Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho

by Stephen Rebello

  Riggs saw right through Hitchcock’s formality on the set and the intimidating, world-class artworks that hung on the walls of his home. She recalled the “wonderful intimacy” of dining with the director and his wife in their newly remodeled kitchen. “I always thought of him as the prince locked in the frog,” Riggs said. “He truly loved beauty so much and set out to create it. I think his perversities and his frustration with his exterior were part of his wonderful creativity. Everyone talks about his pranksterism and practical jokes, but he had a sense of fun about him that I don’t think some people picked up on. For instance, one night, I came home to find a carton of wild, French strawberries on my doorstep because we had been talking about them recently. Is that perversity or is that doing something out of sheer enjoyment?”

  An apparently unusual aspect to Hitchcock’s work method was his entrusting the viewing of dailies to editor George Tomasini and script supervisor Marshall Schlom. “He never went to look at this film,” Schlom asserted. “After dailies, George and I had to come back and tell him what we thought was right or wrong. He knew what he had.” Tomasini, having worked on The Wrong Man, Vertigo, and North by Northwest, was one of the handful of collaborators in whose taste and instincts Hitchcock placed implicit confidence. That track record notwithstanding, Tomasini was only paid $11,000 to edit Psycho.

  Schlom recalled the extraordinary pains Hitchcock took to shoot a close-up of Vera Miles reacting to a plain-bound book in Bates’s bedroom. As described in the screenplay, the moment is pure gas-lit melodrama. “Lila[‘s] … eyes go wide in shock. And then there is disgust. She slams the book closed, drops it.” Schlom observed: “Mr. Hitchcock wanted to suggest it was a pornographic book with a slight raise of the eyebrow. It was so important to him, we shot maybe sixteen takes of Vera, which was unusual for him.” Hitchcock did little that surprised Miles. “If he told me to jump over the moon,” she has said, “I have such confidence in his judgment, I probably would try it.” The moment was also remarkable because it was the only time Hitchcock and cameraman John Russell used anything other than the 50-millimeter lens for the movie. “It was a hundred-millimeter lens,” said Schlom. “He used to say he saved close-ups for a big emphasis—when he really wanted the audience to know something. When George Tomasini and I showed him the edit, he said, ‘Fellas, you’ve got the wrong take.’ We went back to the Movieola, looked through every take, then put in another one. ‘No,’ he said, ‘still the wrong one.’ This went on for three or four showings—’Wrong again,’ he said. Don’t you think we had to print all sixteen takes on one reel and see them on a big screen? He knew which take was best. He saw what we didn’t.”

  Saul Bass and Screaming in the Shower

  In addition to close collaborators Green and Schlom, Hitchcock valued the innovative eye of graphic designer Saul Bass. “I just hung around with my papers under my arms,” remembered Bass, whom Hitchcock paid $10,000 for thirteen half-days for thirteen consecutive weeks and the screen credit “Pictorial Consultant.” Bass said, “When I did some work, I brought it in, showed it to him, we’d talk and I’d keep walking around and looking. For me, [Psycho] was a little bit like being the tuba player in the orchestra who only knows his part. It’s only when he’s off for the day and comes back that he finds out that the piece the orchestra is playing is Carmen.”

  After his conferences with the director, Bass struck notes that resonated with Hitchcock. One of the early Bass concepts centered around the final scene that showed Norman Bates in a detention cell, his persona completely subsumed by Mother’s. As Joseph Stefano described it in the script:

  The walls are white and plain. There is no window. There is no furniture except the straight-back chair … the room has a quality of nowhereness, of calm separation from the world.

  Said Bass, “I devised a small idea for that, which I call the ‘Whistler’s Mother’ thing. In [the painting by James Abbott McNeill Whistler], the mother sits in a rocker and there’s a framed painting on the wall. So I set up the thing based on that where Tony Perkins is wrapped in his blanket and there’s a wall vent in the ceiling where the frame is in ‘Whistler’s Mother.’” In the shooting, Hitchcock was to eliminate any visual reference to the famed painting.

