he’s stepped away from writing (somewhat) to produce and direct three Hitchcock-themed, critically-acclaimed documentary film series projects: How to Watch Hitchcock (2018-19), Freak the Geek (2018-2019) and Alfred Hitchcock, Master of the Surreal (2019-current). Currently, Joel and his partner, Christy La Guardia, live with their beagle, Charlie, in Missoula, Montana.
Co-host Dr. Marc Strauss
Marc Strauss, Ph.D., is Professor Emeritus in the Dobbins Conservatory of Theatre and Dance, Holland College of Arts & Media, Southeast Missouri State University. Dr. Strauss has taught all levels of studio ballet, jazz, and ballroom and theory classes in the history of the musical, dance history and appreciation, dance in world cultures, the creative process, and the aesthetics of movement. He has studied, performed, taught, and choreographed in a variety of dance styles at the regional, national and international level since the 1980s. Specialized interests include Broadway and Hollywood musicals, dance criticism, dance on film, aesthetics, George Balanchine, Astaire and Rogers, and Alfred Hitchcock.
Dr. Strauss is author of Alfred Hitchcock’s Silent Films (2004; McFarland), Hitchcock’s Objects as Subjects: The Significance of Things on Screen (2016; McFarland) and, most recently, Discovering Musicals: A Liberal Arts Guide to Stage and Screen (McFarland; 2019). He’s also the lead author (with Myron Howard Nadel) of the university text Looking at Contemporary Dance: A Guide for the Internet Age (2012; Princeton Book Company) and co-editor/co-author of the third edition of The Dance Experience: Insights into History, Culture and Creativity (2014; Princeton Book Company), also with Mr. Nadel. He and his artist wife, Sarah Riley, are retired and live on the Outer Cape of Massachusetts with their mini-schnauzer Gracie.
Producer Christine Madrid French
Christine Madrid French is a historian, screenwriter and author of the upcoming Alfred Hitchcock and American Architecture: Villain’s Lairs, Skyscrapers, Mansions, and Motels (University of Virginia Press, 2022). Her unproduced screenplay, Piney Croft, a paranormal horror feature set in Florida, was a semi-finalist at the Orlando Film Festival and selected by iHorror Film Festival, Northeast Film Festival Horror Fest, and the Madrid International Film Festival. She currently works as Director of Development with the California Preservation Foundation and is head of Creator Services at LoCo+, a streaming platform featuring local content creators.
Rebecca Asghar
Born and raised in home Hitchcock’s home district of Leytonstone, East London, UK, Rebecca Asghar is Director of Friends of Alfred, dedicated to presenting, promoting and preserving the work and legacy of their native son. An award-winning artist, Rebecca is a former lawyer who has attained a Diploma in Portraiture at the Heatherley School of Fine Art. She was in Sky Portrait Artist of the Year in 2020 and has appeared in major group art exhibitions in London, including the Ruth Borchard self-portrait prize in 2019. She has also shown at the Art Maze at the Oxo Tower Wharf, at which the first three of her Hitchcock series paintings were displayed. These paintings depict real people instead of actors in stills, as well as a Hitchcock cameo.
Robert Bellissimo
The worst thing you can say to Robert is "It's just a movie.” That sense of value imbues his insightful reviews and interviews as host of Robert Bellissimo at the Movies.
Robert is a graduate of George Brown Theatre School’s certificate program and of The New School of Drama’s two-year diploma program. He also trained at The Actor’s Temple in London, England. Credits include Private Eyes (TV Series) Robbery (Amazon Prime), Mariner (winner, 10 Best Short Films of Canada, TIFF, 2016), Moose On The Loose (Magnus Theatre), My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2, Little Foxes, (short film), The Olde Proverb (short film) and Anna (short film, winner, numerous film festival awards). As an acting coach and teacher, Robert has run his own workshops, and has taught at Fraser Studios and Improv Your Acting Studio. Robert has been a cinephile for many years and has always been fascinated by all kinds of movies. He feels that educating people on the importance of how movies reflect our lives is essential. Films open up our hearts, minds and sense of empathy and nothing is more valuable than that!
