Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho

by Stephen Rebello

  However, when Hitchcock returned to action the following day and viewed the footage in the editing room with Green and Schlom, he knew he had miscalculated. Schlom said, “After the lights went on in the projection room, Mr. Hitchcock went to the front of the house, clasped his hands behind his back and said, ‘Fellas, we’ve made a big mistake. The minute you see the hands on the rail, the feet—you’re telegraphing that something’s going to happen. Take it all out, except for the monorail shot.’ We both asked him, ‘What about the little “soft” [out-of-focus] spot?’ He said, ‘I’ll live with that.’”

  Hitchcock had not only spurned the Bass concept for the scene but also an alternative proposal put forth by art director Robert Clatworthy. The director listened patiently as Clatworthy described a notion to film the fall of Arbogast from the point of view of the pursuing murderer—or, if one wishes, from the viewpoint of the audience. “I had an idea to put an Arriflex camera in a soft medicine ball with a hole cut for the lens,” explained Clatworthy. “We’d start the camera, roll the ball down the stairs with Tony pursuing and stabbing. Hitchcock might have liked the idea even though it might have been time-consuming to shoot, but we had already built the track for the camera, so I was too late anyway.”

  Instead of either of these proposals, Hitchcock chose the sort of vertiginous, “floating” fall that he had used for the fall of the spies from the Statue of Liberty in Saboteur or from Mt. Rushmore in North by Northwest. Explained Marshall Schlom: “We took apart the sequence as it had been edited, then put it back together leaving just the one shot of Marty [Balsam] coming upstairs. Then, for when Mom makes the stab, we did that by shooting a moving background plate using the monopod without Marty. Later, we had Marty, sitting in a gimbal, flailing in front of a standard rear-projection screen.”

  Seldom had murder sequences been so difficult for Hitchcock. Few of the crew members knew that the sequence had been redone or were invited to dailies. The moment when Arbogast and Mother meet was to cause a sensation when the Psycho team saw it in the rough cut.

  Endgame

  Falls Lake lay on the Universal-Revue backlot, one of many such large backlot waterways maintained by the studio for films and TV shows. Hitchcock used the lake for the Bates swamp in the scene in which Norman conceals the 1957 Ford Custom 300 containing Marion Crane’s corpse and the stolen money. The lake, with its background of nondescript scrub and hills, had been named after the man-made falls that had been built during the days of the studio’s founder, Carl Laemmle. Because the site, au naturel, conjured little of the seedy melancholy suggested by Joseph Hurley’s sketches, art director Robert Clatworthy suggested dramatizing the bland topography with a painted backing of tall reeds and undergrowth. “Might make all the difference in the world, old boy,” Hitchcock responded to Clatworthy. The art director devised an eight-foot-high, twenty-foot-long canvas backing designed to provide for Hitchcock’s down-tilting camera a moodier backdrop for the sinking car.

  Hitchcock had calculated the scene as an opportunity to wring every possible moment of suspense by showing the car hitting a snag before sinking. The idea was to make each audience member an active conspirator in the agony—and, by implication, the madness—of Norman. To accommodate the director, the prop department devised a mechanical lift. “We built a hydraulic device into the ground very much like an automatic garage door opener,” Hilton Green said, explaining the shooting of the scene. “We pushed the car in and the car clamped on as it hit. The device turned and pivoted a little bit, then pulled the car down steadily at a certain tempo, then stopped cold—all mechanically done. You could only do it once, or else you’d have to clean up the whole car and set it up for reshooting the following day. It was done in one take, but it was another scene that took an awful lot of preparation.”

  On paper, the revelation of the shriveled corpse of Mother in the swivel chair sounded to most of the crew like a milk run. As Joseph Stefano wrote it: “Lila goes to the chair, touches it. The touch disturbs the figure. It starts to turn, slowly, stiffly, a clockwise movement … It is the body of a woman long dead … The movement of this stuffed, ill-preserved cadaver, turning as if in response to Lila’s call, is actually graceful, ballet-like, and the effect is terrible and obscene.” Under Hitchcock, the filming proved to be one of the tougher challenges he threw to his crew.

