Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho

by Stephen Rebello

  Despite the gusto with which he and Hitchcock took a meat-ax to American taboos, Stefano rejects the claims by Hitchcock critics and biographers that Psycho marked a darkening in the worldview of the director. He said, “Hitchcock didn’t think we were doing anything that was any different from his last movie or would be from his next. He didn’t seem to think that this was coming from a ‘new Hitchcock.’ No matter what has been read into Hitchcock’s state of mind, I don’t think at any time he was making it he was knowingly or unconsciously reflecting any particular darkness from within. He simply had a script and he was shooting it. “

  Hitchcock accelerated his production plans and schedule while Stefano polished the script to the director’s specifications. The writer delivered a slightly-revised second draft dated November 2, 1959. Further modest alterations and refinements were turned in on November 10, November 13, and December 1. Following this, Stefano and Hitchcock convened for a day at the director’s home to break down the shooting script. This stage of the development process had always been among the most rewarding, for Hitchcock. “My films are made on paper,” the director often told the press. Stefano detailed the process by which Hitchcock created imagery from words. “From my master scenes, he’d say, ‘Shall we have a close-up here of, say, a purse?’ For the shower scene, we made the decision that you would never see the knife touch the body. I told him I thought there was a point beyond which we would lose the audience, since we like Mary, feel sorry for her, and know that she is going to return the money. He told me that Saul Bass, who had done the titles for him on other films, was also going to storyboard the shower scene.” By early November, with that sequence in mind, Hitchcock had already sent the first script draft to Bass, the innovative graphic designer who had created title sequences for Vertigo and North by Northwest, among others.

  Stefano recalled how Hitchcock enthused over the chance to manipulate sound to heighten audience involvement and to implicate them, with Norman Bates, as voyeurs. In the scene where peeping Norman watches Mary through the hole in the motel office wall, Stefano wrote, under the direction of Hitchcock: “The SOUNDS come louder, as if we too had our ears pressed against the wall.” Stefano claimed that Hitchcock was also very open to suggestions for camera placement—so long as they fit within his overall vision. For instance, the writer said he proposed to Hitchcock that he modify the point of view for the second killing in the movie, the stabbing of Arbogast. “When we got to Arbogast going into the house and up the stairs, I said, ‘If you only start pulling the camera up when the woman comes out of the room, I’m going to get suspicious why you’re not showing her.’ That phrase—‘I’m going to get suspicious’—was my key to get him to change something. I said, ‘When he starts to go upstairs, what if we go way up high like we’re removing ourselves from what’s about to happen? The audience knows what’s about to happen to the detective anyway, so the upward movement would already be established when the mother runs out from her bedroom.’ He said, ‘That’s going to cost a lot of money. I’ll have to build a thing way up there.’ The next day he said, ‘It’s worth it.’ As much as he was concerned about keeping costs down, he wasn’t about to do anything that would hurt or detract from the movie.’

  Writers from Charles Bennett (The 39 Steps, The Man Who Knew Too Much) to Raymond Chandler (Strangers on a Train) and from John Michael Hayes (Rear Window, To Catch a Thief) to Ernest Lehman (North by Northwest, Family Plot) have attested to Hitchcock’s having been an exasperating collaborator. Stefano recalls only a single flare-up. “He wanted to cheat on something,” the writer noted. “It was the scene where Arbogast comes to the motel and he and Norman talk, then Norman goes off to the house to put on Mother’s clothes and kills Arbogast. Hitchcock wanted Norman to just go out the door [of the motel office], but I said, ‘If we don’t see him walking to put the sheets away, I’m going to be suspicious when we go up to the house.’ Hitchcock muttered, ‘Well it might be one of those things you might want to cut.’ I said, ‘Shoot it and don’t cut it!’ I told him this wasn’t going to be the kind of movie where he could get away with stuff like he had in the past.”

