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Recent Headlines
a la Mod:

Domino is
a "disarmingly
straight-forward"
work that "pushes
us to reexamine our
relationship to images
and their consumption,
not only ethically
but metaphysically"
-Collin Brinkman

De Palma on Domino
"It was not recut.
I was not involved
in the ADR, the
musical recording
sessions, the final
mix or the color
timing of the
final print."

Listen to
Donaggio's full score
for Domino online

De Palma/Lehman
rapport at work
in Snakes

De Palma/Lehman
next novel is Terry

De Palma developing
Catch And Kill,
"a horror movie
based on real things
that have happened
in the news"

Supercut video
of De Palma's films
edited by Carl Rodrigue

Washington Post
review of Keesey book

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Exclusive Passion
Interviews:

Brian De Palma
Karoline Herfurth
Leila Rozario

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AV Club Review
of Dumas book

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De Palma interviewed
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No Harm In Charm

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De Palma a la Mod
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Entries by Topic
A note about topics: Some blog posts have more than one topic, in which case only one main topic can be chosen to represent that post. This means that some topics may have been discussed in posts labeled otherwise. For instance, a post that discusses both The Boston Stranglers and The Demolished Man may only be labeled one or the other. Please keep this in mind as you navigate this list.
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Ambrose Chapel
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Tuesday, October 29, 2024
CRITICAL POPCORN DIVES INTO 'PHANTOM' SOUNDTRACK
NICK BARTLETT: "IT's A VIBRANT, UNIQUELY ODD FILM; ONCE SEEN, NEVER FORGOTTEN"
https://www.angelfire.com/de/palma/phantomparadise335.jpg

For the 50th anniversary of Brian De Palma's Phantom Of The Paradise, Critical Popcorn's Nick Bartlett dives into the film's soundtrack, song-by-song, all composed by Paul Williams. Here's what Bartlett writes about "Somebody Super Like You" -
You could reasonably make the claim that over the course of the film Paul Williams predicted numerous trends in the music industry. With Somebody Super Like You, he seemed to pre-empt the theatre of bands like Kiss and Goth Rock. Throughout the film, Swan’s group The Juicy Fruits pop up in a variety of guises, performing variations of the Phantom’s work. For this song the group are all dressed as somnambulist Cesare from The Cabinet Of Doctor Caligari, with a stage set that recreates the German expressionist mise en scene. Now called The Undead, this Frankenstein-inspired anthem celebrates an ideal man, assembled from various body parts, creating a campy, terrifying experience. The bone-chilling screams from singer Harold Oblong are incredible, as are his distinctive vocals, full of little tics – “Somebody sssssuper like you!

Incidentally, this was the highest charting song from the soundtrack. It went platinum, but curiously, only in Winnipeg!



Posted by Geoff at 12:01 AM CDT
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Monday, October 28, 2024
INFO ABOUT DE PALMA'S FIRST SHORT, 'ICARUS'
R.I.P. PAUL MORRISSEY, WHO HAD SCREENED ICARUS UNDERGROUND IN THE 1960s
https://www.angelfire.com/de/palma/depalma1960s.jpg

From today's New York Times obituary of Paul Morrissey, who died from pneumonia Monday in a Manhattan hospital, at the age of 86:
Mr. Morrissey was born on Feb. 23, 1938, in Manhattan to Joseph and Eleanor Morrissey, and grew up in Yonkers, N.Y. He attended Roman Catholic schools and studied English at Fordham University, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in 1955 and began making 16-millimeter silent films. His first effort, a one-reeler, showed a priest saying Mass on a cliff top and then throwing his altar boy over the edge.

Despite the subject, Mr. Morrissey was not rebelling against the church. He enjoyed perplexing interviewers by fully endorsing his Jesuit education, heaping scorn on liberals and denouncing sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll even as he presented, without comment, scenes of shocking degradation on film.

“With us, everything is acceptance,” he once said of his collaborations with Warhol. “Nothing is critical. Everything is amoral. People can be whatever they are, and we record it on film.”