  To heighten the impact of the moment, graphic designer Saul Bass suggested revealing Mother by a naked, hanging light bulb. The device had already jolted audiences in the climatic attic scene in The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945), directed by Albert Lewin. “It was a very simple idea,” Bass said. “The swinging light caused the light to change on the face and gave it a sort of macabre animation that almost made the face look like it was doing something—laughing, screaming, whatever—when you knew it was dead. It was just macabre, so some excuse had to be found to cause the light to do that.” Coming up with a rationale was easy enough: Hitchcock had Vera Miles fling back her arm in panic and her hand swats the light.

  “Hitchcock wanted the dummy to turn a certain way and cock a certain way as Vera put her hand on it,” Hilton Green explained. “We did it with a camera mount. There was a prop man underneath turning the cranks as a camera operator would do. It took a while before we got it exactly the way Hitchcock was after.”

  The final production challenge to cause concern within the Hitchcock team was the penultimate scene, known by some on the crew as the-headshrinker-explains-it-all. In this scene, heavy with expository dialogue, the psychiatrist lectures the Fairvale nabobs, Sam, Lila—and the audience—on the skewed psychic psychology of Norman Bates. Hitchcock and his screenwriter knew that the scene, the bane of creative types, was “obligatory”: a chance for the audience to catch its collective breath while the “logic” buffs among them got their fill of the facts. Hitchcock planned to do his share to enliven the action with slick camera moves, while stage and movie actor Simon Oakland, as the psychiatrist, did his usual scene stealing.

  In preproduction, censors from the Shurlock office had already objected to the use of the term “transvestite,” among other complaints, so Hitchcock thought it wise to handle the scene with kid gloves. In the shooting script, the director and screenwriter designed a stylish means of easing into the scene by a long, moving camera track that was to act almost as a “relay race” from the exterior of the state courthouse into the inner sanctum of the cell of “Norma” Bates. Hitchcock’s camera was to have followed a TV newscaster (played by actor and real life radio announcer Larry Thor) from the steps of the courthouse crowded with stunned, curious townspeople and reporters eager for news of Bates.. Asks the TV Man (as the script identifies him) of a policeman holding back the crowd: “You think they’ll take him out that way?” The cop shoots back: “Probably have to. Besides, the taxpayers hate it when something gets slipped out the back on them.” The “relay” would then have been picked up by a Coffee Boy (played by Jim Brandt) who trundles a carton of take-out into the office of the chief of police where Sam, Lila, the psychiatrist, and the law await.

  As described in the screenplay, Sam would rise, hand Lila her coffee cup, and quip, “It’s regular. Okay?” She replies, “I could stand something regular.” A few more lines of small talk lead into the psychiatrist’s two-page monologue. Hitchcock filmed the opening to the scene as written, then grew concerned that the lead-in slowed down an already lengthy scene. He went back and eliminated the shots of the TV announcer and coffee boy, then filmed actor Simon Oakland (Dr. Richman) entering the office and beginning his talk. “[The scene] was all predicated on how Simon Oakland played the psychiatrist,” recalled Marshall Schlom, to whom Hitchcock confided his concerns that the whole picture might spark censorship problems. “It was shot very clinically. Mr. Hitchcock directed Mr. Oakland to say the lines the way he felt they should be told. He printed the first or second take. He yelled cut, went over and shook the actor’s hand, saying, ‘Thank you very much, Mr. Oakland. You’ve just saved my picture.�
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  Nine days over schedule and having avoided a potentially crippling industry-wide actors’ strike,, Hitchcock wrapped principal photography on February 1, 1960. To save more time and money before shutting down the film, Hitchcock and his crew shot what was to become one of the most famous advertising trailers in movie history. It had been Hitchcock’s custom to mark the completion of production with an expensive, catered “wrap party.” For Psycho, there was none, nor was there much back-slapping, or promises to keep in touch. After all, the director’s favorite performers on the picture—Janet Leigh, Anthony Perkins, and Martin Balsam—had gone on to other projects. For most of the production crew, another installment of the Hitchcock television show was on tap for the following week. Alfred Hitchcock was delighted to have his “thirty-day picture” back in his hands and in those of the people who, he often said, “Really make a picture.”

  8.

