There was obviously a lot of research involved in writing a complex thriller like Black Bag, especially when it comes to figuring out the inner workings of an agency where much of its activities are so top secret, they're referred to as "black bag" i.e. need-to-know. While talking covertly to operatives to prepare his Mission: Impossible script, David Koepp began to dig deeper into their personal lives during his confidential interviews. Speaking with Cinema Daily US recently, Koepp explained that he was doing research for what would become a very different action-driven spy thriller when he learned more about how couples in the field work together. “I would start asking about people's personal lives, because it struck me that a profession where you lie for a living has to be a hard one to have personal relationships in," he said in the interview. "To a person, they would say, ‘Yeah, it's brutal. It's a real conundrum.’ The line actually showed up in Black Bag: ‘If I date someone outside the community, they don't understand, and they don't have any clearance, so I can't talk about anything. And if I date someone inside the community, I don't trust them, because they're liars, and so am I.’ I just kind of carried that nugget in my head as an approach to a spy movie I haven't seen before, and I'd like to see it.”

Other aspects of the film, such as George's proclivity for fishing, also came out of Koepp's later research, once he discovered that a legendary CIA spy named James Jesus Angleton enjoyed bass fishing. That seemed like it might be relevant to George's occupation, as he spends his time fishing for the truth, but that was just a tangential tidbit Koepp put into his script, as he kept exploring some of the problems that might arise when couples, married or otherwise, work together in any capacity. Those problems are frequently on display in Black Bag, as some of the players around George and Kathryn begin revealing their own indiscretions, often with each other, leading to moments that go far beyond merely being awkward.

Although the initial idea for Black Bag was in Koepp's head back in the mid-'90s, he struggled to get around to writing it, especially as other movies came along that seemingly explored the same topic, although in a very different way than his film. “I keep a lot of script ideas in various files," Koepp has admitted. "I was going to work on it, and then True Lies came out, the James Cameron movie, and they're married. And I thought, ‘Oh, well, that kind of steals my area.’ And then I was going to work on it again, and Mr. and Mrs. Smith came out. Then I realized that marriage is a common institution; I don't think I have to wait.” It took two unplanned breaks in the industry, the COVID pandemic and the writers' strike, to finally give Koepp the opportunity to sit down and flesh out his earlier idea into a full script.

Watching Black Bag, I was struck by a moment from a scene in which Michael Fassbender's spy goes fishing. Out on the water, he finds it an ideal place to think, and he begins recalling the dinner he'd hosted the night before, which he'd designed to fish out a rat among fellow spies, including his wife, played by Cate Blanchett. The film here reminds of the great scene in De Palma's Mission: Impossible where Jim Phelps has made contact with Ethan Hunt in London. Over coffee, Ethan begins flashing back to the disastrous night in Prague, and, despite Ethan's words to Phelps, we see things either as Ethan remembers them, or as Ethan believes they likely happened. Of course, Ethan finds it too painful to believe the truth about Claire, and closes his eyes and tries to wipe the thought from his mind, inventing an alternative scenario that he struggles to accept.

There is a similar echo of that moment in the Black Bag fishing scene. As Fassbender's George Woodhouse remembers each face from the dinner the night before, staring back at him, the montage of faces ends by lingering on Blanchett, and then cuts back to George in the fishing boat, closing his eyes, apparently pained by the thought of even considering her as the culprit.

In this clip of "Talking MEWShop, Editor Paul Hirsch, ACE, talks about taking the job for "Empire Strikes Back," instead of working on "Dressed to Kill." In doing so, Paul introduces Brian De Palma to legendary Editor Jerry Greenberg, ACE, to work on it. This led to Brian and Jerry working on many films until Paul returned for "Mission: Impossible."

He is the author of a memoir titled "A Long Time Ago in a Cutting Room Far, Far Away." You can purchase Paul's book here: https://www.amazon.com/Long-Time-Cutt...

Paul Hirsch, ACE, has edited over 40 films, among them the first "Star Wars" written and directed by George Lucas, for which he received an Academy Award in 1978, and "The Empire Strikes Back"; 11 films for Brian De Palma, including "Carrie", "Blowout" and "Mission: Impossible"; four for Herbert Ross, including "Footloose", "The Secret of My Success" and "Steel Magnolias"; three for John Hughes, including "Ferris Bueller's Day Off" and "Planes, Trains & Automobiles"; and "Falling Down" for Joel Schumacher. In 2005, he received his second Academy Award nomination for "Ray", a biopic based on the life of Ray Charles, directed by Taylor Hackford.

