Creative horror screenwriter Joseph Stefano has been writing scripts since the early sixties. His first was The Black Orchid (1958). Less than a year later, he met his new friend, Alfred Hitchcock, to do the famous script for Psycho (1960). Stefano decided to drop the script for Hitchcock's The Birds (1963). Stefano later wrote a great screenplay ...
"I think doing the screenplay for Psycho (1960) has done me more harm than good. Through the years it has made it very difficult for me to get some of the other kinds of pictures that I would have like to have gone on to".
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Fact
1
Member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (Writers Branch).
2
His big break into show business came when he was hired as a writer for the Ted Mack Family Hour (1951).
3
A broken eardrum exempted him from WWII service.
4
Performed in operettas and wrote an off-Broadway musical comedy entitled "It's Your Movie". Also wrote songs for nightclub performers and for Donn Arden's musical revues in Las Vegas.
5
Originally was a singer and dancer who wrote his own material for high school and little theater productions in Philadelphia. He dropped out of high school a few weeks before graduating in order to pursue his career in Manhattan.
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One-time composer/lyricist who turned to writing in the late 1950s.
7
When he first read the novel "Psycho," he felt the story was weak in that it started with and focused too much on the unsavory Norman Bates character. It was Stefano's idea to Hitchcock to refocus the first part of the film on ill-fated Marion Crane with her embezzlement and shocking shower-stabbing murder at the Bates Hotel. Hitchcock loved the idea of killing off the leading lady (Janet Leigh) in the first 20 minutes and the movie was a huge hit.
$950,000
