Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho

by Stephen Rebello

  The director surprised script supervisor Marshall Schlom by inviting him to join George Tomasini in the editing room for the eight weeks it took to assemble the first cut. “George was a very mild person who did not have a huge ego,” observed associate Harold Adler, who contributed to the title designs for several Hitchcock pictures including Vertigo and The Birds. “He used to say that Hitchcock was so well prepared, there was very little film left over to cut.” Schlom explained the parameters of the partnership that he enjoyed with Hitchcock and Tomasini, who died in 1964. “It developed into a ritual,” Schlom said, grinning at the memory. “First Mr. Hitchcock came in and watched a rough assembly of the film reel, about ten minutes of film, in a ‘Stop and Go’ room. [A room equipped with a special projector that can stop-frame as well as run the footage backward and forward.] After the lights went up in the small projection room, Mr. Hitchcock would stand before the screen addressing us as if he were the professor and we the students. He’d say, ‘Gentlemen, this is what I like and don’t like’ and then explain exactly what he wanted. Then he’d sit down again and we’d run the film back and forth, which would probably take us an hour and a half to do. He’d say, ‘Okay, let’s make the changes,’ and then go home.”

  One example of Hitchcock’s adding his inimitable touch occurs in the scene in which Marion, packing in her bedroom, keeps shooting glances toward the stolen cash in the envelope on the bed. “When George and I were cutting that scene,” recalled Schlom, “the theme was a matter of ‘Should she return the money?’ or ‘Shouldn’t she?’ We cut, alternating shots of her dressing to leave with shots of the money. [Hitchcock] told us, ‘Put in more cuts.’ I asked, ‘Aren’t you hitting the audience over the head?’ But it was his kind of movie. He said, ‘I always want the audience to think what she’s thinking. The minute I lose one person, I’ve lost the entire audience.’ And that, I understood, is one way he kept audiences at the edge of their seats, straining to get these little bits of information.”

  During postproduction, however, Hitchcock’s imperious and authoritarian demeanor apparently masked uncertainty as to how Psycho would fare with the public. The movie had been, after all, funded from his own pocketbook. One clue to the director’s state of mind can be found in his indecisive fussing over the closing image of the film. His ambivalence actually led to the movie’s being printed and distributed with two slightly different endings. In both versions, the eerie vision of Anthony Perkins grinning into the camera is succeeded by a second shot of the car of the heroine being towed out of the swamp. But in only some prints of the picture is a grinning skull superimposed over Norman’s smile. Marshall Schlom explained: “He just wasn’t sure which version he wanted to put in the release print—with or without the subliminal cut of Mother’s death skull smiling out from Tony’s face. I remember Mr. Hitchcock saying, ‘It’s got to be on and off that [snapping his fingers] quickly. I want the audience to say, ‘Did I see that?’ That sort of technique was different for him because he never tried to play with their heads that way before. He wasn’t sure if he was going a little bit too far with that.”

  The First Screenings

  On Tuesday, April 26, 8:00 P.M., in Screening Room 8 at Universal-Revue, Alfred Hitchcock hosted the first rough-cut screening of Psycho. Present were such close associates as Hilton Green, George Tomasini, Peggy Robertson, George Milo, Robert Clatworthy, Joseph Hurley, John Russell, Rita Riggs, Helen Colvig, and Jack Barron. Such screenings—an industry ritual—may be the least ideal circumstances under which to see a film. Screening rooms tend to be small and barren; worse, one can become overwhelmed by euphoria, by flop sweat, or by a combination of the two. Often, audience members are too insecure or self-critical to express any reaction at all. Nonetheless, Psycho turned some hardened industry-ites to jello. “Even though it was a built-in audience of the crew, it was fun because of the gasps and screams,” assistant director Hilton Green enthused. “I loved the way it was put together, the suspense, and they loved it.” Costume supervisor Helen Colvig said, “When you’re on a crew, you tend to pick your contribution to pieces or give yourself plaudits. This was different. Everything to do with Mother and seeing Tony come hurtling down the stairs in a dress just scared the beejeebers out of us.” Set designer Robert Clatworthy observed: “What surprised me was it probably looked a little better than we thought it would. It was a helluva picture and turned out to be the only picture I’ve ever been on that I heard people talking about in supermarkets, banks, everywhere.”

