Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho reputation, including "Rope", "Rear Window", "To Catch a Thief", "The Man Who Knew Too Much", and "North by Northwest". The project, which Hitchcock tackled in part to compete with financially successful, low-budget, youth-oriented horror movies, went on to astound many by becoming a cultural watershed, an international box-office success, a film classic, and a forerunner of the violent, disorienting films and real-events of the turbulent 1960s and '70s. "Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho" was initially distributed in hardcover print by W.W. Norton for Dembner Books on April 15, 1990 in the United States. A trade paperback edition was
Alfred Hitchcock rough cut of the work. According to Krohn, this and a great deal of other information revealed through his research of Hitchcock's personal papers, script revisions and the like refute the notion of Hitchcock as a director who was always in control of his films, whose vision of his films did not change during production, which Krohn notes has remained the central long-standing myth of Alfred Hitchcock. Both his fastidiousness and attention to detail also found their way into each film poster for his films. Hitchcock preferred to work with the best talent of his day—film poster designers such as