John and I have spent a terrific couple of nights revisiting two Hitchcock classics, PSYCHO and THE BIRDS. We both found ourselves reentering the minds of moviegoers seeing these films for the first time, and realizing how deeply disturbing both of them must have been. And both begin quietly. It was a technique copied by William Friedkin in THE EXORCIST. He said he knew people would be coming into the theater having heard that this was the scariest movie ever made. So for about forty-five minutes in, nothing much happens. I remember sitting in the theater thinking, “What’s the big deal?” I left later having experienced a trauma I’m still recovering from. It’s a technique I seem to have absorbed early on. It’s one of my favorite things to do in a script: the slow build followed by the unrelenting sucker punch.
Richard Willett
Richard Willett is the author of the plays Triptych, Random Harvest, The Flid Show, and Tiny Bubbles, presented off-off-Broadway and across the country. Honors include an Edward Albee Foundation Fellowship and a Tennessee Williams Scholarship. His play 9/10 premiered off-off-Broadway in September 2024 and won four Broadway World Awards including Best Play; Grief at High Tide (first prize, Capital Rep Next Act! New Play Summit) premiered at Vivid Stage in Summit, NJ, in October 2024; and A Terminal Event (Julie Harris Award winner and Woodward/Newman finalist) premiered in 2022 at the Victory Theatre in Burbank, with Stage Raw naming it one of the best L.A. plays that year. Richard is developing a one-woman show about Ingrid Bergman with actress Annemette Andersen and director Henning Hegland, premiering in 2025 in Iceland. He was a finalist last year for the Dramatists Guild National Fellows Program and as an optioned, working screenwriter has twice been in the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ Nicholl Top 50 and a finalist for the Sundance Labs. He was also a finalist for the Cynosure Diversity Screenwriting Awards, the Stage 32 Diverse Voices Springboard, and won the Lonely Seal Film Festival award for the best script with a disabled lead. His novel A Friend of Dorothy’s, set during the height of the AIDS crisis in New York City in the late 1980s, was in June 2025.