  Two of the most complicated sequences in the film—the shower murder and the killing of Arbogast—involved not only the efforts of Bass, but also of the entire company. Although Hitchcock had in Joseph Hurley one of the finest illustrators in the industry, the director paid Bass $2,000 to render storyboards for the shower scene. “That was a good idea,” observed Hurley’s collaborator, designer Robert Clatworthy. “Joe could have storyboarded the whole thing, but Saul wouldn’t fall into the cliché as we might readily do.”

  The traps were implicit in the sequence: potentially censorable violence, and nudity. Hitchcock told Leonard South, “I’m going to shoot and cut it staccato, so the audience won’t know what the hell is going on.” Bass responded to Hitchcock’s requirements with a montage approach, a barrage of oblique angles, medium shots, and close-ups. Although the scene would contain very little movement and images that, in themselves, might seem banal or benign, the bits of film cut together were meant to create an impression of savage, almost visceral violence. “I had this sort of contention in my head,” explained Bass, “a sort of purist notion of making a horrible murder with no blood. It struck me as a nice thing to do.”

  To accommodate Hitchcock and his crew for rehearsals of the sequence, designers Robert Clatworthy and Joseph Hurley built a mock-up shower. The director auditioned the temporary set during the second week of shooting. “We tested the shower scene by putting up a bathtub and two flat walls on the Phantom Stage,” Clatworthy explained. “Joe and I walked onto this big, dark stage during a test and as we got closer, we saw the wardrobe girl wiping off Hitch’s blue serge suit with a big towel. Janet was in a bathing suit. Maybe it was because we’d built the thing so quickly, but the paint wasn’t completely dry and the shower spray sent it splashing all over the place. Plus, the damn tub didn’t drain either. Hitch spotted us. ‘Fellows,’ he said, ‘this is quite inadequate. I believe this falls under the heading of the “raised eyebrow” department.

  For the actual shooting of the sequence, Clatworthy and Hurley built a separate, four-walled unit. Each of the walls was detachable to allow Hitchcock to place his cameras without restriction. In addition, the breakaway construction permitted the director to shoot the shower and tub unit either separately or attached to the larger, full set of the bathroom on Stage 18-A. This set was approximately six feet from the outer tub wall to wall. According to Clatworthy, Hitchcock insisted on “blinding white tiles” and shiny fixtures, a predilection that harked back to earlier scenes in Murder (1930) and Spellbound (1945).

  Previous Hitchcock scenes set in bathrooms had depicted them as places of revelation or of menace. Psycho would depart from those. It would break new ground in the suggestion of nudity and in the depiction of outright horror. According to Janet Leigh, Hitchcock had begun preparing her for the sequence in mid-November. “Mr. Hitchcock showed Saul Bass’s storyboards to me quite proudly,” Leigh said, “telling me in exact detail how he was going to shoot the scene from Saul’s plans. The storyboards detailed all the angles, so that I knew the camera would be there, then there. The camera was at different places all the time.” Writer Joseph Stefano recalled an encounter with Hitchcock after a meeting with his leading lady. Stefano noted: “Hitchcock said, ‘I’m going to have a problem with Janet. She’s very self-conscious about her breasts. She thinks they’re too big.’ He was aware it was not going to be easy to deal with this woman who was uneasy even standing around on the set in her brassiere. He said, ‘We’ll try to get it over as fast as possible for her sake.’ He wanted no problems or embarrassment for Janet.”

  Makeup expert Jack Barron noted: “When I first went to Mr. Hitchcock’s office to talk about the film, he told me he was going to try and convince Janet to do the sequence in the nud
e. When it came down to it, she wasn’t having any part of it. As time went on, he said he’d try ‘for the European version,’ but she refused. I asked if I needed to prepare anything, but he said, ‘No. We’ll cover up as much as we can and we’ll never show any actual stabbing. Just bring plenty of chocolate syrup for the blood.’” Janet Leigh wonders whether Hitchcock may not have merely been baiting his male collaborators on the aspect of “nudity”: “Of course, Mr. Hitchcock never asked me to do the scene in the nude because showing nudity on the screen was simply out of the question. Doing the scene actually in the nude would have negated how clever and subtle he was at suggesting things.”

  Supervisor Helen Colvig and on-set costumer Rita Riggs were initially stumped by the dilemmas of simultaneously suggesting nudity, remaining within censorship bounds, and protecting the modesty of a star. “It was hysterical,” said Leigh, who pored with Riggs over costumes for strippers in magazines. “They all had feathers, spangles, pinwheels, and birds of paradise. She [Riggs] came up with a brilliant idea, which was to use moleskin, which I had over both breasts and over the vital part—and that’s it.”

