I never visited the old message boards for Psycho. Based on the posts so far, it would seem to be a somewhat off-topic catch-all. Was that the norm? If so, that's kinda cool. It's like that one unused room in the school where all the cool kids hang out.
share@Cheepshooter. The old IMDb Psycho board had lots of OT threads, but they were almost always threads about Film or TV and its history (and there were *no* OT posts about politics per se or about people's sex life or....). Although there were normally *some* connections back to Psycho or at least Hitchcock so that most officially OT threads weren't in fact *completely* OT, at least occasionally a completely OT thread *would* indeed develop (while still on a film and visuals arts topic), and the loose policy of the board was to be relaxed about that. Every month or so, however, someone would complain this status quo.
A couple of us who made the jump from IMDb to Moviechat.org are trying to run a similar ship here, although perhaps *slightly* tighter. I've started the only 2 OT threads so far (on Bill Paxton's Death and on Chazelle's recent article about beginnings and endings of films) and both have have ended up with Psycho connections.
In general too, to be a deep Psycho fan is to understand the weird centrality the film has for Hitchcock's career, for the development of film language, for the history of Hollywood's evolving underlying business model, and for cultural history more generally. Psycho lives today in a way that very few films* from the past century still do, and almost everything in the film world and in film and tv history connects to it *somehow*. In my view, the old IMDb Psycho board just reflected that, and with just a tad more discipline, this Psycho board should reflect that too.
* Other older films with lots of life left in them that have achieved some prominence in the last year or so include What Happened To Baby Jane? (1962), 12 Angry Men (1957), Singin' In The Rain (1952), Citizen Kane (1941), Manchurian Candidate (1962), Face In The Crowd (1957), The Candidate (1972). I'd expect most of these films to generate message boards with general or OT aspects too.
Thanks for the rundown.
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shareI figure that if you want OT threads, why not go to General Discussion here.
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shareSince I'm a main instigator of the OT stuff(and I expect things WILL be stricter here), I'll say that swanstep has laid out how the old IMDb board evolved and the extent to which several of its denizens have ended up here indicates some of that will continue here.
(The hidden sub-issue is: exactly how many of us ARE there here? I'm not sure I want to know. This could be a great ongoing conversation among say, five people, and that's good enough for me. Think of it as sitting around a bar at 11:00 pm talking over beers.)
I'd like to offer up these examples of my own thinking here recently:
The "Feud/Baby Jane" thread. This is an example of how I always felt that the Psycho board worked the best. This "Feud" series is getting a lot of ink and reviews -- it is definitely of "the now." And yet , this series is clearly about a film artifact of 1962 -- which puts it in the wheelhouse of the age bracket of many of us here -- and it definitely WAS compared to Psycho both in its time(the print and TV advertising) and in Robin Wood's seminal book on Hitchocck, Hitchcock's films.
So a thread on "Feud" quite allows us to make a direct connection to Psycho and THEN to branch on out to "Baby Jane" itself: as a stand-alone movie, as a template for "hag" or(I do like this better) "Grand Dame Guignol" and as a subsidiary OF the Psycho type Gothic film.
"Feud" also allows shoot-offs on Sunset Boulevard and Hollywood and women and so forth and so on but...
...it is DEFINITELY connected to Psycho. And...as doghouse rightly points out -- to Rear Window and Shadow of a Doubt. And...as I point out: to Misery, too.
And: as something "immediate" -- Feud is a 2017 production for watching NOW. It is not from the past.
Voila, a "catchall" indeed...but not entirely OT at all.
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Another one: I wanted to post something about the Warren Beatty Oscar mix-up. It was too intensely on everyone's minds for a few days and, in its playout, became a textbook study in How Human Beings Become Indecisive Under Pressure. And somehow in thinking about it , I "flashed" (as I often do) on Psycho and some critic's review in which he spoke about Marion, Arbogast, Lila..and Sam...and even Norman...as "indecisive" people whose indecision to act in minor ways affected them in major ways.
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I used the old Psycho board occasionally for an OT topic that just didn't fit Psycho, but my rationale was: I wanted to talk about THAT movie with THESE people. These people rarely(and understandably) followed me to the other boards. My issue, I guess. But also: on the IMDb boards, "new" movies often had younger and nastier posters than I was supposed to hang with, I think. Its an older crowd here at Psycho.
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As for General Discussion or Classic Movie type boards: to me, those are so broad, I wouldn't know where to start. I mean, if I want to talk about an obscure movie called "Hotel"(1967), one of my favorites-- should I go to the "Hotel" page or just dump the post in classic cinema? "Psycho" seemed a place to drop a relevant OT topic(I snuck "Hotel" in at the Psycho board when Rod Taylor died; he was an OT Hitchcock topic because he was in The Birds; he was an ON TOPIC subject because he was considered for Sam Loomis in Psycho and -- he was the star of Hotel.)
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Anyway, those are my rationales for how the old imdb Psycho board worked, and how I hope the new Psycho board here will work.