De Palma’s self-aware voyeuristic relationship to not only his female characters, but the medium itself, like Hitchcock’s, was what gave his films a jolt, and made his films so endlessly fascinating, and complicated, as well as how technically facile and inventive De Palma dealt with the medium itself. De Palma’s perversity in staging violence was witty and very cinematic. I can’t think of a moment of realistic violence in a De Palma film… the stabbing in Sisters, the pig’s blood and the massacre at the prom in Carrie, Fiona Lewis spinning to her death, midair, and John Cassavetes exploding in The Fury, the elevator slashing in Dressed To Kill, the chainsaw sequence in Scarface. And all of this done on a grand scale that will never be replicated in movies again. Yes, this was the 1970s when De Palma started making a string of great films, with Carrie probably being his go-to masterpiece, and one of the key films of the New Hollywood. Though with each successive viewing of De Palma’s 1981 John Travolta conspiracy thriller, Blow Out, I’m not totally positive about that anymore. Though Blow Out is Quentin Tarantino’s favorite movie. My own personal faves from him remain Phantom Of The Paradise and Dressed To Kill, where the killer is a tormented, pre-op transexual. Oh my God, oh my God, I just heard the Teen Vogue staff self-immolating...

...There’s only one medium shot of Brian De Palma talking that we return to throughout the documentary, in the same room, in the same blue shirt, but the majority of the movie is a brilliant and seamless array of clips from De Palma’s movies, and it is a visually overwhelming experience. I had not seen some of these images on a big screen in decades, and I was in awe. Oh, my God, movies used to look like that. De Palma says at one point about him and Spielberg and George Lucas, and Coppola and Scorsese, the directors who led the New Hollywood revolution in the 1970s, that this kind of moment, this auteurist freedom played out within the studio system, with directors making films for adults, will never return. And it reminds us that it was over almost before it began. De Palma reminds us that it wasn’t Jaws or Star Wars that ended the New Hollywood (aesthetically, they are examples of it), it was actually (as John Carpenter pointed out a couple of weeks ago) the failure of one of the grandest auteur movies ever made by a studio, Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate, that closed the door on an era. I don’t want to be a nostalgist, and neither does De Palma, but I feel a deep sense of loss comparing the movies then with the movies now.

The first annual Sleepy Hollow International Film Festival will include a "special celebration" (or "special presentation") of Phantom Of The Paradise. The fest runs October 10-13, 2019, in Sleepy Hollow, New York. With the event still months away, we'll keep an eye out for any updates on potential guests for this one.

In the meantime, here is a list of upcoming Phantom Of The Paradise events this year::

March 20, in Paris: Laurent Vachaud presents Phantom Of The Paradise, followed by a debate and a cocktail

March 23, in Chicago: Gerrit Graham to present 45th anniversary screening of Phantom Of The Paradise at Sci-Fi Spectacular

March 29, in Lyon: Brian De Palma Masterclass followed by screening of Phantom Of The Paradise at Lumière Institute

April 27, in London: Bret Easton Ellis introduces Phantom Of The Paradise, a film that inspired him, at BFI Southbank

May 3, in Winnipeg: “Phantom Rocks The Park” with 45th anniversary screening at the Park Theatre followed by a live soundtrack performance by Swanage

October 10-13, in Sleepy Hollow: The first annual Sleepy Hollow International Film Festival will include a special celebration of Phantom Of The Paradise.

One week later, on March 27th, Blumenfeld will himself be at the Lumière Institute in Lyon, France, to present a De Palma double feature as part of a running De Palma retrospective: Blow Out and Body Double. And then two nights later, on March 29th, De Palma will be at Lumière to present a Masterclass, which will be followed by another screening of Phantom Of The Paradise.

More to come-- Phantom is all over the place for its 45th anniversary this year...

I love this film (Phantom of the Paradise) so much that I bought a great 35mm print. I then donated it to the @newbeverly cinema. Hopefully they'll program it soon!

And then Edgar Wright jumped in: "But how many times have I gone on about?"

Rian Johnson: "I blame you for all of this."

Edgar Wright: "My first ever programming at the @newbeverly was a double bill of Bugsy Malone & Phantom Of The Paradise with a @IMPaulWilliams Q&A (and a secret midnight of Ishtar). I'm not sure I ever topped it."

New Bevery Cinema to Rian Johnson: "This is very exciting to hear! I can’t imagine a better way to see it for the first time."

