WHAT WENT WRONG - Psycho

Episode Date: September 7, 2026

We all go a little mad sometimes... And Alfred Hitchcock certainly seemed to when he decided to follow up his most expensive film to date with a black and white B-movie based on a gritty novel that would never survive the withering glare of the Motion Picture Production Code. Chris & Lizzie explore the restrictions that birthed one of the most influential horror films in history, the brilliance of casting Anthony Perkins, Bernard Hermann's late-in-the-game musical heroics, and Janet Leigh's unusually positive experience working with Hitchcock. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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What went wrong and what can you do? Listen out free with just a click or two. Hello and welcome back to What Went Wrong, your favorite podcast full stop that just so happens to be about movies and how it's nearly impossible to make them, let alone a good one, let alone a genre-defining horror thriller that made me absolutely terrified to shower for at least three years. I'm one of your hosts, Lizzie Bassett, here as always with Chris Winterbauer and Chris.

What do you have for us from the perspective of the shower curtain today? We're talking about a movie that begs the question. What kind of psycho turns the shower on while standing under the head? That is insane. It is insane. You turn the shower on, you test the water, and then you step in. Janet Lee is the real psycho here, and Norman did what he had to do. That's right.

Yeah, we're talking about Psycho, as you mentioned, a proto-slasher film that changed American cinema history with its, did you see it or did you not, depiction of extreme violence? And so, Lizzie, I have to ask you, had you seen Psycho before? And what were your thoughts upon watching or re-watching it for the podcast? Yes, I'd seen Psycho before. I famously saw Psycho way too young. Yeah, this is well-known. This has been news for a while. This has been news for a while.

I can understand because watching it now, I was like, okay, yeah, I can understand why you might think that like... It feels a little quaint by modern standards in some ways. Yes, although it is still scary. Sure. But I think I saw this, God, I could have been like nine or something. Like, I was not very old at all. I was definitely too young to watch this because my takeaway from Psycho was that if you are in the shower, you're going to get stabbed. That's what scared me was the shower.

I was so genuinely afraid of showering for like a couple of years after watching this that I took a lot of baths. It's probably why I still love baths. And I got in a lot of trouble because whenever I was in the shower, I would peek my head out of the shower curtain all the time, check and make sure that Psycho wasn't coming in to get me and I got a lot of water on the floor. So that's my own baggage with Psycho. Don't show it to your kids when they're eight or nine.

Give it a couple years would be my recommendation for that because they might be like me. But I loved it then, even though it scared me and had an unintended lasting impact on me. And, you know, I've seen it many times since, and I find something new to love about it every time I see it. This was a really fun rewatch this time for the podcast. I will say I never appreciated Janet Lee's eye makeup as much as I did this time. It is fantastic, just expertly done eyeliner. Her hair looks great. That is the pointiest bra on the planet, and good for her. One thing that really did strike me this time is I was quite surprised by how risque this is. I mean, the fact that it opens and she's, you know, in a bra on a bed, like, clearly having just had sex with that guy, that for 1960, that felt like, that felt like pretty revolutionary. And I also just think that it is so effective at hiding the plot twist. Even watching it still, it's so fun. Obviously, I know that Mrs. Bates is. a crusty critter in the cellar, but they do not tip their hand to that at all, and it's so well done. I have to say, Anthony Perkins' performance in this movie is one of the greatest performances of

all time. He is so charming. He is so cute. He's very boyish, expertly cast because he is such a big guy, which I think is useful because he seems sort of non-threatening in the way that he holds himself, but then you realize he's huge. He is just, he's pitch-pritch. He's pitch-prudely. He's pitch Perfect. Like, I don't know if there's ever been anybody better playing this kind of part. I completely understand why you would have dinner with this guy, why you would think he's not threatening. And then at the same time, he sells being just absolutely terrifying by the end of this movie. So he is my favorite part of this. Janet Lee is also incredible. I do love Martin Balsam as Arbigast. I would say the other two are not as strong, but that's okay.

There are Miles and John Gavin. Yeah, not highlights in the same way that everybody else is, but overall, just, it's a classic for a reason. So I'll stop talking. Chris, what about you? Yeah, I don't remember how old I was when I saw this. It didn't make a huge impression upon me. I think I'd already seen Scream. I'd already seen a number of other slasher's. And so it was hard to go back and see the movie that had inspired them when I'd already seen the kind of riffs that they had done on the genre. And I didn't have a strong appreciation for it. And then I rewatched it. We saw it in film school. We studied it a little bit. And again, I don't know if I fully appreciated it. But then rewatching it for the show.

this episode, man, did I think it's masterful. It's so incredibly well done. As you mentioned, we'll talk about him. I think Anthony Perkins lapsed not only everyone in this movie, but he's like arguably three decades ahead of Hollywood in his performance in this movie. And so for me, the two things that really stand out are Anthony Perkins and Bernard Herman's score, which I think is also incredibly modern. If you listen to some of the other scores around this time, What's interesting is that Herman kind of falls out of favor eventually with Hitchcock as film's score moves into a more jazzy sort of era in the 60s. And Herman, I can't remember which film he was fired off of that led to the rupture of their working relationship. But his scores to me, perhaps because they've influenced so many modern composers, feel more timeless than some of his contemporaries at the time,

even though ironically he was phased out from maybe not keeping up, quote, with the times in certain ways in the late 60s. But I think this movie is, as you mentioned, a masterclass of, you know, kind of deception, narrative deception. It differs from the book that it's based on in a couple of important ways to support those decisions. But it's also a movie that really benefited from the restraints and the constraints put upon it. So even though it seems very risque, the creativity that kind of led to, I think, its success was born of restriction. And I think this could be a bellwether for the idea that, you know, necessity is the mother. of all invention. You know, I know we're going to talk in this episode a little bit about Le Diabolique,

which you told me to watch before this as an optional piece of extra credit. And I watched almost all of it. And then I fell asleep and then ran out of time this morning. So that is my confession. Chris, I'm sure you will reveal to me what I missed. And I imagine it was important. But I have to say, there's another movie from the same year as La Diabolique that I also kept thinking about when I was watching Psycho.

And I'm surprised that that one is not mentioned as being as much of a a reference, Night of the Hunter. Night of the Hunter, sure, yeah. This was the first time that I felt like I noticed a lot of, potentially a lot of influence from that as well on Psycho. Sure. Also, in setting, too, a little bit. Yes.

Definitely with the Gothic influences and whatnot. Yeah, the car sinking into the... Yeah, in the water and Night of the Hunter. Yeah. You know, it's not listed as a reference, but as we'll see in this episode... Well, it was not well received, so I wonder if it was not acknowledged, maybe. Maybe, but, you know, all of these movies and writers and directors are influencing each other whether they admit it or not. And so it very much may have been in the mix

and the fact that it was in the zeitgeist may have influenced Hitchcock. He was responding to a lot of other films and other filmmakers, as we'll discuss, that we're kind of maybe nipping at his heels to a certain extent. So let's get into it and we'll see if and where it comes into play. So first, the details. Psycho is, as I mentioned, in 1960, you could call it a thriller film, a psychological thriller. I would call it a proto-slash-er film directed and produced by Alfred Hitchcock from a screenplay by Joseph Stefano based on Robert Block's novel of the same name. It stars. Anthony Perkins is Norman Bates. Janet Lee is Marion Crane. Vera Miles as Lila Crane. John Gavin as Sam Loomis. Patricia Hitchcock's daughter. Did you recognize her? No. She plays Caroline. She works with

Oh, she's the one at the beginning who's like, I got these special tranquilizers from my mother. Oh, she's great. She works with Marion at the Realty Trust Organization, Parity Mutual, I believe, is what it's called in the book. Martin Balsam, as you mentioned, is Detective Milton Arbogast and many more. It was financed by and produced under Alfred Hitchcock's Shamley Productions banner. It was distributed by Paramount Pictures, and it released wide on September 8th, 1960,

although it did limited releases earlier than that. As always, the IMDB logline reads, a secretary on the run for embezzlement takes refuge at a secluded California motel owned by a repressed man and his overbearing mother. I think that works. You could also say, take the money and run, but don't stay at the Hotel California. All right.

Sources for today's episode include but are not limited to. Alfred Hitchcock in the Making of Psycho by Stephen Rebello. Psycho behind the scenes of the classic thriller by Janet Lee. Split Image, The Life of Anthony Perkins by Charles Weincoff. Alfred Hitchcock, A Life in Darkness and Light by Patrick McGilligan, The Making of Psycho, the 1997 documentary. There Really Was a Hollywood by Janet Lee. I just watched the documentary last night, 7852, about the shower scene.

Very interesting documentary, although not as information focused as I had maybe hoped it would be. It's more of a commentary documentary from other directors. I also just want to say before we go any farther that since we are talking about a book-to-screen adaptation, please keep in mind, folks, that during the month of October, we are going to be doing four bonus episodes, which you can get on Apple, Spotify, or Patreon through the subscriptions there. And it's going to be our box office book club. So we are going to be covering new book-to-screen adaptation. We will be reading the books and covering the movies.

So if you're enjoying this, then you should join us for that. We will be doing Verity. We will be doing incidents around the house, which is what other mommy is based on. I'm reading it right now. It's what made me think of this because it's scaring the absolute pants off of me. And then we will be also covering Sense and Sensibility and Wildwood. So that's next month. If you haven't started yet, start reading and consider subscribing because book-to-screen adaptations are

very fun. So, Chris, continue. All right. We'll get your pants back on. I will not. So, Lizzie, as you teed up for us so nicely, the question I had going into this movie is how did Alfred Hitchcock and his many talented collaborators birth the slasher genre in the United States under the very noses of the suffocating motion picture production code or Hays Code?

And as we'll learn, Lizzie, they used every trick in the book. But we need to go back a few years prior to the release of Psycho. to 1958 and head to the Midwest, where the real serial killers are. And Washington State, but yes, continue. Well, yes, fair. A little later, Washington State. We'll catch up. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

We got the Green River coming up. You know, we got Ted Bundy coming up. Don't worry. Writer Robert Block needed a break. On April 5th, 1958, he turned 41 years old. He was living in rural Wisconsin with his daughter, Sally Ann, and his wife, Marion. And Lizzie, Robert Block was having a bit of a midlife crisis. I will do my best, pity party midlife crisis voice.

24 years, a professional writer and what to show for it. A few published books, only two of which had appeared in hard covers a dozen years before. Lots of short stories, most of them sold for one cent a word. A small bank balance, insufficient to pay off the mortgage or insure against disaster. No prospects of shoring up what seemed to be an increasingly shaky marriage, 41, with varicose veins, leaky sinuses, living in virtual small town exile, 41, over the hill and Hollywood out there with the movies and television. I'd have enjoyed working in a field like that, but too little and too late.

