With A Hitch: Psycho's horrifying success

Famed filmmaker Alfred Hitchcock headed off in an entirely different direction from the rest of Hollywood. He made a bargain for the rights to a novel, shot the film as cheaply as he could, using the crew from his weekly television series and gave up his usual fee for a percentage of the movie’s profits.

And it paid off handsomely for him after “Psycho” opened June 16, 1960 — 65 years ago Monday — and proved to be a huge — if terrifying — hit.

Suspense And Terror - But With A Hitch

Alfred Hitchcock was displeased. His 1959 film, “North by Northwest,” had been successful but making the movie had been a sprawling, expensive venture. And that kind of production seemed to invite meddling from studio executives.

For his next project, Hitchcock decided to buck the trend in which Hollywood was heading with a bit of a throwback approach.

First, he found an interesting property he felt he could work with: A suspense/terror novel, “Psycho,” by author Robert Bloch. Hitchcock paid Bloch only $9,500 for the movie rights to his book and then bought up as many copies as he could. His aim was to reduce the number of readers who’d learn about the stunning plot twist at the end of the story.

Next, Hitchcock planned an extremely low-budget production. Having spent several years, by this point, working with CBS for a weekly television show, he decided to shoot the movie in black-and-white and using many of the staffers from “Alfred Hitchcock Presents.”

Alfred Hitchcock

Movie executives had very little faith in these odd choices Hitchcock was making. He satisfied them by promising to pay to film “Psycho” out of his own pocket, at a cost of $807,000. In return, he would receive a much larger percentage of the movie’s box office gross.

Once “Psycho” was on celluloid, Hitchcock went on to demand theater operators not allow audience members to enter the theater once the movie began. He had lobby posters installed — with a photo of him pointing to his wristwatch — to explain to moviegoers the unusual policy.

He then declined to hold a screening for movie critics. They’d have to see “Psycho” along with regular audiences. Again, he wanted to protect the ending of the film.

The result broke box office records around the world. Hitchcock made more than $15 million on the project. He then traded his rights to “Psycho” for movie company stock ... which made Hitchcock his own boss.

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Robert Bloch’s novel was based on the true story of Ed Gein who murdered two women in Plainfield, Wisconsin, in 1954 and 1957. Gein was also the inspiration for “Deranged” and “Texas Chain Saw Massacre” in 1974 and “The Silence of the Lambs” in 1991. In the novel, Norman Bates is fat and middle-aged. Hitchcock made him younger to be more sympathetic.

Anthony Perkins was Hitchcock’s first choice to play the role of Norman Bates. Hitchcock had the bass frequencies removed from Perkins’ voice in order to make him sound younger when he screams in terror after discovering the murder scene. Perkins was paid $40,000 for his work in “Psycho” — the same amount that Marion embezzles in the film.

Mary Crane in the novel was changed to Marion Crane when the studio’s legal department found two people in Phoenix with that name. Hitchcock considered Eva Marie Saint, Angie Dickinson, Shirley Jones and Lana Turner for the role. Janet Leigh owned Paramount one more movie to fulfill her contract, so she agreed to star in “Psycho” for a quarter of her usual fee.

The famous shower murder scene consisted of 78 separate pieces of film shot from 50 camera angles and lasted only 45 seconds. Anytime you can’t see Leigh’s face in that scene, you’re most likely seeing her body double, Marli Renfro, a stripper who was paid $500 for a week or so of work. Renfro appeared on the cover of Playboy magazine that September.

It took Hitchcock and his crew seven days to film the shower scene, using both Leigh and Renfro for various shots. For the one shot looking directly at the shower head, Hitchcock had his prop department make a fake shower head six feet in diameter, with the central jets blocked so it wouldn’t squirt the camera.

Originally, Hitchcock wanted no music at all played during the shower scene, but his wife talked him into trying it. He was so pleased with Bernard Herrmann’s musical score that he doubled his composer’s salary. “Thirty-three percent of the effect of ‘Psycho’ was due to the music,” he told interviewers.

In addition to being much cheaper to shoot and process — making for what Hitchcock called a “more efficient, sparser style of television filming,” black-and-white film didn’t show red blood — easing, to some degree, the level of gore viewers would see. The “blood” we see washing down the shower drain was Bosco brand chocolate syrup.

One angry viewer wrote Hitchcock and complained that after seeing “Psycho,” his daughter refused to take a shower. Hitchcock replied: “Send her to the dry cleaners.” Leigh said watching the finished movie terrified her so much she took baths only the rest of her life. Leigh’s husband at the time, Tony Curtis, said trauma from “Psycho” caused the break up of their marriage.

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