how hitchcock scared up audiences for psycho

Hitchcock wasn’t only a master of moviemaking, he was pioneer of movie marketing. Psycho was a low budget film ($800K) that could have easily tanked because Paramount didn’t want him to make it. The movie was based on a pulp novel that many thought was beneath Hitchcock's sensibility. (In today’s terms, it would be like Woody Allen filming a James Patterson thriller.) When Hitchcock finished the movie, the studio refused to premiere it. Which forced him to come up with his own marketing strategy. He filmed this message to moviehouse managers across the country to show them how to “sell” Psycho, which (brilliantly) advised them to forbid anyone entrance after the movie started. This resulted in long lines of ticket-holders outside theaters and drive-ins, jittery with anticipation, which translated into great WOM, much harder to achieve when social media required social contact. Psycho became one of the hit movies of 1960 and was nominated for an Oscar.

friday flashback--Tom Hanks, creative director, 1986

My 19-year old goes back to college next week and in searching for bonding activities of mutual enjoyment, I netflixed Nothing in Common, an advertising movie I missed somehow. (Oh, right. It came out the year I birthed my first child, a year in which the only movies I saw were reruns at 2 in the morning while breastfeeding.)

It was a great choice, a fun, funny, shareable film. Early Tom Hanks. Bess Armstrong. Sela Ward. "I can't believe it!" I gasped when Jackie Gleason's name flashed on screen. My daughter gasped, too. Someone her age likes Jackie Gleason? Nah. Opening credits were scrolling over first scene which takes place on a plane and announcement is made to extinguish all smoking materials. "You could smoke on a plane?" she said, incredulous.

Which had me noticing all kinds of things that have gone the way of smoking sections and DOS:

marker sets in 87,987 graduating colors
shoulder pads
storyboard pads with frames that looked like mini TV screens
Flashdance-type cutoff sweatshirt sleeves--for guys
epaulets
purple lipstick
mechanical snow makers on set
long gloves worn with wrist-bling on top
designer briefcases
portable phones with pull-out antennas
wall phones
secretaries

Of course, some things never change:

pencils stuck in acoustic ceiling tiles
presentation jitters (Don't bother me now, I'm in pre-game.)
cubicles
theatrics during new business pitches
clueless clients
impossibility of juggling work and family
bosses who get it--and bosses who don't
window office envy
toy collections in creative offices
on set--"client areas" to keep clients as far away from director as possible (But why can't we watch the monitors over there.)
nepotism

the office, circa. 1959

Seeing Bette Davis double feature at a theater the other night reminded me of how much better women of a certain economic strata had it in the old days: afternoon "beauty naps", closetsful of great looking "outfits" (no mom jeans), handsome hardbox luggage to haul the outfits around whenever you travelled, (of course, plenty of willing others to do the actual hauling, for coin tips), a maid AND a housekeeper being de rigueur, even if it was just you and a spouse living in a tiny house in Vermont.

For working women (meaning women without husbands), it was a different story. Only a few jobs were actually open to you: nurse, teacher, domestic labor, sales clerk, secretary. And just one business countenanced female execs--publishing. The only way to break in was as a secretary (NOT an admin) which basically meant being slave to your boss' whims and idiosyncrasies. This could be most daunting in the rare event your boss was a woman as illustrated by Joan Crawford in The Best of Everything who supposedly was the model Streep followed for The Devil Wears Prada. Anything that requires a personal reply goes here... not here, or here, but.. here...