  “The giggles Janet and I had out of sheer shyness!” recalled Riggs. “It was certainly my first experience with ‘nudity’ for a movie. I was very aware of not only Janet’s but Mr. Hitchcock’s shyness, so I approached the job by thinking, ‘How would I feel?’ The storyboarding, particularly for that sequence, was so innovative, I only had to look at the boards to realize what we had to see. And it was clear that we never needed to show the entire body, but, say, a nude back, the tummy area, or breasts almost down to where the nipples begin. I came to think of it as sculpture. If we had to see a part of a breast, say, under the crook of an elbow, I would sculpt moleskin, then glue, cover, and trim away until just the amount of the body that was needed was visible. It was very time-consuming, yes, but most important, it was not to seem invasive to Janet.”

  As a precautionary measure, Hitchcock hired—at $500, total—Marli Renfro, a red-headed, twenty-three-year-old Manhattan and Las Vegas dancer-model whose proportions (5 feet 4 inches, 36-23-35) approximated Janet Leigh’s. “Some directors would announce ‘You will do nudity,’” script supervisor Marshall Schlom observed. “But he wasn’t about to make Janet uncomfortable or touch anything distasteful on the screen. For him, the shower scene was designed to shock, not titillate.” Hitchcock explained to writer Stefano; “‘I want someone whose job it is to be naked on a set, so I don’t have to worry about covering her.’ It was a very smart move on his part.” Hitchcock further fanned the curiosity of the press about the scene by reporting that the presence of Miss Renfro was solely “for a rear-view scene of Miss Leigh.”

  Despite Saul Bass’s purist intentions to have a “bloodless murder,” the storyboards that he devised for the sequence depict such close-ups as the bloodstained hands of the victim reaching for her punctured neck. After Hitchcock approved the drawings, Bass shot test footage on December 10. “I rented an IMO [an old-style newsreel camera] which had a twenty-five-foot magazine in it,” Bass said. “First of all, I wanted to see whether it would work having to cut above the nipple. With the spring loaded, it would run just twenty-five feet before it ran down. I used the standin for Janet to shoot it. At the end of the day, I had her stay a little later. We just set up a key light and knocked off twenty-five feet of the stuff and chopped it together to see whether the thing would work. I showed it to Hitch and he thought it looked okay.”

  Bass explained that the tests for the sequence merely confirmed that his concepts were viable. “The basic point of view of the sequence was based upon a series of repetitive images in which there was a lot of motion but little activity,” noted the graphic designer. “After all, all that happens was simply a woman takes a shower, gets hit, and slowly slides down the tub. Instead, [we film] a repetitive series of motions: ‘She’s taking a shower, taking a shower, taking a shower. She’s hit-hit-hit-hit-hit. She slides-slides-slides. She’s hit-hit-hit-hit. She slides-slides-slides.’ In other words, the movement was very narrow and the amount of activity to get you there was very intense. That was what I brought to Hitchcock. I don’t think that shower sequence was a typical Hitchcock sequence, in the normal sense of the word, because he had never used that kind of quick cutting. By modern standards, we don’t think that represents staccato cutting because we’ve gotten so accustomed to flashcuts. But to have, in those days—I don’t know what it was, two minutes, three minutes, whatever the sequence ran?—forty or sixty cuts, whatever it might be—was just a very new idea stylistically. As a title person, it was a very natural thing to use that quick-cutting, montage technique to deliver what amounted to an impressionistic, rather than a linear, view of the murder.”

  According to Hitchcock’s breakdown of the Bass storyboards, seventy-eight camera setups would be needed. Many of the shots required the construction of a special scaffold built at the studio mill. An article published in Variety at the time scooped several crucial technical aspects of the scene. “Mr. Hitchcock will rehearse with film,” journalist James W. Merrick wrote, “staging the scene and photographing it simultaneously from several angles with hand-held IMO’s. The results obtained from these light cameras will be assembled, edited, then used as the basis for Mr. Hitchcock’s sketches from which he will later photograph the grisly scene with a regular camera.”