After serving in the Army, Mr. Morrissey ran, and lived in, an underground cinema in the East Village, where he showed his own films and those of others, including “Icarus,” an early effort by Brian De Palma. Mr. Morrissey later took pains to explain that he was not part of the experimental-film movement. With his interest in stars and narrative, he was, as he liked to put it, “independent of the independents.”

Mr. Morrissey was introduced to Warhol in 1965 by the poet and filmmaker Gerard Malanga at a film screening, and the Factory phase of Mr. Morrissey’s career began. At the time, Warhol was making experimental films at the commercial loft on East 47th Street known as the Factory. The titles capture their static, impassive aesthetic: “Hair Cut No. 1,” “Shoulder,” “Couch.” The camera stared, unblinking, and whatever happened, happened — or didn’t.


ICARUS

Early in 1958, prior to leaving home in Philadelphia for Columbia University, De Palma had been working to document his father's infidelity by recording his phone calls, following him to work and snapping photos outside his father's office window. According to the book Shock Value by Jason Zinoman, De Palma told one friend that year that the photos were his "first film." In 1970, De Palma mentioned his "background in photography" to Joseph Gelmis (for Gelmis' book The Film Director As Superstar) as he explained how he ended up directing his first short film, Icarus, in 1960:

I started making movies when I was at Columbia University as a sophomore. I was with the Columbia Players, and I had a background in photography. I was obsessed with the idea of directing the Players. But they wouldn't let undergraduates direct them, so I was frustrated. I figured I'd go out and direct movies instead.

This restlessness no doubt led De Palma to corral his friends Jared Martin and William Finley up to Sarah Lawrence College, where the three of them would spend most of their time. (Humphreys writes that De Palma and Martin would travel up together "precariously on a Lambretta scooter while Finley took the train.")

Laurent Bouzereau (in The De Palma Cut) states that De Palma "created a film association between Columbia University and Sarah Lawrence College. The famous stage director Wilford Leach, who conducted a theater class at Sarah Lawrence, was immediately impressed by the young man's energy and interest in filmmaking. Leach soon became De Palma's mentor. According to De Palma, Leach was one of the very few people who ever understood him." Bouzereau goes into further detail about the making of Icarus:

In 1960, Brian De Palma made Icarus, which he today considers a pretentious film, though he admits that it encouraged him to learn more. At first, De Palma was only supposed to be the cameraman on Icarus, but the director left the set after many arguments with De Palma, who was already trying to impose his own visual ideas, regardless of his position. Luckily, De Palma was then offered the opportunity to finish the film himself.

Talking about Icarus, De Palma told Gelmis, "I bought a Bolex 16-mm movie camera secondhand for about $150. I hocked everything I had and used my allowance over a period of a year and a half to finance a long, forty-minute short called Icarus." In the Pye and Myles book, De Palma explains that, because of his scientific background, he had originally planned to be the cameraman. "But I had a falling out with the director. That left me with the cast, and I had to start all over again. I became a director because I had the camera and the film." Asked about Icarus by David Bartholomew in a 1975 interview for Cinefantastique, De Palma said, "It's not a very good film. I had a whole bunch of ideas, and it's pretentious and slow and stupid in many ways, but it has some rather good things in it, too. It was a beginning, and you have to begin somewhere."

Posted by Geoff at 10:27 PM CDT
Updated: Monday, October 28, 2024 10:32 PM CDT
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Sunday, October 27, 2024
'SO FULL OF SOUL' - PHANS EXPERIENCE 'PARADISE' IN DALLAS
PAUL WILLIAMS & ARI KAHAN PRESENTED AT THE MAJESTIC THEATRE LAST NIGHT
https://www.angelfire.com/de/palma/majesticpost1.jpg

Paul Williams from the stage after last night's screening: "The idea of the evil record producer – I mean, that’s the camouflage. That’s the veneer. But what is underneath all of it – what is my favorite thing to watch, as an actor, is the bathtub scene. Because you see who Swan was. You see this little guy who’s, just today, ‘I’ve decided to kill myself.’ He’s just, you know, what might be a little dude, you know. ‘Cause I have seen this face, incidentally, ravaged by the fullness of time, and it ain’t bad!" [audience laughs]

WFAA's Paul Wedding has an article about the evening's event:

DALLAS — "The Paradise — the ultimate rock palace."