41. So funny. It reads like a man about to kill his wife for the insurance policy. Yeah, a little Alpine divorce happening. But something else took place a real tragedy, no offense, Robert Block, in the town nearby. A man named Ed Gein had been arrested on suspicion of murder. A local woman had gone missing, and police found her. her body on Gein's farm. At first, that was the whole story. The Wisconsin State Journal reported

Sheriff Art Schley refused to say how Mrs. Warden died or described the nature of her wounds. But then the gory details started to leak, like how Ed Gein's house was filled with human remains. Yeah. How he'd murdered and robbed graves. Now, we're not going to deep dive into Gein's crimes here, but what you should know is that they were about as grotesque as anyone could imagine so much so that Ryan Murphy would make a show about him. And everyone in this town seemed to be saying the same thing. This guy? Sure, he was a weirdo, but a harmless one. Robert Block was shocked, too. I wondered how this man never suspected of any wrongdoing in a town where if somebody sneezed on the north side of town, someone on the south said Gassindhite was only suddenly discovered to be a mass

murderer. I said to myself, there's a story here. Yeah, because I know we're not going to go into the details, but I believe he had like nipple belts and lampshades made of, it's not like your run-of-the-mill. He was also the influence for Silence of the Lambs as well. One of them, yeah, Ted Bunny too. Yes, one of them. Yes. Ted Bunny Method and then...

Ed Geen Skin Suit situation. Yes, just to be very clear. This would be quite a shock to find this out. This is also a year before the clutter murders, which we're going to discuss briefly, we'll mention in this episode, and we talked about in Cold Blood as well. This was still very much the tranquil 1950s, America, that is just now being woken up to perhaps violence at its door. step in its backyard. So Robert Block writes a first draft in six weeks, and he calls the novel

Psycho. But he wasn't just ripping off headlines, to be fair. He said the facts were, quote, sparse, meaning the facts of the Ed Gein case, because the local papers, unlike now, didn't like to emphasize unsavory local happenings. He said he based the book on the circumstances of the case, not the details. Again, this is before Truman Capote's In Cold Blood was ever published, which would change and really birth the true crime genre, and I think influenced the sense. And I think influenced the sensational way crimes like this would eventually be broadcast by news. Yeah, I think people thought that, like, to your point about the papers, not publishing stuff, I think people thought that, like, no one wants to read this, or like, no one wants to hear

these kinds of details. Of course, now we know that's not the case. But that really was Truman Capote that kind of blew the door off that. You know, and we can just mention it now. Block had written two short stories in this vein before. He'd written a short story called Lucy Comes to Stay, which I read, which is about a young woman named Vi, who's been institutionalized, and her friend Lucy is trying to convince her to escape. And then it's revealed that Lucy is a multiple personality, and they've together killed,

I believe, Vye's husband, George. And then also the real bad friend, which was released in 1957 just the year before Psycho was written. And that follows a man named George, whose friend Roderick, helps convince him to drive his wife insane to basically gaslight her for her recently inherited money. Because I'd be a little concerned if I were Robert's wife. Well, the point is he was interested in these stories and he'd gotten them published, but it doesn't seem like either of them were a runaway success. Yeah. And so he decides he's going to create this character, Norman Bates, a man who lives alone,

a recluse doesn't have a lot of friends. He wants to give him access to strangers, though, so he makes him a motel keeper. And he decides that he's going to commit crimes in a quick. quote, amnesiac fugue with another personality taking over, and that personality is going to be his dead mothers. Now, the mother character in The Real Bad Friend, the mother of George, is an overbearing figure, although only peripheral to the story. He basically married his wife because she reminded him of his mother.

And I think this is a way of him kind of bringing all these themes to the four. Okay. But he wanted Bates' mother to be physically present, too. So he came up with the notion that he had to, quote, actually preserve her body. He then decides the story needs a heroine, so he creates Mary Crane. he decides to give her a problem. She's going to steal this money so she can be with her love interest, Sam Loomis. And then he wants to quote, kill her off about one third of the way through the story.

Readers will say, my God, now what? We've lost her. And then the question becomes, how is he going to kill her off? And that's when he realized what you articulated so well at the beginning of this episode, Lizzie, a person is never more defenseless than when they are taking a shower. It was brutal, shocking, twisted. That being said, it was also brief. The shower scene concludes with two lines.

It basically says the shower curtains rip to the side, the knife cuts off Mary's scream, and her head. And that is the end of the description. Oh, okay. So she is decapitated in the book, to be clear. Hard to do. Well, I think there's a reason why Hitchcock decided to not to do the decapitation, and it was not just due to censorship concerns.

Block knew that when he wrote the book, it probably wasn't going to be turned into a movie. The motion picture code would never allow it, but I'm guessing he had more pressing problems. was even gritty for the publishing world. When his agent, Harry Altschuler, took the book out, Harper and Brothers rejected it. But Simon and Schuster bought it for their monthly InterSancta Mystery series. They think, okay, this is a genre outing.

Sure. He gets paid at an advance of $750, which would be roughly $7,500. Today, he described it as staggering. In fact, he was so grateful to his agent that he added a dedication to him in his book. 10% of this book is dedicated to Harry who did 90% of the work. Aw. Psychos published in April. of 1959, and it is a hit. Wisconsin's Capital Times called it Block's best novel,

lovers of the mysterious and the horrible will not want to miss Psycho, the L.A. Mirror called it a chiller and told readers, don't tackle it alone at night. And Anthony Boucher at the New York Times wrote, Block is more chillingly effective than any writer might reasonably be expected to be, and demonstrates that a believable history of mental illness can be more icily terrifying than all the arcane horrors summoned up by a collaboration of Poe and Love, And over in Hollywood, the search for new horrors was on. So, Lizzie, we've talked about this briefly, but in the 1950s, Hollywood had moved away from Gothic horror of the 1930s and 40s into science fiction horror.

So if you think about some of the most successful horror films of the 50s, the man from planet X, the thing from another world, the beast from 20,000 fathoms, invaders from Mars, phantom from space, them, the creature with the atom brain, Earth versus the flying saucers, invasion of the body snatchers. Sensing a theme? Yeah, there's a lot of aliens. Yeah, we're in the atomic age. Either aliens or something's been irradiated and now it's huge.

Right. So then something unexpected happens. In April of 1959, again, the book's just been published. Block gets a call from his agent. He'd gotten a blind bid for the screen rights for Psycho. Now, Liz, you know what a blind bid is. Meaning you don't know who's doing the bidding. Exactly.

It is a best and final offer. Take it or leave it. You do not know who the buyer is. Interesting. The call had come from Ned Brown of MCA, talent agency, $7,500, take it or leave it. Ten times the advance he had been paid for publishing the book. But again, because it's a blind bid, they don't know who they're selling it to.

So it's his first chance at a film sale. He needs the money. They counter at $10,000. MCA ups their offer to $9 or $9.5,000, depending on the source. After commissions and taxes, Block would pocket roughly $5,000 or $50,000 in today's money. So we're talking a serious step-up in money. He lives in Iowa. I think the dollar was going pretty far for him.

And as you mentioned, you know, he didn't have much. is savings, so not terrible. Block didn't know it yet, but he had just sold the rights to Psycho to one of the most famous men in the world. So, Lizzie, the story goes every week Alfred Hitchcock would read the New York Times book review, and he especially liked the new crime book reviews by Anthony Boucher. So when he came across his review of Psycho, it peaked his interest. He asked his longtime assistant, who we've discussed, Peggy Robertson, to call Paramount

and say, have you done coverage of the book? She calls Paramount. They say they have not. A little time passes. Hitchcock finds himself at the airport. He sees shelves packed with copies of Psycho. He calls Robertson again. Has Paramount done any coverage? Still no. So he buys the book himself and he reads it on his flight to England. He lands, calls Robertson and says, I found on next project. I can't do it. Hitchcock voice. But he says he's found the next project. Now, this is the version of events that Robertson herself recounts, but there's a bit more to the story. So in February of 1959, so before it was published, Blocks Agent Harry sends out advanced copies of the book to the movie studios,

which is standard, as we've discussed. Lizzie, you send out the pre-published manuscript to see if anybody is interested in purchasing the rights. You try to drum up interest, you know, a bidding war. You can always make an announcement. Oh, it's also being turned into a movie, you know, when the book gets released. A reader at Paramount named William Pinkard read the book and here's his report, an excerpt from his report.

Two repulsive for films. And rather shocking, even to a hardened reader. It is original, no doubt about that. And the author practices clever deceptions upon the reader, not revealing until the end that the villain's mother is actually a stuffed corpse, cleverly plotted, quite scary toward the end, and actually fairly believable, but impossible for films. Or maybe not.

You can't tell Alfred Hitchcock something's impossible. That's right. Hitchcock thought psycho had potential. He said he liked the suddenness of the murder in the shower. He liked that the story had relatable characters that the audience would care about prior to getting killed. And if anyone could get an impossible film made, surely, it was Alfred Hitchcock, right? It's the spring of 1959, Lizzie.

He's a household name. He's 60 years old. He's one of the most critically and commercially successful directors working in Hollywood in England. I mean, just some of his films that we all know, I'm sure, Rebecca, suspicion, shadow of a doubt, spellbound rope, dial M for murder, rear window to catch a thief. And the hits kept coming. So do you remember what his last two films prior to Psycho were? Oh, gosh. Is it North by Northwest?

Yep, that was the one right before. Vertigo? Yep, very good. So shortly after buying the rights, Psycho, North by Northwest, premiered. It was a box office hit. It made a net profit of $6.5 million in North America alone. It's a lot of money in the 50s. 65 million, roughly.

It was also his most expensive film yet. It was $4 million. Like Vertigo, his film prior and a number of films shot before that, it was shot in Technicolor on VistaVision. These movies look amazing, although Titchcock, later called them Technicolor Bobbles. They had huge set pieces, like the crop duster assassination sequence in North by Northwest. I rewatched both of these before this episode.

They're so fun. I mean, North by Northwest is like almost a James Bond spoof. It's basically a comedy. It's so funny. It's ridiculous, yeah. Yeah, Carrie Grant's very funny. His mother is hilarious. So, this was Hitchcock's fifth Technicolor VistaVision collaboration in a row with his longtime

cinematographer Robert Burks. And they had done to Catch a Thief, The Trouble with Harry, the man who knew two much and Vertigo and North by Northwest. Again, all Technicolor VistaVision. These are all budgeted between like 1.5 and 2.5 million dollars until North by Northwest, which is $4 million. If you like me, you're like me, you're weird. So you should be more like me, hate paying rent and get something back for it. Becoming a member of Built means earning points on every housing payment. Rent, mortgage doesn't matter. You're paying it. So you should get something back. Built points can be redeemed for flights, hotels, lift rides, Amazon.com, purchases, future housing payments, and more.

