“North By Northwest” is the only film that Hitchcock made for Metro Goldwyn-Meyer. Throughout the 1950s, most of his output was made with Paramount or Warner Brothers, while after “Psycho” he would only ever make movies for Universal. 

The film that MGM originally wanted Hitchcock to make wasn’t “North By Northwest.” Rather, the studio wanted him to direct an adaptation of “The Wreck of the Mary Deare,” about a salvage ship who discovers a mysterious boat adrift. Hitchcock’s go-to composer Bernard Herrmann had previously introduced the director to Lehman, and it was Hitchcock who brought Lehman on as screenwriter. Once director and writer got to work, they struggled. As Hitchcok would tell Francois Truffaut for the latter’s famous “Hitchcock/Truffaut” book:

“You have a beautiful setup in that mystery ship with a single man on board. But as soon as you go into the explanations, the whole thing becomes very trite… When you’re involved in a project and you see it isn’t going to work out, the wisest thing is to simply throw the whole thing away.”

Hitchcock stalled MGM executives with a version of the truth. In a 2000 interview with the “Creative Screenwriting” journal, Lehman recounted:

“[Hitchcock] went to a meeting and told them that it was taking too long to write ‘Mary Deare,’ and that we were planning to do another script instead. The studio people, who apparently assumed that Hitch was now planning to do two pictures for the studio, were delighted. Then he glanced down at his wristwatch, said he had to go — because we didn’t really have a story at that point — and left. And that was that.”

“Mary Deare” ultimately did make it to theaters, directed by Michael Anderson, written by Eric Ambler, and starring Gary Cooper and Charlton Heston, but it didn’t the same acclaim as “Northwest.” Would that be the case if Hitchcock had directed? We’ll never know.