TOYER TALK
A BRIEF LOOK AT THIS UPCOMING PROJECT
As I wrote last week, Brian De Palma has been thinking about ways to film Toyer since at least 2002, when he indicated that he "had an idea to make a very scary movie, based on a kind of serial murderer that preys on tourists." Later that year, Le Paradis' Carl Rodrigue & Tony Suppa interviewed De Palma and asked him about Toyer. De Palma explained:

This is material based on a book and a play by Gardner McKay called TOYER [De Palma later stressed that his film was based on the play, and not the book]. People have been trying to do it for decades. It's a very intensive psychodrama between two characters, but no one's figured out how to open it up and make it work as a movie. I got an idea how to do it, and I pulled it off the shelf last year and adapted it. It took us quite a while to obtain the rights to the material because Gardner died last year and we had to deal with his estate and his widow. Finally, we were able to work out a deal. It's a very terrifying piece of material. It's been terrifying for over thirty years...

De Palma had taken McKay's play and expanded it, adding De Palma touches such as flashbacks that repeated certain scenes from different perspectives, newly invented characters, and locations to provide set pieces for a true blue De Palma film.

In 2005-2006, as post-production work was being done on The Black Dahlia, there were rumored to be plans to shoot Toyer in Venice, Paris, and London. One new character is an English surgeon named Laura Manning, and it had been rumored in 2004 that Tilda Swinton was in talks for that role. With the various settings, of course, an international cast was planned, and Giancarlo Giannini had been rumored for the role of the Italian Inspector Scarlatti. With a four/five-year gap since the project was last considered, the casting has started anew, and it will be interesting to see who fills out some of these roles this Fall.

DON'T LOOK NOW & DONAGGIO
As noted earlier, De Palma had planned to have Pino Donaggio compose the score for Toyer, and I suspect that will still be the plan. Donaggio also scored Nicolas Roeg's Venice-set thriller Don't Look Now in 1973. De Palma briefly discussed Don't Look Now in 2002 with Rodrigue and Suppa. "I love the way Roeg shot Venice in that period," De Palma said. "I always wanted to shoot a movie in Venice in the winter."

THIERRY ARBOGAST, DANTE FERRETTI
Also in 2005-2006, Thierry Arbogast was set to be the cinematographer on Toyer, and Dante Ferretti, having just worked with De Palma on The Black Dahlia, was getting ready to jump onto the Toyer project, as well. Hopefully this dream team is still available... Incidentally, Ferretti will be honored at next month's Venice Film Festival. On the morning of September 10th, Ferretti will receive the Premio Bianchi prior to the premiere of Gianfranco Giagni's hour-long documentary, Dante Ferretti: Production Designer. The film will then be shown on Italian TV in October.

MOVIE GEEKS EXAMINE "THE DE PALMA THRILLER"
TRIBUTE TO DE PALMA LEADS UP TO 70TH BIRTHDAY
Brian De Palma will turn 70 on September 11th, and Movie Geeks United! is preparing a fantastic-looking slate of shows that week leading up to the occasion, with a rich line-up of special guests. The guests are still being added, but here is what they have so far:

The De Palma Thriller: SISTERS - Monday, September 6 at 10pm EST
featuring special guests author/critic John Kenneth Muir and producer Edward R. Pressman

The De Palma Thriller: CARRIE - Tuesday, September 7 at 10pm EST
featuring special guests author/critic John Kenneth Muir, actress Nancy Allen, and additional insights from critic Armond White

The De Palma Thriller: DRESSED TO KILL - Wednesday, September 8 at 10pm EST
featuring special guests author/critic John Kenneth Muir, actress Nancy Allen, actor Keith Gordon, and producer George Litto

The De Palma Thriller: BLOW OUT - Thursday, September 9 at 10pm EST
featuring special guests author/critic John Kenneth Muir, actress Nancy Allen, and producer George Litto, with additional insights from cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond.

The De Palma Thriller: RAISING CAIN - Friday, September 10 at 10pm EST
featuring special guests author/critic John Kenneth Muir and editor Paul Hirsch

Keep up to date at Movie Geeks United!.
(Thanks to Jamey!)