Personally, here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to go on Amazon.com. We're in the middle of a heat wave. I'm going to get a splash pad for the kids. I'm going to buy a margarita maker. And I know what you're thinking. Chris, you don't drink. That's fine. I'm not putting alcohol in it. I'm going to make slushies for the entire family. That's a life hack. I'm not sure I know what a life hack is. But becoming a built member is super simple. All you have to do is download the built app, then link any credit or debit card to the app. So purchases at your local spots, because you're even more rewarding. For the homeowners out there, Bilt works for mortgages too. Your housing payment is one of your biggest monthly expenses, so why wouldn't you want to earn points on it? Download the Bilt app and join the membership for where you live at joinbilt.com slash wrong. That's J-O-I-N-B-L-T dot com slash wrong. Use our link so they know that we sent you. But for his next project, Hitchcock really wants to push real boundaries,

not just monetary ones, and he has two movies lined up, both based on books. So Psycho and No Bail for the Judge, which was set to star Audrey Hepburn. It actually included a rape scene, Lizzie, that Paramount was very hesitant about. Well, she eventually says no to it because of this. We talked about this in Breakfast at Tiffany's. That's right. She was also pregnant. Yeah. And so it's just, you know, the stars did not align on that one. So he turns to Psycho. And in June of 1959, he sits down with Paramount to pitch Psycho. Again, he is a five-picture deal with the studio, which had proven very profitable, and this is going to be the fifth movie. I mean, it's really hard to describe, you know, a director in modern times being on a run like this sitting down with the studio to pitch their next film. No, it's crazy.

And he wants to press the very limits of the motion picture production code. So, Lizzie, we've talked about the motion picture production code from time to time, also known as the Hayes Code. We've actually never read from it, so I'd like to remedy that. This is how the code opens, the preamble. Motion picture producers recognize the high trust and confidence which have been placed in them by the people of the world and which have made motion pictures a universal form of entertainment. They recognize their responsibility to the public because of this trust and because entertainment and art are important influences in the life of a nation. Hence, though regarding motion pictures primarily as entertainment without any explicit purpose of teaching or propaganda, they know the motion picture within its own field of entertainment may be directly responsible for spiritual or moral progress,

for higher types of social life and for much correct thinking, to which Hitchcock said, no. The code was based on three general principles. Principle one, no picture shall be produced, which will lower the moral standards of those who see it. Hence, the sympathy of the audience shall never be thrown to the side of crime, wrongdoing, evil, or sin.

Two, correct standards of life, subject only to the requirements of drama and entertainment, shall be presented. Three, law, natural, or human, shall not be ridiculed, nor shall sympathy be created for its violation. This is so dumb. Now, Lizzie, as you, I am sure, are familiar, Hitchcock had had run-ins with the code on basically every movie he'd ever done.

Rebecca. Wasn't Rebecca famously one that he had to change quite a bit because of it? Absolutely. Do you remember the exact detail? That was the first one I had pulled up. I don't remember exactly. It has something to do with breaking the law, doesn't it? Or murder. Murder.

So Rebecca is murdered in the book by Maxime, the love interest of our hero. this was a violation because the book justifies and condones murders. So David O'Sullsnik and Hitchcock make Rebecca's death accidental. And then he covers up. And he was not happy about that. No.

Well, actually, I heard O'Salzanick was actually more pissed than Hitchcock in this instance. And then we have notorious. Hitchcock gets around the code's three second rule when it comes to kissing, which honestly I think is pretty reasonable. Like, let's not kiss any longer than three seconds. That's ridiculous.

Who does? But he has Carrie Grant and Ingrid Bergman take a little breather every three seconds. while they're kissing on the balcony, and the scene goes on for two and a half minutes. In North by Northwest, this was pointed out actually in the documentary, 7852, Ava Marie Saints' original line in the train with Carrie Grant,

one of the first times that they're meeting. Her lips say, I never make love on an empty stomach, and then they dubbed it, I never discussed love on an empty stomach. And then the end of the movie is them on the train again, and they start kissing, and then the last shot is the train going into a tunnel. And it's just so obviously a sex metaphor.

for. Yeah, well, it's very funny. As we know, Hitchcock was definitely interested in sex, not always consensual. He was, but it also made him very nervous and shy, too. He had an unusual relationship with it. Yeah. And again, a predatory one with some of his actresses. Yeah. Although not on this film, as we'll discuss. Well, that's good. Yes. According to John Bihmer in his book, Hitchcock and the Sensors, Joseph Breen and the Production Code Office requested 22.5 changes on average to each of Hitchcock's American films. So again, this is not new to And to be very, very, very clear, the Hays Code was exclusive to America. This was a Hollywood thing that Hollywood producers essentially imposed on themselves to try and

kind of beat the government to the punch. And also to try to institutionalize something that was happening on ad hoc on a state-by-state basis. And they were running into issues where they said, oh, well, we can distribute this in New York, but we can't distribute in Pennsylvania, for example. A couple more points I want to read because they're important as it pertains to Psycho. So these are just a few more excerpts from the code. The sanctity of the institution of marriage and the home shall be upheld.

Pictures shall not infer that low forms of sex relationship are the accepted or common thing. You mentioned the opening scene of this movie. Yeah. Methods of crime should not be explicitly presented. Yeah, don't give them any ideas. Excessive and inhuman acts of cruelty and brutality should not be presented. Brutal killings are not to be presented in any detail. Sex perversion or any inference to it is forbidden.

Complete nudity is never permitted. This includes nudity in fact or in silhouette. Wow. Okay, so as we mentioned, Psycho opens with premarital sex, follows it up with grand larceny, follows its heroin into the shower where she is stabbed to death nude after being shot with 78 close-ups to show the crime, and the murder is then revealed to be a young man suffering an edipus complex within competing male-female personalities. Yeah, it's a, I can't tell what of the rules it adheres to.

We don't have any direct quotes from the Paramount Executives, but according to Robert Block, they hated it. They didn't like the title. They didn't like the story. They didn't like any of it. But Hitchcock said, no, this is my next movie. So they said, fine, you're not going to get the budget you've been enjoying. No Technicolor, no Jimmy Stewart, no Carrie Grant.

And I think that they thought he's going to bail. That'll be enough to scare Hitchcock off the project. Why would a director take a massive pay cut, take a step back in their career in terms of the budgets they've been enjoying? Again, he's just made his most expensive movie. He should be leveling up. Right. But the thing is, Hitchcock didn't need Technicolor. He didn't need Jimmy Stewart.

He didn't need Carrie Grant. Can you imagine Jimmy Stewart as Norman Bates? Oh, oh, mother! Would you like a cold cut, miss? Oh! He'd gotten by just fine without them on his television show, Alfred Hitchcock Presents. So Hitchcock was perhaps even more broadly known, at least within the United States, for his eponymous anthology television show, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, which had been on the air since 1955.

It was the brainchild of his agent, Lou Wasserman, head of MCA, Hitchcock's daughter, Patricia, would later say, it was unbelievable how famous that show made him. I think it had been on for a little over a year when we went to Tahiti for a vacation. We were on this quiet, secluded little beach, and all of a sudden, people swarmed out of nowhere to see him. It was like being with Elvis Presley.

Liz, you've seen the show, I'm sure, seen clips. The key element here is Hitchcock opens and closes every episode with a personal address to the audience. Right, and his profile is like part of the logo of the show. It is the logo. Yeah. Yeah. And he's also very funny. He's very droll. It opens with kind of a macabre joke in every instance, be it him holding a copy of his own head or something else like that. And so he was more than perhaps the average director, certainly, recognizable to the average person who may not be able to put a face to a name. They might know the name of William Weiler, for example, but they might not know what he looks like. That is not the case with Hitchcock. So Hitchcock had everything he needed to make a low-budget version of Psycho.

He could shoot it in black and white, and he could use the crew from his TV show. He could use cinematographer, John Russell, first assistant director, Hilton Green, set designer, Robert Clatworthy, script supervisor, Marshall Shlam. Paramount saw the budget as a way to constrain Hitchcock. I think Hitchcock might have been excited by the possibilities it presented. So as Janet Lee later wrote, Hitchcock noted with keen interest how many cheaply made black and white thrillers were cleaning up at the box office. Drive-in marquees of the 50s trumpeted such fare as the attack of the 50-foot woman,

the incredible shrinking man, the blob, Earth versus the Flying Saucers, House on Haunted Hill, Dementia, the Tingler. Many of these efforts were roundly dismissed by critics who labeled many of them Bargain Basement Hitchcock. The profits they accrued, however, could not be denied. It feels like he knows, I have to get with the times. And he's actually jumping ship from the bloated, technicolor movie at the exact right time. Yeah.

Lizzie, what movie will come out in nice? 1963 and kind of be the death knell of the giant Hollywood spectacle film. Cleopatra. Cleopatra in just a couple years. Now, this wasn't just happening in the United States. Lizzie, I told you to watch a movie last night. Le Diololique, this is a French film from 1955 from director Henri Georges Clousseau, who was being referred to by some writers as the French Hitchcock.

Now, Lizzie, you did watch most of the movie, so perhaps you can set it up, and then I will tease the ending. And, guys, if you don't want any spoilers on this movie, go ahead and skip ahead, like 45 seconds. maybe a minute. So what I watched of it was great, but basically these two women who work as teachers at a boys boarding school seemingly conspire together to get rid of the headmaster who happens to be the estranged husband of one and the at least sometimes lover of the other. And they kind of lure him out to the, I think, hometown of the mistress to off him. And they seemingly do off him. They drown him in a bathtub. And it's very graphic. It is so graphic. And it's wonderfully done and horrifying. Yes. I was

shocked by that. And I mentioned Night of the Hunter. I think maybe that is why I'm drawing parallels is because both of those have like really pretty stunningly graphic violence and particularly violent images in them. And this, it's the image of him after he's been drowned in the bathtub for me that stands out. But yeah, it is very, very stylish. It feels extremely modern in the acting and also the way that it's shot. felt a lot like Psycho. Did you notice any music? No. There's no music.

Yeah. There's music on the opening credits, and that was it. And there's, I believe, a cue at the end. So, La Diobelique is one of my favorite films of all time. The most obvious influences I think in modern film are Germo del Toro, and specifically Crimson Peak and The Devil's Backbone are, to me, direct homage to this film. As you mentioned, Lizzie, this movie is a great example of what you can do when you don't have the haze coat.

This movie opens with an... explicit situation of adultery. Yes. This French headmaster is having an affair with one of the teachers at the school that everyone is aware of, including his wife, who works there. A then planned execution of his murder, which involves sedating him with a drug, put in his whiskey, and then holding him under the water in a bathtub until he drowns and then revealing his dead face afterwards.

By the way, I love that he drinks a glass of the whiskey and is like, I do not feel good. This is weird. Give me another. and then drinks like three glasses. They then return to the school and they dump his body in the pool, but then when they eventually drain the pool, his body is not there. And the question is, is somebody playing a trick on them? Are they going to be blackmailed?

Does somebody else know? And the movie has an incredible twist ending. I can't. God damn it. So good. I can't believe I made it almost all the way to the end. All right. Well, that's amazing.

So it's really important for two reasons, Lizzie. Number one, it's based on a French novel, the Woman Who Was No More by Pierre Wallow and Thomas Narczezac, I believe I got that kind of right, and it was originally the goal of Hitchcock to adapt it. Hitchcock tried to get the rights to this book. Cluso beat him to it. Robert Block also said that it is his favorite all-time horror film. They're both deeply influenced by this movie.