Lesley Brill
Lesley Brill’s The Hitchcock Romance—Love and Irony in Hitchcock’s Films is required reading for anyone who’s serious about Hitchcock studies. And, as the title implies, it’s a touchstone for our conference. In addition to his prolific writing on Hitchcock, Brill is Emeritus Professor of English and Film Studies at Wayne State University in Detroit, has published four books on filmmakers and cinema, and essays on film, photography, and literature. His most recent books are Crowds, Power, and Transformation in Cinema and The Ironic Filmmaking of Stephen Frears.
Norman Buckley
Norman Buckley is a highly-sought-after, award-winning director whose credits include Pretty Little Liars, Charmed, In the Dark, Zoo, Quantico, Rizzoli and Isles, Chuck, Gossip Girl and The OC. He was co-executive producer/producing director on Sweet Magnolias and Pretty Little Liars: The Perfectionists. His TV movie The Pregnancy Project won Best Primetime Program (Special or Movie of the Week) and Best Actress (Alexa Vega) at the 2012 Imagen Awards. He’s been nominated twice for an American Cinema Editors award: in 2003 for Joe and Max, for best-edited motion picture for non-commercial television, and he won the award in 2008 for the pilot of Chuck, for best-edited one-hour series for commercial television.
Buckley began working in the industry as an assistant editor on the Oscar-nominated films Tender Mercies, Silkwood and Places in the Heart. As editor, he’s worked with many outstanding directors, including Bruce Beresford, Robert Benton, Mike Nichols, Rob Reiner, Michael Lindsay-Hogg, Richard Donner, J.S. Cardone, McG, Doug Liman, and Robert M. Young. He also learned the editing craft from some of the best film editors in the business, including Carol Littleton, Sam O'Steen, William Anderson, and Bob Leighton.
Buckley grew up in Fort Worth, Texas and studied history at the University of Texas at Arlington, before moving to Los Angeles where he would later graduate from the University of Southern California with a degree in Cinema/Television. He teaches at the University of California Los Angeles film school to both graduates and undergraduates. He was married to the late artist Davyd Whaley and established The Davyd Whaley Foundation, carrying on Davyd’s legacy by supporting Los Angeles area artists with annual grants.
Elizabeth Bullock
For Elizabeth Bullock, movies are a “gateway drug” to a life of the mind. As an adjunct instructor, Beth teaches cinema, art history, and humanities courses at the City Colleges of Chicago and film studies at Dominican University. Beth’s Hitchcock course surveys the oeuvre and philosophy of the director from Blackmail through Marnie. She earned her Humanities M.A. from the University of Chicago’s Cinema and Media Studies program. Her thesis, “Identifying Ingeborg: Practical Magic in Cinematic Melodrama,” combines several research interests including motherhood, magic, and photography. Also a photographer, her academic work includes comedy, game studies, feminist film theory, and social justice.
Douglas A. Cunningham
Douglas A. Cunningham is a film historian who serves as an adjunct professor of film studies and humanities at several universities in the Intermountain West. He’s the editor of, and the author of two essays for, The San Francisco of Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo: Place, Pilgrimage, and Commemoration (Scarecrow, 2011). Cunningham is also the editor of, and the author of an essay on The Birds for, Critical Insights: Alfred Hitchcock (Salem, 2017), as well as the co-editor (with John Nelson) of A Companion to the War Film (Wiley, 2016).
Other essays have appeared in academic journals such as Screen, CineAction, The Moving Image, and Critical Survey. After running a successful Kickstarter fundraising campaign, he produced and directed Listen, Darkling, a short fiction film produced as a complex tribute to Hitchcock’s Vertigo. Listen, Darkling went on to screen at film festivals in 2015 and 2016. Cunningham earned a Ph.D. in Film Studies from the University of California, Berkeley. He is currently completing a new book that examines representations of American masculinity in films produced by the U.S. Army Air Forces during World War II.
Christopher Daly
Chris is an actor and producer based in Phoenix, Arizona. An interdisciplinary artist, he often creates intersections where dance meets theatre and movement meets image. He’s participated in several interdisciplinary world premieres, including James Dickey’s Puella, and co-founded several performance groups, including: Improv: local 201; The Movement Consort; and Aurora Mime Theatre. Chris spent ten years teaching creative drama in schools as an artist in education through the Arizona Commission on the Arts before his five-year career creating and presenting interactive educational television via satellite.
