Screenwriter Joseph Stefano Dead at 84

Posted on August 31, 2006

Screenwriter Joseph Stefano has died at the age of 84. Stefano is survived by his wife of 52 years, Marilyn, and his son, Dominic. Stefano wrote the screenplay for Alfred Hitchcock's classic thriller, Psycho. He was also the original writer and producer of the classic science fiction tv show The Outer Limits.

A former composer-lyricist who turned to writing screenplays and TV plays in the late 1950s, Stefano's earliest credits included "The Black Orchid," a 1958 movie drama directed by Martin Ritt and starring Sophia Loren and Anthony Quinn; and a "Playhouse 90" production about racial prejudice, "Made in Japan."
After Hitchcock optioned Robert Bloch's 1959 novel "Psycho," Stefano was given a copy of the book the night before meeting with the director to discuss adapting it to the screen. In a 1990 interview for Media Scene Prevue magazine, Stefano said that, with the exception of the ending, he thought that the story was "weak in writing and characterization." The novel, he said, starts with Norman Bates, the mother-dominated motel owner, "and focuses on him too much. I was sure that no audience was going to like Norman enough to stay with him throughout an entire movie."
But as he was driving to Paramount for his meeting with Hitchcock, Stefano came up with a solution: begin the screenplay with the character of Marion Crane, who steals $40,000 from her Phoenix employer to begin a new life with her lover but is murdered after stopping at the Bates Motel. "Audiences would be sucked into a character who did something wrong but was really a good person," Stefano said. "They would feel as if they, not Marion, had stolen the $40,000. When she dies, the audience would be the victim." And that's just how it worked, he said. "With so much early emphasis on Marion, no one dreams she'll get killed," he said. "When it happens, people are blown away�. The idea excited Hitch. And I got the job. Killing the leading lady in the first 20 minutes had never been done before.
"Hitch suggested a name actress to play Marion because the bigger the star the more unbelievable it would be that we would kill her." "Psycho," starring Janet Leigh as Marion Crane and Anthony Perkins as Norman Bates, was a sensation, shocking audiences when Leigh's character was stabbed to death in the famous shower scene. "I think 'Psycho' bothered people on a level that the horror films that came before and after never even attempted," Stefano told The Times in 1990.

The Janet Leigh shower scene in Psycho is a classic that has been copied so many times that it's easy to forget that when Psycho came out that scene totally freaked out audiences. It still freaks us out.