  Within hours, Hitchcock and Stefano had fully broken down the screenplay. Uniquely Hitchcockian was his insistence on turning the script into a virtual blueprint for production. Each scene was composed with the camera—frequently acting as the audience surrogate—in mind. In the third act of Psycho, Lila Crane (Vera Miles) is about to do what the entire audience was to hope/fear she will do: search the Bates house—alone. Explained Stefano: “He always thought about making the audience share the point of view of the character.” From the screenplay:

  EXT. REAR OF MOTEL —S. C. U. [CLOSE-UP] —DAY

  Behind the motel Lila hesitates. She looks ahead.

  LONG SHOT —DAY

  The old house standing against the sky.

  CLOSE-UP

  Lila moves forward.

  LONG SHOT

  The CAMERA approaching the house.

  CLOSE-UP

  Lila glances toward the back of Norman’s parlor. She moves on.

  LONG SHOT

  The house coming nearer.

  CLOSE-UP

  Lila looks up at the house. She moves forward purposefully.

  SUBJECTIVE SHOT

  The house and the porch.

  CLOSE-UP

  Lila stops at the house and looks up. She glances back. She turns to the house again.

  SUBJECTIVE SHOT

  The CAMERA MOUNTS the steps to the porch.

  CLOSE-UP

  Lila puts out her hand.

  SUBJECTIVE CLOSE-UP

  Lila’s hand pushes the door open. We see the hallway. Lila ENTERS PAST CAMERA.

  Once Hitchcock and Stefano had completed the breakdown, it was all over but the shooting. “We had lunch and toasted the project with champagne,” said Stefano. “He looked very sad, and said, ‘The picture’s over. Now I have to go and put it on film.’” Despite their long hours of story conferences and kibbitzing, Stefano singled out that particular moment as one of the few during which Hitchcock let down his guard. But in another, after the director had arranged a private showing of Vertigo at the writer’s request, Stefano believed he had at last glimpsed the man who hid behind the mask. “Here was this incredibly beautiful movie he had made that nobody went to see or said nice things about it,” Stefano said. “I told him I thought it was his best film. It brought him to near-tears.”

  With the screenplay virtually ready to face the cameras, Hitchcock prepared to begin production in early December.

  *In the final script, the name Mary Crane was changed to Marion Crane.

  6.

  Preproduction

  The Studio

  ARMED WITH A SHOOTABLE script that had been annotated with camera movements and elegance of technique honed over three decades of filmmaking, Hitchcock turned his attention to bringing on-line the technical crew. The process had been set in motion by associate producer Herbert Coleman before his departure the previous summer. Although Paramount had agreed to distribute Hitchcock’s finished product, the studio heads persisted in denying the director’s request to shoot Psycho on the lot. Coleman confirmed to novelist Robert Bloch that the action by Paramount was another means of the studio brass’ opinion that Psycho, with Hitchcock or not, was a dubious project at best.

  On the other hand, Universal-International, the studio in North Hollywood that MCA had recently bought for $11,250,000, was only too happy to accommodate a new Hitchcock production. Universal was a far cry from the posh Paramount studios that had boasted such directors as Ernst Lubitsch, Josef von Sternberg, Preston Sturges, Billy Wilder, and Cecil B. DeMille or contract stars such as Gloria Swanson, Rudolph Valentino, Marlene Dietrich, Mae West, and Gary Cooper. Universal, the home of Frances the Mule and Ma and Pa Kettle, was a factory-mentality studio that had been built in 1914 by Carl Laemmle on the site of the former Taylor Ranch in North Hollywood Lankershim Township. Laemmle bought the land for
$165,000 and christened the acreage Universal City. He charged tourists twenty-five cents to cram bleachers and soundstages to watch the shooting of such silent films as Damon and Pythias and such budding stars as Rudolph Valentino.

  The head of Universal, Irving Thalberg—at twenty-one the youngest Hollywood mogul—brought class to the studio with Erich Von Stroheim’s Foolish Wives and two great Lon Chaney silents, The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923) and The Phantom of the Opera (1925). Despite such occasional classics as Show Boat or My Man Godfrey (both 1936), Hollywood wags dubbed Universal “The House of Horrors” because of four years of astonishingly profitable shockers, beginning in 1931 with Dracula and Frankenstein and continuing through The Old Dark House, The Mummy, Murders in the Rue Morgue (all 1932); The Invisible Man (1933); The Black Cat (1935); and The Bride of Frankenstein and Werewolf of London (both 1935).