That was the Majestic Theatre in Dallas 50 years ago during the filming of the horror musical cult classic, "Phantom of the Paradise." Although considered a box office bomb upon initial release, its influence and fandom have carried on all these decades later.

And on Saturday night, The Majestic got to play the part of the ultimate rock palace once again.

A screening of a restored version of the film was played in the theatre, with a big name in attendance. Paul Williams, a legendary award-winning composer and songwriter, who wrote all of the songs for the film and played the film's antagonist, spoke afterward about the making of the film.

It's not often someone gets to see a movie in the very location it was filmed. So to be able to see a scene in the movie that takes place on a balcony, and then to turn your head and look at that very same balcony — where fans dressed up as the eponymous phantom of the paradise are sitting — is a one-of-a-kind experience.

Shooting the concert scenes of the movie with Dallas residents as extras — some of whom were in attendance for this screening — was not the usual concert. Advertisements in local papers invited extras for a filming of "Phanton (sic) of the Paradise) at 9 a.m. on Thursday. But as Williams tells it, not many people really showed up.

"The fact is that it was cold, and there were not nearly enough people in the audience so there was a lot of moving around," Williams said about the filming of the movie, which took place around Christmas and New Year's.



Posted by Geoff at 11:44 PM CDT
Updated: Sunday, October 27, 2024 11:50 PM CDT
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Saturday, October 26, 2024
BODY DOUBLE HIT THEATERS 40 YEARS AGO TODAY
CANBY'S NY TIMES REVIEW THAT DAY: "GOES TOO FAR, WHICH IS THE REASON TO SEE IT"
https://www.angelfire.com/de/palma/bdposter145.jpg

FROM VINCENT CANBY'S NEW YORK TIMES REVIEW, OCT. 26, 1984:

FROM DOUBLE DE PALMA BY SUSAN DWORKIN:


Posted by Geoff at 6:37 PM CDT
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Friday, October 25, 2024
'OH - DO YOU LIKE PLANTS?'
https://www.angelfire.com/de/palma/bdplants1.jpg


Posted by Geoff at 12:01 AM CDT
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Thursday, October 24, 2024
VIVABEAT & THE MUSIC VIDEO JAKE HALF-WATCHES ON TV
"THE HOUSE IS BURNING" HAD WON MTV AWARD FOR BEST VIDEO FROM A NEW BAND
https://www.angelfire.com/de/palma/bdbored45.jpg

Before Jake Scully finds his way to Holly Body via Frankie Goes To Hollywood, he distractedly watches a music video on a TV in the house he's taking care of while his new actor friend is in Seattle. The song is "The House Is Burning (But There’s No One Home)" by the band Vivabeat, and the video, directed by Derek Chang, had won an MTV award for Best Video from a New Band. Vivabeat founder Marina Muhlfriedel had met Peter Gabriel in the late 1970's while working as entertainment editor at Teen magazine. Earlier this year, Muhlfriedel wrote an article about Vivabeat for Flood Magazine:

As soon as we wrote our first four songs, we booked time at an 8-track studio off Hollywood Boulevard and cut a new demo. I was ready to reconnect with Peter [Gabriel]. A month later, I went to England, and ringing him from my London hotel, Peter invited me to a party at his home in Bath the following evening. I invited my friend, Rich Barbieri, the keyboard player from the band Japan (now in Porcupine Tree), and he agreed to drive.

It was magical—20 or so guests playing croquet by moonlight, surrounded by towering wormwood hedges and sipping peppermint tea. Saying goodbye late in the evening, I didn’t mention to Peter that I left the cassette demo in a fruit bowl on his dining room table.

