Additional dialogue: Anthony Perkins on Psycho

While preparing to introduce Psycho this Wednesday as a Culture Map Night at the Movies offering at the Alamo Drafthouse West Oaks, I've been reminded of how ambivalent Anthony Perkins felt about being typecast by the role of a lifetime: Norman Bates, the boyishly shy motelkeeper who loved his mother not wisely but far too well. Indeed, for more than a decade after he starred in the film, he deeply resented the lasting legacy of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 masterwork.

During this period, it should be noted, Perkins enjoyed a wide range of roles on Broadway, playing leads in The Star-Spangled Girl, Equus and Romantic Comedy. In films, however, he usually was hired to play some variety of neurotic, psychotic or arrested adolescent, most notably in The Fool Killer (1965), WUSA (1970), the cult-fave Pretty Poison  (1968) and (opposite no less a leading lady than Diana Ross) Mahogany (1975). It was almost enough to drive him – well, psycho.

It required a serious attitude adjustment on his part – and the encouragement of his supportive wife, photographer Berry Berenson – for Perkins to fully appreciate the upside of achieving immortality in a classic movie. By the mid-1970s, he was ready to embrace his notoriety, and even mock himself in a classic Saturday Night Live sketch. (“Here at the Norman Bates School of Motel Management….”) By 1983, three years after Hitchcock’s death, he was willing to re-open the Bates Motel in Psycho II.Two years later, he took full control of his destiny as director and star of Psycho III.

Perkins, who died of AIDS in 1992, seldom discussed his private life or sexual proclivities with interviewers. In the 1980s, however, he offered some astonishingly candid revelations in a People magazine profile. The son of film and stage actor Osgood Perkins, he was raised by his smotheringly protective mother after his father died when Anthony was 5. Inadvertently, she aroused ambivalent, sexually charged feelings in her son, feelings often accompanied by pangs of Oedipal guilt. In later years, Perkins told People, he was emotionally ill-equipped to sustain relationships with women. (That changed in 1971, he claimed, when he met Berry – who, in a horrible twist of fate, eventually died aboard one of the aircraft that crashed into the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001.) On the other hand, Perkins’ traumatic childhood may have helped to make him a true soul mate of The Master of Suspense.

Perkins addressed the latter issue, among others, during a 1985 interview with me at his Universal Pictures production office shortly before he started work on Psycho III.

Q: Alfred Hitchcock once said actors should be treated like cattle. How do you think he would feel about cattle taking over the corral as directors?

A: That’s a good question. Actually, when we made the first Psycho, he was tremendously on my side with everything that I tried to bring to the picture. He encouraged my co-operation and collaboration with him at every turn. And I know that was not his well-known way of being. So maybe there was something between the two of us that he responded to. Or maybe he simply was tired of hearing what a dictator he appeared to be, and how actors resented his lack of communication.

Q: Do you think he may have seen a little bit of himself in you? According to Donald Spoto’s biography, The Dark Side of Genius, Hitchcock also had to contend with ambivalent feelings about a domineering mother.

A: That’s an inventive idea. I hate speculative answers, but I like that as a theory. It’s possible, I suppose. But how will we ever know? I certainly have wondered why he was so kind to me, and would accept my suggestions. It was strange: He wouldn’t even be curious about what changes I wanted to make. He’d say, “Enchant me on the set.” He didn’t want to know about them before.

At one point, when we were filming the scene where Norman finds Marion Crane’s body in the bathroom, I jump back and sort of huddle against the door. Well, when I did it the first time, a picture fell off the wall, and hit the floor. Hitch was setting something else up, so I said, “Look, this bird picture fell off the wall. Why don’t we include that? We could even do an insert shot of this picture hitting the floor…?” And suddenly, that got the entire set quiet. Because it’s one thing to fool around with the dialogue, or do your own clothes. But when you tell The Master of Suspense to shoot an insert, you may be sticking your head into the lion’s mouth.

But all he said was “Oh, lovely. We’ll do that.” So, to answer your question: Yes, it was spooky how far he went with me. And I, of course, never tried to take advantage of his generosity.

Q: Do you know why he cast you as Norman Bates?

A: Well, Hitchcock was unique in those days – and probably in these days as well. He never used to cast actors from readings or auditions of any kind. He cast them from seeing them in other pictures and previous roles. That was his way. He’d seen me in Fear Strikes Out (1957), in which I played Jim Piersall – the baseball player who had a nervous breakdown. So, by the time of my first meeting with him, I already more or less had the part.

But I didn’t realize that he would be so relaxed to the point of where he would pull $100 out of his pocket and say, “Here, now that we’ve talked, I have to be on to some other business. But why don’t you go down to a store and buy what you think Norman Bates would wear, and give it to the wardrobe man? Those can be your costumes.” I thought that was awfully good of him to trust me that way, first of all. And second of all, it was good of him to demonstrate that trust, not by just saying “I’m sure you’re gonna be wonderful, and I’m looking forward to this,” but by doing something pragmatic and evidential of his trust.

I immediately went out and bought $100 worth of – well, I don’t want to say low-class stuff. But it was definitely the slouchy early ’60s look. And Hitchcock barely looked at it when I returned with it.

Q: Despite his actions, Norman had always remained an oddly sympathetic character. Why do you think that’s so?

