PHOENIX — December the 11th. It's the date that appears in the opening scene of Alfred Hitchcock's "Psycho" unofficially marking the date as "Psycho" day for Phoenix.
Phoenix served as the home for Janet Leigh's Marion Crane in the movie. Marion would travel out of the city, headed to California to meet her boyfriend, only to end up meeting an unfortunate fate at the Bates Motel.
The Phoenix skyline looks a little different more than 60 years later, but Valley movie fans will probably never forget their city's famous cameo in the opening scenes of the film.
The 1960 film opens with a shot of downtown Phoenix, the famed 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 an elaborate fly-on-the-wall visual 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 wrote of the shot.
A small film crew was actually sent back to Phoenix to reshoot the city skyline, Rebello said in his book.
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 the building," Denton Hanna, a location manager for Hollywood films in Arizona, said.
Hanna said a film crew in Hitchcock's day would have scouted Phoenix as a location much like they do now in Hollywood.
For more information on how to watch Hitchcock's movie, click here.
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