  Screenwriter Stefano suffered more conflicted responses. “It looked awful,” he said. “I came out sick. It was long. It had no tension. It looked careless. When we came out, Hitch saw the look on my face. ‘A lot of work to do, it’s just the rough cut,’ he said. He understood I’d only seen one rough cut before. But the movie lacked a lot of stuff, like some of the shots of the stuffed birds on Norman’s parlor walls. I was afraid they would maybe decide to leave them out. Hitchcock reassured me that everything would be fine.” How could Stefano know what his director had in mind for the sound and music of Psycho?

  Sounds and Music

  Missing from the rough-cut viewed by Hitchcock and his collaborators on April 26 were essential ingredients of a fully mixed audio track and musical score. No matter how much Hitchcock trusted his composer or sound mixer, he always dictated detailed notes for the dubbing of sound effects and the placement of music. Hitchcock was dogmatic about the dramatic functions of sound and music, and often interwove his suggestions into the screenplay. To Francois Truffaut, Hitchcock had registered his displeasure with such scores as Miklos Rosza’s for Spellbound (1945) and Franz Waxman’s for Rebecca (1940) and Rear Window (1954). In fact, the Psycho screenplay suggests that Hitchcock was anticipating an experiment at minimizing music, an attempt that was eventually to culminate in The Birds, which had no conventional musical score at all. In the description of the opening shots of Psycho, which Hitchcock in his notes dubs “Sequence 1,” the director writes:

  Traffic noises at their loudest as the Camera is passing over the [venetian] blind, and then diminish once we are inside the Hotel Room.

  In Sequence 2, after Marion steals the money and is driving through the city:

  [When] Marion’s car comes to a stop at the intersection, we should hear her engine die down to an imperceptible tick over. It is very important to hear her engine sound diminish sharply, because the shot on the screen itself does not clearly show her coming to a stop.

  In Sequence 3, Hitchcock writes of Marion’s hellish drive that ends at Bates Motel:

  When we reach the night sequence, exaggerate passing car noises when headlights show in her eyes. Make sure that the passing car noises are fairly loud, so that we get the contrast of the silence when she is found by the roadside in the morning … Just before the rain starts there should be a rumble of thunder, not too violent, but enough to herald the coming rain. Once the rain starts, there should be a progression of falling rain sound and a slow range of the sound of passing trucks … Naturally, windshield wipers should be heard all through from the moment she turns them on … The rain sounds must be very strong, so that when the rain stops, we should be strongly aware of the silence and odd dripping noises that follow.

  In the screenplay, the description of the scene in which the detective sneaks into the Bates house prescribes the following sound cues:

  Arbogast listens, holds his breath, hears what could be human sounds coming from upstairs but realizes these could also be the sounds of the old house after sunset … [He] starts up, slowly, guardedly, placing a foot squarely on each step to test it for squeaks or groans.

  For the moment when Arbogast meets his maker, Hitchcock dictates:

  Special note must be taken of the sounds of footsteps on the stairs—because, although we do not see “Mother,” we should hear the sounds of her stumbling feet down the stairs in pursuit of Arbogast.

  In a scene after Arbogast has been killed, Hitchcock knew what effect a
creaky stairway would have on the audience, when:

  As [Lila] climbs [the stairs] she is startled by the creaks and groans of the old wood of the steps. She steps more carefully.

  On the shower sequence and its aftermath, Hitchcock’s notes to composer Bernard Herrmann and to the sound men Waldon O. Watson and William Russell dated January 8, 1960, are most emphatic. Again, the director seemed intent upon making the impact through image, not music:

  Throughout the killing, there should be the shower noise and the blows of the knife. We should hear the water gurgling down the drain of the bathtub, especially when we go close on it … during the murder, the sound of the shower should be continuous and monotonous, only broken by the screams of Marion.

  After five consecutive films with composer Bernard Herrmann, Hitchcock deeply respected the contributions of the brilliant, often abrasive New York-born Juilliard graduate. Founder and conductor of a chamber orchestra at age twenty, Herrmann, like Hitchcock, could be a bristly perfectionist, contentious, and a pedant. Although Herrmann was clearly not the sort who easily took direction, the composer was to follow closely Hitchcock’s dictates as to the music cues for the opening third of Psycho—with a single, unforgettable exception.

