I talked pretty recently about my love of Hitchcock movies and how that started with my dad showing Rebecca and Shadow of a Doubt as part of a library series. I realize it’s not politically correct to appreciate Hitchcock these days, but there was a lot to the fellow. My appreciation progressed with adoration of Cary Grant and Jimmy Stewart (and my husband still has a massive thing for Grace Kelly).

What I didn’t know until after college was that he also gave work to other members of the Algonquin Round Table. Of course, I knew Tallulah Bankhead was in Lifeboat, and that Robert Sherwood wrote the screenplay for Rebecca, but there was more! As someone who adored Dorothy Parker in her 20s (although I have grown out of it to some degree, as she herself apparently did in later years), this was a Worlds Collide moment.

Dorothy Parker wrote Saboteur and has an almost Hitchcock-length cameo in the flick. (But she does get a line: “They must be very much in love.”) Robert Benchley plays a corrupt and cynical newsman in Foreign Correspondent—not sure how much acting was required there. Finally, there is a sort of circuitous story about Alexander Woolcott cribbing a story written originally by Marie Belloc Lowndes in 1913 about an elderly lady’s mysterious disappearance from a hotel and titling his story “The Vanished Lady,” which became Hitchcock’s “The Lady Vanishes.”

Some other Hitchcock writerly collaborations: Ben Hecht, Ernest Lehman, Raymond Chandler, Thornton Wilder and John Steinbeck punched up his scripts. He angled but failed to get Ernest Hemingway and Vladimir Nabokov on his train.

And, of course, on the non-writerly side, Salvador Dali weirded up Spellbound’s dream sequences with those crazy eyeball curtains.

What’s your favorite surprise Hitchcock discovery?