Psycho

Hey, Do You Remember...?

Christopher Schrader

Tv & Film, Comedy

4.8 • 676 Ratings

🗓️ 19 October 2018

⏱️ 112 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Psycho is the film (and maybe the one scene) Alfred Hitchcock is most identified with, despite the fact that it's something of an anomaly on his filmography. Deliberately pulpy and shot on the cheap, it would go on to become the legendary director's biggest success - as well as a masterclass in misdirection.

These days, it's tough to find anyone who isn't familiar with all of the big twists and iconography, even if they've never actually seen this. There's also the fact that all of the material that was regarded as so dangerous and shocking in 1960 is downright quaint now.

And yet...

Psycho still packs a formidable punch. Why is that? Join us as we check into the Bates Motel to see if we can uncover some of the secrets hidden in that house on the top of the hill.

Topics include: all of the imitators that made Hitchcock feel like he needed to reinvent himself, how hard Paramount tried to get out of this, the major deviations the screenwriter made from the novel, the two actors Hitchcock really loved and the two he really didn't, the many sequels, Gus Van Sant's controversial remake, the TV series, and much much more!

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About The Show

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey, do you remember Psycho?
0:06.7	Hello and welcome to Hey Do You Remember, a show where we reminisce about a movie or TV series we grew up with, then take off the rose-tinted glasses to see how it holds up.
0:31.9	I'm Chris.
0:32.6	I'm Donna.
0:33.3	And I'm Carlos.
0:34.1	And today we're revisiting Psycho.
0:53.6	Yeah. And I'm Carlos. And today we're revisiting Psycho. Psycho came along at a critical moment in Alfred Hitchcock's career.
0:57.4	He was still under contract to deliver one more film for Paramount Pictures, but his relationship
1:01.6	with the studio had grown sour.
1:03.7	The last two movies he'd made there, Vertigo and The Trouble with Harry, had been well
1:07.7	received critically, but didn't perform that well at the box office.
1:10.8	His most recent film, North by Northwest, had been well received critically, but didn't perform that well at the box office.
1:16.5	His most recent film, North by Northwest, had been incredibly successful, but that had been for MGM. His budgets were ballooning. He was notoriously demanding, and for the higher-ups at Paramount,
1:22.0	there was maybe this sense that the aging director was becoming more trouble than he was worth.
1:26.5	And Hitchcock had some concerns of his own.
1:28.7	To say his work was influential would, of course, be a massive understatement. But what that
1:33.0	meant was there was already this crop of younger, fresher filmmakers, churning out movies that were
1:37.5	being described as Hitchcockian. He had become his own subgenre. And he hated the idea that audiences
1:43.9	felt like they knew what to expect
1:45.6	from him. He wanted to throw them, and all of his imitators, a curveball. It was time to reinvent himself.
1:52.8	There were only a handful of people he trusted to hunt down prospective material for him,
1:56.6	and one of them was his longtime assistant Peggy Robertson. Robertson had just read a positive review for Robert Block's new novel, Psycho,
	...

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