Nonetheless, a month later, I received a pre-dawn morning call from Peter, introducing me to a jovial Brit named Tony Stratton Smith. Tony owned Charisma Records, the label for which Peter, Genesis, Monty Python, Van der Graaf Generator, among others, recorded. Strat, as he was known, said everyone in his office was whistling “Man From China” and that he had no choice but to take us under the “famous Charisma wing.” We became their first American signing.

This sort of thing did not happen, even in the ’80s. We knew dozens of bands, far more experienced and popular than us. Bands who struggled for years to get a second glance from a label. We played three gigs before suddenly finding ourselves at the Record Plant with Rod Stewart in the next room. We had clothing and equipment allowances. A famous director shot our first video. We signed with the William Morris Agency and were convinced we were on a trajectory to the big time.

Our first album, Party in the War Zone—featuring “Man From China”—came out in 1980. The song became a dance club hit in much of the world, and we got to lip-synch it at all the big gay discos. However, good fortune is often ephemeral. The fact that our first manager’s vanity license plate read “IM SPACED” should have rung a warning bell. It didn’t. Clueless, we forged ahead as he repeatedly dropped the ball. When two band members became heroin addicts and could barely perform, Charisma rejected our demos for a second album and dropped us from the label. And we dropped Connie and Alec from the band.

Soon, our drummer Doug crashed his motorcycle on Fountain Avenue. He was high with no helmet, and Mick found him listed as a John Doe in a coma at Cedars Sinai. He survived, but lost the use of three limbs.

Mick, Terrance, and I pulled together a funkier and more inventive version of Vivabeat with guitarist Rob Dean, who had been in the band Japan, and local session drummer Chris Schendel. We got another manager—and a record deal with Polygram—for a while. But while recording our next album, the manager went AWOL, not returning our calls. Once again, we were in rock ‘n’ roll limbo.

But all was not lost. A couple of dance club promoters released a limited-edition follow-up EP featuring a song called “The House Is Burning (But There’s No One Home).” The song became a European dance club hit and was picked up along with its video (which won an MTV award) to appear in the movie Body Double. Vivabeat was on track to live out a few more fab ’80s cocaine-fueled years, recording some of our strongest work yet. When Rob Dean left Vivabeat for Gary Numan’s band, Jeff Gilbert, a tech-brained San Francisco transplant who later became one of the wizards at Mackie, joined us.

Vivabeat never hit the great big time, but we got a whiff of its heady enchantment, making music we loved, going on the road with bands like Gang of Four, Human League, Depeche Mode, Gary Numan, Thompson Twins, and The B-52’s (R.E.M. opened for us). We also found a dream production partner in Earle Mankey, who got us like no one else.


Posted by Geoff at 6:51 PM CDT
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Wednesday, October 23, 2024
THE VISCO GLASSES - 'THEY WERE THE REAL THING'
INGEBORGA DAPKUNAITE TALKS TO SPYHARDS PODCAST ABOUT PLAYING HANNA IN DE PALMA'S MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE
https://www.angelfire.com/de/palma/spyhardspodcast.jpg

In a terrific episode of the SpyHards Podcast, "Agents Scott and Cam welcome actress Ingeborga Dapkunaite to the show to talk about playing ill-fated IMF agent Hannah in 1996's Mission: Impossible. She also shares stories about working on Red Sparrow, Seven Years in Tibet and more."

 

Discussing the Visco glasses worn by several IMF agents in the opera gala sequence, Dapkunaite tells the podcast hosts, "You know, the glasses, those days, thirty years ago, they were miracle glasses - they literally go dark...and blank."

"Oh, those were a real thing...?" one of the hosts responds.

"Yes, they were the real thing," Dapkunaite confirms.

"Oh, I thought that was just an effect," he says.

"They were the real thing," she assures him. "We carried them as if they were, I don't know, made of diamonds. Which probably, they cost that much. And Tom [Cruise] was very very cool about it. Very proud and all that. So we all played with them."

