Joseph Stefano, 84; Was Screenwriter Behind `Psycho,' `Outer Limits'

Joseph Stefano, who wrote the screenplay for Alfred Hitchcock's classic thriller "Psycho" and was the influential first-season producer-writer of the 1960s science-fiction anthology TV series "The Outer Limits," has died. He was 84.

Stefano, who underwent surgery for lung cancer in 2001, died of heart failure Friday at Los Robles Hospital & Medical Center in Thousand Oaks, said his wife of 52 years, Marilyn.

A former composer-lyricist who turned to writing screenplays and TV plays in the late 1950s, Stefano's earliest credits included "The Black Orchid," a 1958 movie drama directed by Martin Ritt and starring Sophia Loren and Anthony Quinn; and a "Playhouse 90" production about racial prejudice, "Made in Japan."

After Hitchcock optioned Robert Bloch's 1959 novel "Psycho," Stefano was given a copy of the book the night before meeting with the director to discuss adapting it to the screen.

In a 1990 interview for Media Scene Prevue magazine, Stefano said that, with the exception of the ending, he thought that the story was "weak in writing and characterization."

The novel, he said, starts with Norman Bates, the mother-dominated motel owner, "and focuses on him too much. I was sure that no audience was going to like Norman enough to stay with him throughout an entire movie."

But as he was driving to Paramount for his meeting with Hitchcock, Stefano came up with a solution: begin the screenplay with the character of Marion Crane, who steals $40,000 from her Phoenix employer to begin a new life with her lover but is murdered after stopping at the Bates Motel.

"Audiences would be sucked into a character who did something wrong but was really a good person," Stefano said. "They would feel as if they, not Marion, had stolen the $40,000. When she dies, the audience would be the victim."

And that's just how it worked, he said.

"With so much early emphasis on Marion, no one dreams she'll get killed," he said. "When it happens, people are blown away

"Hitch suggested a name actress to play Marion because the bigger the star the more unbelievable it would be that we would kill her."

"Psycho," starring Janet Leigh as Marion Crane and Anthony Perkins as Norman Bates, was a sensation, shocking audiences when Leigh's character was stabbed to death in the famous shower scene.

"I think 'Psycho' bothered people on a level that the horror films that came before and after never even attempted," Stefano told The Times in 1990.