Swan song: RIP Rod Taylor

 An autographed photo of Rod Taylor and Tippi Hedren at the Bodega Country Store. Wish we'd bought it when we were there.

 The Tides Restaurant, a crucial location in "The Birds." This is how it looks today.

 The Bodega schoolhouse...

...where everybody has to get into the act.

It is with sadness that we learned of the passing of the great actor Rod Taylor today. Among other roles, he starred with Tippi Hedren in Alfred Hitchcock's "The Birds," which is one of our all-time favorite movies. So much so, in fact, that a few years ago, we made a special trip to the two California towns about an hour north of San Francisco that Hitchcock used for location shooting, Bodega and Bodega Bay. Both places are beautiful, rugged northern California villages that still revel in being part of such a classic film, even fifty years later. You can read our earlier post about them here.

As for Mr. Taylor, we're imagining he's being fitted for his own pair of wings right about now.

For "The Birds": Bodega and Bodega Bay, California

Here's the schoolhouse as it looks today in Bodega...

...and with a little bit of Photoshop artistic license.

The Tides back in 1963...

...and today...

...where a few of our feathered fiends, er, friends still like to hang out.

The dock where Tippi got her boat from Doodles Weaver.

The Bodega Country Store offers a wealth of Hitchcock-abilia...

The store's lucky proprietor got his picture taken with the one and only Tippi Hedren...

...who likes to come back to the area often.

Prior to 1963, the small northern California villages of Bodega and Bodega Bay were known for their rugged coastal charm and small town ways of life. That all changed when the great Alfred Hitchcock chose Bodega Bay as the locale for his thriller "The Birds" and used sites in both towns for the movie. In the film, a San Francisco socialite played by Tippi Hedren pursues a potential lawyer boyfriend played by Rod Taylor. They meet rather testily in S.F. and then again when she travels to his weekend home of Bodega Bay, about an hour up the coast. This game of romantic cat and mouse takes a sharp turn (or is it tern?) when the town is repeatedly attacked by hostile birds for no apparent reason. It's a great movie, with its weird dysfunctional characters, only-in-a-Hitchcock-movie dialogue and you-never-know-when-they'll-attack-next surprises. And the location is as much a star of the film as Miss Hedren and Mr. Taylor. The schoolhouse used in the film is in Bodega and today it looks freshly painted and even better than it did in the movie. The jungle gym where all those crows convened and Suzanne Pleshette's house, next door to the school in the movie, are nowhere to be found, though. In Bodega Bay, you'll find that the Tides restaurant, where Tippi, Rod and the locals all debated and then hid from the birds, has been vastly expanded and modernized. It's a very nice place on the water and, yes, birds still congregate there. There's no sign of the explosive gas station or phone booth that Tippi caged herself in, but the dock where she rented a motorboat to get to Rod's house across the bay is still there in Bodega Bay. The Bodega Country Store, in Bodega, has a terrific Alfred Hitchcock memorabilia section where you'll find posters, autographed photos, a Hitchcock life mask, and a stuffed crow or two thrown in for good measure. And Tippi is still a bit of a fixture around town...we just missed a personal appearance she was making by a few days. Too bad. That would have been a real feather in our caps.