Manhattan Edit Workshop is a New York Film Editing School offering a full range of basic to advanced training courses, from the Avid, Autodesk, Assimilate, Blackmagic and Apple products to the complete suite of Adobe applications.

Manhattan Edit Workshop's mission is to provide the highest quality education for filmmakers and editors. Focusing on both the art and technology inherent to our craft. We foster a "learn by doing" approach in an atmosphere where mistakes are encouraged as part of the process and the only "silly" question is the one that isn't asked.

Pointer was mother to Amy Irving - and she was also Amy Irving's on-screen mother in Carrie (1976). This was the second time that Brian De Palma had cast a real-life mother-daughter duo in one of his films, having done so in Sisters (1972), with Mary Davenport playing mother to her real-life daughter Jennifer Salt. Earlier this month, in a Criterion "Closet Picks" video, Amy Irving pulled out a copy of David Lynch's Blue Velvet (1986), in which Priscilla appeared as Kyle MacLachlan's mother. "Mom's a hundred years old now," Amy says in the video, "and still going strong. And she and I do this kind of film sessions at her assisted living facility. And Blue Velvet was one of them."

Here's an excerpt from the Los Angeles Times obituary:

For 44 episodes of CBS’ series “Dallas,” Pointer played Rebecca Barnes Wentworth, Pamela and Cliff’s mother and the head of a rival oil family. In the 1976 movie “Carrie” she played Mrs. Snell, mother to Sue Snell, who was played by her daughter Amy.

She was just shy of her 101st birthday, according to a family statement obtained by The Times.

“Priscilla had a long acting career. She met her first husband Jules Irving in Europe just after WWII in an army production of ‘Brother Rat,’” the statement said. “They returned to the U.S. and formed the Actor’s Workshop in San Francisco. The company eventually took over the Vivian Beaumont Theater in NYC.”

Pointer, who was born in New York City on May 18, 1924, began her stage career in the city the 1940s. She was was married to Irving from 1947 until his death in 1979, moving out west with him after the war. They returned to New York City as the San Francisco troupe was winding down and Irving served as artistic director of Manhattan’s Lincoln Center from 1965 to 1972. The couple moved to Southern California after he retired, settling down in Santa Monica.

After her first husband died, Pointer married Robert Symonds. The two knew each other from San Francisco, and Symonds had moved to New York from California to work as Irving’s associate director at the Lincoln Center.

Symonds recalled meeting Pointer for the first time at the Actor’s Workshop in San Francisco, where she was “sitting at a desk typing a letter,” he told The Times in 1997. “I remember she was very, very pretty.”

Former Times staff writer Daryl H. Miller dubbed Pointer a “natural beauty.”

“Whether hunkered on the floor petting a dog or sitting pertly on a couch,” he wrote, “she is regal yet casual, arresting yet homespun.”

Amy Irving told The Times in 1997 that her mother and Symonds were “unbelievably well-suited” as a couple. “I know my mom and dad were deeply in love with each other, but Mom and Bob have so much in common,” she said. “There’s such harmony in their lives, a really nice balance. They spark each other.”

The couple’s joint projects included the 1984 Blake Edwards film “Micki & Maude,” in which they played Ann Reinking’s parents, and the 1993 South Coast Repertory production of “Morning’s at Seven,” in which they played brother- and sister-in-law. “First Love” at the Odyssey Theater in 2003 and the 2000 production of Athol Fugard’s “Road to Mecca” at the Fountain Theatre in Hollywood were also twofer shows.

When Pointer and Symonds worked together on the 1997 production of “Fighting Over Beverly,” also at the Fountain, they rehearsed at home and carpooled across town to the theater, but their characters weren’t supposed to have seen each other in 50 years.

“That really requires acting,” Pointer told The Times, “because instead of having known him for 43 years, I have to pretend — and so does he — that we haven’t seen each other since we were 18.”

“The unflappable Pointer sails above the general mayhem with a ladylike aplomb that makes her subsequent emotional epiphany all the more moving,” The Times wrote about Pointer’s performance in that show.

From Brian De Palma's screenplay, coming soon: "The problem with hypnotic programming is that it always leaks out into the subconscious. There’s no way to absolutely contain it. That’s why she’s having all these mixed-up nightmares. You may have a Sleeping Beauty on your hands."

