No matter how hard we try to pretend that TMZ writers would be out of job in the classic days of Hollywood, the fact remains that the movie industry has always been filled with insufferable assholes. Some of those assholes produced your favorite movie moments ever -- and some of them did that while putting their cast and crew through relentlessly horrible experiences, which they didn't always survive.

12 Alfred Hitchcock Liked to Torture Actresses

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Alfred Hitchcock was a genius, and by all accounts it was amazing to work with him ... as long as you were a dude.

Grace Kelly had to stand during Rear Window, while James Stewart just lounged around all day.

Hitchcock had a thing for the ladies, and it wasn't a healthy "thing." Even if you don't read anything into the fact that young, attractive blondes were continuously getting slashed, tortured or harassed in his films, his treatment of them off-camera was just slightly less deranged.

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Wait, what?

For instance, Hitchcock cast an unknown called Tippi Hedren in the lead role for The Birds -- presumably because he knew that a famous star wouldn't be quite as receptive to having massive piles of crap unleashed on her. Bird crap, to be more specific: For five days of filming, Hitchcock would throw live birds directly at the actress, peck, scratch and shit all over her. Not satisfied with the resulting terror, he ordered that the birds be physically tied to her, and one of them just missed clawing her eye out.

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"Can you do that one again?"

All those scenes of the girl losing it in The Birds? She really is that scared, and since this was her big break, she didn't dare saying anything. The whole thing reduced Hedren to tears.

And then things got worse: Hitchcock became infatuated with Hedren, which he demonstrated by paying staff to follow her on her time off and sexually propositioning her (because chicks love guys who throw birds at them). When Hedren refused and demanded to be let out of her contract, the director vowed to ruin her career. And he did: For the next few years, Hedren remained under contract but made no movies. When she was finally released, demand for her had died down, and she spent the remainder of her acting career in relative obscurity.