Marion Crane wants to have a life with Sam Loomis, but they need money in order to get married. Marion will do anything, even steal $40,000 from her employer. Marion drives off and makes herself look suspicious because she is nervous. She’s never stolen from anyone before because she’s always been good. Marion realizes she can’t continue doing this. Marion stops at a motel for one night and plans to return the money the next morning. Marion takes a shower to calm herself. A mysterious silhouetted figure sneaks into the bathroom and stabs Marion to death. The owner of the motel, Norman Bates, finds the dead body and disposes it.
Blaine: While making “North by Northwest”, Alfred Hitchcock was already trying to figure out what his next project was going to be. He found a review in “The New York Times” about a book called “Psycho”. Alfred Hitchcock bought a copy of the book and read the whole thing. After that it was clear to Alfred Hitchcock that “Psycho” was going to be his next movie and he told that to Paramount Pictures when he met with them. The first thing Alfred Hitchcock needed was a screenwriter and there were a lot in mind. Joseph Stefano was recommended by his agent because he was determined that Joseph should work with Alfred Hitchcock. Alfred looked at the two previous things Joseph had done and wasn’t impressed with them. Another thing was Alfred Hitchcock wasn’t too big on working with young and new writers. Joseph had to convince Alfred Hitchcock that he was good enough to write the screenplay. Joseph had ideas for how he would reconstruct the story as a screenplay. Joseph thought the audience shouldn’t know the mother is dead and have it focus on Marion. Marion steals money and tries to run away, but she does it for love. While she’s on the run, she stops at a motel because it’s hard to go on while it’s raining hard. Marion decides to return the money because she doesn’t want to get herself into too much trouble, but before she gets a chance she is stabbed to death while taking a shower. In the book, the murder decapitates Marion. Alfred Hitchcock really liked Joseph’s thoughts and liked how it would focus on the Marion character, so he decided to give Joseph the job.
Whenever Alfred Hitchcock would make a movie based on other material, he would transform it into something new. And while “Psycho” was in development, both Alfred Hitchcock and Joseph never mentioned the book because they were making a movie. Alfred always spent a lot of time with a screenwriter discussing how the movie was going to go. Alfred would let the screenwriter work alone a times while writing the script. Alfred was going to spend some time with his wife, Alma, and told Joseph to write the scene in the hotel. Alfred would show Alma the first draft of that scene and she loved it. Joseph was touched that both Alfred Hitchcock and his wife were impressed with his writing. Alma was a great business partner and partner in life for Alfred Hitchcock. Whatever interested him, Alfred Hitchcock would always ask Alma’s opinion on whether it would make a great movie or not. Alfred Hitchcock wanted “Psycho” to be in black and white because he thought it would be to gory if it was in color and he also wanted to make the movie under a million dollars. Alfred Hitchcock learned that a lot of low budget movies were doing successful at the box office and that made him want to try it out to see if “Psycho” could do well at the box office. “Psycho” was going to be distributed by Paramount Pictures, but shot at a different studio, Universal.
Joseph wrote the murderer, Norman Bates, different compared to how he was in the book. In the book, Norman Bates was a middle aged man who drank a lot and Joseph didn’t like that. Joseph wrote Norman Bates as a young man who looks good on the outside, but inside is vulnerable and kind of sad. Alfred Hitchcock had Anthony Perkins in mind because he represented how Joseph wrote the character and as luck would have it Anthony Perkins was available. The first time Joseph told Alfred Hitchcock the story he had in mind, Alfred thought a star should play Marion Crane. Alfred was going to be making a change to cinema by having a star play a character that gets killed off early in the movie. Alfred Hitchcock had Janet Leigh in mind. Alfred sent Robert Bloch’s novel to Janet Leigh, with a note saying he wanted her to play Marion Crane. The note also said that the story they were developing was going to be completely different from the book. At that time, there was no script. Janet Leigh already knew she would do “Psycho” before reading the book because it was a great opportunity to work with Alfred Hitchcock. Janet Leigh found the novel to be interested and never had there been a movie like “Psycho” at the time and that got Janet even more interested. Janet Leigh knew how brilliant Alfred Hitchcock was and was dying to see what it would look like through his direction. The number one thing Alfred discussed with Janet was the camera movement and how she was going to act and move in front of it. That was a challenge for Janet, but Alfred Hitchcock was a huge help.