Some had even started to call Clousseau the French Hitchcock. And so, I wonder if Hitchcock wanted to kind of beat Cluceau at his own game. Cluzo was shooting in black and white. He was not using very much music, so Hitchcock maybe thought, I can do the same thing. Another reason that Hitchcock later gave for wanting to shoot in black and white, although, again, this could have been revisionist history or kind of retconned in, was that the blood, if they had done it in color, circling the bathtub drain, would have been, quote, too repulsive. So he goes back to Paramount and he presents his plan. And they say, no, no, thank you. We are not interested.

No, thank you. Well, I want to say repulsive, but also notoriously difficult to shoot. blood and have it look realistic for a long, long time. Like even all the way up into the 70s, they really, really struggled with this. It either looked sort of like technicolor, bright, or it looks sort of brown. It can be very hard to get the right consistency in color. Yeah. Paramount, they don't care. They go, we don't care what the blood looks like. We have nothing to do with this. We are not financing this. Oh, and also, all of our soundstages are booked, so you can't shoot it here. And Hitchcock says, it's fine. I'll finance it myself. I'm going to take no

salary, I'm going to keep 60% ownership of the negative, and I will shoot it at Universal, MCA's parent company who co-produced Alfred Hitchcock Presents. Again, Paramount is the distributor for the film. They basically say, fine, we'll distribute it, you finance it, and you find somewhere else to shoot it. That's how much we do not want to touch this movie. That is crazy. They made a whoopsie do. Even some of Hitchcock's closest collaborators didn't want to be involved, producer and Oscar-nominated screenwriter. It should be mentioned. Joan Harrison told him, this time you're going too far. Also, here's a recommendation of who you should hire to write the script.

Well, at least she did that. Hitchcock reportedly considered asking Robert Block to write the script, but MCA said, he's unavailable. Why don't you hire someone off of our client list instead? Yeah. So Joan Harrison and MCA suggest James P. Kavanaugh. He is an obvious pick.

He had written for Alfred Hitchcock Presents, including an Emmy-winning episode called Fog Closing In. By the way, Alfred Hitchcock presents, in its entire run, only won three Emmys. So this was a big deal that this one had won an Emmy and an episode that Hitchcock directed called One More Mile to Go, which has some similarities to the plot of Psycho. Let's talk about these briefly because it's important. The first one, fog closing in, an agoraphobic woman who wants to live with her parents, but who has been taken away from them by her husband, a slightly older man, is kind of trapped

in her home as he goes to do his sales job. A mental institution escapee comes into the home, and there's an unexpected turn where she relates to this mental patient more than anybody else in her life. And then he leaves. And then when her husband returns home later, she murders her husband in order to be able to go back and live with her parents. Wow. It's great.

It is so fun. It is very unexpected. Phyllis Baxter gives a great performance as the central woman. And then one more mile to go is about a man who kills his wife in a kind of fit of rage argument. And then he puts her in the trunk of his car. And he's attempting to find a place to dispose of the body. And it's a comedy of errors of sorts as basically a busted tail.

light leads to a motorcycle cop overzealously following him forever and kind of torturing him as he tries to get rid of this body. So between these two, right, like weird, overbearing mother figures, you know, shut-ins, trying to get rid of a body. It just makes a lot of thematic sense. So James B. Kavanaugh's hired and he takes a crack at the script. And he makes some flourishes. So instead of Mary's head getting cut off, her throat's going to be slashed for the straight razor. He then has Sam Loomis and Lila develop a romance. Now, I will say, this is hinted at in Blocks novel. They actually find that they of more in common than Sam did with Mary. And in fact, Sam and Mary's relationship is really not an in-person relationship at all in the book. I mean, I would argue that there's hints of it even in the

final product. I think a little bit. I'm glad that they don't go farther than they do. But there's a little bit of, you know, like we're going to appear as man and wife. We're going to go. Like, it's, it's, you know, it seems like it's potential. It's more explicit in the book. Okay. You know, the other big difference is the central theme of the book is really, how well can you know anyone? Not just how well do you know your neighbor. How well do you know the guy that works at the Bateswood Motel? But how well do you know the people in your life? How well does Sam know his fiancé? How well does Lila know her sister? Can you really know anyone? That's really kind of the pervasive theme of the novel. Now, like the book, instead of a note, they find a bloody earring in the bathroom. Sam confronts Norman as he does in the book.

He gets hit over the head with a liquor bottle, and then he gets woken up by the sheriff and then Lila finds Norman's mother. And then a local sheriff, not a psychiatrist, explains Bates's a psychological state. In the book, it's actually between... I know, I know. It's a very Hitchcockian thing. I love Hitchcock. I'm sorry, he does not know how to end some of his movies. I'm assuming, though, that Bates is described as he was in the novel.

I'll read some descriptive words from the novel for you, Lizzie. 40 years old, bespectacled, thinning sandy hair, and heavy set. The word they use in the book repeatedly is fat. He's a fat man. Okay. Well, we know what Egg Gain looked like, so... Yeah, it should be mentioned that some key elements from this past would make it into the movie, although it's unclear they were Kavanaugh or Hitchcock's ideas.

is, depending on whose notes they were using, details like the parlor conversation between Mary and Norman. That had been moved from the house into the motel itself, and Norman cleaning up the shower after the murder and dumping her car on the swamp. But Peggy Robertson said of the script, it took some kind of genius to take that story and make it dull, but Kavanaugh managed to do it. Oh dear. So in his book, Stephen Rubello actually goes as far as suggesting that Joan Harrison may have suggested Kavanaugh specifically because she knew he wouldn't be up for the job. Quote, did she hope that the collaboration might persuade Hitchcock to get Psycho out of his system by doing it for TV or to drop it all together? Having seen the episodes he wrote for Alfred Hitchcock Presents, I don't think that.

I actually think he just very faithfully followed the book. But as we'll see, they make a couple of really important changes from the book that make the movie what it is. So Hitchcock needs to fire his writer, something he left to an agent named Michael Ludmer. Hitchcock could not fire writers. As Ledmer later said, it was very difficult for Mr. Hitchcock to express his feelings. He didn't know how to say, I'd like to tell you how I feel about these pages if there was a problem. He knew that a writer would be upset or disturbed if you were to find out that somebody else was coming on the script, which is exactly what was happening.

So while Kavanaugh seemed like an obvious fit, writer Joseph Stefano, didn't seem to make any sense at all. His only connection to the material is that his agent, Ned Brown, was the MCA agent who had arranged the rights purchase for Hitchcock. So I'm guessing Ned Brown just suggested him to Hitchcock. Yeah. He was a musician-turned writer. He's about the same age as Kavanaugh, late 30s, but he's a lot less experienced. He'd only been writing for two years. Hitchcock didn't want to hire him.

He didn't want to meet with him. He says, this guy's too inexperienced. I don't really like his writing so far. But Ned Brown keeps pushing. Hitchcock says, fine. They sit down and Hitchcock says, what do you think about the book? And Stefano says, I hate it. And Hitchcock says, all right.

Well, it's not going to be another north by northwest, but, and then Stefno keeps going. He goes, the problems the characters. I don't care about them. I wish I knew this girl. I wish Norman were someone else. And Stefano had some solutions, like, what if we start the movie from Mary's perspective, opening with her shacking up with Sam Loomis? So Lizzie, the book opens with Norman at the motel. Okay.

He is ostensibly the protagonist. And then we go to Mary, who is explaining that she has this long-distance relationship and she's living in Fort Worth and she'd love to go meet up with Sam and Fairvale. Instead, what if we make them share a hotel room at the beginning? We see her perspective. We see what she's interested in. We see that she wants this man and she can't get him. Very smart to center her. We root for her.

What if we then make Norman younger and more appealing? And Alfred Hitchcock said, like Anthony Perkins? Now, Anthony Perkins could not be more different than the Norman Bates that Robert Block had put on the page. At this point, Perkins is 27 years old, boyish good looks, athletic, gangly at 6'2. Lizzie, what current actor does he roll? reminds you of so much. Well, not his son, who's also a director. No, no, not Oz. I don't, I don't know. Andrew Garfield. Oh, yes. Yeah. Uh-huh. Absolutely. Absolutely. Dead Ringer. Yeah. Well, you know, it's interesting, too, because it makes sense, given the kinds of sort of serial

killers that were coming to the four when Block wrote Psycho to write him the way that he did. Yes. It was, you know, Ed Gein, like, no, I don't think he was fat, but he was not attractive. He was a strange-looking guy. Oh, and you had kind of a droopy eye. Bit of a wonky eye. And so the idea to make a serial killer like this, this handsome, is really pretty revolutionary. And it's what people found quote-unquote remarkable about Ted Bundy later, even though the fact that anyone thought Ted Bundy hot is just stunning. But this is really like the first time, I think anybody kind of did that. You know, if you read the book, which I highly recommend, I think it's really well written. It's very fun. It's really fun to read the book and compare it to the movie because I do think it is a very

faithful adaptation, but I think it makes some very smart changes for the screen. One of the biggest differences, though, is the naivete of Perkins is such a choice because in the book, although he is naive and ultimately undone by some of his own assumptions, Norman Bates of the book is well read. He's very interested in history and the occult. And, you know, for example, and sort of like fantastic practices elsewhere, he also has this deep resentment. for his mother and women and refers to them as bitches. And there's this internalized misogyny that is ever present in the stream of consciousness of his thoughts

that I think they so smartly omit in this film because it really plays up the twist so well. Yeah, you don't need to say it. As we mentioned, Perkins at this point is a good old boy. Lizzie, he's a romantic lead. Yes, he is. He had just been Oscar nominated for playing a Quaker in William Weiler's friendly persuasion.

And Stefano says, it's brilliant. He had seen Perkins years earlier during the rehearsal of a play called Look Homeward Angel, and there's this long scene in which Perkins has nothing to do. And yet, Stefano's eye kept drifting toward him. He had this look about him. I don't know, kind of an innocence, a pellucid innocence, which just means translucent, very apparent innocence. So it's unclear.

If Stefano or Hitchcock knew or discussed this, although the 2012 film Hitchcock does seem to make it explicit that they did, or at least Hitchcock did with his wife, Alma, I could not find anything to support that creative decision in that film, but Lizzie, Anthony Perkins, had a secret. Not a necessarily super open secret, but I do think it was known. Do you know what this is? He was gay. Yes.

He was bisexual or gay. He never came out at a time when homosexuality was still very much illegal, as we discussed on Giant with Rock Hudson. And he would be playing a character who would be diagnosed on screen as suffering from a psychotic split and repressed sexual desires, and he would have to cross-dress in this role, effectively. It's a brilliant bit of casting. So Stefano writes the draft with Perkins in mind for the role, but not Janet Lee. According to Stefano, the second time he and Hitchcock met, Hitchcock suggested they hire a big-name actress for the role of Mary, so her death would come as an even bigger shock.

