Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho

by Stephen Rebello

  In the advertisements, Hitchcock also broke precedent with what had become another standard Hollywood practice: the re-use in advertising posters of the Saul Bass title designs used in the credit sequence. Commented title-letterer Harold Adler: “Saul liked to use very tall, thin type that looked very stylish in print but was not bold and sometimes hard to read.” Hitchcock opted instead to employ in the posters and ads the title concept by Tony Palladino that had been effective on the cover of the original novel—bold, shattered letters. The cut-and-paste, tabloid look of the posters and print ads was much in keeping with the jagged, jarring nature of the movie itself.

  Yet perhaps Hitchcock’s single most potent publicity gimmick was the three preview trailers for the film. They were produced at a total cost of $9,619.09, and one of them has become legendary. The trailers were shot by cinematographer and special effects expert Rex Wimpy over three days at the tail end of production: for about three hours on January 28, for five hours on January 29, and finally—using one of the leading ladies—on February 1. About one month prior to the openings of the film, Paramount released two of the three—the two being brief “teaser” trailers—to theaters nationwide. The first reinforced Hitchcock’s policy that “No one but no one will be admitted to the theater after Psycho begins,” while the second pushed secrecy. “Please don’t tell the ending,” Hitchcock scolded. “It’s the only one we have.” By far the most innovative was the third trailer—Hitchcock’s six-minute tour of the Bates house and motel.

  In the tradition of David O. Selznick’s preview-of-coming-attractions trailer for Gone With the Wind and the Orson Welles trailer for Citizen Kane, Hitchcock wanted the public to glimpse no actual footage from Psycho in the previews. Such a ploy was not new to Hitchcock trailers. For his first Technicolor film, Rope (1948), he had also concocted an offbeat trailer that features a character who is murdered before the action of the film begins. Hitchcock assigned the writing of the trailer script for Psycho to James Allardice, one of his contract writers. Allardice, a playwright (At War With the Army) and Emmy-winner (“The George Gobel Show”), generally scripted Hitchcock’s lugubrious, sponsor-baiting leadins to “Alfred Hitchcock Presents.” Allardice devised a tongue-in-cheek script that cast Hitchcock as equal parts geek-show carnival barker and House of Horrors tour-guide. “Here we have a quiet little motel …” says the Master, shot from a bird’s-eye angle as he stands before the motel set. “Tucked away off the main highway and, as you can see, perfectly harmless-looking, whereas it has now become known as the scene of the crime.”

  As the camera glides down for a close-up of Hitchcock, he explains:

  This motel also has, as an adjunct, an old house, which is, if I may say so, a little more sinister-looking, less innocent than the motel itself.

  With the house now looming behind him, Hitchcock continues to lay it on:

  … And in this house the most dire, horrible events took place. I think we can go inside, because the place is up for sale. Although I don’t know who’s going to buy it now.

  In that window in the second floor, the one in front, that’s where the woman was first seen. Let’s go inside.

  At the lower stair landing, Hitch halts:

  You see, even in daylight, this place looks a bit sinister. It was at the top of these stairs that the second murder took place. She came out of the door there and met the victim at the top. Of course, in a flash there was the knife, and in no time—

  Hitchcock’s fingers spiral and his features register mild disgust:

  … the victim tumbled and fell with a horrible crash, I think the back broke immediately, and hit the floor. It’s difficult to describe how the twisting of the [his fingers twitch] of the … well, I won’t dwell on it. Come upstairs.

  On the stair landing, Hitchcock prattles on:

  Of course the victim, or should I say the victims, hadn’t any idea of the kind of people they’d be confronted with in this house. Especially the woman. She was the weirdest and the most … well, let’s go into her bedroom.

  Hitchcock wanders into Mother’s bedroom and points out features of interests:

  Here’s the woman’s room, still beautifully preserved. And the imprint of her body on the bed where she used to lie. I think some of her clothes are still in the wardrobe. [He looks and shakes his head.] Bathroom.

  This was the son’s room, but we won’t go in there because his favorite spot was the little parlor behind the office in the motel. Let’s go down there.