The number one thing that had to be kept secret on “Psycho” was the mother. No one was supposed to know she was dead, that Anthony Perkins’ character was keeping her corpse inside the house and he was pretending to be her when Marion was killed. Alfred Hitchcock made sure that fake rumors about casting the mother would be going around so that way they wouldn’t suspect anything. Alfred Hitchcock made sure a lot of things on “Psycho” were kept secret from the public because the movie’s a mystery.
Alfred Hitchcock and Joseph Stefano thought John Gavin should play Marion’s love interest, Sam Loomis. They really liked John Gavin in this one movie he was in and that was that. The first scene they shot was the opening scene where you see Janet Leigh and John Gavin in bed together. It was a little awkward for Janet to shoot that scene, but she did what she was told to do by Alfred Hitchcock and she was happy to have done the scene with John Gavin because he was easy to like and a gentleman. Alfred Hitchcock felt he wasn’t getting enough out of Janet. Alfred wanted to show that Marion is deeply in love with Sam Loomis. Alfred always made sure Janet felt comfortable with the stuff she was doing and he asked Janet if she could put more into the love making.
Janet improved herself for that love making scene for Alfred Hitchcock because he was a gentleman. Alfred Hitchcock wanted to make his cameo appearance early in the movie before the Marion character gets killed. People would always be keeping their eyes open for Alfred Hitchcock wherever he would show up, but with “Psycho”, after Marion gets stabbed to death, the audience would only focus on the murder and the mystery after that. Alfred’s cameo in “Psycho” was standing outside the building Marion works at.
Alfred Hitchcock had trouble with cops ever since he was a kid. The police thought that Alfred did something wrong and took him to the police station. He was alone in a room for a while. The scene where Marion is being questioned by a cop with a serious look on his face represents how Alfred feels about cops. Some of Alfred Hitchcock’s movies would have to be shot at real locations and Alfred wasn’t big on shooting in real locations because it cost more compared to how much it would be to shoot in a studio. The only real location that’s in “Psycho” is the car place Janet goes to get a new car because she feels the cop is harassing her.
The Bates motel and the house are supposed to be located somewhere in California in the film. As people know, the house and motel are really close together and the house had to have a specific angle to it that you could see from the motel room. The motel and the house were shot in back lot of Universal studios. They were getting ready to shoot the scene where Marion arrives at the motel and rain is poring, but there was one problem. When they were about to do a shot of the house, there was a full moon right next to it and the moon wasn’t supposed to show at all because Marion shows up on a dark and rainy night. The crew had to block the moon using a long pole and something black.
When they shot “Psycho” it was 1959 and nudity wasn’t allowed to be shown in movies at that time and Janet Leigh had to look like she was naked during the shower scene. Rita Eiggs, the wardrobe girl, and Janet worked together on how to make Janet look nude. Rita had an idea of this plain moleskin. The color of it could match skin. The way it is written in the book is different from the movie because Marion’s head gets cut off. In the movie, she gets stabbed to death. Joseph Stefano wrote a lot of detail for how that scene would go. There were rumors saying the storyboard artist directed that scene for Alfred Hitchcock, but no one else, but Alfred directed it. Alfred had strong ideas for how that shower scene would go and people like Janet Leigh and the crew were witnesses to seeing Alfred direct that scene. The starboard artist did a wonderful job at showing how that scene would look through storyboards, but it was Alfred Hitchcock who was explaining how it should look through his words. The shower scene took seven days to shoot because of the different angles the camera had to be in, straight down to straight up. That scene required a lot. Janet had a double, who was a nude model, because Alfred thought Janet wouldn’t feel comfortable showing off her body in a scene, even though the shots wouldn’t be that sharp.
