Rob Price
Gutbrain Records
rob + gutbrain.com = email

2024 October 25 • Friday

Happy birthday!

Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho has certainly been extensively covered. But if you're interested in it and you haven't heard what Janet Leigh has to say about it yet, then her book Psycho: Behind the Scenes of the Classic Thriller, a collaboration with Christopher Nickens, is one you must read.

Leigh takes the reader through her biography, starting with the very unlikely beginnings of her Hollywood career. (They were so unlikely that when she told studio publicists how she had come to be there, the response was along the lines of, "That's great, we can use that, but you should tell us what really happened just so we're prepared".)

Leigh is an assured narrator of events, witty, discerning and generous. Nickens's role is to provide journalistic information to set scenes and add perspective.

Her account of the film's production is fascinating, as expected. I didn't realize that the voice of Norman Bate's mother was the result of Hitchcock's stitching together three audio recordings of three different people reading her lines. (Anthony Perkins was not one of them.)

Leigh is just as interesting when she raises the curtain on what her life is like, reading The Manchurian Candidate on a flight to DC for JFk's Presidential Gala, for instance, with no idea that the plot of the book would more or less play out in real life and that she would star in the movie adaptation.

Life after Psycho includes acclaim as well as anxiety, as the movie attracts some disturbed people to the Leigh household. Jamie Lee Curtis, one of Leigh's daughters, claims never to have seen Psycho all the way through. I bet Leigh saw Halloween, though.

The first line is "Are you wondering why I waited thirty-five years to do a book on Psycho?".