  When the Variety reporter asked Hitchcock whether he feared that the sensational aspects of the scene might bring down censorship, the director snapped, “Men do kill nude women, you know.” The retort recalls the logic of a line of dialogue from the film. When Norman defends Marion by saying, “Mother, she’s just a stranger! She’s hungry and it’s raining out,” Mrs. Bates volleys back: “As if men don’t desire strangers.”

  Hitchcock believed he had locked in every predictable element of the sequence before beginning photography on December 18 and continuing from the twenty-first through the twenty-third. Crowds flocked outside Stage 18-A as if it were the studio commissary or the pay window. “I never knew there were so many people at the studio,” quipped makeup artist Barron. Hitchcock curbed the rubberneckers—and scored a publicity coup—by installing guards at the doors of the soundstage who were then photographed for publicity-hungry newspapers. “The press and photographers were dying to come on,” said Rita Riggs, chuckling. “Mr. Hitchcock fed them precisely what he wanted them to know and they actually felt privileged.”

  The director baffled his associates, the studio publicity heads, and the chief of the studio still department, Bud Fraker, by permitting the New York Times’s Eugene Cook to snoop around the set for a photo essay story. Hitchcock leaked to Cook the news that the character played by Janet Leigh would be murdered in the shower. “I may use a hand-held camera,” Hitchcock mused for the press. “I haven’t decided yet.” The comment is interesting in light of the test footage shot with a newsreel camera by Saul Bass. Yet most Psycho crew members consider it as no more than Hitchcock’s working the press like a virtuoso. “I can’t imagine him thinking about or even liking a hand-held camera,” screenwriter Joseph Stefano observed.

  From a technical standpoint, the actual shooting of the shower sequence was recalled by assistant director Hilton Green as “nothing extraordinary.” He observed: “It was not that difficult because it was laid out. We knew shot for shot and setup for setup where the camera would go ahead of time. It only took time because of the many different angles we had to get. It became the most famous sequence in the picture, but it was not that difficult.”

  As is often the case with classic movie scenes, the precise details of the shooting of the shower sequence have been obscured by time, selective memory, ego, the haze of legend, and controversy. According to various versions, Anthony Perkins was or was not involved in the filming. Other stories insist that Janet Leigh did or did not shoot the sequence in the nude. The shower sequence has been credited to many—from a special film crew imported either from Japan or Germany, to grap
hic designer Saul Bass entirely. Indeed, during the mid-seventies and continuing today, Bass has startled many by asserting his own auteurship of the sequence.

  That Hitchcock was parsimonious at doling out credit to others is well established. In his published conversations with Francois Truffaut, Hitchcock observed of the contributions of Bass, “He did only one scene, but I didn’t use his montage. He was supposed to do the titles, but since he was interested in the picture, I let him lay out the sequence of the detective going up the stairs, just before he is stabbed.” Hitchcock went on to detail how he was forced to reshoot the Bass scenes. Never in public did Hitchcock acknowledge the involvement of Saul Bass in the shower scene.

  Bass, in London to promote his debut feature film, Phase Four, in 1973, startled many with revelations about Psycho that appeared in the London Sunday Times. A reporter for that paper wrote: “He [Bass] was invited by Alfred Hitchcock to design the notorious shower-bath in Psycho and wound up directing that too.” Reproductions of the Bass storyboards illustrated the piece and the graphic designer was quoted as saying of Hitchcock, “The man’s a genius. But why should a genius get away with being so greedy?” According to the Sunday Times, Bass went on to say, “When the film came out everyone went wild about the shower-bath murder which I’d done, almost literally shot by shot, from my storyboard. And then Hitchcock had second thoughts.”

  Over the years, the statements of authorship by Bass, amplified and elaborated for other publications, have been accepted without question by some. In Halliwell’s Film and Video Guide, an encyclopedic volume of film titles with critical comment, author Leslie Halliwell describes Psycho as a “Curious shocker devised by Hitchcock as a tease and received by most critics as an unpleasant horror piece in which the main scene, the shower stabbing, was allegedly directed not by Hitchcock but by Saul Bass.” Halliwell, hardly a Hitchcock enthusiast, further cites the directorial credit for Psycho as “Alfred Hitchcock (and Saul Bass).”