Anthony Perkins, Bruce Dern, and Karen Black -- Hosting SNL in the 70s and 80s
I got the Peacock streaming service. I heard Hitchcock movies were there. But they are not(at least not right now.) All of the Hitchcock TV shows are....
...and so are ALL the Saturday Night Live episodes from its first 1975-1976 season to ...last week's episode(Ryan Gosling host).
This is on topic about Anthony Perkins and Psycho, but a little bit OFF topic about Bruce Dern, Karen Black and Family Plot. Hitchcock players all and -- I believe -- the only three Hitchcock performers to host Saturday Night Live.
Perkins rather famously got to host Saturday Night Live("SNL") in its very first season and hence his stint got talked about a lot when I was in college and that one aired (March of 1976 , I think, just ahead of the April 1976 opening of Family Plot -- I always like to note that Saturday Night Live entered the culture just around the time that Alfred Hitchcock left it.)
Anyway, Perkins' show had his famous sketch "The Norman Bates School of Motel Management" where Norman(in a nice "motel office" set, complete with stuff birds), offers these two questions:
"Your female guest has lost her room key. Do you":
a. Give her another key.
b. Let her in with your passkey.
c. Hack her to death with a kitchen knife.
(Audience laughs.)
"What is the most important part of running a motel?":
a. Providing a pleasant welcoming atmosphere.
b. Providing courteous service.
c. Hack her to death with a kitchen knife.
(Audience laughs HARDER.)
Perkins plays off his "Psycho" image well in that episode...Psycho was STILL a big thing in the 70's thanks to all its TV and revival showings, and thus Perkins merited an SNL gig. The sequels were still 7 years away(to start) but...and this is weird...hosting SNL in 1976, Perkins ALREADY had that weird, stilted sing song vocal pattern that had nothing to do with his great 1960 performance and which rather cheapened Norman in the 80s, IMHO.
I scanned the list of episodes (almost 50 years worth now) and found that Karen Black hosted (once) and Bruce Dern(twice.) Both Black and Dern were in Family Plot, and Dern was in Marnie. I have not watched any of the Black episode, and I only had time to watch Dern 's opening monologue for his second appearance(in 1983..the year of Psycho II, hey.)
Dern's monologue touched on a few movies discussed here. He sat on a stool on stage and spoke quietly and earnestly(this is all paraphrased):
"I was thinking, since I hosted last year, that when I came back I would talk about how hard it is when you get pigeonholed in one kind of role.
Consider me. I"ve been in a lot of good, serious films..often playing a nice guy..movies like Silent Running, Smile, Middle Aged Crazy...Family Plot (pause then with edge)...but you DIDN'T GO SEE THOSE movies!! (Angrily) DID YA?
(He continues in the more sneering raging Dern voice.) NO...you liked to see me in Hush Hush Sweet Charlotte , where they cut off my head and hand with a meat cleaver, and Marnie, where I got bludgeoned to death with a fireplace poker..and The Thing With Two Heads, and my Hell's Angels movies and...and...and..BLACK SUNDAY, where I hijacked the Goodyear blimp and tried to kill 85,000 fans at the SUPER BOWL!! THAT's what you went to see!!"
Ha. A nice tour of some unsung movies. Dern conspicuously LEFT OUT The Cowboys , where he famously killed John Wayne by shooting him in the back! I think even in 1983, that outrage(to some) was too sensitive a topic.
I'll have to see what Bruce Dern did and said in his other SNL episode, and how Karen Black handled hers. I guess its good enough to know that Hitchcock at least cast two people at the end of his career who were deemed hot enough to host SNL.
And Anthony Perkins remains hot forever...in legend.
PS. I got no time to watch all of them, but as one scrolls the decades of SNL episodes listed -- and some of the more offbeat hosts (George Carlin, Richard Pryor, Desi Arnaz, Broderick Crawford, Lily Tomlin, Jill Clayburgh Ralph Nader, Madeleine Kahn...Tom Hanks, Mel Gibson, Bruce Willis..Sydney Sweeney, Dakota Johnson) -- the entire last 50 years of American movie, TV and political culture rather passes through one's brain. Its sobering. Like watching your life pass before your eyes...I can only GUESS. Ha.