NEW CAST IN TALKS FOR TOYER

Producer Scott Steindorff tells De Palma a la Mod that there is a new cast now in talks for Toyer. This was in response to my question of whether or not they are still talking with Juliette Binoche and Colin Firth about the lead roles in the upcoming film. It looks like we can expect to see some news of a new cast in the upcoming weeks. Steindorff also confirmed for me that Brian De Palma is the sole writer of the screenplay adaptation (so the long-ago unsubstantiated rumor of a Ted Tally revision was probably never true).

When I talked to De Palma in Paris in 2002, he told me that he "had an idea to make a very scary movie, based on a kind of serial murderer that preys on tourists." In later months, it was announced that he would be filming an adaptation of Gardner McKay's Toyer with producer Tarak Ben-Ammar, and it always seemed to me that this must have been the film De Palma had been referring to. "A kind of serial murderer" is different than saying "a serial murderer," and seems close to the premise of Toyer, which is about a serial killer who does not actually kill his victims, but has the surgical skill to lobotomize them. Hence, "a kind of serial murderer." There was also a rumor around 2004 that De Palma had planned to cast famous actresses in cameo roles as Toyer's victims (or should we say, Venice "tourists"?). This would be one obvious alteration to the original one act play, which has only two characters.

When De Palma said in the quote above that he "had an idea," part of that idea was undoubtedly visual. As he explained in the same interview, "you know, now you go through a process of reading a lot of material, books, scripts, writing… until you get something that’s going to get you interested enough to make the movie. And as you get older, it just gets harder. And you say, do I want to spend all this time making something I’m not really a hundred percent sure that it’s going to be moving what I’m doing another step. You know, 'What am I saying with this movie? Am I involving some kind of cinematic idea I’m working on?'" With Toyer, which he has tried to get off the ground repeatedly, it is a safe bet that De Palma feels he will be working out some new cinematic ideas.

DE PALMA TO MAKE TOYER AFTER ALL
THRILLER TO SHOOT IN VENICE LATE FALL, EARLY WINTER
Claude Brodesser-Akner at New York Magazine's Vulture posted an exclusive item Friday announcing that Brian De Palma will be heading to Venice late this fall to begin shooting Toyer, a project he has been wanting to do since at least 2002. The film will shoot from late fall into early winter, according to Vulture. De Palma's screenplay for Toyer, which he adapted from the one act play by Gardner McKay (not from McKay's later novel of the same name), has been in the control of Tarak Ben-Ammar all this time. Ben-Ammar worked with De Palma on Femme Fatale, a film in which De Palma was able to follow his muse and create a stunning work of profound brilliance. As of 2006, De Palma had Juliette Binoche and Colin Firth on board to play the two leads in Toyer, and each had said they were just waiting for De Palma to be ready to film. (About the long delay, Firth had quipped that perhaps he would play Toyer's grandfather.) De Palma's adaptation is set in Venice during the winter, with a set-piece designed to take place during the Carnevale di Venezia. Part of the challenge initially seemed to be getting permission to film during the Carnival, which takes place in February and March. Scott Steindorff, who is now aboard the project as a producer, tells Vulture that it would be logistically impossible to shoot during the Carnival itself, and so they plan to re-create the Carnival on location.

"I READ THE SCRIPT-- IT'S REALLY FRICKIN' SCARY"
There was a report somewhere along the line that Ted Tally had also done some work on De Palma's script adaptation, but that has never been confirmed. In any case, Steindorff tells Vulture that De Palma's adaptation of Toyer "has all the elements of suspense that Brian does so well in films like Blow Out and Carrie. And by that I mean, it's really frickin' scary: I read the script on a plane, and I was still terrified." The Vulture post adds that "Steindorff has brought heavyweight literature like Philip Roth's The Human Stain and Gabriel García Márquez's Love in the Time of Cholera to the screen." (Steindorff also produced the suspenseful horror film Turistas.) Brodesser-Akner also notes that De Palma's film should be creepy, as it is set against the Carnival "for which elaborate masks disguising one's identity are traditionally worn on the street from St. Stephen's Day (the day after Christmas) until the start of the Venitian Carnival (two weeks before Ash Wednesday)."

Pino Donaggio had mentioned around 2004 that he had been asked by De Palma to write the score for Toyer, something he said he was looking forward to. In a 2008 interview with Joep de Bruijn at MainTitles, Donaggio said, "And of course I would have liked to do all other films by Brian De Palma. He keeps on changing composers, but there is still something out there. He came to Venice to talk to me about The Toyer. After that meeting The Black Dahlia followed and another one. I don't know, I'll wait for it."