  Postproduction

  Retakes, Quibbles, and Indecision

  TROUBLED BY HIS OPENING shots for the film, Hitchcock, on February 25, ordered a tiny film crew back to Phoenix, Arizona, to reshoot the city skyline. Budgetary and technical limitations of the day made it necessary for Hitchcock to abandon his elaborate “fly on the wall” visual pun in which a helicopter was to have descended over the city and “into” the motel room window. So the director also dropped the notion of the insect that pesters Sam and Marion in the hotel room and let the reference to a fly in the final line of the film (“She wouldn’t even harm a fly”) stand alone.

  Instead, Hitchcock simplified the overview of Phoenix to a panoramic “pan” from left to right, moving progressively closer, toward the hotel window. The new footage was to prove more satisfactory than the first go-around, but the effect never really paid off. In the film, although the two titles (“Friday, December the Eleventh,” and “Two Forty-Three P.M.”) tend to divert the eye, there are four visible dissolves as the point of view of the camera homes in on the hotel. “We didn’t get a very good blend between the original Phoenix shots and the cut to the dolly move into the hotel window, which was done on the soundstage,” admitted Marshall Schlom. “There is a definite ‘color’ change between the shots, even though the movie is in black and white. The camera wasn’t quite steady enough, so that when you cut into the facing, you go from ‘slightly jiggly’ to ‘stop,’ and from one exposure to another exposure. The whole thing just didn’t work.” Hitchcock decided not to press; too much time and money had already been wasted on the effect.

  While one crew toiled in Phoenix, a second crew in North Hollywood reshot details of the murder of Arbogast to bring the original intentions of Saul Bass in line with Hitchcock’s revisions. The crew redid the entrance of actor Balsam into the Bates hall, views of the actor’s face and feet heading upstairs [which went unused], inserts of a shadowed, menacing Cupid figure poised with a drawn arrow, and Hitchcockian moving point-of-view shots to put the viewer “with” Arbogast as he climbs the stairs. In addition, Hitchcock reshot for moodier lighting the discovery of Mother by Vera Miles in the basement.

  In postproduction, Hitchcock again tapped the expertise of Saul Bass. “We’ve really got to do something to make the house look forbidding,” observed the director to the designer. Hitchcock wanted to parody the conventions of the haunted house genre—stormy nights, rattling windows—by turning the Bates house into one of the giant red herrings of the picture. After all, the horror and tragedy of Psycho were of the heart and mind, not of ectoplasm. “I tried the obvious things,” explained Bass. “I made a model of the house and tried lighting it various ways, but it all looked fakey. Finally, I found an answer that, like so many of these things, was really wonderful and so dumb and simple, you know? Behind shots of the house, I matted-in a time-lapse, moonlit, cloudy skyscape. The rate of movement was not much above normal because I didn’t want the eye to go right to it. So when you see the shot, what you look at is the house, but the clouds behind it are moving in a very eerie and abnormal way. I’m not sure that it wasn’t even stock footage that I used!”

  The Sound of Mother

  Hitchcock, having already gone to great visual lengths to ensure the shock ending of Psycho, had also employed his wiles to find a “voice” for mother. “Hitch was very eager to play fair, but he also didn’t want the audience to see through the whole thing,” recalled Anthony Perkins, who discussed with his director the possibility of recording all the lines himself. The idea did not fly, but Perkins persisted. “I still thought it would be clever to have a male voice reading the lines, which is why I suggested Paul Jasmin to Hitch,” Perkins said. Jasmin, then twenty-three, a Montana-born budding actor who stormed Hollywood with hopes of becoming the next Montgomery Clift or Gary Cooper, was a natural mimic, a practical joker, and a friend of Perkins.

  “I was studying to be an actor,” recalled Jasmin, today a successful painter and fashion photographer. “For a joke, I did this old-lady character named ‘Eunice Ayers,’ a no-bullshit, Marjorie Main kind of gal. Tony [Perkins] and [Broadway and film star] Elaine Stritch used to egg me on, so I’d call up big stars like Rosalind Russell and put her on with this voice for hours. Stanley Kubrick was directing Spartacus at Universal at the time and, through a press agent, he heard about our little pranks, loved them, and began to tape the conversations. Then, Tony told Hitchcock about me and gave him some of the tapes.”

