MovieChat Forums > Psycho (1960) Discussion > A Twisted Tree or Two

A Twisted Tree or Two

posted 7 years ago by ecarle (14979)
8 replies | jump to latest

Where is the Bates Motel located?

Hitchcock rather fudged the location in interviews.

As the film went into production, he told the New York Times that the motel was near "Sacramento, California" -- the capitol of the state but also in the higher reaches of the dusty and arid Central Valley of California...about 100 miles inland from the far more rich and gorgeous seaside city of San Francisco.

Some years later after the release of Psycho, Hitchcock specified that the Bates Motel was "near a place called Redding."

Now Redding is about 170 miles north of Sacramento, in a dusty valley of its own but near the high snowy mountain peaks of Mount Shasta and the Cascade mountains.

Psycho bears out the Redding locale, for Redding is in Shasta County and the map on the wall in the DA's office at the end says "Shasta County" and the cop who asks for the blanket for Norman has a patch on his shoulder that says "Shasta Police." Done.

I expect Hitchcock told the New York Times..Sacramento...because New Yorkers knew Sacramento but they didn't know Redding.

And of course, "Fairvale," unlike the real California towns of Santa Rosa and Bodega Bay found in other Hitchcock films, was entirely fictional, a name lifted from Bloch's novel.

After dispensing with the second-unit opening shots over Phoenix and the street-level Xmastime streets of Phoenix, Hitchcock's second unit guys covered Marion Crane's drive heading "North by Northwest" -- Arizona west to LA north to Redding -- with shots of:

The Grapevine hills north of Los Angeles(and the nothing town of Gorman; the cop stop.)

Bakersfield (where Marion buys her next car; the lot was actually near Universal Studios)

Highway 99 North(all that driving footage; probably captured for about 100 miles before quitting.)

No footage was filmed in or near Sacramento or Redding.

Which brings me to my point:

After all that second-unit "real location footage" of Phoenix, Gorman, Bakersfield, and Highway 99 for about 100 miles north(near the farm town of Tulare, California)...

...Psycho never really goes on location again.

The ACTUAL Bates Motel was, famously, on the Universal backlot, and what we see of the terrain around the Bates Motel(some bushy hills behind it in long shots, some twisted trees on the hillside and near the swamp) is all...North Hollywood.

Hitchcock was, famously, working on a very low budget for Psycho, and I think it is interesting that, on the one hand, he still spent enough money to get all that location footage of Marion's journey (to set up the terrain in our mind) but then....

...never left the backlot.

The location of the Bates Motel is thus "a state of mind." If one knows enough about California to recognize the signs for Gorman and Bakersfield, or to "get" the Highway 99 footage, or to understand the map of Shasta County...then Psycho and the Bates Motel have a STRONG sense of place(as with Bodega Bay for The Birds, or San Francisco and the peninsula for Vertigo.)

But if one doesn't have that local geography, the locale of the Bates Motel and mansion seem very much dictated by Hitchcock's decorations of the locale: which to me, consists mainly of:

A twisted tree or two.

There are photos on imdb of Hitchcock talking to Anthony Perkins near one of those twisted trees, and photos elsewhere of Perkins standing alone near one of those trees -- his wooden "foot marker" at his feet to hold his camera position. Perkins is here being filmed watching the car sink in the swamp.

But the twisted tree is prominent in both the Hitchcock/Perkins photo and the Perkins alone photo and for me -- that tree summons up the creepy atmosphere of Psycho quite well.

Reason being: one sees twisted trees like that all the time in Northern California in general...and in Redding and Sacramento areas in particular.

Hitchcock got THAT right...that kind of tree (which also dot the hillside leading to the house) is very atmospheric, and, by its very "twisted" nature....very much a commentary on the twisted nature of the Bates family, Norman Bates, the Bates motel and the Bates House.

A tree can be a very symbolic thing. Especially when joined by two or three.

I'll end with a rhetorical question: were those twisted trees already on the backlot near where they built the house and filmed the swamp?

Or did Hitchcock "cast" the trees and have them brought in and planted?

Honestly, I don't know....

[–] brux (14724) 7 years ago

Every page on this section is filled with posts by you. Are you a descendent of the Hitchcock estate trying to drum some life in these old movies to collect royalties or something. Geez, it is boring seeing and reading all your posts..

[–] ecarle (14979) 7 years ago

You nailed me.

I am Melvin Hitchcock III.

And the royalties just keep pouring in....

[–] swanstep (2715) 7 years ago

Geez, it is boring seeing and reading all your posts.

@Brux. Insofar as your problems with this Psycho board boil down to an aversion to just a couple of posters' contributions, to that extent there's a complete, purely technological solution to your problems. Go to the problematic (for you) posters' personal pages and click on the 'Ignore' links there, i.e., add them to *your* personal 'Ignore List'. At any rate, I predict *you'll* soon be Ignored into invisibility around here if you continue to post rude, ill-informed, unconstructive moans and personal attacks. Life's too short, etc..