Aaron Stewart-Ahn, co-screenwriter of last year's Mandy, responded to del Toro's initial tweet, writing, "The Academy archival print is so effin gorgeous and such a highlight of how prints even of films from that era and stocks can hold saturation and inky blacks." Stewart-Ahn also retweeted del Toro's tweet, adding, "One of the most underrated movies ever."

TONTO is further described at The Swan Archives:

"It's a Series III Moog modular synthesizer, which Cecil expanded with modules from Moog, Arp, Oberheim, and others. It was used by Stevie Wonder on several albums, and is also heard on records by Quincy Jones, Bobby Womack, The Isley Brothers, Gil Scott-Heron and Weather Report, Steven Stills, The Doobie Brothers, Dave Mason, Little Feat, and Joan Baez. All those dials and jacks on the walls are actually part of the thing, and not some set-designer's fantasy."

"In 2013, the National Music Centre (NMC) acquired TONTO for their working musical instrument collection and the famous synthesizer was moved to Calgary to be restored for use," Beatroute's David Daley wrote ahead of TONTO Week. He continued:

In conjunction with the Alberta Electronic Music Festival, NMC is celebrating the completion of TONTO’s restoration with TONTO week, a series of events running November 14-18 that includes which include a rare screening of the cult film that helped make TONTO famous.

The Phantom of the Paradise is many things at once: a mind-bending horror film, rock opera, tragedy, love story, comedy and a cautionary tale for us mere mortals. There’s a reason why the movie ran almost constantly for a year in Winnipeg after it first opened and has earned permanent die-hard cult status around the world: it’s a damn good film.

Legendary director Brian DePalma both wrote and directed the story, drawing from the classic tales of Faust, The Phantom of the Opera and The Picture of Dorian Grey. Rod Serling of the surreal TV show The Twilight Zone narrates an eerie introduction explaining how the music mogul Swan seeks the music to open his new rock palace “the Paradise” with: “..this film is the story of that search, of that sound, of the man who made it, the girl who sang it and the monster who stole it.”

Winslow Leach is a brilliant composer. Swan steals his masterpiece cantata and sends him to jail on false charges. Leach escapes from prison and is horribly injured and believed dead after he tries to destroy the pop-music pressings of the music swan stole from him. Things heat up when a lurking phantom kills the Paradise’s opening act “Beef” in a horrible onstage spectacle. The story get even stranger after that.

The diminutive Paul Williams (who also plays Swan in the film) wrote the music and lyrics for the soundtrack at the height of his song-writing career and each tune is quite successful on its own. Blistering rock performances by Swan’s musical incantation “The Undead” leave more than a few people chopped up afterwards. The chanteuse Phoenix sings a hauntingly beautiful love ballad after Beef is cooked alive onstage. Immediately an instant star, Phoenix is seduced by Swan which creates a love-triangle that doesn’t end well at all.

Don’t be thrown off by the movie’s campy 1970s aesthetic or apparent simplicity, this is a film lover’s film of the highest order with strong visual symbolism and a rich sub-text. It’s a dark parody and venomous critique of the star-making schemes of greedy producers and well worth seeing on the big screen. Love and death, hope and despair, doom and redemption all await the viewer in this unique rock and roll horror phantasy.

TONTO: The 50-Year Saga of the Synth Heard on Stevie Wonder Classics
by Martin Porter & David Goggin, Rolling Stone

It was during that same period that TONTO had its Hollywood close-up. TONTO and Record Plant Studio B are featured in several key scenes in Brian De Palma’s 1974 cult movie Phantom of the Paradise, in which a Phil Spector–like producer (Paul Williams), imprisons and drugs a tormented Phantom (of the Rock Opera) composer until he completes his rock cantata. For fans like Rod Warkentin, organizer of Winnipeg, Canada’s annual Phantompalooza festival and Facebook page, “TONTO is like another character in the movie.” Following the film’s storyline in which the Phantom’s composition is purloined by its producer, Cecil was never paid for the use of TONTO, based on an unfulfilled promise that he could contribute to the movie’s score.

I know you’ve mentioned that you’ve drawn a lot of influence from Argento and Brian de Palma. Any films in particular?

Yann Gonzalez: I saw Phantom of the Paradise again two weeks ago, and this is one of the films I [showed] to the actor who plays the killer, Jonathan Genet, who was the lead in the last Żuławski film, Cosmos. There’s something so childish in Phantom of the Paradise. It’s like a kid playing with the images, and trying to invent and expand on them at every moment in the film. And I loved it, so much. [It] brings together so many atmospheres; it’s a comedy, it’s a tragedy, it’s super goofy, it’s super stupid at some points, it’s a musical, it’s a horror film. It’s so many things at the same time, and it’s dealing with everything in such a brilliant way.

