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The Published Screenplay of "Frenzy" vs. Those of Psycho and NXNW

posted 6 years ago by ecarle (14979)
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Here's a little set of musings for the weekend.

Back in early 1970, some paperback giant published William Goldman's screenplay for "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid." It had been a very high-selling script with plenty of one-liner jokes for Butch and Sundance and, while not in my estimation a very exciting Western, it was SOMETHING...something hip and different and very 1969/1970.

I bought that screenplay paperback, read it cover to cover several times, and came to understand just how different a screenplay can be from a movie. You have to picture a lot of the movie, the blueprint is all that dialogue in between(which was hilarious, I memorized it.)

So taken was I with the Butch screenplay, that I somehow finagled in an English class for a friend and me to read it for class credit out loud -- to ACT it. Probably the jumping off the cliff pre-dialogue.

I learned that a screenplay could make commentary like a novel could. Goldman wrote things like this:

CAMERA MOVES at train at SUPERSPEED...Craig Breedlove must be driving this camera! Huge sidedoor opens to reveal: THE SUPERPOSSE!

And, unforgettably as a fight is to begin between Butch and a Giant Gang Member,

"Butch proceeds to deliver the most exquisite kick in the balls in the recorded history of film."

By the way, as a sample of the fun dialogue in Butch/Sundance, this between the two guys before the afore-mentioned fight:

Butch: I think maybe you can make a little money off this fight, if you bet on him.
Sundance: Yeah..but who'd bet on YOU?

I can tell you that the Butch screenplay triggered, in my teen mind, a desire to write screenplays myself. I wrote a few in college. They won college awards and got me an agent...and went nowhere(well some of one is in McQueen's last movie, The Hunter, but I never sued, no point, not enough of it in there.)

But I have since read that that 1970 Butch Cassidy screenplay book inspired a whole lotta guys and gals who DID become successful screenwriters, guys and gals who skipped film school entirely and used that one book(the screenplay of Butch Cassidy) to learn what a screenplay looked like, how it was written(101.EXT. CORRAL. DAY) and how to make it work for them. I think among those who read that book were Sly Stallone(to write Rocky) and Billy Bob Thornton(to write an early film that was not Sling Blade.)

Published screenplays became a mini industry for a couple of decades, but they weren't exactly TONS of them. It is debated that many Hollywood studios didn't want their secrets getting out; or that many screenplays were very inferior to the movies made from them, or that legal issues were a problem.

And thus, no screenplay of Psycho was ever published in book form(though a photo book with all the dialogue as spoken in the film WAS, in 1974) , and I think I only found one on Our Friend the Internet over ten years ago -- in the early 00's.

But back in 1972, a coupla years after the Butch screenplay came out, something more exciting(to me) was published:

The original screenplay for North by Northwest.

I read that one about 100 more times than the Butch screenplay...because NXNW was my favorite film and I got excited just re-living it on the page.

The NXNW screenplay was part of a small group of such released by MGM -- I recall that Singin in the Rain was another, I can't remember others.

What was fascinating about the NXNW screenplay is how somebody -- probably Cary Grant -- changed just about every line that Cary Grant delivered in that movie. And always for the better. Perhaps Grant knew his persona and how he should speak (more politely than the brash character on the page, more "pleases" and "thank yous.")

The key reveal was that Hitchcock (I'm guessing) removed all sorts of one-liners that Ernest Lehman had written into the Mount Rushmore climax, like:

Eve: I've just thought of a new drink -- people on the rocks.

OR

Thornhill(grasping Valerian's knife wrist): I'm beginning...to think...you don't LIKE me.

Hitchcock understood that the Rushmore climax was not a place for jokes. Or too MANY jokes(the one about Thornhill "leading too dull a life" was kept in , as was Vandamm's curtain line: "Not very sporting, using real bullets."

They also cut this groaner for Eve during the kissy-face on the train:

Eve: We're just strangers on a train. (No product placement for Hitch!)

A fair amount of dialogue was cut from the Glen Cove opener -- dialogue that might have allowed Thornhill to prove his real identity too well("I'm with the so and so advertising agency on Madison Avenue, so unless you gentlemen are interested in advertising something, this meeting is going to be a bust.")

[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

Importantly, they cut an entire opening narration before the movie was to begin, where a disembodied voice talks about how in a city of one million footsteps(NYC), of course some footsteps might cross into the wrong path. Or something like that. Better what we got in the movie: The exciting Saul Bass credit (with the roaring MGM lion against a matte shot green background that becomes lines of latitude and longitude) with the exciting Bernard Herrmann overture(building and building and building, the musical bars matching the lion and then exploding into a mad fandango)

No opening narration necessary.

