BEST PROOF PHOENIX IS STILL PSYCHO 2007 | Phil Gordon's Phoenix | People & Places
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Alfred Hitchcock had a thing for both birds and word games, so our fair-feathered city provided him with the perfect location for the opening of his now famous Psycho. Unlike the mythical bird for which Phoenix is named, however, Psycho heroine Marion Crane didn't exactly rise from the ashes reborn, which is why local developer/gadfly Michael Levine thinks Crane pretty much personifies Phoenix's historic warehouse district — or what's left of it. In a deft reworking of the film's opening credits, posted on YouTube, Levine gives us "Phil Gordon's Phoenix," starring a host of city functionaries "and Janet Leigh, as the warehouse district." With "screenplay by the City of Phoenix Planning Commission, based on the novel by Downtown Urban Forum Project," we don't need to see more than the credits to know where this story is going. (Levine himself, after buying and restoring such downtown jewels as the Southwest Cotton Company Building and the Bentley Projects space, has finally given up and is moving shop back to his hometown of Brooklyn.) From the Psycho opening — including that slow pan over downtown Phoenix, in which Levine has highlighted landmark buildings — we go straight to the famous shower scene. Watching it is doubly chilling when you think about everything that's really going down the drain.

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