But Stefano said that Hitchcock initially wanted someone, quote, much bigger than Janet Lee, someone who I didn't think was terribly good. We could never figure out who that name was. Stefano has never said who that name was. I do not know who that name was. I wonder. I mean... Monroe? Maybe. 1959? Yeah. Actually, yeah, totally. That would make sense.

It's kind of who I was thinking. The other names that come to mind, Marilyn Monroe makes the most sense in the context of the story, although I would argue that she was great. But Grace Kelly, obviously, he had worked with previously. She doesn't make as much sense. I heard he was trying to move on. He didn't think it was the time for Grace Kelly anymore. You know what I mean? Like the world had moved on from that type of film.

Marilyn makes sense. Ava Marie Saint maybe a little bit, but I don't know if she's... Although she was pretty big. She was a studio recommendation. We'll talk about her in a moment. Yeah. Okay. Jane Mansfield, also.

Jane Mansfield, sure, the rip-off Monroe. So Hitchcock hires Stefano on a week-to-week basis. So for the next four weeks, they meet every day for story conferences, and they never talk about Psycho. So Stephano was in therapy at the time, and Hitchcock was really interested in his therapy, more so than the movie. And Stefan was really interested in Hitchcock's movies. So he'd watch one of Hitchcock's movies, and then he'd just ask him hours worth of questions about it.

And he asked him things like, why did you tell them? the truth about Madeline halfway through Vertigo, and he unlocked the one thing Hitchcock was truly afraid of, which was the audience getting bored. The audience would have gotten bored if we didn't reveal the truth. So, Stefano, with that in mind, and with like basically no other input from Hitchcock, starts writing his draft. He didn't read Kavanaugh's draft. He actually didn't know there was another draft of the script already. That makes sense. It was pretty common at the time. He also didn't know that Robert Block's book was based on Ed Gein. Oh, interesting. He didn't find out until a couple years later, William Friedkin showed him information on Ed Gein's case that he'd collected in his office,

which was very freaking. Yeah. But I do think actually that probably helped the movie because... And then he blew it off a shotgun next to his head. Yeah. So, ah, bam! But I think it allowed Stefano to craft a character independent of any preconceived notions of who that character should be. Yeah.

And I think that's really valuable here. So Hitchcock goes on a cruise with his wife and collaborator Alma, and he says, Hey, Stefano, take a crack at the opening scene. He writes the scene, the in-person, in-bed, post-coital opening scene to the movie, which, by the way, I love that the end of North by Northwest is Carrie Grant and Ava Marie St. are about to do it. And then this movie opens with them just having done it. Yeah. We'll skip over that part. Yes. He reads the scripts. The next morning, Hitchcock tells Stefano, Alma loved it.

Which is apparently as close as you could get to a compliment from Hitchcock as a screenwriter was he would say that his wife loved it. He could never tell you that he loved it. Of course. Alma loved it. Now, Lizzie, the people who got arguably the fewest compliment from Hitchcock on his movies were which people? The actors? Oh, yes. He had a reputation with actors. He referred to them as cattle and spoiled children.

And yet, everybody wanted to work with him, including Anthony Perkins. He later said there weren't that many autours in those days for an actor to get the crook of the finger from Hitchcock was about as high as you could get. I think that was probably generally true. So Perkins signed on before the script was finished. In May of 1960, Variety put out a very, very subtle headline. Hitchie puts Perkins in transvestite role. Oh, boy. All right.

Which I'm guessing Perkins wasn't thrilled about. That's interesting also because in the movie they explicitly say that that's not what's going on. I know. I think they smartly do. Yeah. Perkins signed up before the script was finished, but he knew that the role would call for him dressing in Norman's mothers, Mrs. Bates' clothing. I don't think he was thrilled about this, but what we do know is that he wasn't going to let fear dictate his decisions. Lizzie, which cross-dressing role had he turned down recently?

That starred Janet Lee's husband. Some like it hot. That's right, the Tony Curtis role. Oh, interesting. Wow. Shell oil, Jr. He turned it down. According to some sources, he and or his agent were uncomfortable with him acting most of the movie in drag. He'd actually done a little bit of drag in 1958's The Matchmaker toward the end of the film. And then he took the co-lead role in Audrey Hepburn's Green Mansions, which is just

directed by her husband, Mel Ferrer, which was one of the few critical and commercial misfires of her career. He did that instead of Some Like It Hot. Some Like It Hot was obviously a big hit. Yes. And so he decided, I'm not going to let fear dictate my career. I'm going to do Psycho. It's a risk, but so was any movie. He also came relatively cheap. He owed Paramount a movie. He could be secured for $40,000. And as for Hitchcock, everything about Perkins, he had a lovely singing voice. He was a matinee teen idol, his romantic leads. No one would see it coming that he was the killer. So as we mentioned, Stefano has claimed that Hitchcock wanted to someone bigger than Janet Lee, but he provided no name. We did read that Hitchcock briefly considered

Ava Marie Saint, as you mentioned, makes a lot of sense right off of North by Northwest. Yeah. I think there is a steelyness to Janet Lee that is pretty necessary for this movie. Astealiness and also a glamour. Definitely. Ava Marie Saint is, even though she's so beautiful, I think she makes more sense in like on the waterfront, for example, whereas Janet Lee would not fit into that world. Yeah. The studio apparently also asked him to look at Piper Laurie, Martha Hire, Hope Lang, Shirley Jones, Lana Turner, who was, I think, having a career revival at this point. But Hitchcock wanted Janet Lee, you know, popular leading lady of the 50s. I didn't know this, Lizzie.

She was discovered by Norma Shearer. Oh, interesting. Retired MGM actress. We've talked about her Irvingthalberg's widow, who discovered who later? Bob Evans. Bob Evans, that's right. So apparently she was on a ski trip in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. She noticed a framed photo of a beautiful young woman at the registration desk.

She says, who is this? And the man working the desk says, oh, that's my daughter. She takes the photo. Yeah, this lady was nuts. Passes it along to an agent at an MGM exec who pass it along to Lou Wasserman, who passes it along to another MCA agent, and there begins the career of Janet Lee. That's insane. I know.

Leave her alone. I love he just physically takes this man's photo of his daughter. I'll have this photo of your child. So at this point, Lee's in her 30s. She's married to actor Tony Curtis, and she's a mother of two, Kelly Curtis, and... Jamie Lee Curtis. Jamie Lee Curtis. And she just starred in Orson Wells, fantastic.

Although at this point in time, much studio muddled version of Touch of Evil. Panned, right? Or at least critically mixed. Yes, critically mixed would later be re-evaluated as an absolute masterpiece, especially they did Walter Merch, I believe, actually headed the recut of that movie based on Orson Welles extended notes on how the movie was supposed to be edited. I don't know when you last time you saw Touch of Evil was I've re-watched it for this episode. It's incredible. I think this film was the biggest influence on how Paul Thomas Anderson moves his camera in his

movies. Watch this movie and then watch the movie. the first five minutes of Magnolia, and it is, you can just see the influence. Janet Lee's character spends a lot of the movie alone at a motel. Yes. Surrounded by the would-be killers of the Grandi gang as Charlton Heston, a Mexican detective in this movie. The one part of the movie that doesn't age well, because actually, I think the movie is actually extremely politically progressive in that the Mexican detective is the good guy.

Right. Just happens to be played by Charlton Heston, yes. And Orson Wells' American detective is the bad guy, and it's an amazing Orson Welles' performance. Anyway, okay, Hitchcock sends Lee Psycho the Book, and he says, don't worry, I'm going to beef up Mary's role. This is true. So in the book, she dies much earlier structurally than she does in the movie. So, you know, that was one thing that did surprise me on this rewatch, because I hadn't seen it in, like, at least probably seven or so years. And I always think of this movie as like, oh, it's so brilliant because they kill Janet Lee so fast.

Not true. She lasts like half the movie almost. That's right. There is a colloquialism that She dies a third of the way through. That's not accurate. It's basically the midpoint. Yeah. And so I think a lot of people assume it's the end of act one. It is in the book. It's not until the midpoint in the movie.

It's brilliant. No, she gets to do a lot in this. I agree. She is the lead of this movie. I would argue opposite Anthony Perkins. Co-leads is how I would describe it. The first half of the movie is her movie and there's a handoff at the murder. Yeah.

Even though she was the biggest name, Lee was actually only paid $25,000 for her part. She actually made less than Anthony Perkins on this movie. Wow. I was very surprised to hear that. Shortly before production began, they made a crucial change, Lizzie. Mary Crane was a real person in the Phoenix telephone book. Oops. And they were going to shoot some scenes in Phoenix.

So they had to change her name to Marion, which unfortunately was Robert Block's wife's name. Oopsies. So he'd avoided it for the book and then it ended up that way for the movie. So production's about to start. They send the script out to all the department heads to the studio and the motion picture association of America. Specifically, Luigi Larashi, Paramount's liege. to the MPAA and the Motion Picture Production Code. About a week later, Luigi tells Hitchcock,

it's impossible to issue a certificate on a finished film based on this script. He warns him, The Legion of Decency of the Catholic Church is going to have a lot of problems with this movie. The Legion of Decency. Now, Lizzie, the biggest concern at this point in time from the MPAA's perspective was, quote, a very pointed description of an incestuous relationship between Norman and his mother, which does not actually make it into the finished film. And so Hitchcock was known to put basically red herrings in his scripts, just ridiculous lines and details that he could trade off and bargain with later on.

Yeah, that he knows he's going to get rid of. Exactly. He also didn't tend to care when they changed dialogue is what I read. He really cared if they changed structure, perhaps logic, but not dialogue so much. So ultimately, the script gets stamped approved subject to seeing the product. And Luigi says, exercise the utmost care in the scenes involving the murder and the shower. And Hitchcock says, no problem, just not in the way you're thinking. Yeah.

So if Hitchcock can't walk this tightrope, to be clear, if he cannot get this approval upon a finished film, he will have personally financed a distasteful B-movie that will not be able to be distributed in much of the United States. So principal photography begins on November 30th, 1959. He has 36 days. This is half what he'd had on North by Northwest, depending on the source.

There were rumblings of a potential sag strike on the horizon. So, again, you want to make sure you finish before that happens. So Hitchcock didn't have time to direct it like one of his big budget Technicolor movies. So he directed it like television. According to script supervisor Marshall Shlom, he would do 14 to 18 camera setups per day, never going past take three or four, because he always felt the spontaneity would diminish and the scene would take on a different feeling. Now, it was apparently a very formal and closed set. Much of the crew wore shirts and ties. There were also very fun references to some of Hitchcock's other recent films. Lizzie,

if you watch Vertigo, the McKittrick Hotel where Kim Novak is staying, is a dead ringer for the Bates House, especially the interior staircase. The Bates House, we should mention, designed by Joseph Hurley and Robert Clatworthy. It's built on the Universal Lot. You can actually still go see it. We'll talk about that at the end. It's great. It looks so good. You almost can't tell that it's on a lot.