Joe Stefano similarly over-wrote the opening pages for the Psycho screenplay. HIS camera scan over Phoenix was this extravaganza helicopter shot over a city that would have to be far bigger than Phoenix...as we flew "over the stockyards" and neighborhoods changed from posh to middle-class to rundown...where the hotel would be. No doubt Stefano wanted to impress Hitchcock on paper -- Hitchcock tried for a helicopter shot that didn't work, and gave us the great series of pan and scans over a sad, bleak Phoenix that we have today.

And Anthony Shaffer's opening for the Frenzy screenplay was a bigger deal than what we got, too.

It was to be a map of London that filled the screen -- an animated map with a LONDON legend in the upper corner. The camera was to follow the River Thames in animation on the map until suddenly the REAL River Thames appeared and we got the shot we have in the movie today.

[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

I must admit that I am always pleased -- with the Frenzy we have today -- to see a remnant of Shaffer's map idea: there IS a legend with the big fancy Ye Olde word "LONDON" surrounded by ribbons, over the REAL shot travelling down the River Thames and I remember how excited I was to see that when I first saw Frenzy in 1972. I thought -- This is like how the MGM lion was against a green screen in NXNW, or how the Paramount mountain was sliced into pieces at the opening of Psycho -- Hitchcock is starting his movie in a SPECIAL way -- this is going to be a SPECIAL movie!"

That's how I felt at the Cinerama Dome in 1972, and that's pretty much how I still feel today about Frenzy -- even if it has a thoroughly blasé sequence of dialogue scenes smack dab between when Rusk murders Brenda and when Rusk murders Babs. (In which folks like Blaney, Babs and the Porters prove quite dull, and only Inspector Oxford generates much interest.) All of the other scenes in Frenzy intrigue, delight and disturb me -- and I will carry with me forever the wonderful surprise that this comeback film was for a director who was being written up as "old and out of it" before Frenzy appeared.

I found the Frenzy screenplay on the internet only last week -- that's a long time after 1972, yes? I mean I read the Butch Cassidy screenplay within a year of its 1969 release, and the 1959 North by Northwest screenplay in 1972. It took decades to read the Psycho screenplay(which mainly delights in how much dialogue Martin Balsam changed -- he could have taken a co-writer credit.)

I read two other Hitchcock screenplays in my lifetime. The "most technical" was one that I read for Rear Window. I read it at the Oscar library in the 70's. It was a REAL screenplay REALLY used on the Rear Window set, and it was amazing. It was a "rainbow script" -- with different colored pages for different changes made to the first draft -- and there were a LOT of different pages.

[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

What I mainly remember about the Rear Window screenplay was that it was incredibly hard to read. When there wasn't dialogue, there was page after page of numbered shots (all of Jeffries POV shots) and the screenplay looked like some sort of engineering document:

101.INT APT Jeffries looks.
102. EXT APT POV: Miss Torso dances

Going on for page after page after page. I think I skipped to the climax(Jeffries versus Thorwald) and didn't finish the rest.

I recall reading the screenplay for The Birds at top speed in a bookstore. It was published in a film magazine and more expensive than what I had in my pocket at the time. It was the "real deal." Two things I remember: the screenplay was more violent than the movie(maybe some attacks on eyes) and a big owl attacked Melanie in the phone booth( a nod perhaps to Psycho, but Hitchcock didn't want menacing birds of prey in his film.)

With Frenzy now read by me, I think I've read all the Hitchcock screenplays that I have always WANTED to read: NXNW(all those years ago), The Birds, Rear Window, Psycho...and now Frenzy. I suppose I should track down the Vertigo screenplay, to be righteous. And I recall Universal PR people saying that the Family Plot screenplay would be published as a book. But it was a flawed screenplay(no matter how brilliant the criss cross plotting) and that never happened. I think I'd like to read it anyway.

[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

Now on to a few comments and a very few excerpts from the Frenzy screenplay:

My main comment is that a LOT of the screenplay follows the movie, exactly. For a moment, I felt that I was reading a "fake" screenplay of the film dialogue "re-typed." But then certain things turned up that were cut from the movie , or re-phrased and I thought: "Nope, this is the real original screenplay alright." That said, so little being changed tells me that either Hitchcock (a) thought the script was just fine as it was or (b) was too old and tired to edit the script like in the old days(which he should have done, IMHO with the long stretch between the two murders, and hey, I just remembered, it has that nude scene for Anna Massey's double after love-making with Blaney, so its not ALL boring exposition.)

