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Screenplay by Joseph Stefano, From the Novel By Robert Bloch

posted 7 years ago by ecarle (14979)
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I was old enough back then, to see The Exorcist and Jaws start off as big best-selling novels before they became movies. The man who wrote the novel The Exorcist -- William Peter Blatty -- got to write the movie and win an Oscar for the screenplay. The man who wrote the novel Jaws -- Peter Benchley -- got to write a first draft of the movie, but had to share writers credit with Carl Gottlieb(officially) and with others(including maybe Robert Shaw) unofficially.

I was alive when Psycho the novel came out, and Psycho the movie came out a year later, but too young to remember anything; I've only read about their creation. Evidently Robert Bloch's Psycho was NOT a bestseller like The Exorcist or Jaws -- or at least not promoted as such. Rather, it was a "pulp" novel put out under Simon and Shuster's "Inner Sanctum" mystery book series. ("Inner Sanctum" being the name of an old radio show.) "Psycho" the novel sold surprisingly well and got a good review by Anthony Boucher in the New York Times(read by Hitchocck) but was considered by one Paramount reader to be "impossible for films."

And so Hitchocck was able to buy the book of Psycho dirt cheap ($9000 versus the $250,000 paid by Otto Preminger for Advise and Consent) and to produce it almost "on the sly." People weren't much waiting for the movie of Psycho as they would be for The Exorcist and Jaws. (Interestingly, Hitchcock paid as much for Tony Palladino's graphic logo for PSYCHO -- the one on all the movie posters -- as he did for the rights to the story IN the book: $9,000. A brilliant producer's decision -- that logo SELLS the movie; I consider it the greatest movie logo of all time.)

In seeking to make Psycho cheaply, Hitchcock hunted around for cheap -- but good --screenwriters. A first draft of Psycho was written by Hitchcock series TV writer James Cavenaugh("One More Mile To Go"), but rejected -- the script pulled many punches and presented Mother in the fruit cellar as a big doll with button eyes. Cavenaugh simply couldn't see Psycho on screen with the horror intact.

So Hitchcock hired -- on advice of agent Kay Brown -- writer Joseph Stefano, who had very little on his resume save an award-winning TV episode and a movie called The Black Orchid with Anthony Quinn and Sophia Loren(that Hitchcock watched for five minutes and then turned off.)

When Psycho became a big, big hit -- and soon an acknowledged classic -- both Robert Bloch (as the author of the book) and Joe Stefano( as the writer of the screenplay) parlayed that into long careers.

And word is, the two men hated each other for stealing each other's thunder.

Bloch had the better case. When he saw Joe Stefano billed as "the writer of Psycho" to promote The Naked Edge(1961), his blood boiled. After all, said Bloch, Hitchcock practically remade the book from Chapter Three on(Mary/Marion arrives at the Bates Motel) and all the big ideas were HIS: the shower murder, the house on the hill versus the motel, the split personality, Mother in the fruit cellar; the detective getting killed(albeit not on the stairs.) How could Stefano claim ANY of that as his own. "Its a good thing Stefano didn't adapt the Bible," said Bloch.

Stefano's case was that Psycho as written by Robert Bloch would have been a terrible, sleazy movie, possibly "unmakeable." Stefano found the book to be disgusting pulp(with far gorier murders than shown in the film) , and particularly didn't like the character of Norman Bates -- fat, forty, drunken, perverted. I suppose Stefano would have to share credit with Hitchcock himself for making certain changes to Bloch's book, the biggest of all being to convert fat Norman into skinny heartthrob Anthony Perkins. For his part, Stefano gave Psycho the movie two new scenes -- the opening hotel tryst and the cop stop.

But Stefano's biggest contribution to the movie of Psycho over Bloch's book seemed to be in the dialogue, which is always important.

Whereas in the parlor scene, Norman had yelled to Mary/Marion: "She's not crazy!" about his mother, Stefano softened that down to more sophisticated tension: "You mean an institution, a madhouse?"

The Marion/Norman dialogues, the Arbogast/Norman dialogues, and other dialogues are much more witty and sophisticated in the Hitchcock film than in the Bloch book.

It seems to me, however, that Bloch still won the "author of Psycho" sweepstakes. Bloch got that billing on many more movies than Stefano did: Strait-Jacket, The Psychopath, Torture Garden all come to mind. But it was tough on Bloch: folks kept expecting another Psycho from him,and never really got one.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 7 years ago

Bloch and Stefano each got revenge on each other in the years after Psycho:

BLOCH'S REVENGE ON STEFANO: When film writer Richard Anobile put out a "frame by frame" blow-up book of Psycho in 1974, every credit at the beginning of the movie got a frame shot in the book -- except for Stefano's credit. That frame is missing. Evidently, Robert Bloch controlled BOOK rights and could have the frame mentioning Stefano , cut.