  The clarion soprano of Deanna Durbin saved Universal from going under during the forties, yet the studio ground out 350 features between 1940 and 1945. Few besides Destry Rides Again (1939), My Little Chickadee (1940), Never Give a Sucker an Even Break (1941), Hitchcock’s Saboteur (1942) and Shadow of a Doubt (1943), and Phantom Lady (1944) linger in the memory.

  On November 12, 1946, Universal merged with the independent International Studios. Hoping to spruce up its image for a changing market, the new studio brooms swept away the B-movie unit and most of its contract players. Despite the shift to Technicolor, it was the Ma and Pa Kettle and Abbott and Costello pictures that buttered Universal’s bread until 1952, when Decca Records won controlling interest in Universal. New studio heads Milton Rackmil and Edward Muhl knew what the public wanted to see and ushered in the era of profitable science fiction movies (It Came From Outer Space, The Creature From the Black Lagoon, The Incredible Shrinking Man), tearjerkers (All That Heaven Allows, Imitation of Life, Magnificent Obsession), and frothy sex comedies (Pillow Talk, That Touch of Mink).

  However, between 1957 and 1958, when the average movie ticket cost fifty cents, ticket sales plummeted by 12 percent. The Universal soundstages lay vacant, and the studio was $2 million in debt. The bosses of MCA—which was known as “The Octopus” for having its tentacles wrapped around a bit of everything—wanted larger facilities for their television subsidiary, Revue Productions. They tempted Rackmil with a $11.25 million buyout offer and he accepted. The studio, renamed Universal-Revue, was to earn respect from the industry as a moneymaker, if nothing else. Still, the Revue lot boasted Hitchcock’s Shamley Production bungalow. Today, the Shamley site has been replaced by a monolithic bank building. In those days, Hitchcock and his staff could watch rabbits and ducks romp on the lawn outside their windows. The director’s associates Herbert Coleman and Peggy Robertson had budgeted Psycho at $800,000, or roughly three times what the average episode of the TV show “Wagon Train” cost Revue. Given the precision with which Hitchcock had predesigned the film, a thirty-six-day shooting schedule seemed realistic. Every day, the momentum for making Psycho built.

  In October, the Motion Picture Association of America alerted the Shamley office that the maverick director Sam Fuller (Pickup on South Street) had, in late September, registered the title Psycho for an original screenplay. The news brought a dignified but unequivocal protest from the Hitchcock staff. The MPAA decided in favor of Hitchcock because the Bloch novel of the same title had been published the previous spring. This was not to be Hitchcock’s only contretemps over the title. Following the release of Psycho, the Hitchcock office and Paramount lodged a complaint with the Motion Picture Association of America about the registration of the title Schizo by none other than Hitchcock’s old boss, producer David O. Selznick. The withdrawal of the title by the once-mighty producer of Gone With the Wind and Rebecca, with whom Hitchcock’s relationship had grown increasingly strained during their nine-year association, perhaps gave Hitchcock grim satisfaction.

  The Technical Crew

  Late October 1959 found Hitchcock absorbed in dictating to the department heads of Revue the precise production requirements of Psycho. Vincent Dee would handle costumes, Florence Dee hairstyles, and Jack Barron makeup. Each would receive his or her standard TV-show fee; a check from the Hitchcock office for the princely sum of $300 would be sent to makeup and hairdressing department head Larry Germain, for example, to cover his total costs for the film. Not surprisingly, Hitchcock worked out these details from his swank Paramount suites in Hollywood rather than trudge over the hill to the North Hollywood valley home of rough-and-ready Universal-Revue.