Some years ago on a board, I tried to discreetly write about the precision details of the Brenda Blaney rape-murder -- and how Hitchocck had actually stylized and soft-pedalled much of it so we didn't really see what we thought we saw. But my entire post was "deleted by an administrator," so I don't much discuss that scene any more.

But I will say this: Hitchcock made a key cut of dialogue in that scene and in many ways, saved it to be the disturbing scene that it is:

In the movie as we have it, early on Rusk tells Brenda that in his greengrocer trade: "We have a saying. Don't squeeze the goods til they're yours. I would NEVER do that."

Hitchcock scholar Donald Spoto wrote that when Rusk strangles Brenda, he is squeezing her because she is now his(raped.)

Good guess, Spoto. Because in the screenplay, After Rusk moves his tiepin and undoes his tie to kill Brenda, he announces "with a slight giggle": "I told you, didn't I... I don't squeeze the goods til they're mine!"

That's too on the nose. Too much of a "mwah..hah hah!" statement of villainy.

And Hitchcock cut it.

[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

Hitchcock also cut something from the strangulation for good reason:

In the movie as we have it, Rusk murmurs with growing anger: "Lovely...lovely...LOVELY!" as he tries to rape Brenda.

Well the screenplay had Rusk yelling "Pay! Pay! PAY!" during the strangulation(I guess, a woman having to pay for frustrating him.) Well "Lovely" stayed in ; but "Pay!" got cut. Good moves, both. ("Lovely" is at once creepy and sad and profound, I think.)

Rusk also yells that Pay! line in the flashback to Babs' murder later. Hitchcock cut the line and cut all dialogue, allowing the flashback to play briefly with music and for a mercifully short time.

Some key cuts:

BODY COUNT:

Early on , we learn how many victims the Necktie Strangler has killed:

WOMAN: Its' a tie! Another necktie murder!

OTHER WOMAN: Its the third he's done.

MAN: Fourth. There was the Stepney Baths one, the Plumstead Librarian, and the one they found in Epping Forest three weeks ago.

--

As with the two women that Norman Bates killed before Marion, I always wondered how many necktie murders Rusk had to have committed to be a newspaper star. Well, four counting the River Thames. Brenda is five; Babs is six; and the bed victim at the end is seven.

It begs a question of real life serial killers too: when DID Rusk -- a man of his late thirties or early forties by appearance -- decide to become the Necktie Killer? And WHY? Well, I expect serial killers don't decide anything. Likely Rusk -- who is established early on as a man with a taste for SM-type sex with masochistic women -- slowly advanced, from his teens through his twenties and his thirties(likely with hookers) from fantasy to reality in his violent needs. And happened upon the necktie motif because psychos can be flamboyant newspaper attention seekers...

[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

A NEAR MISS(AND A BAD SCENE):

In a brief scene that doesn't make much sense, a young woman in bra and open blouse runs out of Rusk's building and past a cop on the street. Rusk follows -- necktie undone -- and tells the cop that the woman went nuts when he removed his necktie on their romantic date. The cop jokes that she just must be scared of the Necktie Killer. And Rusk and the cop part ways. I suppose the scene is about how nobody suspects Bob Rusk but...wouldn't he have been being pretty scary to that woman? Why didn't she tell the cop? Anyway, Hitchcock cut the scene. The script wasn't perfect.

A POST SCRIPT ON THE PORTERS

In the movie, the Porters won't help Blaney at court...but they sure did agree to hide him and put him up overnight, a dangerous flouting of the law.

So we get a scene of Oxford reading a letter from the Porters(with Mr. Porter's voice over) that they did put Blaney up overnight but had no idea he was being hunted as the Necktie Killer. A plot point that Hitchcock dumped.

AN ODD BIT IN BLANEY'S CELL

There's a bit where Blaney has written a series of equations on his cell wall to tell himself how many days, hours, minutes and seconds there will be in his life term. Its very oppressive and downbeat and rather too complicated.

And it begs the big plot hole in Frenzy: so Rusk managed to quit killing women for the duration of Blaney's trial? And will never kill again? But decides to do so on the very night that Blaney breaks jail and comes to kill him?

Its a weakness that the script of Psycho doesn't have, and a late-breaking disappointment in the middle of Hitchcock's comeback triumph.

[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

ONE DETAIL ABOUT RUSK'S TRADE

Rusk is a wholesale greengrocer (the trade of Hitchcock's father) and there's a detail in the script when Blaney comes to his stand seeking cover. A customer walks up to Rusk and we get:

Customer: When are the Israeli melons coming in?
Rusk: You mean the kosher ones? Next week.