  Hitchcock leads the viewer into the parlor behind the motel office:

  This young man, you had to feel sorry for him. After all, being dominated by an almost maniacal woman was enough to drive anyone to the extreme of, oh, well, let’s go in.

  The tour guide wanders about the parlor, indicating:

  I suppose you’d call this his hideaway. His hobby was taxidermy. A crow here, an owl there. An important scene took place in this room. There was a private supper here. By the way, this picture [pointing to the painting on the wall] has great significance because … let’s go along into cabin number one. I want to show you something there.

  Hitchcock approves of the stark white bathroom of cabin one:

  All tidied up. The bathroom. Oh, they’ve cleaned all this up now. Big difference. You should have seen the blood. The whole, the whole place was, well, it’s too horrible to describe. Dreadful. And I tell you, a very important clue was found here. [He points to the toilet] Down there. Well, the murderer, you see, crept in here very silently—of course, the shower was on, there was no sound, and uh …

  Shooting a look toward the opaque shower curtain, Hitchcock reaches out and tears it aside. A blonde in the stall screams and the screeching violins of Bernard Herrmann’s score shred the air. The shrieking woman is Janet Leigh, right? Look closer. The blonde is none other than Hitchcock contractee Vera Miles in a wig.

  The screen goes black and, over music not from the Bernard Herrmann score, a narrator says, “The picture you must see from the beginning—or not at all!”

  As is the case with the movie itself, the trailer is a gigantic hoax, a gleefully macabre con game. In retrospect, the promotional reel might seem audacious for the amount of plot information Hitchcock divulges. However, the narration adheres to a basic Hitchcockian tenet of suspense: Tell the audience something awful is going to happen—in the bathroom, say—then let them work themselves into a lather anticipating the pay-off. A more surprising and revealing aspect to the trailer: How “on-the-nose” is the monologue written for Hitchcock by James Allardice. What Hitchcock says almost suggests the director’s fear that prospective viewers needed to be prodded into seeing the house as “sinister” or Norman as someone “you had to feel sorry for.” The trailer takes the bully approach, but overall it adroitly strews clues that lead nowhere, and protects the surprise that it is Janet Leigh, the biggest star, who comes to harm in the shower.

  On completing the trailers, Hitchcock personally recorded close to a dozen radio commercials. “It is not true, as has been suggested,” he intoned in one of these, “that Psycho frightens the moviegoer speechless. I understand a number of men sent their wives there in the hope that this was true.” With the completion of his promotional tools, Hitchcock and Paramount closed the budget books on the film. Total production costs came to $806,947.55. By comparison, a Hitchcock half-hour television show of the day cost $129,000 an episode. In 1989, the cost of an average hour of prime-time television hovered at about $1 million; the budget for an average feature was about $16 million.

  Just ahead of the release of the movie, Fawcett World Library reprinted Psycho in paperback, with a new cover design that stressed the film tie-in (“Alfred Hitchcock’s most chilling movie from the novel by Robert Bloch”), cast credits, and two photographs of Janet Leigh. In addition, the ever-hammy Hitchcock posed for photographer Gordon Parks in a Life magazine spread to publicize the movie “about murder in a motel and an amateur taxidermist’s strange way of showing filial
love.” Parks imbedded the face of Hitchcock in the center of a huge, malevolent flower, his fist strangling a rose.

  The more the director toyed with the press about his forty-seventh release, the more scribes descended on the actors to prise out information. “Psycho is the weirdy of all times,” Vera Miles told gossiper Louella Parsons. “Of all Hitchcock thrillers, this is the one that will get people right out of their chairs. I’d like to tell you the plot, but when we started to work we all had to raise our right hands and promise not to divulge one word of the story.” Lurene Tuttle, who appeared in the supporting role of the wife of the sheriff, angered the Hitchcock office by divulging to a local columnist that Anthony Perkins “dressed up as his own mother” in the film.

  Knowing he had a final duty in launching his off-center film, the director and his wife, Alma, embarked on a halfhearted vacation-cum-promotional-junket in advance of the opening of Psycho on June 16 at the DeMille and Baronet theaters in New York. From June 8 through June 21, Hitchcock would try to scare up business in New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and Chicago. On September 13, if the movie appeared to warrant the effort, the couple would fly to Europe to promote Psycho in London, Munich, Berlin, Frankfurt, and Paris. Neither Alma nor Alfred Hitchcock knew it at the time, but these trips and the film that they were to promote would forever alter their professional lives.

