78/52

Any damned fool with an iPhone can make a movie now. Go on Tubi and you'll find backyard movies made on favors and cast with friends by the hundreds. Names like Exorcist Shark and Suburban Sasquatch. I'm not here to castigate them. They have a passion, but they just don't have the budget or the prominence to make more refined movies. Hell, maybe they want to make no-budget schlockfests. There's an audience for that. But there's a craftsmanship behind making movies that often gets overlooked. Making a film isn't just setting up a camera and yelling action. The framing, the blocking, the sequencing of cuts, lighting, angles; every element of it contributes to the telling of the story, even if you only perceive of it on a subliminal level. Most people are content to just watch the movie and enjoy it at face value, and that's perfectly fine. There's no wrong way to watch a movie. But for those of us who get a little geekier and like to see the breakdown of the artistry behind the art, there's 78/52, a documentary about examining the filming and editing that made the iconic shower scene in Psycho. 78/52 brings in a bunch of directors, actors, Janet Leigh's body double for the scene, Jamie Lee Curtis, Alfred Hitchcock's granddaughter, and more to discuss how Hitchcock's career seemed to build towards this movie, the impact of the movie itself, and then a very thorough dissection of the scene, shot by shot and cut by cut. The 78/52 refers to the scene containing 78 camera setups and 52 cuts. The documentary breaks down a number of these; how the camera moves from one side of Janet Leigh to the other, how one shot early on when she's just stepped in mirrors a shot as she's dying and sliding down the wall, and so on. This does make 78/52 a rather geeky documentary with a high bar to entry. If you don't care about seeing how the sausage gets made, 78/52 will strike the average viewer as people getting overly analytical about a movie. And, yeah, it is that. After the doc gets through explaining the historical impact of Psycho on pop culture and cinema, it is watching film nerds get film nerdy. If you don't care about it, no judgment, but you should know up front this doc will NOT be for you. It's meant for dorks like me, who love getting to peek behind the curtain at the process just as much as we love the final product. There's joy in watching people like Eli Roth and Elijah Wood and Guillermo del Toro get giddy like a child as they watch the scene and seeing all the movie-making tricks employed. That's the litmus test here: do you want to go behind the scenes and see the breakdown? If so, this is your kind of doc. If not, don't. But for those of us that do, it is an excellent celebration of one of cinema's most iconic moments, its director, and all that went into bringing the life of Marion Crane to a violent end.