Previously:
De Palma's Ambrose Chapel screenplay to be published in May, by Sticking Place Books

James Kenney posts more Ambrose Chapel screenplay book teasers

Brian De Palma's Hi, Mom! opened in New York City on this day in 1970. The following day's edition of The New York Times included Roger Greenspan's review of the film - here's an excerpt:

AMONG contemporary-urban-scene-movies (sub-genre, invasion-of-privacy) Brian De Palma's "Hi, Mom!" stands out for its wit, its ironic good humor, its multilevel sophistications, its technical ingenuity, its nervousness, and its very special ability to bring the sensibility of the suburbs to the sins of the inner city. With no recognizable landmark further north than Cooper Square, it nevertheless feels like Bronxville or the quieter stretches of the upper East Side.

Not that it aspires to quietness or that it even for a second eschews relevancy. One major portion (for me, the best portion) depicts an all-black play production, "Be Black, Baby," in which the cast, in white face, mingles with, steals from, and finally beats and rapes the white liberal audience. And the hero, a young Vietnam veteran, moves from filthy picture-taking to middle-class apartment house bombing, partly in an effort to achieve total involvement—which, in the terms of this film, seems necessarily to include a final solution.

But the eager hero (Robert De Niro) and the over-eager heroine (Jennifer Salt, the major interest of the flashbacks in "Midnight Cowboy," revealed as a fine comedienne here) are so clean-cut; the second leads, white and black, so epitomize attractive youth; and the supporting cast, as in many Brian De Palma movies, could so handsomely model a panoramic painting of the Rape of the Seven Sister Colleges; that an air of tasteful respectability pervades even the outrageous violence. As if they were making bombs on West 11th Street.

"Hi, Mom!" turns approximately every other current social misery to a comedy that is sometimes quite elabborately successful and sometimes only well intentioned. As in De Palma's previous "Greetings," the humor, at its best, is understated but highly structured—so that you have to work a bit for your laughs. But "Hi, Mom!" is much sharper, crueler, funnier. Although it scatters some shots (often in a kind of fast-motion photography that seems an addiction of De Palma's) it pulls enough together to suggest some major insights, as it investigates the militarization and despoliation of Washington Square South.

On June 14, 1970 - a few weeks after the initial release of Hi, Mom! - The New York Times published an essay by film critic Vincent Canby with the headline, "Ah, Youth! Ah, Sex! Ah, Revolution!" -

THE suspicion has been in the attic of my mind for some time, but it didn't start clomping around in such a way that I had to acknowledge its presence until the other day, when I came out of the Cinema I after seeing “Getting Straight.” “Well,” I found myself saying with a good deal of sincerity, “at least the riot is a lot better than the one in ‘The Strawberry Statement.’”

My companion had objected to the neo‐Busby Berkeley choreography with which Richard Rush, the director of “Getting Straight,” had staged the attempted student revolution and police bust that conclude the film: Elliott Gould and Candice Bergen, their eyes locked in romantic recognition, rush into each other's arms across a room crowded with swinging nightsticks, and then repair to a nearby staircase to make love, accompanied by the sounds of rock music and cracking skulls. “Terrific!” said a young man sitting behind me.

This was the same young man who, at the very start of the movie, had whispered “terrific photography!” when Rush, like a dreary tour guide, directed our attention from one character to another by shifting the focus of his camera. (The young man had apparently been dazzled to the point of catatonia when Rush shot one scene upwards through the bottom of a typewriter, which is Academe's variation on what Billy Wilder once called “the Santa Claus shot”— the love scene photographed through the embers of a fire place.)

“Getting Straight” (youth, education, the relevance of universities) might be tolerable if it were the only movie of its kind. However, it's not. In fact, it almost looks like part of a conspiracy when one considers such other current films as “The Magic Garden of Stanley Sweetheart” (youth, education, sex, drugs), now at the Paris, and “The Landlord” (youth, sex, white guilt, black paranoia), now at the Coronet. I'm also thinking of “The Strawberry Statement” (youth, education, the relevance of universities, personal commitment), a Cannes entry that will open at Cinema II tomorrow.

Each of these big‐budget, Hollywood financed movies pretends to deal with important contemporary issues when it actually is co‐opting—and then sub merging—those issues in ways that must offend even those who stand somewhat to the right of Marcuse. Because their ultimate effect is to “soothe and prolong stupefaction,” one begins to think along the lines of the kid in “Woodstock” who blames the CIA for seeding the clouds that brought the rain to the pastures of Bethel.

