source
Rebello — Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho (1990)
The production history. Where nearly every behind-the-scenes claim about Psycho should be checked.
- book
- production-history
- hitchcock
Stephen Rebello, Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho (Dembner Books, 1990; reissued by Soft Skull/Open Road). Built from interviews with surviving cast and crew and studio records. Basis of the 2012 film Hitchcock. Book overview ↗
Good for
Production context, exhaustively: Paramount's refusal, the Shamley/TV-crew economics, the censor correspondence, the shooting of the shower scene day by day, the marketing plan. The strongest single source behind:
- The shower scene is built from 78 setups
- Herrmann scored the shower against orders
- The first flushing toilet
- The Production Code and Psycho
- Selling Psycho: the no-late-admission policy
Handle with care
Anecdotes collected decades after the fact; some numbers (setups, cuts, days) circulate in slightly different versions. Where a figure matters, this wiki flags it as "commonly cited" rather than gospel.