  “Mr. Hitchcock had a wonderful relationship with Bennie,” observed script supervisor Marshall Schlom. “And the way to maintain that was to give Herrmann the latitude to do what he wanted. Mr. Hitchcock only wanted people around him who knew what they were doing.” Herrmann, who died in 1975, once told director Brian De Palma, “‘I remember sitting in a screening room after seeing the rough cut of Psycho. Hitch was nervously pacing back and forth, saying it was awful and that he was going to cut it down for his television show. He was crazy. He didn’t know what he had. ‘Wait a minute,’ I said, ‘I have some ideas. How about a score completely for strings? I used to be a violin player, you know…’ Hitch was crazy then. You know, he made Psycho with his own money and he was afraid it was going to be a flop. He didn’t even want any music in the shower scene. Can you imagine that?’”

  In fact, Hitchcock dictated that he wanted “no music at all through the [motel] sequence” with Marion and Norman. Herrmann so mistrusted the uncharacteristic state into which Hitchcock had worked himself that he ignored a counter-suggestion made by his directorial colleague for Psycho: a fidgety, post-bebop jazz score. Screenwriter Stefano, a former musician, recalled Herrmann’s telling him, “‘I’m going to use only strings.’ I thought it was weird. No drums? No rhythm section? At the time, I didn’t realize that he had prepared through several movies—Vertigo being a good example—for this score. But I felt that Bernard Herrmann was the first person other than Hitchcock and I who dug the movie, the first who said ‘Ooops—we’ve got something else here.’”

  For Psycho, Bernard Herrmann was to concoct nothing less than a cello and violin masterwork, “black and white” music that throbbed sonorously as often as it gnawed at the nerve endings. The score would prove to be a summation of all of Hermann’s previous scores for Hitchcock films, conveying as it did the sense of the abyss that is the human psyche, dread, longing, regret—in short, the wellsprings of the Hitchcock universe. According to Stefano, Hitchcock was particularly amused by Herrmann’s “screaming violins,” and “gave him more credit than anyone else he ever spoke of.” So pleased was the parsimonious director by Herrmann’s score that he did the unheard of: He nearly doubled the composer’s salary—to $34,501.

  Titles

  Alfred Hitchcock wanted Psycho to look from start to finish like a major feature film made economically. To help accomplish that goal, Saul Bass created one of his prestigious, evocative title sequences. Hitchcock paid Bass $3,000, and production costs for the sequence totaled $21,000. The graphic motifs that Bass suggested were nervous, balletic horizontal and vertical bars that expanded and contracted in mirror-image patterns. In the style of a Rorschach, they simultaneously suggested prison bars, city buildings, and sound waves. “In those days,” explained Bass, “I liked strong, clear, structural forms against which to do things. I liked giving more zip to Psycho because it was not only the name of the picture but a word that means something. I was trying to make it more frenetic and I liked the idea of images suggesting clues coming together. Put these together and now you know something. Put another set of clues together and you know something else. It all adds up to who killed Cock Robin.”

  According to several former associates of Saul Bass, the graphic designer originally devised the title sequence used for Psycho for Otto Preminger’s Anatomy of a Murder (1959). Apparently, when the volatile, Viennese Preminger reportedly judged the design “child stuff,” Bass salted away the concept. Today, Bass contends that the bar motif is the only similarity between the sequence worked up for Preminger and the one used in Psycho.

  It was the task of Harold Adler, a movie advertising artist and title design letterer, to make the Bass concepts work on film. Adler, an artist for National Screen Service, which specialized in illustrating film credits and movie “trailers,” observed: “I don’t think [Saul Bass] was too technically involved or oriented at that time. One of the reasons he came to us at National Screen Service was that we tried to contribute to that concept and not let him make any mistakes. The storyboards for the Psycho [title sequence] were very complete and precise, which was true of all of Saul’s work, but I had to interpret them. They were based on a great deal of movement or parallel bars. The job required [teamwork] and considerable discussion between animation director William Hurtz (Pinocchio, Fantasia), and cameraman/production man, Paul Stoleroff. It is much less costly to do moves under the camera as opposed to using cel animation. Bill and Paul decided that all the lines that went up and down were to be animated and all the lines that moved side to side would be done under the camera with black bars moving across the screen at random speeds and positions.”

