Profile of Joseph Stefano on Famous Like Me

Joseph Stefano is an American screenwriter.

Originally a composer of pop music in the 1940s, Stefano began writing movie scripts in the late 1950s, beginning with Martin Ritt's The Black Orchid (1958). In 1960, Stefano was tapped by Alfred Hitchcock to adapt Robert Bloch's pulp novel Psycho for the screen. Stefano was offered the job of scripting Hitchcock's Marnie (1964) but opted out to produce and write for friend Leslie Stevens' science fiction television project The Outer Limits.

After leaving the series due to network intereference and exhaustion, Stefano wrote and directed The Ghost of Sierra de Cobre (1964; AKA The Haunted), a difficult-to-find film utilizing many of the crew responsible for The Outer Limits. The thriller Eye of the Cat (1969) and the comedy Futz! (1969) (co-written by Rochelle Owens) were Stefano's last big-screen jobs for many years. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, he wrote many made-for-TV movies, such as Home for the Holidays (1972), and Snowbeast (1977).

In 1990, he revisited the characters from Psycho with the TV movie script for the last sequel in what had become an increasingly disappointing series of films. Psycho IV: The Beginning (1991) posits the origins of Norman Bates' destructive mother-love; featuring Olivia Hussey as Mrs. Bates. Stefano wrote and executive produced the Al Pacino drama Two Bits (1995; AKA A Day to Remember), a personal project that fared poorly at the box-office and with critics, leaving Stefano less than enthusiastic about continuing to write for modern Hollywood. Gus Van Sant's remake of Psycho (1998) followed Stefano's script.

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