I think maybe because of how well they do the landscaping around it. Yes. Some of that is Matt Painting, I believe. But, yes, it's all seamlessly tied together, I think, you know, incredibly nicely. Actually, originally, they were going to have the house and the hotel be connected in Kavanaugh's draft and they were separated. So Hitchcock knew what he liked, and that was true of the actors. So Lizzie, he had his favorites, Janet Lee and Anthony Perkins.

And then there was everybody else like Vera Miles and John Gavin. He apparently called John Gavin the stiff. He's not wrong, though he is mean. Unfortunately, he's the weakest part of the movie. I agree. I don't think it's a huge problem. It's fine, but yeah. Apparently the opening scene, which was already stressful because this risque was very

frustrating for Hitchcock because he felt that Gavin had, quote, no sex appeal. Again, I don't disagree with him. I will say on watching this, it is just so clear that Janet Lee and Anthony Perkins are in an entirely other ball game than everyone else, except Martin Balsam, who I think is playing in the same league as they are. I think Martin Balsam is very good as Arbigas. Yeah. He knows the cat and mouse of it all.

Yeah. So let's talk about Perkins and his approach. So apparently when he showed up, he was very nervous. And he was taking this very seriously. He'd actually only met Hitchcock once before. and he was originally very hesitant to make suggestions on set. But he said that he felt that Hitchcock seemed interested in his perspective. So he started to express himself.

He'd make little changes, a butt to an and. And then he started making bigger suggestions. Like it was his idea to chew candy corn nervously. And then he contributed to a rewrite of the speech in the parlor about mother. So it started really becoming Anthony Perkins' role. Meanwhile, Janet Lee said that Hitchcock was always trying to make her blush or laugh or scream. He would leave the mother's corpse in her dress. room and decide if it was monstrous enough based on how much horror he heard in her shouts when

she would go in there. But it should be noted, she also wrote, quote, he was very thoughtful in regard to comfort and safety, end quote. So a quick aside, because this is a stark contrast to the birds, for example. Well, there's a reason for that. Janet Lee is an extremely established star, who is also married to an extremely established star. She is not somebody that he has the same ability to fuck with that he does tippy hedron on the birds, which may be exactly why he sought out Tippyhedron for the birds. Entirely possible, as you covered excellently in our episode of The Birds. Janet Lee agrees with you.

This is what she wrote. With people like Vera Miles and Tippyhedrin, he was going to be their Svengali, groom them for stardom. As talented as these women were, they were not really established, and initially they weren't married. I had made many pictures. I was married, and we had socialized a bit. It was a completely different association I had with him.

Yep. End quote. She has spoken very positively about her experiences on this movie. That is not to say he did not have the ability to be monstrous with some of his actresses. No, that's fine. I completely believe her that he was that way with her. It's a power thing. She was in a position of power at that point. That's right. Now, let's talk about the most consequential scene that they created together, Marion's murder in the shower. It was delayed twice, once because Janet Lee had a head cold the second time she was on her period. The scene remains iconic and

controversial, as you mentioned, Lizzie. Now, one of the reasons that the scene remains controversial is because everybody involved seems to remember this scene and the making of this scene differently. Some people have said that Hitchcock tried to persuade Janet Lee to do the scene nude. Janet Lee said that this is not true and would make no sense given the strict censorship guidelines at the time. Yes. Again, complete nudity is never permitted. This includes nudity in fact or in silhouette. Undressing scenes should be avoided and never used saveware essential, indecent or undue exposure is forbidden.

So Janet Lee has said that the plan was always to look naked without. actually being naked. Yeah, that makes sense. Also, note that in the first scene, she does not get undressed. She is already undressed and she dresses herself over the course of the scene. Yes. She said that she and the wardrobe supervisor poured over strip tease magazines looking for ideas of how to do that. And then she said, quote, every male on the set tried to donate his services in the search. We had popular literature. There was an impressive display of pinwheels, feathers, sequins, toy propellers, balloons, et cetera, but nothing suitable for our needs. Right.

In the end, the wardrobe supervisor comes up with the perfect solution, flesh-colored moleskin, which will be applied as pasties effectively over her crotch and her nipples. Yeah, she's basically wearing a little skin murkin. Yeah. I'm picturing, have you ever seen Gypsy? No. Oh, my God. Okay, you should watch Gypsy, but it obviously features burlesque dancers and strippers,

and there's a whole number called You Gotta Get a Gimick where they're all explaining their costumes. And there's one that's like a light up Christmas tree. That's all I can see. That's great. So Janet Lee said, so for each morning of the seven shooting days and 71 setups, we covered my private parts and we were in business. So that's right. The roughly 45 or 52 second scene took one week and I read 78 shots or setups to complete, which may seem excessive. You can tell it's a lot of shots.

It was actually necessary to not make it explicit in some way. So they couldn't show her actual body or the murder. It had to all be implied. Another rumor. It's not really Janet Lee's body in the shower. scene or portions of the scene. On this front, Hitchcock said the studio made a rubber torso filled with tubes of fake blood, but they never used it.

In the movie, the knife only touches the skin once on a shot of her stomach, and it's actually a reverse shot, I believe. But they did hire an artist model, a pin-up model, Marley Renfro, to block the scene and act as Marion's corpse when Bates wraps her in the shower curtain. I was wondering. And for a shot of Marion's bare bottom after she's murdered. Now, Marley Renfro claims that the shot of her stomach with her belly button, which You weren't allowed to show belly buttons on screen at the time.

Actually, that's why they wore high-wasted pants and bikinis at the time. She said that that was her. She said also the shot of the hand on the shower curtain where you can actually see her breast out of focus was her and a few other shots as well. Is the shot of her where she's kneeling, essentially, and you actually see almost her full back. Is that her as well? I think that might be Janet Lee, but Marley Renfro, I believe, says that that might be her. I could not confirm one way or another because Lee claims that it's all her. except for the shots once she's dead and being carried out.

I mean, it looks like Janet Lee, so I don't know. Marley Renfro says it is her for a number of shots as well. And again, Hitchcock gave a quote to Truffaut later, Francois Truffaut, where he said he shot all of the nudity, quote, with the girl, and I believe he's referring to Renfro in that instance. Watch the documentary 7852, if you want to see it in more detail, and if you want to see Marley Renfro identify which shots she says were hers. So regardless of who it was with, it was not easy.

The water would wash off the mole, Marley Renfro said this with her crotch patch as well as Janet Lee. According to the wardrobe supervisor, Hitchcock was very impatient. I remember him sitting there twiddling his thumbs clockwise or when particularly exasperated counterclockwise. I also remember him trying not to generate any giggles to break the tension. Instead, he did a lot of pontificating, which was something he did often to cover his shyness. Now, Lizzie, the most difficult shot was actually the final shot of Marion's eye after she was

murdered. So if you remember, it ends with an optical. It's technically a screen grab of her eye. they are doing a rotation, a circular rotation, a counterclockwise, I believe, rotation on her eye, and then they pull out along the floor of the bathroom as she stares past the camera. The original plan was for her to wear contacts for the close-up, not unlike how Michel wears contacts to hide that he's a corpse in Le Diabolique. But the optometrist said that she would need a few weeks to learn how to put them on and get used to them without damaging her eyes. Remember, at this point in time,

this is basically putting a giant piece of glass in your eye. Right, because they were hard. They didn't have time to do that. Hitchcock didn't want to. risk her hurting her eyes. So in the end, they did more than 20 takes of this shot of her holding still on the ground. I know. And her little eyeball still twitches in that last shot. It's still twitches. Which is okay, actually, I thought, because it's like potentially a final, you know. Well, apparently there was actually an even bigger twitch or breath that nobody noticed until they were screening it. And Alma, Hitchcock's wife, caught it. And that's why they cut to the showerhead before they cut back to her eye and then pan into the hotel room and land on the money.

Makes sense. So Alma caught the breath there. So while that may have all been Janet Lee, for all I know, or Janet Lee and Marley Renfro, we do know none of it was Anthony Perkins. So Hitchcock hired a double for that whole scene for Anthony Perkins because he was, quote, excessively shy around women. That was actually a female stunt double who was doing that scene, that they painted her face darker and darker shades so that it would be obscured upon the reveal of the shower curtain being

opened. Which is great and very effective. So that is not Anthony Perkins. Also, the way that they make her eyes glow is so spooky. Well, it's actually not dissimilar from the message that they would eventually use on obsession, for example. Fun fact, that's also not Perkins doing Mother's Voice. That is his friend, actor Paul Jasmine, mixed in post with the voices of actors Jeanette Nolan and Virginia Greg. But the most interesting controversy around the scene, Lizzie, is whether or not Hitchcock was there or did Saul Bass direct it? So, Liz, do you remember who Saul Bass is? We talked about him briefly

on our coverage of The Shining, who's a very famous graphic artist. He did some of the posters for The Shining. He had done the opening titles for Vertigo and North by Northwest, the opening graphics for those films, and he also did the posters for those movies. He was brought on as a, quote,

pictorial consultant on this film, also to do the titles, and he storyboarded the whole shower sequence. And you can see his storyboards online. And they matched the final sequence very, very closely. But Saul Bass actually took it a step first, in the subsequent years after the film, and he said that he directed the shower scene.

He said that Hitchcock basically said, why don't you do it? But several people who were there said that that's not true, including Janet Lee. I very seriously doubt that. She said that Bass threw the storyboards, but Hitchcock and only Hitchcock directed the scene. I also read one version that Saul Bass directed a test version

with Marley Renfro, which could explain some of the confusion, and I could believe. Sure. It seems unlikely to me that Hitchcock would have handed over this scene to Saul Bass, even though he did obviously come up with much of the look and feel for it because his storyboards do match the finish the finish Salvas's contributions. No, it seems extremely unlikely, given what we know about Hitchcock, though, and his predilection for control.

And also knowing that this is probably the most important scene in the entire movie that they have to get right in order for it to even ever be able to air. I can't see him not doing this. That's right. So they wrapped shooting on February 1, 1960. They were nine days over schedule, so that 36 days was a little too aggressive. This was actually two weeks after the WGA went on strike, and they narrowly avoided the SAG strike, which would start roughly a month later, headed by Ronald Reagan in negotiations. Fun fact, that was the last time until 2023 that SAG and the WGA struck simultaneously.

But Hitchcock and his team were far from home free. So his editor, George Tomasini, script supervisor Marshall Slam, and Hitchcock put together a rough cut in two weeks. they would show Hitchcock some of the film. He'd stand up in front of the projector and say, no, boys, and then he would tell them what he wanted to do, and then they'd go back and forth, and then they'd it for a little longer. He was struggling with the movie. He was struggling with the ending.

He didn't know if he wanted to end with Norman Bates' creepy smile or add the quick flash of the grinning skull, you know, his mother kind of in there. The best. He actually ended up printing both versions. They screened both versions. Some ended with Just Bates's smile, others with the superimposed skull. The first rough cut screening takes place on April 26, 1960, at Universal.