JENNIFER SALT, BIG-TIME SCREENWRITER
EAT, PRAY, LOVE ADAPTED FROM ELIZABETH GILBERT MEMOIR
Jennifer Salt is the co-screenwriter on the film adaptation of Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat, Pray, Love, which opens in theaters today. Salt wrote the screenplay with the film's director, Ryan Murphy, the creator of the TV series Nip/Tuck and Glee. Salt was a regular writer and co-producer for Nip/Tuck.

Salt, of course, is a staple of the early films of Brian De Palma, having appeared in his first feature length project, The Wedding Party, in 1963 (released in 1969), which was made while both attended Sarah Lawrence College (according to Brooks Barnes at the New York Times, De Palma and Salt briefly dated during this time). In 1964, De Palma made a short film about her called Jennifer, and Salt subsequently appeared in De Palma's Murder a la Mod, Hi, Mom!, and Sisters, the latter having been imagined by De Palma specifically with her and Margot Kidder in mind to play the leads. She also appeared in a film written by her late father, Waldo Salt, 1969's Midnight Cowboy, which costarred her then-boyfriend Jon Voight (Salt would appear in one more film with Voight, Paul Williams' The Revolutionary, released the same year as the similarly-themed Hi, Mom!). Salt told Backstage's Jenelle Riley that her father had originally thought of a small role for her in Midnight Cowboy, but that role became bigger when she met with director John Schlesinger. Barnes' New York Times article, which features quotes from De Palma, briefly discusses this early part of Salt's career:

The early 1970s found [Salt] living (and partying) in Malibu, Calif., with Margot Kidder, who would go on to play Lois Lane in three “Superman” films. Drawn by Ms. Salt’s cooking and both women’s tendency to sunbathe topless were some dudes: Martin Scorsese, Brian De Palma, Steven Spielberg. (“To see those pale city boys running around on the beach with no clothes on was so charming,” Ms. Salt recalled. Said Mr. De Palma, “She cooked so well she could get us to do almost anything.”)

Salt went into television, acting for a long time on the TV series Soap before becoming disillusioned with it all, and eventually realizing that she never really wanted to be an actress after all. Here is how she told it to Riley at Backstage:

"I was doing nice guest shots on TV, but it just wasn't happening in a creative and fulfilling way," she says. "The roles I was up for—mostly mom roles—were dreary. And my enthusiasm for working on them and for auditions was very low." She had an epiphany. "Over the course of your life, you realize more and more who you are and how you want to spend your time," she reflects. "And it became clearer and clearer that I was very unhappy as an actress and didn't feel comfortable in my own skin. When I was younger I thought it was because I wasn't successful enough. But as I got older I realized it had more to do with the fact that I just didn't love it."

The two interview articles linked to above are great, and for another really great interview in which Salt discusses working with De Palma in depth, check out Cult Film Freak. The undated interview appears to be from around the late 2000's (maybe even 2009). When asked which of the directors she worked with provided the most freedom for an actor, Salt replies:

Without a doubt, Brian De Palma. Back in the late 60's and early 70's there was much more freedom in filmmaking. Brian was always experimenting with new ideas and wanted equal input from everyone. He was willing to hear and try nearly anything you could think of that might help. But I also worked on more than one film with him, so we trusted each other very much and over time we created a formula that worked between us. There was chemistry there by the time production began on Sisters. John [Schlesinger] was also equally open to ideas and he was focused on getting naturalness out of the performances of his actors. But during the duration of the shooting of Midnight Cowboy John was also battling some personal issues that often hampered the flow of the film's progress. Some of the best directors I have ever had the chance to work with were those in television. Many of them are now making theatrical films. There was at least back then much more room for improvisation in television than there is now.

When asked which of her roles she likes best, Salt replied:

I loved playing “Judy Bishop” [in Brian De Palma’s Hi Mom!]. Of course who wouldn't want to work with Bobby De Niro? Naturally back then he was pretty much an unknown, but I still can't believe I shared the screen at one time with him. Of course I still say “Grace Collier” [Sisters] is up there at the top of my short list as well.