I love that exchange, but it got cut. In the movie, about all we see of Rusk's trade are the grapes he offers Blaney and a line to a helper: "Here, that's the last one" -- the last WHAT? Rusk hands the man a slip. Just a little detail.

----

One thing that fascinates me about Frenzy is how the film uses Covent Garden as a "working backdrop": worker bee men in caps and aprons with wheelbarrows cart fruits and vegatables around and all dramatic action has them cutting in and out OF the action. And of course, eventually, Rusk inserts himself into that trade by disgusing himself as a Covent Garden workman(cap, apron, wheelbarrow) and putting a potato sack with Babs on the barrow. This becomes a lingering shot in Frenzy that is probably my favorite shot in the movie. A still photo of this shot is the "official picture" for actor Barry Foster on his IMDB page, and I think it is the Essence of Hitchcock.

Much as like the shot of Arbogast climbing the hill to the house in Psycho, I like the shot of Rusk in disguise with the wheelbarrow in Frenzy. Both shots summon up "the essence of the tale." Psycho: A Count Dracula Gothic House with a Mike Hammer modern day private eye inserted. Frenzy: A tale about a psycho operating in the Covent Garden fruit and vegetable market shows us that killer using the work of the market to cover up his crime(it takes only seconds to realize that Babs' body is in that sack -- it is sad and macabre at the same time.)

[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

In the Frenzy screenplay, the description of Rusk in that disguise with the potato sack and the wheelbarrow is a big, long thick paragraph that takes in every detail as we will get it on the screen. Shaffer must have been proud to have delivered that paragraph to Hitchocck's specifications.

---

A little close-out on the Frenzy script. Back to the Brenda murder. Much of it plays on the page exactly as in the film -- Hitch and Shaffer must have blocked the action out. But the scene on the page has a few sexually violent details that I'm very happy are NOT in the movie.

And kudos again to Barry Foster for his performance in that scene. There is very, very little on the page to suggest Rusk's demeanor in that scene. His brief lines -- particularly as his psychosis comes forward -- give the actor little clue of how to play this madman. Barry Foster hit all the right, spooky notes -- a certain gooney-ness to his sexual side(he's geeky, he's not masculine), a sadness to the man as the killing urge takes over, and then an uncontrollable rage. Its just barely on the page, Foster got it done.

The internet article where I found the Frenzy screenplay announces the screenplay as a "monumental achievement" that comes with "the highest recommendation" as a great screenplay. I'm not so sure. Oh, I think it should have gotten a 1972 Oscar nomination(in place of Shaffer's less compelling script for Sleuth, which WAS nominated), but that stretch between murders is pretty expository stuff -- Babs and Blaney are the Lila and Sam of Frenzy.

That said, much of the disturbing but flavorful mix of Frenzy, the movie, is in Frenzy, the script.

Hitchcock must have gone to work on that picture with confidence, with that script in hand.

And now I have read it.

[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

that's pretty much how I still feel today about Frenzy -- even if it has a thoroughly blasé sequence of dialogue scenes smack dab between when Rusk murders Brenda and when Rusk murders Babs. (In which folks like Blaney, Babs and the Porters prove quite dull, and only Inspector Oxford generates much interest.)

---

I return to my own thread to offer a bit more on this "stretch" of Frenzy -- versus the "matching" stretch in Psycho:

Frenzy: Between the murder of Brenda and the murder of Babs....fairly dull, for the most part.
Psycho: Between the murder of Marion and the murder of Arbogast....NEVER dull.

How come?

Well, it is perhaps a matter of my personal taste , but I think it is because between the two murders in Psycho, we get Arbogast, first with Sam and Lila in a wonderfully crisp and concise expository scene, and then with Norman. Norman is ALREADY a fascinating character(even if we don't know he's a psycho, he is an ACCOMPLICE to a psycho) and Arbogast becomes one, and together, they are dynamite.

Well, there is no Arbogast in Frenzy -- Oxford is perhaps most close -- and Rusk doesn't appear in the any of the scenes between his murder of Brenda and his murder of Babs. We are left with Blaney and Babs. And couple of introductory scenes of Oxford(at Brenda's office, at HIS office eating breakfast.) Interestingly, the first "Oxford dinner" scene comes between Rusk killing Babs(unseen by us) and Rusk disposing of Babs body.

I still think that Frenzy is a fine film and I will always treasure, as a young Hitchcock fan, watching Hitchcock get that big comeback -- but if there are reasons that Frenzy isn't quite at the level of Psycho, that script structure is part of it. Here is a psycho movie where the psycho disappears from the story for long stretches. Although, that happens quite a bit with Norman in Psycho come to think of it -- he enters at the 30 minute mark and isn't in the Fairvale scenes.