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Posted by Geoff at 12:01 AM CDT
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Tuesday, October 22, 2024
PACINO VISITS MARC MARON'S HOUSE TO RECORD PODCAST
RECENTLY ATTENDED SCARFACE AT AERO THEATRE, STUNNED TO WATCH HIS OWN COMMITMENT TO THE ROLE
https://www.angelfire.com/de/palma/wtfpodcast2024.jpg

Posted by Geoff at 11:53 PM CDT
Updated: Tuesday, October 22, 2024 11:54 PM CDT
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Monday, October 21, 2024
SMILE, TOO
DEADLINE'S MIKE FLEMING JR. ADDS, "THEY'RE OPENING A WRITERS ROOM, SO THIS ONE'S HAPPENING QUICKLY"
https://www.angelfire.com/de/palma/smile28.jpg

Posted by Geoff at 6:34 PM CDT
Updated: Monday, October 21, 2024 6:47 PM CDT
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Sunday, October 20, 2024
PHANTOM TUESDAY AT NORTHWEST FEAR FEST IN EDMONTON
PAUL WILLIAMS TALKS TO EDMONTON JOURNAL AHEAD OF CLOSING NIGHT SCREENING
https://www.angelfire.com/de/palma/northwestfearfest85.jpg

"I want to talk about the Canadian fans," Paul Williams tells Edmonton Journal's Fish Griwkowsky during a Zoom call ahead of this Tuesday night's screening of Phantom Of The Paradise at NorthwestFEARFest. "When Brian De Palma and Bill Finley went to see the movie in New York, I heard there were six people there, including Brian and Bill. Nobody raved about it, except a few fans in two cities: Winnipeg and Paris. I’m not sure why, but there would always be a couple people who were just fanatics and made everyone they knew watch it. And this year I introduced it as the closing film to the Cannes Film Festival! And the film stayed alive just because, I can’t even call them fans at this point, because of family and what they did. And amongst those fans, Guillermo del Toro wants me to write the words for a musical based on Pan’s Labyrinth. And among those fans emerges Daft Punk, and I end up writing two songs and singing one on Random Access Memories, and the next thing you know I’m accepting the Grammy for Album of the Year. So when you start talking about Phantom of the Paradise, I can’t even muster the language to show you how grateful I am, and it begins in Winnipeg and Paris."

Here's Griwkowsky's intro to the Edmonton Journal article:

Living a life of unparalleled collaboration, Paul Williams is surely the only person on Earth able to claim a direct creative pipeline to David Bowie, Barbra Streisand/Kris Kristofferson and Kermit the Frog, all of whom sang his lyrics to the world — including Hunky Dory’s Fill Your Heart, A Star Is Born’s Grammy-winning Evergreen, and the immortal Muppet Movie opening theme, Rainbow Connection.

Remarkably, it’s just the tip of Williams’ creative iceberg.

His staggeringly diverse accolades stretch back to a different Grammy win with Daft Punk in 2014, singing with a lit cigarette in full Battle for the Planet of the Apes makeup on Johnny Carson in ’73, co-writing We’ve Only Just Begun and Rainy Days and Mondays for The Carpenters — never mind penning the words to The Love Boat theme!

Insanely, the list goes on, including voicing the beloved Batman Animated Series’ Penguin amid countless guest spots on everything from Babylon 5 to The Hardy Boys, occupying a Hollywood Square in the midst of it all.

To try and zoom in like that helicopter shot into Kermit’s swamp, the 84-year-old legend is here Tuesday at Metro Cinema for NorthwestFEARFest’s closing–night, 50th-anniversary screening of Brian De Palma’s beautifully weird and musically wondrous cult classic Phantom of the Paradise, scored by and indeed starring Williams.

In a long and magnificent conversation I can just barely sample here, the Oscar/Grammy/Golden Globe-winner talks about it all, laughing as he asks to flip from the phone over to Zoom, “I’m so f—ing old, I listened to everything at 11 for 40 years!”


Posted by Geoff at 11:34 PM CDT
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