PREDICTIONS – 10 Years Later - Santa Fe Institute

7. COMPETITION IS THE CREATOR AND THE REGULATOR
Alfred Hitchcock’s life’s work. 7 In Figure 7.4 we see a graph of the
number of films for which Hitchcock could claim credit at a particular
time during his career.
As a child Hitchcock manifested interest in theatrical plays, but as a
teenager he started going to cinema more often and soon began frequenting
movie studios. At the age of twenty he took a modest job as a
designer of titles for the silent movies of the time, pretending—as he
maintained even later—that he had no ambition to assume more
responsibility. This is in contradiction to his insistence on learning
everything there was to learn about filmmaking and volunteering to
try out his hand at any new assignment. In fact, the lower part of
the curve fitted to the data of his full-length films seems to originate
ALFRED HITCHCOCK’S TWO NICHES IN CINEMA
Cumulative number
of
80
films
70
60
TV films
50
40
30
20
10
Full-length features
Time of death
0
1915 1925 1935 1945 1955 1965 1975 1985
FIGURE 7.4 The squares indicate full-length films while the circles indicate the
sum of both full-length plus shorter television films. The fit is only to the fulllength
films. A smaller curve is outlined by the television works and seems to
have its beginning in Hitchcock’s film works. The configuration of these two S-
curves provides a visual representation of the niche-within-a-niche situation.
151