Watching Joseph Stefano's The Outer Limits, with Psycho in Mind

Though Robert Bloch famously wrote the novel upon which Psycho is based, Joseph Stefano wsa famously selected by Hitchcock to write the screenplay(after Hitchcock had fired another screenwriter who didn't turn in a good script.)

Its hard to say exactly what merit Joe Stefano "deserved" for writing the screenplay of Psycho. Robert Bloch had really written the story, start to finish, from when Marion reaches the Bates Motel. The house and the motel; the shower murder; the climax in the fruit cellar; the final scene in the jail cell...all from Bloch. Bloch had also written the character of Arbogast(called Milton Arbogast in the book) and his killing.

Arbogast dies differently in the movie -- on the staircase from a knife, rather than in the foyer from a straight razor. Did Stefano give us that change? Or did Hitchcock? The staircase murder was truly a "cinematic" flourish. We can figure that perhaps Hitchcock and Stefano SHARED the idea of putting Arbo on the stairs.

So much of Psycho is without dialogue -- including the shower murder and minutes on either side of it -- that Hitchcock comes out as the co-auteur with ...Bloch(who wrote the story.)

Ah, but Joe Stefano did his part -- HE came up with the idea of opening with Marion Crane in a hotel room "shacked up with her lover"(Stefano's phrase.) HE came up with the idea of doing a half hour of Marion's story(all lifted from the book, less the motor cop). And HE wrote dialogue for the parlor talk and the Norman/Arbogast interrogation, which was much better, on a line for line basis, than Bloch's dialogue.

Stefano's reward came quickly: a script for the final Gary Cooper movie in 1961(The Naked Edge.) And then a 1963 TV series in tradition of Hitchcock's TV series(which got their first) and The Twilight Zone(which got there second.)

The Outer Limits.

The Outer Limits is streaming right now, and I've gone and sampled a couple of the episodes that Joe Stefano actually WROTE. He came onto the series as a producer, but occasionally wrote an episode, too.

I only saw a couple of Outer Limits episodes first run in its 1963-1965 run. The problem was our family only had one TV and it didn't get "picked." But I had a friend who watched it a lot, and in the tradition of the times, he TOLD me the gist of many episodes.

Still, I did manage to see a few first run, and more than a few in re-runs.

It was fun to "re-visit" two of those episodes the other day. Both written by Joseph Stefano. I watched and listened with an "ear for Psycho." Would the dialogue be the same?

The title of the first one was a"classic B": "It Crawled Out of the Woodwork." Indeed, it did -- a spongy dustball in an electronics lab is vacuumed up by a cleaning lady and becomes a human-size-but-bigger mobile "electronic being" who kills people and soaks up their energy. The animation for the electronic being is pretty good --it moves almost like a person, but in stop motion bursts.

The Psycho echoes are there, weak, but there. The lab where the monster lurks(along with the mad scientist who created him) is the "zone of danger" in a backwoods location, and characters have to decide to go out there and invade it. Our hero and his girlfriend stay in a local motel(separate rooms) and eventually when the girlfriend wants to accompany the hero to the lab, he says "no , you stay here" and memories of Sam heading off to the Bates Motel at night arise.

There's a plain clothes cop investigating the disappearances of people at the lab. Its Ed Asner, in his 30's, and 7 years away from fame as Lou Grant. Here, Ed proves something I always thought: in a certain time, Ed Asner could have played Arbogast. He's a little thinner here than as Lou Grant, closer to the short and stocky build of Martin Balsam than the more bull-like football player frame he would later have. And he's balding like Balsam so he would have looked the same with the knife hit to the forehead.

Asner questions some people who have "something to hide," and there's a bit of the Arbogast style to the performance and his scenes.

Still...and this was interesting...none of it played as well as the Arbogast scenes in Psycho. Maybe the pressures of quickie TV production prevented Stefano from writing the cop's interrogation lines with the wit and relaxed vigor that Arbogast had. What definitely came through was Stefano(as writer) and Gerd Oswald(as director) having an inability to film Asner's scenes or the REST of this episode with anything less than a certain heavy-handed hysteria. This is a "monster show" where people eventually start panicking and fighting for survival and -- no -- the "Psycho feeling" just ain't there.