  10.

  The Release

  The World Goes Psycho

  PSYCHO OPENED DURING THE summer of a boom-time America. The population stood at just over 180 million and the median income at $5,700. 1960 seemed a year of optimism for most white Americans, but discord and upheaval thrummed just beneath the country’s chrome-and-vinyl surface. While Broadway theatergoers caught the show from center orchestra seats at $8.60, kidnapper-rapist Caryl Chessmann had been put to death in the gas chamber at San Quentin on May 2. It was the year when the marriage of those sweethearts of TV, Lucy and Desi, came apart at the seams. The average secretary—like Marion Crane—earned about $75 a week, and could sip a five-cent glass of Coke and hum along to such jukebox hits as “Theme from ‘A Summer Place,’” “Teen Angel,” “Put Your Head on My Shoulder,” or “Everybody’s Somebody’s Fool.” Adolf Eichmann stood trial in Israel as a ruthless exterminator of Jews. Ted Williams retired from the Red Sox after slamming his 521st homer, and the “King of the Movies,” Clark Gable, died weeks after making The Misfits with Marilyn Monroe. Elvis, another show business king, returned from the army after a two-year hitch.

  Audiences flocked to movies starring box-office favorites Doris Day, Rock Hudson, Cary Grant, Elizabeth Taylor, Debbie Reynolds, Tony Curtis, Sandra Dee, Frank Sinatra, Jack Lemmon, and John Wayne. It was a time when a Chevrolet Bel-Air cost $2,818 and ads urged us to “Move on Up to Schlitz,” or posed the burning question: “Is it true blondes have more fun?” America’s favorite mom, Jane Wyatt, won an Emmy for “Father Knows Best,” and our favorite G-man, Robert Stack, won his for “The Untouchables.”

  Psycho was sprung upon a moviegoing public who might feel naughty or adventurous enough to stray to an occasional La Dolce Vita or The Virgin Spring. But a swell time at the movies for most Americans ran more along the lines of Exodus, From the Terrace, Journey to the Center of the Earth, or Sunrise at Campobello. Families gathered around televisions tuned to “I Love Lucy,” “Bachelor Father,” “The Flintstones,” “Hawaiian Eye,” and “This is Your Life.” No wonder Paramount and Hitchcock were slightly anxious when when the National Legion of Decency of the Roman Catholic Church gave Psycho a “B” rating: “Morally objectionable in part for all.” There were rumblings about further sanctions, but they came to nothing.

  By the late eighties, Psycho had been endorsed by such diverse critics as film theorist Robin Wood, who called it “one of the key works of our age,” and director Peter Bogdanovich, who termed it “probably the most visual, most cinematic picture [Hitchcock] ever made.” Critic Peter Cowie calls it “not only Hitchcock’s greatest film; it is the most intelligent and disturbing horror film ever made.” But this praise came twenty years after the movie’s debut. When it opened on June 16, 1960, Psycho won only middling-to-hostile reaction from New York critics. In spite of that, the response of the public to the movie surprised everyone. From the first day, lines began forming on Broadway just after 8:00 A.M. and did not let up until the late night show. Who would have expected it? The manicured nails of Paramount executives scratched their heads in wonder: Is the response a midsummer fluke, peculiar only to heat-crazed New Yorkers? From the earliest indicators, Hitchcock’s publicity stunts were going over like gangbusters. Ticket holders standing in line grilled the patrons who poured out of the theater laughing, outraged, shaken: “What’s the ending?” The answer came back from most: “You’ve gotta see it for yourself!” Customers were not revealing Hitchcock’s trick conclusion.

  “I recall it opened on Sunday in New York,” said Marshall Schlom, for whom life had returned to business-as-usual, working on a Hitchcock TV show directly after completing Psycho. (June 16, 1960 was in fact a Thursday). “The next morning, we got these stories from theater owners who were calling the distribution exchanges telling them about people going berserk in the audience, running up and down the aisles. It was mayhem. They had to call the cops.” At nine A.M., a telegram arrived from Lew Wasserman: “What will you do for an encore?”