A lot of the crew. think this looks great. You know, A.D. Hilton Green, the costume supervisor, Helen Colvig. Screenwriter Joseph Stefano said, this thing's a bomb. It looked awful. I came out sick. It was long. It had no tension. It looked careless. Hitch saw the look on my face. And he said, a lot of work to do. It's just the rough cut. But Hitchcock was having major doubts about Psycho. Lizzie, if you had to guess what element of the movie was missing during the rough cut, what would you guess? Music. That's right. The music was absent from the film. Now, Hitchcock had brought on Bernard Herman.

Herman is a legendary composer. We've talked about him on Taxi Driver. That was his final film, right? Taxi Driver was, yeah. He'd scored for Orson Wells at the Mercury Theater. He'd done Citizen Kane, the Magnificent Ambersons. He'd won an Oscar in 1942 for The Devil and Daniel Webster. And they had done five films together, Hitchcock's last five films.

It's safe to say that Herman knew Hitchcock fairly well. After the screening, Herman said, Hitch was nervously pacing back and forth, saying it was awful, and he was going to cut it down for his television show. He made Psycho with his own money, and he was afraid it was going to be a flop. So apparently, Hitchcock had never intended Psycho to have music. His notes in the original script specified minimal score. Lizzie, I wonder if part of it was that he really felt like he wanted to beat Clousseau at his own game.

Again, if you go watch The Wages of Fear, which I rewatched for this episode, which, Lizzie, if you've not seen it, you've got to see it. You would love it. It's about four men transporting nitroglycerin across South America to blow up an oil well. It's what Sorcerer is based on William Friedkin's sorcerer. Ah, which we will definitely cover. Yeah, Friedkin says it's not based on that film. It's just based on the book that that film's based on, okay, whatever. But it's all based on the same thing.

And then again, he blew off a shotgun next to someone's head. Yeah. And Friedkin's brilliant, and his version's great too. But Clousseau's version, Wages of Fear, has no music either. And it is incredibly tense. Hitchcock wanted the audience to be able to hear things like traffic noises, Marion's car dying, the rain and the thunder, footsteps on creaky wood and a shower.

For the shower seen his notes read during the murder, the sound of the shower should be continuous and monotonous, only broken by the screams of Marion. Herman said Hitchcock wanted no music in the shower sequence. He didn't want any music throughout the hotel sequence with Marion and Norman. At one point, he just said to Herman, well, maybe we could give it a fidgety post-Beebop jazz score. Herman decided that Hitchcock was having a breakdown and couldn't be trusted. So he ignored him. And he said, what if I do a score completely for strings?

I used to be a violin player We'll have no drums, no rhythm section Joseph Stefano said, like, that's so weird, this is a tense thriller. Don't you need drums? Don't you need a rhythm section? But he had been working with these restrictions his whole life. I believe he did the day the Earth stood still with like some brass and seven pheromans.

Right. He had been working within this type of restriction forever. So I'd like to paraphrase some quotes from Herman's biographer Stephen Smith about his approach to the score. As Smith notes, Hitchcock was notorious for planning every detail of his movies, except the music with Bernard Herman.

Herman was given way more latitude than a lot of Hitchcock's other composers. Hitchcock's working with a limited budget. He's working in black and white, so Herman says, I want to match the black and white cinematography with the black and white score. Herman found tremendous range

within his limited group of instruments, the string section. He made the strings extremely dry. He put mutes. He loved to have mutes on his strings. It creates a very different sound from what we think of as the usual Hollywood romantic film score

that used violins. It's the exact. It's not opposite. It's cold. It's chilly. And he uses the strings also for percussive effects. He also was pulling from his own library. So Lizzie, according to Professor Royal Brown, some of Psycho's cues or the inspirations for them were actually written by Herman decades earlier. And you can listen to this. So if you pull up on YouTube, The Swamp, which is a cue from Psycho, it actually sounds exactly the same to my ear as Symphonetta for Strings, a piece of music that Herman had written back in the 1930s. So they held another screening with Herman's music added.

Here's what first assistant director Hilton Green said. When the music came in, it just knocked everyone out of their seats. Everyone except author Robert Block. Hitchcock said, what do you think of the film? He said, a long pause, a deep breath. And then the truth, Mr. Hitchcock, I think this is either going to be your greatest success or your biggest bomb, end quote. But before they can find out, they're going to need to contend with the motion picture production code. So, Lizzie, the screen the movie for Luigi, Paramount's liaison to the MPAA, and Peggy Robinson,

is sitting next to him. According to Robertson, he began shifting around his seat as Janet undressed in the motel bathroom. Anything the matter, Luigi? asked Hitch dryly. And then on came the shower scene. By now, Luigi is shaking with fear and he shouts, Hitch, I see a breast. And Hitch replied calmly, Luigi, it's all in your imagination. There are no breasts in this picture. Are there, Peggy? I love how Hitch is just going, these aren't the droids you're looking for. Yeah, these aren't the boobs you're looking for. Luigi insists, I have to show the scene to the other members of the NPAA board. Half of them watch it and they say, I saw Janet Lee's tits, 100%. And the other half say, I don't think I saw any tits in this scene. I'm just assuming they're saying tits. Yeah, for sure.

Hitchcock says, okay, I'll cut the nudity. He then tells his editor, George Tommasini, don't cut anything, just resubmit the exact same cut. Yeah. They resubmit the exact same version. The half of the board that said that he had seen boobs before, now don't see boobs. And the half that had not seen boobs before, now see boobs. Yeah, it's a boob Roarsack test. This goes on for a week. Hitchcock says, Take out the nudity if you allow me to keep the opening scene of two people in bed. The board says no. So Hitchcock says, okay, let's do the reverse. Leave the shower as it is, and I'll reshoot the opening.

They say, okay. He says, but you have to send some of your people to the set so I can be assured that the new version will pass. They agree. The reshoot is scheduled. And then they apparently never showed up. So Hitchcock didn't shoot the new opening. Wow. And then he got to keep the nudity in the shower sequence, which is kind of there the whole time.

There is a little bit of nudity if you look really careful. There's more than I remembered, to be honest. Yeah. It's very tastefully done. It's very well done. But you can definitely see, you know, the curvature of her breast at one point. You can also see the back of her butt when she's in the bathtub leaned over the side of the tub. Yes, briefly.

Yeah. Now, they actually did cut a more explicit shot of her butt. Joseph Stefano hated that they cut this shot. It was actually after she was dead. It's an aerial shot of her over the edge of the tub. He said it was the most tragic scene in the movie. And he thought it was really important to bring home the tragedy of what had happened. but it ended up being sacrificed.

It's in there a tiny bit that aerial shot from above is, but it's very brief. Yeah. The NPA approved the final cut. The Legion of Decency gave it a B, morally objectionable in part for all. And then Hitchcock decided to throw another curveball toward the exhibitors a very unique release strategy. So there were three trailers, but the most famous was the third. We'll post it on our Patreon. I'm not going to make you watch it right now, Lizzie, it's six and a half minutes.

It's very similar in style to the intro of Hitchcock's show, Alfred Hitchcock Presents. In fact, there's no actual footage from the movie in this trailer. It's Hitchcock walking and talking around the Bates Motel and the Bates House. And somebody on Reddit described it as giving away the entire plot, but in a way that only makes sense if you've already seen the movie. Because he says, he goes into the bathroom and he says, something happened here. There was so much blood everywhere.

It was so awful. I can't tell you about it. So you're primed to wonder what's going to happen in the bathroom. And then at the end of the trailer, he opens the shower, and there's a woman screaming, but the title of the movie covers her face, but it's Vera Miles. It's not Janet Lee. Oh.

She's wearing a Janet Lee wig, but it doesn't look like Janet Lee. So a lot of the audience thought, Vera Miles must be the one that's going to get murdered going into this movie. Again, another misdirect. Then there were promotional photos and newspapers that implied again that Vera Miles' character was the murder victim, and the trailer ends with this line. The picture you must see from the beginning or not at all,

for no one will be seated after the start of Alfred Hitchcock's greatest shocker, Psycho. So theaters at this time did rolling admissions. But Hitchcock said, We won't allow you to cheat yourself. You must see Psycho from the beginning. Do not expect to be admitted into the theater after the start of each performance of the picture. We say, no one, and we mean no one, not even the manager's brother, the president of the United States for the queen of England. God bless her.

He was really worried that people were going to come in after Janet Lee had died and wonder where she was because he doesn't show up in the movie again. Who would come in halfway through the movie? Movies were disposable entertainment. They were, again, rolling admission. You just wander in. And you would watch the second half and then stay for the next showing to, watch the first half. Oh, oh, that's bizarre. Okay. Actually, this strategy had been used on Le Diobolique in France. Yeah, you have to. Because the twist ending that I gave away for you. Yeah,

thank you. It was still a big deal. According to Lee, the theater owners were terrified they were going to lose their customers. She says that on opening day, the exhibitors called Hitchcock and begged him to drop the policy. Journalists actually even hired pregnant women to try to persuade the theaters to let them in after the movie started playing, just to test the policy. So Psycho premieres on June 16th, 1960 in New York, rolls out across the East Coast at the end of the month. It releases wide in September. Hitchcock stood his ground.

The theater started providing umbrellas. They sold chairs to people waiting in line. And the strategy worked. But not everybody was happy, including the critics who didn't get advance or private screenings of the film. They had to watch it opening day with the masses. And the reviews were mixed. Janet Lee said 60% were negative.

Time Magazine said that Hitchcock bears down too heavily in this one. The delicate illusion of reality, for a creak and shriek movie becomes instead a spectacle of stomach-churning horror. Newsweek called it a gimmick movie, although they did praise Perkins and Lee's acting in the shower scene, specifically the shot of the showerhead squirting onto the camera, which is done, but they actually plug the holes in the middle of the shower and they use a long lens, so the water's actually going all around the camera. That's how they did it. Esquire said it was merely one of those television shows patted out to two hours by adding

pointless subplots and a reflection of a mean, sly, sadistic little mind. The response in England was apparently actually worse. There was a feeling in England that Hitchcock had abandoned his homeland, and a lot of the critics didn't like that. But Lizzie, people couldn't get enough of Psycho. Psycho would not go away. And in fact, some of the critics started to change their tune. In July, New York Times critic Bosley Crowther warned readers that they better have a pretty strong stomach and be prepared for a couple grisly shocks. He said Mr. Perkins and Miss Lee perform with Verve, but that the psychological explanations for Bates's character felt like a bit of leg pulling and the movie's denouement falls quite flat for us.

By August, he was actually defending the movie against readers, who felt that that it went too far with its tasteless violence, and we're calling for it to be banned. And by December, he said, Psycho's a top 10 movie of the year. You gotta go with the times. Lizzie, Psycho made $32 million against an $800,000 budget. Wow.

So $320 million, basically, in today's money. Yeah. It was nominated for four Oscars. Do you know which four categories? If you had to guess. Uh, was Anthony Perkins? No. No?

