him. How are they going to work up a cyclone?" Lehman responded. "I just can't tell you who said what to whom, but somewhere during that afternoon, the cyclone in the sky became the crop-duster plane." In fact, Hitchcock had been working on the story for nearly nine years prior to meeting Lehman. Otis Guernsey was the American journalist who had the idea which influenced Hitchcock, inspired by a true story during World War II when British Intelligence obtained a dead body, invented a fictitious officer who was carrying secret papers, and arranged for the body and misleading papers to be discovered by the Germans as a disinformation scheme called Operation Mincemeat. Guernsey turned his idea into a story about an American salesman who travels to the Middle East and is mistaken for a fictitious agent, becoming "saddled with a romantic and dangerous identity". Guernsey admitted that his treatment was full of "corn" and "lacking logic", and he urged Hitchcock to do what he liked with the story. Hitchcock bought the 60 pages for $10,000. In an interview in the book Screenwriters on Screenwriting (1995), Lehman stated that he had already written much of the screenplay before coming up with critical elements of the climax. An example of the "corn" in the finished screenplay was the scene wherein Roger Thornhill returns to the Townsend estate with the detectives to find everything changed. If Thornhill was indeed a spy, he would have had no reason to return to the estate after his escape the previous night, nor would the criminals be expecting him to return as they obviously did. This was the only Hitchcock film released by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Since 1986, it has been owned by Turner Entertainment, as part of the pre-1986 MGM film library that it acquired through temporary ownership of MGM. Production costs on North by Northwest were seriously escalated when a delay in filming put Cary Grant into the penalty phase of his contract, resulting in an additional $5,000 per day in fees for him before shooting even began. Casting Eva Marie Saint's agent had told her that she had received an invitation to a dinner with Alfred Hitchcock and his family, the first time she and Hitchcock met. Days after the dinner, Saint's mother called her and reminded her that Hitchcock loved casting women wearing beige clothing and white gloves. Following her mother's advice, she met with