That scene became top secret, no one outside the project was allowed to know about it.
With each stab the silhouetted figure is doing, it cuts to either a close up or a different angle of Janet Leigh or her double. The makeup department tested out what would be perfect for the blood and chocolate syrup became it. The last shot of that scene is the close up of Janet’s eye and the camera is slowly backing away. It wasn’t an easy shot because back then a lot of the cinematography was done by hand and they didn’t have anything automatic. What was difficult for Janet was pretending to be dead and keep this blank look on her face and keep her eyes wide.
With the star of the movie gone, there had to be someone else to focus on and keep the movie interesting.
Vera Miles was supposed to be in Alfred Hitchcock’s “Vertigo”, but she became pregnant and couldn’t do the movie, which upset Alfred Hitchcock. Vera was on contract with Alfred Hitchcock and owed him after stepping out of “Vertigo”. There was the question on what part Vera would be good for in a future Hitchcock movie. It took a while and then while “Psycho” was in development, Alfred thought Vera Miles should play Marion’s sister, Lila. Vera was able to make things more interesting after Janet Leigh’s character gets killed off.
Anthony Perkins wasn’t around when they shot the shower scene. Norman Bates is the one who stabs Marion believing he’s his mother, but you don’t know that till the very end. Till then she is nothing but a silhouette and different people would play her. Both men and women were tested out to see who should do the voice of mother, but in the end Virginia Gregg got the job. Lila Crane discovers Mrs. Bates is a corpse. Lila sees the corpse’s backside at first and believes it’s alive, until she turns the chair around. Someone was operating the chair from underneath while laying on his back so the chair could stop at that certain point. Alfred Hitchcock used that Mrs. Bates prop to scare Janet Leigh. Janet was heading to her dressing room after lunch and as soon as she opened the door she screamed because the prop was just sitting there waiting to scare her.
There had to be an explanation on why Norman Bates would be running around believing he was his mother. Screenwriter Joseph Stefano loved writing that scene because he studied this type of insanity and he wanted to be in the movie saying the dialog he wrote himself for the psychiatrist. But they cast an actor instead. In those days you couldn’t say the word transvestite on film because it was thought of as dirty, but Joseph thought that should be the reason Norman Bates would dress up as his mother. In the dictionary, it says a transvestite is a man who likes to wear women’s clothes and Joseph stuck with it.
“Psycho” had to be checked for it’s censorship and the guy who was in charge of that thought he saw a breast during the shower stabbing scene, so they ran the scene again and discovered he was wrong. Alfred Hitchcock’s wife, Alma, would be a judge and she had suggestions on how the film should be edited. Alma used to be an editor in England and she basically became an editor on “Psycho”. She would look at the film frame by frame and fixed it up. People didn’t know what to expect when they saw “Psycho” because Alfred didn’t want anything given away. It had to be a surprise, like Janet Leigh being stabbed to death.
People left screaming during the stabbing scene. Janet Leigh did not realize how terrifying the shower scene was until she saw the film. She was scared out of her mind. It made her afraid to go into the shower.
Critics didn’t think “Psycho” was as good as Alfred Hitchcock’s other films. Usually critics got to see a film in a screening room before it’s release, but because a lot of things in “Psycho” had to be kept secret they had to watch it with an audience. Alfred Hitchcock was disappointed that “Psycho” didn’t get good reviews. Like all Alfred’s film, so much was put into it and the stuff the critics said about “Psycho” made him upset. Of course critics aren’t always right. Little did they know was “Psycho” would be a classic. People who went and saw it liked it and liked being scared. “Psycho” was also one of the two movies released in 1960 that started the slasher genre, next to “Peeping Tom”, a film by Michael Powell.