In my more sane moments I realize that the conspiracy is, for the the being anyway, a completely honorable one: to make profits by plugging into the current scene in ways that will interest the biggest possible audience. What better, safer way to define legitimate social outrages and incipient revolution than in completely romantic terms, and in cinematic styles that, although they look comparatively new, are subliminal calls to reaction because of their identification with 20‐, 40‐ and 60‐second television commercials?

To paraphrase Jean‐Luc Godard, who once said that every tracking shot is a political statement, I'd say that every zoom shot is a call to preserve the status quo (and to win happiness‐ever after) by purchasing more cigarettes, shampoo and Dodge Darts. (I will subscribe to the idea that TV commercial techniques can enrich the theatrical feature film when someone makes a decent theatrical feature film 60 seconds long.)

Every movie, by being a movie, has a way of romanticizing all that it touches, but the makers of “Getting Straight,” “Stanley Sweetheart” and “The Landlord” have not hesitated to augment that romance in their own fashions. Stanley Sweetheart (Don Johnson), a Columbia junior, resolves his identity crisis (good heavens, isn't there another phrase for it?) by having a series of affairs that leave him exhausted, wiser (and the envy of every male in the audience). In “Getting Straight,” Elliott Gould, a Vietnam veteran and former drop‐out earnestly trying to get his master's degree in education, finally opts for mindless revolution because (1) he gets caught cheating, (2) the university authorities are comic strip buffoons, and (3) student demonstrations that turn into orgies of destruction of file cabinets are “sexy.”

“The Landlord” is, as the ads say, about a 29‐year‐old boy who runs away from home and buys a tenement in a Brooklyn ghetto. It is full of individually funny things (Beau Bridges, Lee Grant, odd lines of dialogue), but its heart is as fickle as that of a Broadway show. The blacks are alternately patronized and sentimentalized; the suburban whites are so monumentally gauche they don't even belong in the same movie with Bridges (they are playing in a series of blackout sketches while he seems to be in a genuine satire). For him salvation is a mixed marriage.

Of all these films, “The Strawberry Statement,” adapted by Israel Horovitz from James Kunen's novel about the 1968 Columbia confrontations, has the most interesting potential. However, when I saw the film at Cannes (I understand it's been somewhat re‐edited since), the pretty, conventional performances, and the flashy, zoomed ‐ out ‐ of ‐ its mind cinematic style denied the effect of its concerned melodrama.

Simon (Bruce Davison), an amiable kid as committed to crew as to causes, originally joins the protest to get near his girl. When, finally, he is overwhelmed, it seems he's overwhelmed less by historical events than by soundtrack music. The Kent State affair has given “The Strawberry Statement” an unhappy relevance that has nothing to do with its value as a movie.

It isn't that these films are as bad as they are opportunistic, unworthy. Ideas and characters are seldom protected from the gags, for ideas and characters are expendable and gags aren't. “Getting Straight” gets a lot of comic mileage out of Gould's ancient car that pops, wheezes and groans with all sorts of special effects that would have done credit to a Marx Brothers movie.

Every film that makes its villains out to be fools (without endowing its heroes with commensurate foolishness) automatically denies the urgency of the conflicts it presents.

It is just this sense of shared idiocy that makes Brian De Palma's “Hi, Mom!” so much more satisfying than the more pretentious “Getting Straight,” “The Landlord” and “Stanley Sweetheart.” “Hi, Mom,” now at neighborhood theaters, is not only funnier than these films, it is the first legitimately funny film I've seen in a very long time. It traces the progress of an urban pilgrim from neat, bland conformity to neat, bland anarchy. Jon Rubin (Robert De Niro), a failure as a dirty filmmaker, joins a militant black theater company putting on something called “Be Black, Baby.” Eventually he comes to identify himself so closely with the victims of bourgeois repression that, in the film's penultimate sequence, he is seen happily stuffing the washing machine, in the basement of his Washington Square Village apartment house, with dynamite. Up go his wife, his unborn child, his pipes, his easy chair and his identity as an insurance salesman. In the last sequence, Jon turns up at the scene of the disaster, masquerading as a Vietnam veteran, mouthing truisms about violence for the benefit of the TV camera and waving to his Mom out in television land.