  Adler, who previously had worked with Bass on the title sequences of Vertigo and North by Northwest before tackling Psycho, explained how it was done: To realize the sequence, the cameraman and animator plotted the action on two separate fields. The cel animation was shot on a twelve-field. The horizontal bars moved across the screen on a twenty-four field. The bars were twice as wide as the artwork drawings on the cels and they all matched on the final result. The field defines what the film will “see” when a “stop-action” animation camera is positioned at a specific distance above the artwork in that field. Because stop-motion cameras photograph one frame at a time, an inanimate object can be moved minutely between exposures. When the film is projected at twenty-four frames per second, the inanimate object appears to move naturally.

  The production team for the Psycho credit sequence settled on a configuration of over thirty parallel bars for each field. Adler, who handled the horizontal bar movements, explained: “We got six-foot-long aluminum bars and sprayed them black. We worked on a large, white-painted plywood board with pushpins to guide the bars. The bars had to follow a straight line and couldn’t wiggle. Paul [Stoleroff] and I manually pushed in each bar at predetermined distances for each exposure. The bars came in at different positions and speeds. Each bar was precisely timed by numbers of frames per second, called ‘counts.’ Each bar had to be pushed in and shot separately. Once a bar had gone across the screen, it was tied down. There were lots of retakes because they’d come in crooked or something.”

  So much for graphic motifs; the title lettering still had to be done. Up until about the sixties, nearly all movie titles were hand-lettered with a brush. Typography did not have the theatrical pizzazz that film titles and trailers called for. Harold Adler, like other artists in the field, customarily laid out his title concepts in chalk on black poster board. Finished concepts were executed in white paint on the black poster board. Adler observed: “On a lot of pictures, Saul [Bass] liked to use small and sometimes thin type like he used in advertising. But working in film is a different medium from print. You’re reducing images to three-quarters of a inch a
nd you have a reproduction problem. I did the title, Psycho, in Venus Bold Extended [a popular typeface style of the day] and got two reverse photostats made. I cut one of the photostats into three horizontal parts. I moved the top section [of the title letters] in one direction and shot it at a certain speed, moved the bottom in another direction at another speed, and the middle part at another speed. So you were really getting three images, each one a third of the height of the lettering, coming in at different speeds. For the last frame, we popped on the word Psycho, which was the intact photostat by itself. For the other big titles, like ‘Directed by Alfred Hitchcock,’ I used News Gothic Bold typeface and we did the same three-cut technique as for the title of the movie.” Observed Adler of his experiences with Hitchcock on Psycho: “We made it work. Oh, God, I would have hated to work in the Hitchcock office. It was so strait-laced and formal when he was present. Mr. Hitchcock was the most articulate person I ever met. And he always had specific ideas of what he wanted. I was amazed to see that his library in his large office contained more art books and current magazines on graphics than I owned. He would specify specific new type styles that he had seen advertised in Graphis, a magazine mostly graphic artists would get.”

  Hitchcock Braves Another Screening

  During completion of the impressive contributions by Bernard Herrmann and Saul Bass, Hitchcock and editor George Tomasini sharpened the pace of the picture with minor trims. The collaborators cut unnecessary interchanges between Marion and Sam (in the hotel room), between Marion and Cassidy (the oilman who sexually harasses her), and between Sam and Lila. Also edited were shots of Marion hurrying from the hotel after her rendezvous with Sam, and of exteriors as she drives away from her house with the stolen money. By late spring, Hitchcock could feel more confident in the tighter 111-minute answer print that was now enhanced by a powerful musical score. Although he had been troubled by the mixed response to the first screening of the picture, Hitchcock knew that Psycho was in far better shape for its second. He invited to this screening the head of MCA, Lew Wasserman; novelist Robert Bloch; Bernard Herrmann; Janet Leigh and Tony Curtis, (Leigh’s husband at the time); Hilton Green; Marshall Schlom; and most of the technical crew and their spouses. Even for Green, who had seen and liked the earlier cut, the movie was a revelation. “When the music came in,” Green said, “it just knocked people out of their seats.” Elaborated Schlom: “I was sitting in the back row with my wife, Mr. and Mrs. Hitchcock, and Hilton and his wife. It wasn’t the shower sequence the wives and girlfriends were buzzing about. Everybody was saying, ‘Wait till you see Marty [Balsam] getting killed.’ But only Mr. Hitchcock, Hilton, and I knew that the form of the Arbogast scene had been changed [from the original Saul Bass montage]. So when Marty started up the stairs, and the camera pulled back, Mother’s knife came in and Bernie Herrmann’s music started shrieking, everybody came off their seats a good six inches! When even the fellows who photographed it were taken, we knew we were successful!”