STEFANO'S REVENGE ON BLOCH: When Gus Van Sant made his remake of Psycho in 1998, Van Sant hired Joseph Stefano to "touch up" the old script for modern times -- things like changing $40,000 to $400,000. Wonderfully for Joe Stefano, Universal and Van Sant paid Stefano far more money for his modest "touch up" of his classic script than what Hitchcock paid him to write the original. And that's a good thing.

But when the opening credits of Van Sant's Psycho reach Stefano's screenwriting credit -- Screenplay by Joseph Stefano -- the credit "From the Novel By Robert Bloch" -- is GONE. Bloch's credit turns up near the very end of the credit crawl at the very end of the movie. Stefano evidently secured this banishment(Bloch had been dead since 1994, anyway.)

"Psycho" is the famous "success that has a million fathers." Well maybe only five or so: count Bloch for the original material(above all), Hitchcock for re-shaping it into cinematic genius that could pass the Hays Code; Stefano for writing great dialogue and assisting Hitchcock in making Psycho work for the screen; Anthony Perkins for turning the inscrutable Norman Bates into someone you could care about as well as fear; Bernard Herrmann for the greatest scare score of all time, and one woman(more mother than father)...Janet Leigh for giving us Marion Crane's sad, sexy, and driven life and a spectacular death in a shower.

[–] ecarle (14979) 7 years ago

But in the area of writing the piece, it boiled down to Bloch and Stefano. I say, both were necessary to give us Psycho the classic movie.

Bloch would seem to be more important -- he created the storyline -- but had Psycho had a Bloch screenplay, it might well have been the clunky, wit-free and simplistic kind of William Castle picture that Bloch wrote with Strait-Jacket(1964.) No, Bloch had given Hitchocck and Stefano the raw material, but they had to shape it into brilliance.

Psycho just might be the greatest merger of source book and screenplay in film history.

[–] swanstep (2715) 7 years ago

[–] ecarle (14979) 7 years ago

One of the better features of 78/52 is that it works through first Bloch's brief shower scene then Stefano's much more evocative and cinematic version of the scene then Bass's story-boards attempting to do justice to Stefano's scene descriptions (which really envisioned the feeling of a completed scene thereby giving Bass a lot to work with - Stefano pre-directs then Bass elaborates with Hitch overseeing both is the basic p8/52icture).

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Aha, swanstep...then you have now seen 78/52. One of the things I liked was the recreation of the Bloch version(though missing important elements -- like Mother's face popping through the curtain as if hanging in mid-air.

Stefano's screenplay has the build-up to the murder, and then relegates to the murder to a punchy paragraph called, I believe:

THE MURDER

...with a key visual: "The knife tears through the air as if ripping the movie screen itself."

Thus did Hitchcock get "enough" to re-stage Bloch's version(which still creeps me out in its own way, lingering as it does on the Head of Mother popping through the curtain; imagine THAT) as the Hitchcock Version.

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The doc. allows one to see clearly how Hitch had long been obsessed with bathrooms and how it was absolutely the bathroom murder that attracted him to Bloch's Psycho property in the first place,

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Yes. Hitchcock told Truffaut in an offhand way, that the murder in the shower is pretty much "about all" the reason he bought the book. Which seems wrong to me. That might have been the "hook" that told him: "Buy this book and make this movie," but there were so many OTHER elements to play with: the House, the motel, Norman Bates split personality, the killing of the detective. And yet, perhaps none of that would have mattered much to Hitchcock had not the shower murder drawn him in , in such a big way(climaxing Chapter Three by killing the lead early).

[–] ecarle (14979) 7 years ago

and yet still film is such a collaborative medium that without at least Stefano, Bass, Herrmann, Leigh there's no shower scene as we know it.

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Each element played its own part, yes? Stefano in "setting the stage" for a shower murder different than that in Bloch's book; Janet Leigh to give heart and soul(and screams, and a dead face) to the start-to-finish conversion of the living Marion into a corpse and...late in the game, Herrmann to transform the whole sequence and take it up to 11 in "screamability." Ironic: Norman Bates is a big part of this scene, too...but Anthony Perkins wasn't there to play him. In fact, two doubles -- one for Norman and one for Marion -- are part of the scene, too. (And 78/52 has immortalized one of them on film, elderly of today.)