WRIGHT HEADING TOWARD THE PURELY VISUAL
DIRECTOR INFLUENCED BY DE PALMA FOR BABY DRIVER
While talking to The Playlist's Kevin Jagernauth about Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, director Edgar Wright mentioned that he is working on an original script that delves into the "purely visual" in a way a Brian De Palma film frequently does. According to Jagernauth, the script is called Baby Driver, and here is how Wright described it to him:

Well, it’s something I’ve been meaning to write for ages. I really planned to recharge my batteries and get back into writing. I’m excited about doing something that’s almost purely visual, because I’ve done three films—and even though Scott Pilgrim is very visual, it’s very dialogue heavy as well, which is great. And music heavy. Yeah. I think I’d like to try something—I’m a big Brian De Palma fan, and I’ll sit and look at something like "Carrie," and I like the fact that it starts to play out like a silent movie. There’s a point in "Carrie" in the last half hour where there’s no need for any more dialogue because the plot is in motion. Or something like [Jean-Pierre Melville's] "Le Samourai," I look at something like that and think, wow, there’s hardly any dialogue in this film. Something like that can be enjoyed around the world. I’d really like the challenge of doing something where the dialogue is really stripped back and it’s all about the cinema.

Elsewhere in the interview, Wright tells Jagernauth how he was originally not going to use much music at all in Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, "because we saw that most fictional bands in films suck, and we thought we’d do a running joke on it." But as the music began coming in (from Beck and others), Wright started to see things differently:

I found out that once I had the songs, I allowed myself more time to let them breathe. So I think the first Sex Bob-Omb song, "Garbage Truck," maybe originally I thought they’d play the first verse and just before it kicked into the forest, [Matthew] Patel would interrupt, but then it was like, "no fuck it, let’s just listen to it." And when the songs started to expand, I thought, "wow, I’m really starting to get that vibe more like a sixties or seventies film." Some of those films like "Phantom of the Paradise" or "Beyond the Valley of the Dolls," I would love it when they would go, "And now, the Strawberry Alarm Clock will play" or "Now The Carrie Nations will play" and it’d be like 10 minutes of the film. That was something that definitely developed once we had the material. I think in an early cut of the film, I think we played the whole of [Metric's] "Black Sheep." That’d be on the DVD, one version. In fact, when we shot the songs, we shot the full songs with all the artists, so we have different versions of them which we’ll put on the DVD.

In a separate interview with the Daily Comet's Dave Itzkoff, Wright again called out Stephen Chow’s Kung Fu Hustle and De Palma’s Phantom of the Paradise as the "true antecedents" [Itzkoff's words] of Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, but said he was wary of citing those films in meetings with executives, because "you don’t want to reference things that are way too obscure.”

SCOTT PILGRIM REVIEWS COMING IN
Meanwhile, the reviews for Scott Pilgrim vs. The World are coming in as the film is released this Friday. Armond White at the New York Press loves the film, contrasting it with the work of one of his favorite targets, Quentin Tarantino. The latter's films, according to White, are "pop-referencing movies" that "extract all social and political contexts," while Wright's pop-referencing is done as "a social satirist."

At The Pacific Northwest Inlander, Ed Symkus writes in his review that "Wright keeps the film sprinting along, throwing in a split-screen segment here and an exciting rock performance there — with another super-stylized fight right around the corner. There turns out to be as much talk as there is action, and by the time we’re introduced to the (sorta) villainous Gideon Graves (Jason Schwartzman), the film has slickly turned into a diatribe against the cold, heartless record business. If you want to see anything remotely like it, check out Brian De Palma’s Phantom of the Paradise — a film that was as far ahead of its time for 1974 as Scott Pilgrim is for today."