Brian de Palma is my favorite director ever, and maybe it’s not my favorite film of his because I think he made stronger films. For instance, every time I see Carrie or Obsession, I cry, and cry, and cry, for half an hour at least. But with Phantom of the Paradise, you have this guy, this is maybe his third or fourth important picture– I think he made maybe five or six pictures before, but this is really one of the first important pictures he made, and he’s still so young at heart. You can feel the vibration of youth, the joy of making cinema and the artifice of cinema all the time in that [film]. That can be very exhilarating.

I’m seeing all kinds of similarities now that I think about it. From the masked monster to the relationship between creativity and violence; how a beautiful thing can have a really dark past. You mentioned the joy of filmmaking, which I think is really present in the film–

Yann Gonzalez: Thank you!

Like the way the opening sequence was unfolding, as Lois was editing and the murder was happening, I just kept thinking to myself: “God, snapping film like that must be so satisfying.”

Yann Gonzalez: This is why I mostly still watch films from the Seventies or Eighties. I think we kind of lost this naivety of cinema; just opening yourself and trying to be as free as you can, and expressing your joy [in] making a film. It’s getting more and more rare that you can feel this joy in making a film. There are too many producers, too many people involved in the filmmaking process. I think you lose this childish aspect of making a film, which I think is super important.

Is there something you do on set, or in preparing with your actors, to maintain that sense of joy in making a film?

Yann Gonzalez: It has to be contagious. Of course, it’s the job of the filmmaker, but you must choose the right people to maintain this joy. And it’s very fragile because there’s lots of tension on the set; sometimes it’s really excruciating to go through one day of shooting. There are so many issues, so many problems all the time. I think I was really lucky because, 95% of the time I was surrounded by people who were really kids at heart. And especially Vanessa Paradis, she has this real innocence, and this kindness of a kid. She’d never acted like a star, she was part of the crew, and that’s all, expressing the same joy as the crew. It was really contagious. We were like a bunch of kids doing film.

COHEED AND CAMBRIA - "OLD FLAMES" & "UNHEAVENLY CREATURES"

Meanwhile, Coheed and Cambria premiered a new song today. "Old Flames" is the fourth track to be released from the band's forthcoming album, Vaxis – Act I: The Unheavenly Creatures. Last month, the band's frontman Claudio Sanchez told Rolling Stone's Ryan Reed that Phantom Of The Paradise was an influence:

I have to ask about “Unheavenly Creatures,” the title track. I can’t think of another band that mixes prog, metal, hard-rock, power-pop and post-hardcore in that way. Do you recall how you put that one together?
I wrote two songs together, “Old Flames” and “Unheavenly Creatures.” I think a little bit of “Old Flames” inspired “Unheavenly Creatures.” I was inspired by this Brian De Palma movie Phantom of the Paradise. It’s basically a Seventies version of Phantom of the Opera, a movie musical.

That makes sense. Several of these songs are super theatrical, like “Old Flames” and even “The Gutter.”
With “Old Flames,” I was trying to write something that sounded a bit more Fifties. I just sat behind my digital piano in my living room and constructed the opening piano sequence. I wrote it from there on piano — it wasn’t written on guitar. To me, it had a pretty powerful chorus. After writing that song, that put me in this mindset of writing that sort of material. I’d written “True Ugly” and “Black Sunday,” so I was in this Coheed pop idea. So when I started “Unheavenly Creatures,” I took out this Roland boutique one-oscillator synthesizer, the SH-01A — it’s a very easy-to-use synth that has a very fun sequencer on it. I just punched in a bunch of notes and created this very long sequence and played it back. It was just by chance. I was just trying to create something. Every now and then, I’d hit the wrong note and have to start over. It was fun to put together. When I played it back, it was like, “Oh, this is so magical to me!” And that’s how the chords started to come together. Those were the first two songs Atlas started to gravitate toward. He’s all about the record, but especially those two — with “Old Flames,” I played the chorus like three times, and he’s already singing it as I’m constructing it. I’m like, “Maybe I should go down this path.” He’s a kid! He doesn’t care about anything but whether it sounded good to him. Then I made my way into “Unheavenly Creatures,” and the same thing started to happen. I was like, “Are you telling me you want a production credit on this, son?” In a way, it was like entertainment for him. As I was constructing these songs that were a little more melodically friendly.