Yet, it hardly needs to be said, Hollywood being Hollywood, that despite the piously professed desire to do everything exactly as Hitchcock did (including no screenings for critics), no one felt constrained to stick to the original $800,000 budget (Grazer and Van Sant have given conflicting interviews on how the new film’s $20-million-plus cost relates to the inflation-adjusted original figure) and no one offered to cut admission prices back to 1960s levels. The license plate on Marion Crane’s car is the same in both versions, the newspaper she buys is folded the same way, many of the scenes are shot just as Hitchcock did (largely wasting superb cinematographer Chris Doyle), and Van Sant has even hired an actor to impersonate Mr. Yes, I know, everyone in America has heard by now about the next-door-to-fetishistic care Van Sant took with “Psycho’s” details.

But calling it a shot-by-shot re-creation of what happens to unsuspecting Marion Crane (Janet Leigh in the original, Anne Heche here) when she checks in at the lonely Bates Motel was a superb piece of marketing, a gambit that gains in brilliance because at best it is only partly true. If Gus Van Sant and producer Brian Grazer had simply said they were remaking “Psycho,” the torrent of revenue-generating publicity they received would never have materialized. By the same token, what is interesting about “Psycho” is the combination of forces that got it made, forces that neatly encapsulate what carries weight in today’s Hollywood, what levers are most effective in getting things done. If anything is troubling about this project it’s the charlatanism involved, the attempt, which did not start off impressively at the box office (the opening weekend was $10.5 million), to dupe the public into thinking they’re getting something they’re not. No film is a holy object, and certainly not those by Hitchcock, a director who blithely remade his own works, believed passionately in being commercial and liked nothing better, he once said, than playing the audience “like an organ.” It’s not a crime against art or nature to do to “Psycho” what Gus Van Sant has done, it’s simply boring, a waste of time and money, and doomed to be the failure it is. The word is gimmick.įor though the “creative team” (a phrase that doesn’t often deserve to be in quotes as much as it does here) behind it would have you believe that critics would be offended simply by the notion of redoing “Psycho,” that’s not the case. It’s not sacrilege, not travesty, not profanation or desecration. There’s a word for Gus Van Sant’s colorized version of Alfred Hitchcock’s “Psycho,” a word that so dominates today’s marketing-driven movie culture it probably deserves to be written in capital letters.

Torrent psycho 1998