The photographs and the film and the sanctuary are all connected. The 1971 photographs document the domestic experiment that preceded the production. The production was the full expression of the ambition the domestic experiment had been serving. The sanctuary is the institution that absorbed the animals when the expression of the ambition was complete and the commercial logic that had motivated it had failed.
And across this full arc, the person whose commitment to the project was most complete and most sustained — who contributed the most to the project from the beginning and who absorbed the most from its consequences — is Tippi Hedren. She was the actress Hitchcock had discovered and held and damaged. She was the woman who had married Marshall and built the project alongside him and appeared in the film and been injured during it. She was the one who built the sanctuary when the project ended and who advocated for federal legislation for decades and who has spent the adult years of her granddaughter’s lifetime as the president of the institution the project created.
Whether the outcomes justify the choices is not a question that admits of a clean answer. The sanctuary exists and does real work caring for animals that would otherwise have no place to go. The legislation exists and prevents the creation of new private ownership arrangements that would produce new animals with nowhere to go. The film exists and is, in its specific and unusual way, unlike anything else in the history of commercial cinema.