Psycho

WHAT WENT WRONG

This episode of 'What Went Wrong' dives into the making of Alfred Hitchcock's groundbreaking 1960 film 'Psycho,' exploring how creative cons

Key takeaways

Hitchcock's decision to make 'Psycho' as a low-budget black-and-white film was driven by studio restrictions and the need to bypass the strict Motion Picture Production Code.
The film's shocking violence and sexual content were groundbreaking for its time, especially with Janet Leigh's early scene in a bra—radical for 1960s cinema.

Main topics

The cultural and production constraints that influenced 'Psycho'
Anthony Perkins' iconic performance as Norman Bates

Notable quotes

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...

I was so genuinely afraid of showering for like... a couple of years after watching this that I took a lot of baths.

Conclusion

Despite its low budget and controversial content, 'Psycho' became a genre-def

Transcript preview

Speaker 3 (0:00) You know 15 seconds back and then 30 ahead you land mid-sentence. Oh you're scratching your head What went wrong and what can you do? Listen ad-free with just a click or two. Well, howdy, folks, and welcome back to another episode of What Went Wrong, your favorite podcast that, well, I think you know that part. We wanted to let you know that we are now offering bonus and ad-free episodes to all Patreon, Spotify, and Apple subscribers for only $5 a month. Well, that's less than going to one-third of a movie on a Wednesday afternoon down here in Los Angeles. Now, just so you know, because of technical limitations and the search with Apple, you Apple... special features recipients may not see the ad-free episode until the afternoon on release day, but don't let that there deter you and go on and sign up at Patreon, Spotify, or Apple. And we hope you have a good day now, y'all, and enjoy this episode of What Went Wrong. You go 15 seconds back and then 30 ahead. You land mid-sentence or Speaker 1 (0:59) you're scratching your head. What went wrong and what can you do? Listen ad-free with just a click or two. Speaker 4 (1:26) 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? Speaker 3 (1:53) 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 Leigh 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? Speaker 4 (2:33) 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. Famously. I can understand because watching it now, I was like, okay, yeah, I can understand why you might Speaker 3 (2:47) think that like... It feels a little quaint by modern standards in some ways. Speaker 4 (2:51) Yes, although it is still scary. 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 Leigh'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 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 Leigh is also incredible. I do love Martin Balsam as Arbogast. 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 Speaker 3 (5:42) a Speaker 4 (5:42) classic for a reason. So I'll stop talking. Chris, what about you? Yeah, I Speaker 3 (5:46) 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 slashers. 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. You know, 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 this episode, man, did I think it's masterful. So incredibly well done. As you mentioned, we'll talk about him. I think Anthony Perkins laps not only everyone in this movie, but he's like arguably three decades ahead. Yes. Hollywood in his performance in this movie. And so for me, the two things that really stand out are. Anthony Perkins and Bernard Herrmann'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 Herrmann kind of falls out of favor eventually with Hitchcock as film score moves into a more jazzy sort of era in the 60s. And Herrmann, 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 for 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. Speaker 4 (7:38) You know, I know we're going to talk in this episode a little bit about Les Diaboliques, 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 Les Diaboliques 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 reference. Night of the Hunter. Night Speaker 3 (8:08) of the Hunter. Sure. Yeah. Speaker 4 (8:09) 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 Speaker 3 (8:17) little bit. Yes. Definitely with the gothic influences and whatnot. Yeah. Speaker 4 (8:20) The car sinking into the... Yeah. And the water in 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. Speaker 3 (8:32) 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 were 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. First, the details. Psycho is, as I mentioned, a 1960, you could call it a thriller film, a psychological thriller. I would call it a proto-slasher film directed and produced by Alfred Hitchcock from a screenplay by Joseph Stefano based on Robert Bloch's novel of the same name. It stars Anthony Perkins as Norman Bates, Janet Leigh as Marion Crane, Vera Miles as Lila Crane, John Gavin as Sam Loomis, Patricia Hitchcock. Hitchcock's daughter. Did you recognize her? No. She plays Caroline. She works with... Speaker 4 (9:24) Oh, she's the one at the beginning who's like, I got these special tranquilizers. From my mother. Speaker 3 (9:29) Yeah. Oh, Speaker 4 (9:30) she's great. Speaker 3 (9:30) She works with Marion at the Realty Trust Organization, Parody Mutual, I believe is what it's called, at least 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 and the Making of Psycho by Steven Ribello. Psycho Behind the Scenes of the Classic Thriller by Janet Leigh. Split Image, The Life of Anthony Perkins by Charles Weinkauf. 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 Leigh. 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 Speaker 4 (10:45) 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 adaptations. 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 Speaker 3 (11:33) right, well, 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 Speaker 4 (12:07) Washington State, Speaker 3 (12:08) 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 hardcovers 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. Speaker 4 (13:11) 41. So funny. It reads like a man about to kill his wife for the insurance policy. A Speaker 3 (13:17) 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 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 describe 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 Gesundheit, was only suddenly discovered to be a mass murderer. I said to myself, there's a story here. Speaker 4 (14:23) 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. Speaker 3 (14:30) 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 Bundy. Yes. Yes. Ted Speaker 4 (14:38) Bundy method. And then Ed Gein skin suit situation. Speaker 3 (14:42) Yes. Just to be Speaker 4 (14:43) very clear, this would be quite a shock to find this out. This Speaker 3 (14:46) 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 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 doorstep and 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 influence the sensational way crimes like this would eventually be broadcast by news. Speaker 4 (15:35) 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. Speaker 3 (15:50) 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, Vi'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. I guess 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. Speaker 2 (16:43) Yeah. Speaker 3 (16:44) 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, quote, amnesiac fugue with another personality taking over. And that personality is going to be his dead mother's. 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 fore. Speaker 4 (17:16) But Speaker 3 (17:17) 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 Speaker 4 (18:19) a movie. The motion picture code would never allow Speaker 3 (18:22) it. But I'm guessing he had more pressing problems. Psycho was even gritty for the publishing world. When his agent, Harry Altshuler, took the book out, Harper and Brothers rejected it. But Simon and Schuster bought it for their monthly Inner Sanctum 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. Psycho's 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 LA 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 Lovecraft. 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 vs. the Flying Saucers, Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Sensing a theme? Speaker 4 (19:54) Yeah, it's a lot of aliens. Yeah, we're in the atomic age. Either aliens or something's been irradiated and now it's you. Right. Speaker 3 (20:01) 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, did 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. 10 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 $9,000 or $9,500, depending on the source. After commissions and taxes, Block would pocket roughly $5,000 or $50,000 in today's money. So, you know, 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 in his 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 piqued 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 our next project. I can't do it. It's cock 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, Block's 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. Too 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. 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? Speaker 4 (23:13) Oh, gosh. Is it North by Northwest? Speaker 3 (23:15) Yep. That was the one right before. Vertigo? Yep, very good. So shortly after Buying the Rights to Psycho, North by Northwest premiered. It was a box office hit. It made a net profit of $6.5 million in North America alone. That's a Speaker 4 (23:29) lot of money Speaker 3 (23:29) 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 Hitchcock later called them technicolor baubles. 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. They're... I mean, North by Northwest is like almost a James Bond spoof. It's basically a comedy. It's so funny. It's Speaker 4 (24:01) ridiculous. Yeah. Speaker 3 (24:02) Yeah. Cary 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 Too Much, and Vertigo, and North by Northwest. Again, all Technicolor VistaVision. These are all budgeted between like $1.5 and $2.5 million until North by Northwest, which is $4 million. Speaker 3 (24:31) If you're like me, you hate paying rent. And if you're not 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.