  For budgetary reasons, Hitchcock dropped in preproduction several lovingly detailed camera flourishes described in the shooting script. First to go was a helicopter shot of the sort with which he had amused himself on To Catch a Thief (1955). Thus, Psycho would have to do without a shot in the “absurdist geometry” style that Hitchcock would later display in the aerial views of the heroine’s car trip in The Birds (1963), or the hero pursuing the hostile widow through the cemetery maze in Family Plot (1976). In Psycho, the audience was to have viewed the progress of two taxis—one carrying Lila Crane, sister of the heroine, and the other with Detective Arbogast—as they made their way through city streets and converged on the hardware store owned by Sam Loomis.

  Hitchcock also scrubbed a 360-degree camera pan that would have begun on Norman Bates darning socks (!) on the front porch of the motel. From there, the camera was to have followed the character’s point of view as he watches Arbogast’s car thread its way toward the motel. The shot would have ended full circle on the reaction of Bates as the car pulled up before the porch. The director also cut exterior shots of the house and neighborhood of the heroine and her sister, as well as a cat-and-mouse sequence at a filling station where the jittery Mary would refuel en route to Sam. Gone, too, would be scenes at Lila’s hotel lodgings in “Fairvale”—a locale that Hitchcock’s production notes suggest he planned to shoot in a style that would recall the hotel at which Sam and Mary enjoyed their final tryst.

  Although rumblings about what Hitchcock was calling his “thirty-day picture” had emanated from the Shamley office for months, Hitchcock played his intentions even closer to the vest than usual. “Those of us associated with him through television all knew he had his own feature-film crew,” explained Hilton green, whom the director had promoted from a second assistant director with Revue Productions to his first assistant director on his TV show. “He definitely didn’t like new crew faces around all the time. While he was doing North by Northwest at MGM, I was quietly called in and told, ‘He’s thinking about doing a low-budget, quality film,’ and that I was going to be the assistant director. North by Northwest having been a rather expensive film for its day, he wanted to prove to his peers he could make a quality movie without spending a lot of money to do it. So he thought of his television crew because we were more accustomed to shorter schedules.”

  That October, Hitchcock charged Hilton Green with overseeing a small crew headed by second-unit director Charles S. Gould. Their assignment was to capture a detailed series of stills of Phoenix residents, city streets, and atmospherics. Again, Hitchcock’s precisely detailed requirements for these photographs belie the “low budget” trappings of the project. They included a “shoddy hotel exterior, with the street outside with taxis and passersby”; “the interior and exterior of a real estate office, including a bank”; “exterior of a small house in which two girls live [secretaries], including a two-car garage and street; a bedroom of the same house.” Further requirements included the details and furnishings of the home of a local sheriff.

  On the return trip, the same crew obtained information on psychiatric detainment facilities in California. They also scouted possible locations for the Bates swamp, finding one at Grizzly Island off Freeway 40 or along Highway 12 near Travis Air Force Base. Green observed: “Hitchcock wanted to know things like exactly what a car salesman in a small town in the valley would be wearing when a woman might come in to buy a car. We went up there and photographed some salesm
en against a background. He wanted to know what people in Phoenix, Arizona, looked like, how they lived, what kind of people they were. He wanted to know the exact route a woman might take to go from Phoenix to central California. We traced the route and took pictures of every area along the way.” On roadmaps hung on his office walls, Hitchcock traced with pushpins the heroine’s exact route. Carefully noted were the precise distances between each point from Phoenix to California, via Blythe, Indio, San Bernadino, Palmdale, Lancaster, and Redding. Hitchcock also obtained from the studio research department information as to whether “a mental case could be kept at a jail until a psychiatrist got there.”

  On Green and Gould’s return, Hitchcock installed Green in the same office at Paramount that producer Herbert Coleman, who had defected from the project, had inhabited since the production of Rear Window. The symbolic significance of that move was apparent: Green on Psycho was as important to Hitchcock as Coleman had been to the director on previous films. The preproduction details and the intensity with which Hitchcock immersed himself into them suggest the degree to which Psycho was a project Hitchcock undertook as a challenge. Hilton Green observed: “He was always looking for something new. The one thing that tickled him the most, that he talked about again and again, was that his leading lady was going to get killed in the first twenty minutes. ‘This is really going to throw them for a loop,’ he said. He enjoyed fooling the audience like that.