December the 11th. The date that appears in the opening scene of Alfred Hitchcock's "Psycho" unofficially marking the date as "Psycho Day" for Phoenix.
The skyline looks a little different, but Valley movie fans will probably never forget their cities famous cameo in the opening scenes of the film.
The 1960 film opens on a shot of downtown Phoenix, the Heard Building, not the Westward Ho, in the foreground before sweeping across the city and into the Barrister Building, or what was then the Jefferson Hotel.
According to Stephen Rebello in his book "Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho," Hitchcock had to abandon his "elaborate fly on the wall visual pun in which a helicopter was to have descended over the city and into the motel room window."
"Instead Hitchcock simplified the overview of Phoenix to a panoramic pan from left to right, moving progressively closer, toward the hotel window," Rebello writes.
A tiny film crew was actually sent back to Phoenix to reshoot the city skyline, Rebello writes.
The scenes inside were shot in Phoenix too.
"You can see Phoenix out the window, and they're not doing CGI back then." So they shot that in in the building," Denton Hanna, a location manager for Hollywood films in Arizona, said.
Hanna says Phoenix would have been scouted by a film crew as a location much like they do now in Hollywood and filming of the shot would "probably be the same way" today.
So how can you celebrate what might just be Phoenix's most famous Hollywood cameo on "Psycho Day"?
The FilmBar in Phoenix is showing the classic at 7 p.m. Tuesday.
