Home of the Birds

“The birds are everywhere,” declared legendary film director Alfred Hitchcock in 1963, prior to the release of his cinematic thriller that would become a box-office blockbuster. Nearly 40 years later, The Birds is still everywhere, as far as most residents of a northern California coastal town—the setting for much of the movie—are concerned.

Bodega Bay (pop. 1,423) will forever be linked to the film classic, if its many visitors are any indication. Although The Birds is ancient history to some residents, others (including some not even born at the time of the movie’s filming) still feel Sir Alfred’s imprint.

Chris Wedel, born nine years after Hitchcock’s cast and crew turned her hometown into a silver-screen legend, understands how The Birds has shaped Bodega Bay’s landscape. As marketing manager for The Inn at The Tides, Wedel lives with the story and has become an occasional unofficial guide for tourists visiting The Tides’ Wharf Restaurant in search of movie memorabilia.

The Tides served as the backdrop for one of The Birds pivotal opening scenes. In it, the gas station that once occupied the restaurant’s parking lot was “blown up” as patrons (including the film’s star, Tippi Hedren) witnessed the scene through a bank of windows. Coincidentally, says Wedel, both the restaurant and the gas station burned down in a real fire shortly after The Birds was released. The present restaurant, rebuilt several times over the years, retains the movie set’s original layout: Its sweeping windows provide a panorama of the famous bay where fishing boats set sail for daily catches of crab and salmon.

Framed photographs featuring Hedren and co-stars Suzanne Pleshette and Rod Taylor line The Tides’ walls. Three years ago, Hedren revisited the restaurant to celebrate her movie debut in The Birds and to raise money for Shambala—the preserve she founded on the grounds of her California home as a sanctuary for mistreated animals. Close to 100 local residents sat down to dinner and a movie that night as Hedren commentated on The Birds. The movie, projected onto The Tides’ dining room walls, says Wedel, never seemed more dramatic.

For Hazel Mitchell, a waitress at The Tides during The Birds’ filming, the Bodega Bay restaurant holds charged memories. It was here that Mitchell served Hitchcock lunch every day for six months. She remembers the famous director “always ate the same thing: a piece of sole, a cup of green beans, and a piece of lettuce with no dressing.”

Waiting on Hitchcock was a highlight for Mitchell, and working as a waitress at The Tides gave her an opportunity to convince other residents to join her efforts in turning Bodega Head into parkland. “It was,” she says, “the great accomplishment of my life.”

Like Mitchell, Donna Freeman measures her life in the community by more than her contribution to The Birds. Freeman, who had a small role in the film—a run up the hill toward The Tides’ burning gas station—is married to a local fisherman and is a founding director of Bodega Bay’s 30-year-old Fisherman’s Festival. (Fishing and tourism account for much of the local economy.) The spring event began as a fund raiser for the Bodega Bay Volunteer Fire Department and includes an annual blessing of the fleet.

“Money from the event bought the department its first ambulance,” notes Freeman.

For certain, Bodega Bay did exist before Hitchcock’s film. Miwok and Pomo Indians, Spanish explorers (Don Juan Francisco de la Bodega among them), Russian fur traders, and Mexican rancheros all helped develop the area from the mid-1500s on, trading on the rich supply of seals, sea otter, and timber.

Even so, it’s Hitchcock’s lens that remains focused on Bodega Bay. “He put us on the map,” Freeman says. “For six months, we were Birdville.”

Margaret Dornaus is a freelance writer from Springdale, Ark.

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