  Only when Psycho shattered attendance records and unleashed further pandemonium upon its June 22 openings at the Paramount Theater in Boston, the Arcadia in Philadelphia, and the Woods Theater in Chicago did Hitchcock and Paramount grasp that the picture was rapidly growing into an audience phenomenon. “Must report three faintings at Paramount Theater and expect many more among trade when weeks’ [box-office] figure published,” cabled a Boston exhibitor. “Paramount didn’t think they had anything special,” screenwriter Joseph Stefano said. “Once they found out they did, they and Hitchcock poured lots more money into promotion.”

  On the heels of his East Coast promotional tour, Hitchcock consulted with the Paramount sales and promotion staff in California. For months, the walls of the Hitchcock production offices in the Producer’s Building at the studio rumbled like an earthquake epicenter. Nationwide bulletins poured in about state police who had to be called in to untangle drive-in theater gridlock, and about quick-thinking concessionaires who used golf carts to sell snacks to patrons waiting in their cars. A frantic theater manager called Paramount from Chicago: Psycho ticket holders caught in line in a downpour were threatening to dismantle the Woods Theater unless the manager let them inside. Finally, Hitchcock intercepted the calls. “Buy them umbrellas,” advised the director as glibly as Marie Antoinette, and buy them umbrellas the manager did. The act and the quote won Hitchcock reams of free publicity when they made front-page news in the morning edition.

  No amount of optimism or carefully orchestrated hucksterism could have prepared anyone—least of all Alfred Hitchcock—for the firestorm the film was creating. Certainly no one could have predicted how powerfully Psycho tapped into the American subconscious. Faintings. Walk-outs. Repeat visits. Boycotts. Angry phone calls and letters. Talk of banning the film rang from church pulpits and psychiatrists’ offices. Never before had any director so worked the emotions of the audience like stops on an organ console. Only the American public first knew what a monster Hitchcock had spawned. “The atmosphere surrounding Psycho was deeply charged with apprehension,” wrote film theorist William Pechter, describing how it felt to watch the film with an audience of the day. “Something awful is always about to happen. One could sense that the audience was constantly aware of this; indeed, it had the solidarity of a convention assembled on the common understanding of some unspoken entente terrible; it was, in the fullest sense, an audience; not merely the random gathering of discrete individuals attendant at most plays and movies.”

  Star Janet Leigh graciously avoided any public showing of Psycho because she believed her mere presence would dispel the impact of the m
ovie on others. “A theater manager told me about a little boy who went to the first showing the first day it opened,” said Leigh, whose enormous popularity with audiences at the time created crowds wherever she went. “They emptied the theater and the little boy went back to every show that day. He kept running up and down the aisles yelling, ‘Oh my gosh, oh my gosh—wait till you see what’s going to happen!’”

  Joseph Stefano and his wife invited a group of their friends to a theater on the day Psycho opened in Los Angeles. “As the movie went on,” the writer said with a laugh, “I saw people grabbing each other, howling, screaming, reacting like six-year-olds at a Saturday matinee. I couldn’t believe what was happening. I found it hard to reconcile our movie with how the audience was reacting. I never thought it was a movie that would make people scream. When Marion Crane was in the shower and audiences saw the woman coming toward her, I thought they’d shudder and go ‘How awful,’ but I never thought they’d be so vocal. And neither did Hitchcock. When the shower sequence was over, paralysis set in. Nobody knew quite what to do.”

  Anthony Perkins also asserts that audience response to the humor in Psycho caught Hitchcock short. “It’s not scrupulously clear,” Perkins said, “what Hitchcock’s specific and precise intentions were for the tone of the film. But, after hearing audiences around the country roar, Hitchcock—perhaps reluctantly—acknowledged that it was OK to laugh at the film and that, perhaps, it was a comedy after all. He didn’t realize how funny audiences would find the movie, generally. More importantly, I don’t think he was prepared for the amount and intensity of the on-the-spot laughs that he got from first-run audiences around the world. He was confused, at first, incredulous second, and despondent third.”