A: Well, I think one of the things that made the first Psycho an enduring film is that Norman’s crimes were always committed out of love, out of an excess of love, rather than an excess of hate. Norman never hated anyone. And he’s not a person who works from the emotion of hate, or even responds to it. So I think that is one thing that has kept audiences kind of on Norman’s side, because they realize he’s been pushed to these extremes out of love. Also, it’s because Hitchcock had the brainstorm to cast the role not as it was written in the original Robert Bloch novel, as an older, overweight, disconsolate sort of half-stupefied man. Instead, he made Norman a younger, more sympathetic character. I think that was a very intelligent thing for him to do.

Look, over the years, maybe tens of thousands of people have come up to me in airports and theater lobbies and hotel lobbies and restaurants. And no one has ever walked up to me with anything but a smile. That’s because they found Norman was someone they could warm up to. No one has ever seen me and cried, “Oh, my God! It’s Norman Bates!”

Q: Even so, weren’t you resentful for a long time at being so closely associated with Norman Bates? I have the impression you weren’t able to resign yourself to your image until well into the 1970s, when you spoofed Norman on Saturday Night Live.

A: I have definitely made peace with it. Years ago, my wife pointed out to me that the more resistance I had to the public association of me and Norman Bates – and vice-versa – the more people would come away from an encounter with me confirmed that their suspicions were correct. And from that very casual remark of hers on, it’s been very much easier for me to accept that people still literally say, “Hi, Norman,” when they meet me. Actually, it’s an honor to be associated with a movie that has lasted and gone on through a generation, and is still able to quicken the pulse. I think it’s great. I prefer that to walking down the street and having people say, “Oh, look, that’s… that’s… uhhhhh…”

Once Mad magazine has done you, and Saturday Night Live has done you, and once you’ve been anthologized in everything, and your sequences are shown to film schools – you’re just part of the national grain, that’s all.

Coming Wednesday: Filmmaker Bradley Beesley escorts Sweethearts to Alamo Drafthouse

After observing barehanded fishermen in Okie Noodling, an up-close view of small-town sportsmen, and examining alt-rock icons in The Fearless Freaks, his celebration of Wayne Coyne and The Flaming Lips, Oklahoma-based filmmaker Bradley Beesley shifted his gaze to an event billed as "the only behind-the-walls rodeo in the world" in Sweethearts of the Prison Rodeo, a critically acclaimed documentary that will have its Houston theatrical premiere at 7:30 pm Wednesday at the Alamo Drafthouse Cinema in the West Oaks Mall.

Beesely will be on hand for a Q&A after the Wednesday screening – the first-ever CultureMap Night at the Movies presentation -- and I’ll be there to host the event.

At once clear-eyed and compassionate, Sweethearts is a fascinating group portrait of women convicts who are relative newcomers -- but determined competitors -- in a decades-old statewide event previously restricted to male inmates in the Oklahoma prison system. Beesley includes several scenes highlighting a male prison rodeo vet -- a convicted murder who makes no excuses for himself even as he seeks parole – but his movie focuses primarily on the feisty female competitors held in the Eddie Warrior Women's Correctional Center in Taft, OK.

“To be honest,” Beesley told me when I interviewed him at the 2009 SXSW Film Festival in Austin for Cowboys & Indians magazine, “ I never dreamed I would ever make a prison film or a rodeo film. Most prison documentaries bore me to tears. And rodeo documentaries have already been done, you know? But once my producer James Payne and I realized that women would be included in the mix — we figured that would be novel enough for us to show up with our cameras. Which we did — unannounced, basically. That was back in 2006, when they first announced that women were going to participate in this event.”

So he and Payne just showed up one day at the front door of the correctional center?

“Well, we did call the day before we arrived,” Beesley said “But we didn't know who we were going to meet, or whether they were going to let us film. But they let us shoot, and we produced a short — which we premiered [at the SXSW Film Festival] in 2007. And we got some really positive feedback based on the short, which we used to attract funding for a feature-length documentary.”

Like most filmmakers who make films like this one, Beesley and Payne had to rely on educated guesses and gut instincts while “casting” subjects for Sweethearts. “You've got to get lucky,” Beesley said. “ But what we did was, we picked girls who were hopefully going to get out of prison within a year, or two years, because we wanted their stories to have some kind of resolution. And we also picked girls who, for lack of a better term, had drama in their back stories. But even then you don't know what's going to happen.

“Like, we didn't know one of them would get kicked off the rodeo team for receiving contraband. And at first, we were devastated. Here's one of our main ‘characters’ — Jamie Brooks, who did very well the first year women could compete — and she gets kicked off the team, and we're freaking out.

“But after a couple of days, we realized that, for better or worse, it's sort of the best thing that could have happened — for us — because it gave us a bigger arc for her character. For a while it looked like that was going to mess up her parole, after 13 years in prison. But Jamie made parole — and even appeared in Austin for the premiere screening.”

Beesley found himself hoping for the best for all his subjects while filming Sweethearts of the Prison Rodeo. And, yes, that sometimes made it difficult for him to be a completely objective observer.

“Look, I'll admit: Whenever I was down there in a chute with one of these women on a bull, I was shaking. I mean, I wasn't doing a very good job shooting at all. In fact, I'd forget I was shooting because I'd get so wrapped up in watching these ladies that we'd come to care about mounting a bull.

“It was really hard to film.”

But wait, there's more:

One night only: 45365

You can see it Thursday night at the Alamo Draft House West Oaks in H-Town. And I'll be there to introduce it. Read more about it here.