[–] brux (14724) 7 years ago

You didn't look at my post, or at this board. Scan through a couple of pages, see what you think. Not really cool to leap before you look.

[–] Otter (24464) 7 years ago

Of course there are no location shots after Marion enters Bates World.

That's because the world of Norman Bates is small, and has no connection to the outside world. And when Marion and Norman meet, the film's POV shifts from Marion to Norman, and from the shower scene to the very end, the camera and the viewer are as firmly trapped in the tiny Bates World as Norman himself. It's like a sci-fi "pocket universe".

[–] ecarle (14979) 7 years ago

"Bates World."

I like that.

Recall that Hitchcock staged his entire Psycho trailer in "Bates World," giving a guided tour of it himself, and emphasizing how the motel had "as an adjunct" that creepy old house on the hill(how the camera swings DOWN at Hitchcock in front of the motel and then OVER AND UP to reveal the house is a great shot that has no corollary in the film itself.)

Hitchcock gave us his tour with so many "rich" places to visit(Mother's Room, the parlor, Cabin One) that he could even skip such Bates World attractions as the swamp and the fruit cellar..

So I guess it indeed makes sense after having surrounded Marion with the few location scenes in the film(the cop stop, California Charlie's) and all that footage on Highway 99...her arrival at Bates World would be communicated in the film's move to the Universal back lot -- pretty much forever(all the Fairvale scenes were filmed on the backlot, too.)

Bates World -- Norman Bates' private world --- a classic concept. And those who enter it do not always get out alive.

BTW, if I "buried a lede" in this OP , its that I've always been intrigued by the use of the "twisted trees" in the film -- and I do wonder if Hitchcock had them shipped in and re-planted to give his Bates World just that much more twisted atmosphere.

[–] ecarle (14979) 7 years ago

Meanwhile, I'm taking a little time away from this holiday to express just a few thoughts on the recent attack posted here.

Its a given that many of the OP posts on these pages indeed have "ecarle" on them. There is, I think, a reason for this.

I'm among a handful of people who have chosen to make this particular board my home here. My "entry fee" is the alternation of two kinds of posts: posts on Psycho itself(or its many offshoots, including the sequels, the Van Sant, Bates Motel, Hitchcock, 78/52 , Hitchocck/Truffaut the movie, etc.) and OT posts (often about current films, or Oscar films, and usually to prove that movies other than Psycho inhabit my brain.)

Since a lot of other people DON'T make OPs on Psycho, and since this board stretches back through the imdb days...there are a lot of my OPs here.

But there are other details:

More often than not, I reply to other people's OPs. You could look it up. I usually post an OP when it seems to me the Board could maybe use one.

I spend entire weeks away from this board, but you can't always see that when my posts line up one right after another. I am here far less frequently than I was at imdb...where, frankly, more people participated.

But here's the big thing: I feel that moviechat is a welcome but much smaller playing field than imdb was. I've posted on all sorts of other movies -- Frenzy, NXNW, Charley Varrick. Rio Conchos to name a few -- and no responses came in at all. You can see posts of mine on the Frenzy board where answers came in MONTHS later.

I don't think moviechat is very active at all on "old movie" pages.

It plays better -- and younger -- for Star Wars and Avengers and Black Panther . Which is as it should be.

I think the Psycho page -- almost by default -- has been selected by myself and a hardy few as our venue of choice to talk about anything. Hence the OT posts. But -- to stay "legal" -- I for one feed Psycho posts here on a regular basis.

[–] ecarle (14979) 7 years ago

And yet -- the more OPs from other sources, the better.

I think that ray's recent OP about Van Sant's Psycho ("Watching the Remake With an Open Mind") triggered not only a "re-visit" to a topic we have taken up here before, but yielded NEW INSIGHTS -- from a welcome new source -- about this very important remake in film history.

And I certainly welcome new OPs to respond to.

And this: while I expect more people are lurking and reading, just the idea that I can trade a few thoughts with the six or so "regulars" here is more than enough satisfaction for me. If this page were just the six of us talking, it would be worth it. But good new folks arrive all the time.

And of course, antagonists. I've known from the beginning that to "enter the internet world" is to enter a world in which friends AND foes will find you. You'd better be ready for attacks. I'm not even sure I like the word "troll." Its just people who have strong opinions and a certain rage factor which is a part of this very high-pressured and difficult world we live in now. I continue to draw an analogy between internet rage and road rage -- we are safely anonymous, we turn into monsters against each other that we would never be "face to face." Its all very relevant to Psycho, which strikes me as a movie more relevant to our modern world all the time.

You gotta take the bitter with the sweet.