Outside the studio, he produced educational television shoots in the Grand Canyon and the Amazon jungle. More recently he has produced interactive internal training programs for corporate clients. A voiceover artist, Chris has provided the voice in online programs for a long list of clients, including Coke, Pepsi, Disney Vacations, and Pfizer, and is the longtime voice for Titleist golfballs.
Steven DeRosa
Steven DeRosa is the author of Writing with Hitchcock: The Collaboration of Alfred Hitchcock and John Michael Hayes. He’s appeared on-screen in the documentary Viaggio nel Cinema in 3D: Una Storia Vintage, which premiered at the 2016 Venice Film Festival, in the documentary The Master's Touch: Hitchcock's Signature Style and in featurettes on home video releases of To Catch a Thief and North by Northwest.
In addition to presenting at NYU’s Hitchcock Centennial Conference, Steven has lectured on Hitchcock at The American Museum of the Moving Image, Film Forum and at the New World Stages in New York City. He has been a film archivist, at one time managing the MGM, Warner Brothers and Columbia Pictures outtake collections. Additionally, he was a contributing writer to the Writers Guild of America Awards.
Since 2011, Steven has been teaching film studies and screenwriting at Mercy College in Westchester County, New York. Beginning with his popular course on Hitchcock, Steven partnered with his local Alamo Drafthouse Cinema to host discussions for both students and the theater audience. He’s also hosted film series on Orson Welles, Hollywood Westerns, and Screwball Comedies.
Sidney Gottlieb
A true leading light of Hitchcock scholarship, Sidney edits the Hitchcock Annual and is Professor of Communication and Media Studies at Sacred Heart University, Fairfield, Connecticut. His publications on Hitchcock include two volumes of Hitchcock on Hitchcock: Selected Writings and Interviews (University of California Press, 1995; 2015), Alfred Hitchcock: Interviews (University Press of Mississippi, 2003), Framing Hitchcock: Selected Essays from the Hitchcock Annual (co-edited with Christopher Brookhouse; Wayne State University Press, 2002); The Hitchcock Annual Anthology: Selected Essays from Volumes 10-15 (co-edited with Richard Allen; Wallflower Press, 2009), and the forthcoming Haunted by Vertigo: Hitchcock’s Masterpiece Then and Now (co-edited with Donal Martin; John Libbey Publishing/Indiana University Press, 2021).
Elisabeth Karlin
Elisabeth Karlin is an award-winning playwright living in New York. Her plays include The Night the Ocean Met the Bay (Jerry Kaufman Award, Citation for Excellence); The Showman and the Spirit (Winner of the 2017 Stanley Drama Award; Finalist, Ashland New Play Festival 2015; Semi-Finalist, the 2014 O’Neill Playwrights Conference; Semi- Finalist, Bay Area Playwrights Festival; Staged reading HRC Showcase Theatre.) Hotbed (Epic Play Readings, Project Y Theatre; Reading, Jersey City Theatre Center) Bodega Bay (Produced by The Abingdon Theatre Company; Winner of the 2013 Jerry Kaufman Award in Playwriting; THE BEST MEN’S STAGE MONOLOGUES 2014 and THE BEST WOMEN’S STAGE MONOLOGUES 2014, Smith and Kraus); Wild Men of the Woods (The Lark, Playwrights Week; Semi-Finalist, Premiere Stages Play Festival; Winner of the 2008 Jerry Kaufman Award); A Mother’s Prayer (Mile Square Theatre, Hoboken); The Mooncalf (Produced by The Abingdon Theatre Company, represented in THE BEST STAGE SCENES 2001, Smith and Kraus); Lucy’s Last Date (Produced at The Third Street Theatre, Los Angeles, named a Dramalogue Critic’s Choice.)
Elisabeth is also a dedicated film buff who has taken a deep dive into the complex and compelling waters of the films of Alfred Hitchcock. She has been a frequent contributor to the Alfred Hitchcock Geek Blog, covering a wide range of themes inspired by The Master.
Christina Lane
Christina Lane is the Edgar®-Award winning author of Phantom Lady: Hollywood Producer Joan Harrison, the Forgotten Woman Behind Hitchcock. She is Professor of film studies in the Cinematic Arts Department at the University of Miami, where she teaches courses in film history, gender, and directors.