  According to Jasmin, Hitchcock told him that he had decided against using Perkins to record the voice of Mother. Jasmin explained: “Hitchcock had decided that if Tony did the voice right from the beginning, it might give away the whole thing. Then he considered just having a woman do the voice. But that didn’t work either because, in the final scene, the voice had to sound at least something like Tony. At the summons of Hitchcock, I went out to the soundstage one day. I can’t think of another director who was held in such awe. I was terrified. Hitchcock was terrifying. He was just a god on the set. I did the ‘Eunice Ayers’ voice for him and he loved it. He asked me to go to the sound recording studio and make a tape. After he heard it, he called me back and said, ‘Come in and do it.’”

  Hitchcock gave Jasmin only the appropriate script pages, the former actor recalled, “Because nobody was allowed to read the final pages. [Hitchcock] really didn’t tell you very much and volunteered nothing. He just wanted those voices he kept hearing in his head. He sent me to the dubbing room and I just did it scene by scene for an assistant while Hitchcock was on the set shooting. Even just the page or two of dialogue, I had to do again and again. The woman’s voice was really shrewish. That’s the quality Hitchcock liked.”

  Hitchcock also required Jasmin’s presence on the set for several weeks to feed lines to Perkins. “He had me there for the shots where Tony sinks the car in the swamp and also for when he carries Mother down the stairs,” Jasmin explained. “Also, we recorded some lines as if Tony can hear her from the house when the car goes into the swamp. Hitchcock had a notion that, having watched a number of scenes played out, I’d bring something of that atmosphere to the dubbing room when I recorded the lines later. I had no idea what he would or would not eventually use in the movie.” (The swamp scene lost its harangue by Mother in the cutting.)

  In late January, while Hitchcock shot the climactic monologue of Mother in the detention cell, Jasmin voiced the lines off-camera while Anthony Perkins, wrapped in a blanket, stared eerily into himself and, finally, into the camera. Observed set decorator Robert Clatworthy: “Even watching and listening to the scene as it was shot gave the crew goosebumps. The damn thing was so weird, so uncanny.”

  In postproduction, Hitchcock revealed another ace up his sleeve regarding the voice of Mother. He hired actresses Jeanette Nolan (Orson Welles’s Macbeth, 1948) and Virginia Gregg (Spencer’s Mountain, 1962) to offer greater possibilities for throwing off the audience. Hitchcock personally directed Gregg in a one-day recording session. “Hitchcock rehearsed and coached me very carefully,” the actress recalled. “I had thought of Mother as
sounding pearly and wheedling, but he had something very fixed in his mind: old, loud, strident, and monstrous. He kept saying, ‘Let’s make her sound a little more shrewish.’ It came so easily that I didn’t think he was happy about it and would probably record other people.” Gregg admitted that she puzzled over why her director insisted upon Mrs. Bates’s sounding more grandmotherly than motherly. “I think that was the sort of voice that Hitchcock was hearing in his head,” she reasoned. Gregg subsequently gave voice to Mother in two sequels to Psycho.

  Emmy-winner Jeanette Nolan, accustomed to five-hour dubbing sessions with Orson Welles on her debut film, Macbeth, claimed barely to recall her work on Psycho. “I remember my husband [John McIntire, who played Sheriff Chambers in the movie] working on the film more than I remember my own work,” the actress said. “I had next to no contact with Mr. Hitchcock. I simply went to the recording studio and looped some of the mother’s lines. I also recall doing quite a lot of screaming for the film.” The screams were confined to scenes in the shower and in the fruit cellar.

  Hitchcock and his sound men, Waldon O. Watson and William Russell, worked their postproduction magic on the voice of Mother. “It wasn’t until I saw the movie a second and third time that I understood why I didn’t recognize my voice,” Paul Jasmin remarked. “But Hitchcock was even more brilliant than I thought. In postproduction, he spliced and blended a mixture of different voices—Virginia, Jeanette, and me—so that what Mother says literally changes from word to word and sentence to sentence. He did that to confuse the audience. I recognize my voice before Tony carries Mother down the stairs. But the very last speech, the monologue, is all a woman; Virginia, with probably a little of Jeanette spliced in.”