ALFRED HITCHCOCK, QUINTIN TARRANTINO: REALLY PSYCHO

REALLY PSYCHO:  REMAKE OF ALFRED HITCHCOCK’S CLASSIC FROM RECENTLY DISCOVERED ORIGINAL MANUSCRIPT

By Barkley M. Adler for CPW News Service

     In Joseph Stephano’s screenplay and film by Alfred Hitchcock, the chilling original film Psycho, Norman Bates, played by Anthony Hopkins, has a problem.  Well, several problems, all seeming to stem from a dark secret.  A cross-dresser by night and a simple hotelier by day, Mr. Bates is nuts.  Psycho, as the film’s title strongly suggests.

     His beautiful blonde victim dies an agonizing death as she showers in one of the Bates Hotel’s cracker box cages like a rat in cruel schoolboy’s science experiment.  Norman Bates has Oedipal issues which the viewer only understands in the closing scenes.  “Mother” is mummified in a rocking chair in the attic of the creepy Bates home that towers above the hotel on the hillside beyond.

     “The film brings into murky focus a number of abnormal psychological syndromes that modern society has rightly considered taboo.  Sons are not suppose to be so attached to their mothers that they freeze dry them and keep them for posterity in a chair, on an ottoman, much less in a missionary position on a twin bed in the childhood bedroom with a vinyl disc of the classic surfer song by The Beach Boys, In My Room, playing on a record player,” said Sidney Thelenbloom of the American Society for the Study of Abnormal Obsessions in Cincinnati, Ohio.

     “We are delighted, however, that Mr. Hitchcock’s original first manuscript of Psycho was discovered and that it will be made into the film as it was first envisioned by Hitchcock,” said Thelenbloom who noted  that Hitchcock's first screenplay of the Stephano story was too psycho for Psycho.

    “In the original screenplay, Norman Bates is Norma Bates who cross-dresses as a man.  Her victim is a handsome and debonair young Mark Crane whose best physical features are eliminated while he showers at the Bates Hotel.  "His cock becomes unhitched," said Thelenbloom.  Mr. Crane also has a secret, but it is from there that the new Quintin Tarrantino screenplay departs from Hitchcock’s original version that was later revised into the movie Psycho based on  Stephano’s classic tale.  Quintin Tarantino’s script has Mr. Crane, a former executive of Bain Capital and previously at Goldman Sacks, fleeing an uncharacteristically late upper Atlantic hurricane that cripples the Northeast.  Embezzling $4 million from Bain Capital after he threatens to vote Democratic in an upcoming Presidential election, Mr. Crane takes a liking to the soft spoken hotel manager, Norman Bates, who in their first encounter at the hotel explains that “father had to be put away”.   Mark Crane, the role of Vivien Leigh as Mary Crane in the first Psycho film, is to be played by Brad Pitt who becomes the focus of an investigation by his broken-hearted older brother, played by Matt McConoughey,” said the film’s spokesperson, Carmine LaRocca.

    “This is the role of a lifetime for Uma Thurman, who in the closing scene will ascend to the room at the top of the stairs with McConoughey in hot pursuit to discover that the man he is chasing, Norman Bates, is a woman, Norma Bates.   In the attic is the body of a man in a bed that resembles a stiff log with a single extended ten inch branch pointing headward.  A single stained white pillow supports the cadaver's gray haired head.   A jar of K-Y  flies across the room from the night stand in the scuffle between Thurman and McConoughey,” said LaRocca, who is not only an adviser to Mr. Tarantino, but also to Johnson & Johnson who makes K-Y Jelly.   Speaking to Phillip S. Bareagan in a July 27th NewsDayNewsNight.com interview  LaRocca, a successful country and western songwriter reportedly sang his latest tune...."Oh how my Johnson thanks Johnson and Johnson."  Bareagan teamed up with Roger Lesser of the Madison Avenue advertising firm, Lesser, Moore and Batter for placement of K-Y in the new film.  "Lesser's idea was a stroke of genius," said Bareagan.  "The subliminal message is that K-Y helps women to embrace the most painful of sexual encounters.  While the message to men is that no relationship is hopeless," said Bareagan.

     Really Psycho will appear at theaters on December 25^th, 2012.

   "Uma Thurman was always our first choice for Norma Bates," said LaRocca.  "She pulls off Norman Bates beautifully, and makes an incredibly believable man," said LaRocca noting that both Angelina Jolie and Jennifer Anniston also showed an interest in the part.  "Especially Jennifer," said LaRocca.