Christina's publications include the books Feminist Hollywood: From Born in Flames to Point Break and Magnolia as well as articles in Cinema Journal, Feminist Media Histories, the Quarterly Review of Film and Television, Cine-Files, and The Journal of Popular Film and TV. She contributed essays on Alfred Hitchcock's collaborators Joan Harrison and Alma Reville to the volumes Authorship and Film (Routledge 2002) and Hitchcock and Adaptation (with Jo Botting, Rowman & Littlefield, 2014). She provides commentary for such outlets as the Daily Mail, CrimeReads and AirMail, and has been a featured guest speaker at the Film Forum, on NPR and on Turner Classic Movies.
Thomas Leitch
Hitchcock's Nightmares and Love's Awakenings
Thomas Leitch has had a special relationship with Alfred Hitchcock ever since, after hiding under the bed while his sisters watched Vertigo on television, he emerged long enough to see Dial M for Murder five times in a single week when he was eleven. He watched Psycho as a college senior, and despite having already read Robert Bloch’s novel and François Truffaut’s copiously illustrated book-length interview with Hitchcock beforehand, still refused to shower for the following week.
After missing Hitchcock’s appearance at his college commencement to receive an honorary Ph.D. because he had to work that day, he caught up with most of Hitchcock’s backlist in graduate school, where seeing the trailer for Psycho just before a Marx Brothers movie traumatized him all over again…and published Find the Director and Other Hitchcock Games in 1991. Since then, he’s repeatedly sworn off Hitchcock and repeatedly returned in The Encyclopedia of Alfred Hitchcock (2002), The Companion to Alfred Hitchcock, which he co-edited with Leland Poague in 2011, and some twenty standalone essays. When he’s not writing about Hitchcock, Leitch is most often writing about other fictional crimes in books like Crime Films (2002) and Perry Mason (2005), writing about film adaptations of books like Film Adaptation and Its Discontents (2007) and The History of American Literature on Film (2019), reviewing novels for Kirkus Reviews, where he serves as Mystery Editor, or trying to scare students at the University of Delaware, where he teaches in the English department and holds the Unidel Andrew R. Kirkpatrick, Jr. Chair of Writing.
Tony Lee Moral
Tony Lee Moral is a British documentary film maker and writer. He’s written three books on Alfred Hitchcock: Alfred Hitchcock's Movie Making Masterclass, The Making of Hitchcock's The Birds and Hitchcock and the making of Marnie. The latter book investigates behind-the-scenes events during the making one of Hitchcock's most controversial films and examines the critical reception of Marnie. Moral is also the creative director of Sabana Films, a television and film production company based in the UK. He directs factual, specialist factual and entertainment programs for television, such as; Man vs Wild, Bill Bailey's Birdwatching Bonanza, Last Man Standing, Globetrekker and Wild Thing I Love You.
Sarah Nichols
Sarah Nichols is a poet and essayist who lives and writes in central Connecticut. She is the author of ten chapbooks, including the essay collection Hexenhaus (2020; Milk and Cake Press) and Press Play for Heartbreak (forthcoming, 2021; Paper Nautilus Press), a winner of PNP’s 2020 Vella Chapbook Prize. Film absolutely informs her work as a poet, ranging from a collection about Grey Gardens to the aforementioned Hexenhaus, a collection influenced by the horror film Suspiria. Her film criticism has also appeared in Senses of Cinema.
Walter Raubicheck
Walter Raubicheck is professor of English at Pace University in New York. He is the co-author with Walter Srebnick of Scripting Hitchcock (2011), and they both edited Hitchcock’s Rereleased Films: From Rope to Vertigo (1991). Recently he edited Hitchcock and the Cold War: New Essays on the Espionage Films, 1956-1969. In addition to his work on Hitchcock, he has published essays on twentieth-century authors such as F. Scott Fitzgerald, T. S. Eliot, Dashiell Hammett, and G. K. Chesterton.
Patricia White
Patricia White is Professor of Film and Media Studies at Swarthmore College. She is the author of Rebecca (2021; Bloomsbury), Women’s Cinema/World Cinema: Projecting Contemporary Feminisms (2015; Duke University Press) and Uninvited: Classical Hollywood Cinema and Lesbian Representability (1999; Indiana University Press). She is co-author with Timothy Corrigan of The Film Experience (2018; Bedford St. Martins), now in its 6th edition. White serves on the boards of Women Make Movies and Film Quarterly and the editorial collective of Camera Obscura.