Mount Rushmore Black Hills region of South Dakota in order to promote tourism in the region. His initial idea was to sculpt the Needles; however, Gutzon Borglum rejected the Needles because of the poor quality of the granite and strong opposition from American Indian groups. They settled on Mount Rushmore, which also has the advantage of facing southeast for maximum sun exposure. Robinson wanted it to feature American West heroes such as Lewis and Clark, Red Cloud, and Buffalo Bill Cody, but Borglum decided that the sculpture should have broader appeal and chose the four presidents. Senator Peter Norbeck sponsored the project
Mount Rushmore in popular culture in the course of screenwriting, as Hitchcock and scriptwriter Ernest Lehman were struggling to develop an idea. As Lehman would later recall, Hitchcock "murmured wistfully, 'I always wanted to do a chase across the faces of Mount Rushmore.'" While writing the script, Lehman took a trip to Mount Rushmore to scale the faces of the famous monument; he only got halfway to the top, and bought a camera to give to the park ranger to photograph the famous monument for him. However, the scene was not actually filmed at the monument, since permission to shoot an attempted killing on the