It all seemed to be going to well until Norman Bates busted out his iPod. Up until then (and granted, it was just a few minutes of airtime), it seemed like A&E's new scripted series, Bates Motel, was at least trying to preserve the legacy and reality of its source material, Alfred Hitchcock's 1960 horror classic Psycho. But no, this prequel series, which premiered last night, is set in the present, an act of folding time for the sake of...what? Not scaring the kids away with something that would have to be set in the '40s to preserve the timeline set by the film (and Robert Bloch's 1959 novel of the same name) while chronicling the adolescence of Norman Bates?

Principal photography began last Friday for the film adaptation of Stephen Rebello's Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho — a non-fiction title which tells the story of how Hitchcock's classic thriller Psycho came to be.

The National Film Preservation Foundation at the New Zealand Film Archive discovered the first three reels of the first film that famed suspense director Alfred Hitchcock worked on as an assistant director and art director.

The master of suspense made his iconic bald head his own signature in his movies. So before saying goodbye to Halloween this year, watch this compendium of his best cameos.

There are official Star Wars LEGOs and official Indiana Jones LEGOs. So why not official Quentin Tarantino LEGOs? Oh, right, the violence and curse words. Here's the next-best thing, though: LEGO recreations of famous movie scenes, courtesy brickmaster Alex Eylar.

On a weekend when the wholesome American Girl doll "character" movement rocks its pre-pubescent influence at the box office for the first time, a loyal reader points us to a bit of perverse toy revisionism for the rest of us. Behold, in recognition of the Hitchcock film's 45th anniversary, The Birds Barbie:

Reality makes you dumb — that's our four-word distillation of the groundbreaking new study by neuroscientists at NYU, who compared a cross-section of work by Hitchcock, Leone and Larry David (!) in an attempt to determine stimulation patterns for movie and TV viewers. Their findings revealed that participants' highest "inter-subject correlation" — i.e. the most commonly stimulating editing and direction — occurred for viewers watching an expertly crafted Hitchcock TV entry, followed closely by The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly. Curb Your Enthusiasm brought up the rear with an 18% ISC, essentially suggesting that its loose, pseudo-reality format defied subjects' attention spans. "Our data suggest that achieving a tight control over viewers' brains during a movie requires, in most cases, intentional construction of the film's sequence through aesthetic means," the researchers wrote. "The fact that Hitchcock was able to orchestrate the responses of so many different brain regions, turning them on and off at the same time across all viewers, may provide neuroscientific evidence for his notoriously famous ability to master and manipulate viewers' minds." But how many DVD box sets did he sell? Eh? That's right. Hack. [Science Daily via THND]