Okay. Any actors? Yes. Really? Janet? Janet, best supporting actress. Okay, I mean, deserved. She is great in this.

Adapted screenplay? No. What? Okay, tell me. Directing, Hitchcock? Yeah, sure. Art direction, black and white. Joseph Hurley, Robert Clatworthy, set direction by George Milo, and Cinematography by John L. Russell,

cinematography, black and white. They were separated at the time. And nothing for Bernard Herman. Nothing for Bernard Herman. Bernard Herman and Anthony Perkins, for those two to be excluded, is ridiculous. They were so robbed. Anthony Perkins' actor in a leading role, I think this is one of the biggest snubs in Oscar history. Do we know who was?

Burt Lancaster won for Elmer Gantry. Trevor Howard was nominated for Sons and Lovers, Jack Lemon for The Apartment, Lawrence Olivier, and Spencer Tracy inherit the wind. I have not seen Elmer Gantry, and I have not seen Sons and Lover. I do think Jack Lemon, Lawrence Olivier, and Spencer Tracy are all really good in those movies. I was going to say those three, or the three I've seen as well, yes. But even there. But Anthony Perkins is doing such much.

modern work here. Yeah, that's a tragedy. Alfred Hitchcock's lowest budget film in years would prove to be his most enduring. So he would make more hits, one we've covered, the birds. Marnie would be another one. But none would ever top Psycho. It remained the highest grossing film of Alfred Hitchcock's career. On the Dick Cavett show in 1972, he said he once got a letter from a man who said his daughter stopped taking baths after seeing Le Diobolique.

And now, after seeing Psycho, she stopped taking showers too. And as a result, she was very unpleasant to be around. Hitchcock replied, Dear sir, send her to the dry cleaners. Good thing I didn't see Lady Abolique when I was that age. Yep. In 1996, Janet Lee told the New York Times that after making Psycho, she stopped taking showers, only baths.

She made sure the doors and windows of the house were locked, left the bathroom door and shower curtain open and always faced the door. She did win a golden globe for her work on Psycho, but she and Hitchcock did not work together. Again, her career slowed down a bit after Psycho intentionally. She took a break after Bobbiard. By Birdie to spend time with her young daughters. I was going to say a little bit.

She did Bye Bye Birdie, and she did a big one right before that. Mentree and Candidate. Oh, yes. Great movie. And then she was kind of back in 1967, I believe. She had started to do more. She later said, quote, I've been in a great many of films, but I suppose if an actor can be remembered for one role, then they're very fortunate.

And in that sense, I'm fortunate. Now, Anthony Perkins, I believe, had a somewhat more complicated relationship with the movie and its legacy. Well, yeah. He did continue to work a lot. He worked with Orson Wells in 1962 for the trial. He did Catch 22. Murder on the Orient Express is a fun one from 1974.

Yes. But he, as we've discussed, Lizzie, had become somewhat synonymous with Norman Bates. Psycho kind of broke the spell of his boyish charm. And it was read by many audiences as creepy subsequent to this film. It was hard to differentiate the character and the man. His legacy, I think this is complicated by the fact that he also had a really troubled relationship with his mother. His father had died when he was five. He later said that he and his mother were abnormally close,

that she would, quote, touch me all over, even stroking the inside of my thighs right up to my crotch. Oh, no. Yeah, he later said he did not understand that that was abuse until much later in his life. He never did come out. He eventually did get married. He married a woman.

He had two children, including Osgood Perkins, the writer and director. He reportedly endured some form of conversion therapy. You know, Tab Hunter, who says that he was in relationship with him. He returned to Psycho decades later with actually the decently well-reservation, received Psycho 2, and he directed Psycho 3. Screenwriter Joseph Stefano returned for the fourth film, a TV movie, Psycho 4, The Beginning.

And it was actually while making this film that Anthony Perkins was diagnosed with HIV. He died at his home in Los Angeles in September of 1992 from AIDS-related pneumonia. He was 60 years old. These stories are so, it's so sad to hear about this, and particularly with this one, especially, because I believe the term the Anthony Perkins effect refers to someone playing a role so villainous that they are kind of unable to ever recover from it. And I think coupled with the fact that he was obviously dealing with being closeted, it's just this must have been really hard.

Yeah, I mean, that was the concern with Anthony Hopkins in Silence of the Lange, right? Was, oh, this is going to follow you for the rest of your career. But in 2022, the American Film Institute listed Norman Bates as the second greatest villain in cinema history. Lizzie, do you know who he is next to? One spot ahead and one spot behind him. Well, Hannibal Lecter has to be number one. Hannibal Lecter is number one. And do you know who he was one spot ahead of?

No. Darth Vader. Oh, wow. Okay. So. Great. Psycho and Peeping Tom were released the same year in 1960. They laid the foundation for the slasher genre.

It would not really kick off in earnest in the United States until 1978, thanks in no small part to the efforts of Jamie Lee Curtis, Janet Lee's daughter, although it would jump to Italy first. The Bates Motel remained where it had been built for years. It was actually used in a number of television shows. And it was eventually moved to higher ground, Lizzie, the back of it, butts up against the War of the World's plane crash set where Steven Spielberg shot Tom Cruise exiting that destroyed house in 2006. Fun. And of course, what Hitchcock really killed with this movie was the motion picture production code,

which was revealed to be pretty toothless with the release of Psycho and died completely in 1966. And that concludes our coverage of Psycho. Amazing. I hope you enjoyed it, Lizzie. have to ask you what went right. That's easy for me on this one. It's Anthony Perkins. Ah, he stole it.

I know. So many things went so right about this movie. I think you're absolutely correct that the restrictions, you know, the specificity that they were required to adhere to in this ended up, I think, making the movie better for it. But it doesn't work without him, I don't think. And the performance that he gives is so small in a role where it would be so tempting to go, you know, big with it, hammy, to tip your hand or a twirl of the mustache and he doesn't do it anywhere. And I also think he shows a great respect for Norman Bates in the way that he plays this role,

which you have to in order for him to really be scary. It is remarkable. It's so natural. It looks like a performance you would see now and not battened eyelash at. I just can't get over how good he is in this movie. and he should have gotten to do more. He obviously was an absolutely unbelievable actor. And then at the very end, when you do see him come with the knife in his mother's outfit, it is so scary. And that could easily have been like a sort of laugh out loud moment if it had been done wrong or if he'd played anything wrong over the course of the movie.

And he's just pitch perfect. So Anthony Perkins. I also think there is a childish glee in his eye when he runs into the room as Mrs. Bates. that is so wonderfully smart because to me it actually removes some of that kind of grotesque resentment and internalized misogyny from the book, which I do like in the book, but it's actually much more twisted in the film to me where it's almost, there's a performative quality to it almost. It's almost like he wants her to see him like this. Well, that did make me laugh that he had to take the time to go get dressed before he goes to

I know, but I kind of loved it. There was a bit of a performance art quality to it that made it feel, I don't know, look at me. Look at my true self, you know, but I got to kill you now. But also, I don't know. There was a quality of a little boy showing his mom. And I liked that because it ties in so thematically. I would like to give mine to editor George Tomasini. I think Bernard's Herman's score in this movie, outside of the shower scene, is incredible. Yeah. And obviously he heightens the shower scene. But one thing I think we all forget is it took so long to make a single cut at this point in time. and they're doing an average of, I believe, 18 frames a cut is what Walter Merch said during that shower scene.

Wow. And figuring out, and there's like a fun jump cut in that scene to create the effect of her being, like, thrown against the wall at one point. I think sometimes the editing is overshadowed by the music, which I do not begrudge people at all. Bernard Herman's score is fantastic, but I do think this movie is exceptionally well edited at a time when rapid cutting like that was fairly unusual. Yeah. So I'll get mine to George Thomasini. Great. All right.

Lizzie, what do we have next week for the fine folks at home? We're heading to, I guess, supposedly New England, but actually San Juan Island. We are going to Practical Magic. I'm very excited about this. We are covering it, obviously, because Practical Magic 2 is coming out. And, you know, I thought, ah, synergy. We should look at the original. And I was pleasantly surprised by how interesting and honestly moving the story behind that movie is. So I can't wait to dive into it with you next week. And we will have a primer on witches coming. out on Friday discussing a brief history of witches and also how they've been portrayed across cinema. So tune in to that. Bring your broomsticks. That's right. Well, folks, if you are enjoying this podcast, there are a few easy ways that you can help support it. We are an independent podcast. If you guys would like to help us grow, leave us a rating and review on whatever podcast you're listening to us on that always helps us visibility. Make sure you hit subscribe or follow on that podcaster so our episodes drop every Monday and occasionally Fridays, like with

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I didn't have a lot of time to do the shoutouts this week, been on vacation, but I wanted to write a little ditty for all those crazy couples out there that just make it work, even when it's a chore. A boy's best friend is his mother Well the son is a poor substitute For a lover, mother, shut your mouth, you need me It's not as if she were a maniac, a raving thing She just goes a little mad

Sometimes we all go a little mad sometimes Stap our guests in the shower Quite a few times now, Norman Go turn off the motel sign The motel sign The motel sign Now there's nothing crazier than spending $50 every month Just to keep your favorite podcast going

We are so grateful to all of our full stop supporters For doing just that In song form, per one of your requests Adrian Pencoria, Alex Barrett, Angeline, Renee Cook, and the Thomas Benchend Olman Blaze Ambrose Brian Donahue, Brittany Morris, Brooke, Cameron Smith, C, Grace B, Chris Leal,

Datum 3, David Friskillante, Darren Dan Dale Conkling, M Zodia, Evan Downey, Felicia G, film it yourself, Frankenstein, Galen and Miguel the Broken Glass Kids, the cast and crew of winter trip to Browntown, Half Greyhound, James McAvoy, Jason Frankel, J.J. Rapido, Johan George Gunnerson, John D. Wiltshire, J., Hillpiper, Karina, Kanaba, Amy Olgeslager, McCoy, Lanna, L.J. Lizzie Bassett is pretty damn fabulous, too, I agree with that lousy Susan Lydia House, Mandy Roarlandson, Mark Bertha, Matthew Jacobson, Michael McGrath, Nate, full stop, Ashley, Nate the Knife, Pete Reedree Peterson, Rose me Southward, Earl Jury, Sadie, Just Sadie, So Manchianani, Steve Winterbauer, Suzanne Johnson,

The Provost family worthy O's sound like O's. I have run out of names. There's nowhere left to go. I guess you're stuck with me. We're all a little crazy. We love movies too much, and that's what I love about you. And this podcast so much freestyling at the end of the full stops. I hope there's only one more gore to go.

Because my children are banging on the door, I got to go. All right, guys. We will see you next week for Practical. Mergic. Portical Mergic. See you there. Bye. Bye.

What went wrong is a sad boom podcast presented by Lizzie Bassett and Chris Winterbauer. Post-production and music by David Bowman. This episode was researched by Jesse Winterbauer and edited by Karen Krepsaw.