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"Psycho" Scribe Stefano Dies

Wed., Aug. 30, 2006 7:05 PM PDT by Natalie Finn

Thanks to Alfred Hitchcock, millions of people thought twice before stepping into the shower. But because of Joseph Stefano, everyone knows that "a boy's best friend is his mother."

Stefano, who penned the screenplay for the classic 1960 thriller Psycho, died of heart disease Friday at Los Robles Hospital & Medical Center in Thousand Oaks, California. He was 84.

The Philadelphia native was the one who added Marion Crane's back story to Hitchcock's film, in which Marion (immortalized by Janet Leigh) steals $40,000 from her boss so that she and her lover can ride off into the sunset. Unfortunately, she stops for an overnight at the Bates Motel and never gets the chance to return the embezzled funds. The original Robert Bloch novel, which Stefano adapted, had Marion getting killed right off the bat.

"On the way to meet [Hitchcock], I realized I was hearing an awful lot about the killer and very little about the killed," Stefano told E! Online in 1998, the year Gus Van Sant's shot-by-shot Psycho remake came out. "That brought my mind around to Marion Crane, and I thought, 'What if the movie is about her?'...In 1959, it was unheard of to get a star to play someone who gets murdered 15 minutes into the film. That worked to the advantage of the film."

It worked to everyone's advantage. Psycho is still considered to be one of Hitchcock's most effective films, topping the American Film Institute's list of the 100 most chilling/thrilling/horrifying movies of all time.

Stefano went on to cocreate and executive produce the sci-fi series The Outer Limits in 1963 and later served as a consultant on the 1995 remake of the show, which lasted until 2002. He also lent his otherworldly expertise to a 1988 episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation.

Before and after going Psycho, Stefano wrote scripts for the Anthony Quinn-Sophia Loren drama The Black Orchid in 1958 and the thriller The Naked Edge, starring Gary Cooper and Deborah Kerr, in 1961.

Stefano, whose pre-Hollywood jobs ranged from typist to pianist to modern dance troupe member, worked steadily throughout the 1970s on TV movies such as the courtroom suspense-drama A Death of Innocence with Shelley Winters and the benignly titled thriller Home for the Holidays with Sally Field and Jessica Walter. He returned to his roots to give Anthony Perkins one last hurrah as Norman Bates in the 1990 made-for-TV sequel Psycho IV: The Beginning.

Stefano is survived by his wife of 52 years, Marilyn, and son, Dominic.