By Lee Pfeiffer
Kim Novak has a bone to pick with Michael Hazanavicius, the director of the acclaimed film The Artist, which is a tribute to the silent film era. Hazanavicius employed a key love theme by Bernard Herrmann from Alfred Hitchcock's classic Vertigo in a sequence in his film. This lead to Vertigo star Kim Novak to come out of self-imposed hibernation and take out a full page ad in Variety saying that she felt her work had been "raped" by the appropriation of Herrmann's score that is so associated with the Hitchcock movie. Predictably, Hazanavicius does not agree and has said that he used the musical piece as an 'homage' to one of his favorite composers. This is not the first time that 'homages' have been accused of being rip-offs. Some years ago legendary artist and designer Saul Bass sued filmmaker Spike Lee for using images from his ad campaign for Anatomy of a Murder in Lee's 1995 film Clockers. Lee's defense was that the graphic of the outline of body was an 'homage' to Bass. Similarly, director Brian De Palma was criticized for using all-too-apparent Hitchcock techniques in some of his early films. De Palma also maintained these were intentional homages. Click here to read Variety music historian Jon Burlingame's article about the controversy.