VING RHAMES TALKS MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE
AND SNARKY'S MACHINE SCREENS THE DE PALMA BLOCKBUSTER


Ving Rhames visited Lopez Tonight last week to promote his chainsaw-bearing role in the upcoming Piranha 3D, and mentioned a couple of things about the Mission: Impossible franchise. On the show, Rhames revealed that his character in the M:I films, Luther Stickell, was originally written to be one of the team members killed off in "the first six minutes" of the first film. "Now, I called Tom Cruise and Brian De Palma," Rhames told Lopez, "and I said, 'Why is it the black man dies in every action movie in the first six minutes?' Well, I'm about to do Mission: Impossible 4, so, uh, cha-ching and God bless." Since the Stickell character is a computer tech wiz, it seems likely he would have been essentially the one to die in the elevator shaft (that role ended up being played by Cruise's pal Emilio Estevez as an uncredited, and unadvertised, extended cameo-- people were surprised when the film began and the first real face they saw in color close-up on the big screen was Estevez'). Rhames had previously worked with De Palma when he portrayed Lt. Reilly in De Palma's Casualties Of War in 1989 (Mission: Impossible was released in 1996). If all goes as planned with the fourth installment, Rhames' Stickell will be the only character besides Cruise's Ethan Hunt to appear in all four M:I movies.

Meanwhile, a couple of months ago, Snarky's Machine watched Mission: Impossible and provided a terrifically entertaining running commentary. Here's a sample:

11:09 – I much prefer Cruise in one of those rubber face masks. I find his acting much more satisfying. Nothing too De Palma-y going on right now. Though the scenery looks an awful lot like the scenery in Phantom of the Paradise. Though like Emilio, I question Cruise’s decision to go with a Foghorn Leghorn accent. Very curious.

DOUBLE DE PALMA/DE NIRO AT THE NEW BEV
THE UNTOUCHABLES AND HI, MOM! SCREEN THIS WEEKEND
The New Beverly Cinema in Los Angeles is screening a Brian De Palma/Robert De Niro double bill this weekend, featuring The Untouchables and Hi, Mom!. It seems a good time to note that these two films have at least one interesting connection beyond the De Palma/De Niro one: in each film, De Palma presents a contrast between a man on a mission and a wife who is preoccupied with the color of her kitchen. As Eliot Ness says in The Untouchables, "Some part of the world still cares what color their kitchen is.” Although it should also be noted that Hi, Mom!'s Jon Rubin hardly seems to agree with the notion put forward in The Untouchables that "it's good to be married."

UPDATE 8-7-10 Come to think of it, there is another interesting link between the films-- an almost literal bumper sort of link involving the final two scenes of Hi, Mom! and the first two scenes of The Untouchables. After De Niro as Jon blows up the apartment building in the second-to-last scene in Hi, Mom!, he comes back and meets the press as a just-returning war veteran from Vietnam deploring the violence he has to come home to, and that he has, in fact, knowingly caused (he actually had returned at the beginning of the film). The Untouchables opens with De Niro as Al Capone meeting the press in a barber chair, followed by a scene in which a bomb explodes in a little girl's hands-- and we are, of course, led to believe that Capone is the one in control of the organization that has delivered this bomb, despite Capone's insistence to the press in the previous scene that neither he nor anybody he employs has anything to do with such violence. The Untouchables was the next film De Niro made with De Palma, 17 years after Hi, Mom!, and this thematic link seems so well planned out, one would almost think that it was, indeed, planned out...

HIRSCH DISCUSSES STAR WARS
"DE PALMA WAS THE FIRST TO SUGGEST I WOULD WIN AN OSCAR FOR IT"
Last week, Dennis Pellegrom at Star Wars Interviews posted an interview with Paul Hirsch, who, along with fellow editors Marcia Lucas and Richard Chew, won an Oscar for his work on George Lucas' Star Wars. In the first section of the interview, Hirsch explains the series of events that led to his working on Star Wars:

My brother Charles produced Greetings, a comedy directed by Brian De Palma, and came to me for the trailer. [De Palma] and I hit it off, and he hired me (at my brother's urging), to cut the sequel, Hi, Mom!. I then cut his next four films, and came to the attention of Brian's friends, who included Marty Scorsese, Steven Spielberg and George Lucas. Marcia Lucas was cutting Taxi Driver for Scorsese, and when they needed help, called me to work on it, but the studio nixed it. Then, the following year, they again needed help, this time on Star Wars, and called me in. The studio went along and the rest is history.

Later, Pellegrom asks Hirsch what he thought of the film while working on it, and whether he ever might have guessed that the film would be such a success and that he would win an Oscar for it. "I loved it," replies Hirsch, "but never dreamed it would go on to be the cultural phenomenon it grew into. Brian De Palma was the first person to suggest I would win an Oscar for it. Before that, it had never crossed my mind."