In Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds, mankind’s feathered friends decide they no longer want to be friends, turning their avian wrath on anything with two arms and two legs. What follows is an increasingly apocalyptic scenario that leaves a smallcoastal town in ruin and a family paralyzed with fear and torment.

That’s not what happens in Judy Irving’s The Wild Parrots Of Telegraph Hill. In Irving’s charming nature documentary, the birds, free though they may be, are our friends. More specifically, they are Mark Bittner’s friends, wild parrots with personalities as varied as yours and mine, and lives with just as many ups and downs. In2005, it became the little documentary that could, garnering critical raves, glowing reviews, and a better box office take than much-ballyhooed films like Dogtown & Z-Boys, Metallica: Some Kind Of Monster, Inside Deep Throat and The Kid Stays In The Picture. How did a film with little to no hype and publicity - March of the Penguins this wasn’t - manage to succeed beyond expectations? caught up with director Judy Irving, and she said it was simple: After seeing the film, people wanted to talk about it. And talk about it. And talk about it. The result has been an unexpected but very welcome success for a filmmaker who has labored in the industry for three decades.

“Things are looking up. After 32 years of being a documentary filmmaker, it’s really nice to make a film that lots people want to see,” Irving said. “Everyone has been thrilled.”

It began small enough. A few showings, people got interested, signed up to an email mailing list (1,400 subscribers and counting), got the word out, those people told more people, who told more people, and on and on. Suddenly the film was playing in 440 markets, taking in $3 million at the box office and climbing the ladder to become the third highest grossingnature documentary of all time. This probably wouldn’t have happened in the 1970s, and you can thank the Web for that. The wonders of the Internet age and the rapid communication it provides, Irving said, are a welcome change of pace to how she used to have to get word out about her films. “There really wasn’t any way back then except for letters and phone calls,” Irving said.

The success is certainly welcome – it’s likely to lead to newer, better opportunities for this filmmaker – but in some ways, it was never supposed to happen in the first place. You see, Irving never intended to make a feature-length documentary.

In between projects, she had some rolls of film leftover from her last film and was looking for something to base a short project around. A book about a San Francisco man who devoted his time to feeding and caring for a flock of wild parrots, The Wild Parrots Of Telegraph Hill: A Love Story … With Wings, by Mark Bittner, caught her eye. Here was a good subject for a short film. A fairy tale, really, about colorful birds living in a bustling city. At least, that’s how she envisioned the project when she began. But Bittner changed all that.

“When I first got in touch with Mark I was really interested in the parrots,” Irving said. “You’re first looking at the birds, but it’s really Mark as a person you let in. His personality and knowledge of the parrots really brought the film to life.”

The man she thought would be something of a hermit ended up being lively, well-spoken, intelligent and full of life. Suddenly she had a full-length film on her hands. Rather than a short documentary about an eccentric man and some birds, it became a wistful tale about the relationship between good people and nature, and how those things we take for granted – the birds just outside our window, for instance – can change a life. Cute, endearing and family-friendly, The Wild Parrots Of Telegraph Hill turned out to be a winner.

The film turned out to be a winner for Bittner, too. Sure, his book was a New York Times bestseller, but it didn’t have people recognizing him on the street the way Wild Parrots did. It didn’t make him, in its own small way, something of a star. talked to Bittner about the film and where his life has taken him since the film’s release … but where his life has gone would spoil the end of the movie, which means his comments will sadly be left on the cutting room floor. Sorry folks, but ruining the ending would ruin some of the charm the film has to offer. We can say that he told us he encounters people at Telegraph Hill daily, folks out searching for the parrots and the man who has befriended them, and he couldn’t be more pleased with the public’s warm response. Even better, the film changed his life in a very, very significant way.

“There was three things I wanted (in doing this film),” Bittner told , “and one of them was …”

Well, that would be spoiling it. Let’s just say Mark gets a haircut and leave it at that.

Irving and Bittner have enjoyed unexpected but very welcome success with the film, which has migrated from theaters to DVD. (See our review for more details.) What’s next? It’s too early to say, but one thing is certain: Telegraph Hill and its parrots will see a lot more visitors in the coming years.

Though we wager Tippi Hedren won’t be one of them.