I doubt that De Palma and Charles Hirsch, his producer and co‐author, set out seriously to trace the evolution of a Now anarchist. Ironically, however, John's extraordinary act makes a lot more sense than Gould's final rebellion in “Getting Straight.” Jon is, after all, simply carrying his white middle‐class guilt to a new plateau of experience and action. The movie works because it is consistent, because it is witty, because it is played beautifully and because it resolutely refuses to use most of the clichés of current filmmaking, except when it wants to call attention to clichés.

I'd also like to recommend Win Chamberlain's “Brand X,” at the Elgin. This is a tacky, vulgar, dirty, sometimes dull, often hilarious movie that pretends to be a series of television commercials, panel shows, dramas and news broadcasts, most of which star Taylor Mead, who, by simply breathing, is an affront to all vested interests. A lot of talented or notorious people (Sally Kirkland. Frank Cavestani, Abbie Hoffman, Sam Shepard) turn up in various sketches, but it is Mead's movie. I particularly liked a Presidential news conference in which Mead, as the President, is asked what he thinks of osmosis (“He's definitely not qualified for the Supreme Court”) and to describe his program for India (“shoot all the cows, drain the Ganges and turn the Taj Mahal into a Carvel ice cream stand”). Its humor, as you can see, is that of a liberated college humor magazine, but then, we haven't had much good (or bad) humor from any college magazines lately. They take themselves seriously—and well they might.

In the following paragraph, Coogler lists many influences on Sinners, including Brian De Palma:

For this script, this crew, and this cast, I dug deep into myself and reached back to my ancestors who breathed so much life and purpose into me. I also unabashedly reached towards my cinematic influences including but not limited to, Spike Lee, John Singleton, Ernie Barnes, Steve McQueen, Ava Duvernay, Euzhan Palcy, Eudora Welty, Oscar Micheaux, Robert Rodriguez, Barry Jenkins, Quentin Tarantino, Nicolas Roeg, Andrea Arnold, Jeremy Saulnier, Paul Thomas Anderson, Joel and Ethan Coen, Bill Gunn, Jordan Peele, John Carpenter, Boots Reilly, Shaka King, Nia Dacosta, Terence Nance, Rian Johnson, Bradford Young, David Cronenberg, David Lynch, Chris Nolan, Emma Thomas, Theodore Witcher, Francis Coppola, Julie Dash, Steven Spielberg, Kahlil Joseph, Mati Diop, Ben and Josh Safdie, Stephen King, Robert Palmer, Amiri Baraka, Martin Scorsese, Brian De Palma, George Lucas, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Walter Mosley, Stephen Graham Jones, Joel Crawford, Wes Craven, and many others.

The prologue spiritually anticipates Żuławski’s Possession - thanks to its disturbing, free-flowing wide-angle dollies - and is visually reminiscent of John D Hancock’s brilliant Let’s Scare Jessica To Death with its eerily idyllic soft light. Carrie (Sissy Spacek) gets her first period in the school shower and panics, unsure of what’s happening. Her classmates seize the moment for cruelty. Already within these first voyeuristic minutes, the supernatural surfaces, as does De Palma’s bravura visual eclecticism.

The remaining premise is dead simple. Penalised for the abuse, Carrie’s classmates scheme to get even with her via public humiliation. The story doesn’t keep us waiting for the main event long: the Prom with a capital-P. This sequence is to Carrie what the post-iceberg section is to Titanic; tragedy is foretold, but De Palma guides us to invest emotionally elsewhere, to keep rooting for Carrie. She makes a playful pact with the devil earlier, and so do we, surrendering to the director's choreography of spectatorship. One scene in particular is unforgettable: the camera swirls around Carrie and Tommy (William Katt), the popular boy who asked her to Prom, on the dance floor, not merely observing but pulling us into the rhythm, the dreaminess of it. It’s a pure, immersive moment that feels miraculous amid all the sweetly trashy sacrilege De Palma pioneers across the film.

The irreverent score, the gothic art direction, and Mario Tosi’s kaleidoscopic, slithering cinematography coalesce into something mesmeric. At one point, De Palma speeds up the footage and sound as Tommy and co. try on their Prom suits. It should come off as cheap and jarring. Instead, we’re so in sync with the film’s flow and confidence that we accept it without hesitation, and adore it for its audacity. This was one of those rare screenings at Warsaw's Timeless Film Festival with no guests, no Q&A, just a plain festival slot, that ended with a spontaneous ovation. That’s the enduring power of Carrie: a film so so alive with invention it stirs up astonishment, and love, decades on: the Prom Queen of the greatest decade in horror, still ruling.