Hello and welcome to the unofficial Brian De Palma website.
Here is the latest news:

De Palma a la Mod

E-mail
Geoffsongs@aol.com

De Palma Discussion
Forum

-------------

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

-------------

Exclusive Passion
Interviews:

Brian De Palma
Karoline Herfurth
Leila Rozario

------------

AV Club Review
of Dumas book

------------

« December 2017 »
S M T W T F S
1 2
3 4 5 6 7 8 9
10 11 12 13 14 15 16
17 18 19 20 21 22 23
24 25 26 27 28 29 30
31

Interviews...

De Palma interviewed
in Paris 2002

De Palma discusses
The Black Dahlia 2006


Enthusiasms...

De Palma Community

The Virtuoso
of the 7th Art

The De Palma Touch

The Swan Archives

Carrie...A Fan's Site

Phantompalooza

No Harm In Charm

Paul Schrader

Alfred Hitchcock
The Master Of Suspense

Alfred Hitchcock Films

Snake Eyes
a la Mod

Mission To Mars
a la Mod

Sergio Leone
and the Infield
Fly Rule

Movie Mags

Directorama

The Filmmaker Who
Came In From The Cold

Jim Emerson on
Greetings & Hi, Mom!

Scarface: Make Way
For The Bad Guy

The Big Dive
(Blow Out)

Carrie: The Movie

Deborah Shelton
Official Web Site

The Phantom Project

Welcome to the
Offices of Death Records

The Carlito's Way
Fan Page

The House Next Door

Kubrick on the
Guillotine

FilmLand Empire

Astigmia Cinema

LOLA

Cultural Weekly

A Lonely Place

The Film Doctor

italkyoubored

Icebox Movies

Medfly Quarantine

Not Just Movies

Hope Lies at
24 Frames Per Second

Motion Pictures Comics

Diary of a
Country Cinephile

So Why This Movie?

Obsessive Movie Nerd

Nothing Is Written

Ferdy on Films

Cashiers De Cinema

This Recording

Mike's Movie Guide

Every '70s Movie

Dangerous Minds

EatSleepLiveFilm

No Time For
Love, Dr. Jones!

The former
De Palma a la Mod
site

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.
All topics
Ambrose Chapel
Are Snakes Necessary?
BAMcinématek
Bart De Palma
Beaune Thriller Fest
Becoming Visionary
Betty Buckley
Bill Pankow
Black Dahlia
Blow Out
Blue Afternoon
Body Double
Bonfire Of The Vanities
Books
Boston Stranglers
Bruce Springsteen
Cannes
Capone Rising
Carlito's Way
Carrie
Casualties Of War
Catch And Kill
Cinema Studies
Clarksville 1861
Columbia University
Columbo - Shooting Script
Congo
Conversation, The
Cop-Out
Cruising
Daft Punk
Dancing In The Dark
David Koepp
De Niro
De Palma & Donaggio
De Palma (doc)
De Palma Blog-A-Thon
De Palma Discussion
Demolished Man
Dick Vorisek
Dionysus In '69
Domino
Dressed To Kill  «
Edward R. Pressman
Eric Schwab
Fatal Attraction
Femme Fatale
Film Series
Fire
Frankie Goes To Hollywood
Fury, The
Genius of Love
George Litto
Get To Know Your Rabbit
Ghost & The Darkness
Greetings
Happy Valley
Havana Film Fest
Heat
Hi, Mom!
Hitchcock
Home Movies
Inspired by De Palma
Iraq, etc.
Jack Fisk
Jared Martin
Jerry Greenberg
Keith Gordon
Key Man, The
Laurent Bouzereau
Lights Out
Lithgow
Magic Hour
Magnificent Seven
Mission To Mars
Mission: Impossible
Mod
Montreal World Film Fest
Morricone
Mr. Hughes
Murder a la Mod
Nancy Allen
Nazi Gold
Newton 1861
Noah Baumbach
NYFF
Obsession
Oliver Stone
Palmetto
Paranormal Activity 2
Parker
Parties & Premieres
Passion
Paul Hirsch
Paul Schrader
Pauline Kael
Peet Gelderblom
Phantom Of The Paradise
Pimento
Pino Donaggio
Predator
Prince Of The City
Print The Legend
Raggedy Ann
Raising Cain
Red Shoes, The
Redacted
Responsive Eye
Retribution
Rie Rasmussen
Robert De Niro
Rotwang muß weg!
Sakamoto
Scarface
Scorsese
Sean Penn
Sensuous Woman, The
Sisters
Snake Eyes
Sound Mixer
Spielberg
Star Wars
Stepford Wives
Stephen H Burum
Sweet Vengeance
Tabloid
Tarantino
Taxi Driver
Terry
The Tale
To Bridge This Gap
Toronto Film Fest
Toyer
Travolta
Treasure Sierra Madre
Tru Blu
Truth And Other Lies
TV Appearances
Untitled Ashton Kutcher
Untitled Hollywood Horror
Untitled Industry-Abuse M
Untouchables
Venice Beach
Vilmos Zsigmond
Wedding Party
William Finley
Wise Guys
Woton's Wake
Blog Tools
Edit your Blog
Build a Blog
RSS Feed
View Profile
You are not logged in. Log in
Saturday, December 23, 2017
JERRY GREENBERG HAS DIED AT 81
OSCAR-WINNING EDITOR WORKED ON 5 DE PALMA FEATURES & SPRINGSTEEN VIDEO
https://www.angelfire.com/de/palma/jgreenberg2016.jpgJerry Greenberg, the Oscar-winning editor (for The French Connection) who collaborated with Brian De Palma on six projects, passed away yesterday at the age of 81. Greenberg worked on five features with De Palma: Dressed To Kill, Scarface, Body Double, Wise Guys, The Untouchables, and the music video for Bruce Springsteen's Dancing In The Dark. In Susan Dworkin's 1984 book Double De Palma, De Palma said of Greenberg, "I can just talk to him on the phone, and he'll know exactly what I want. And can even do it better."

In an interview about a year ago with CineMontage's Michael Goldman, Greenberg said it was only coincidence that he ended up working with De Palma more than any other director:
Greenberg says his success on his two films with Friedkin was in part a result of the fact that his collaborator was a director “of considerable ability when it came to taking a point of view on how a film is to be presented.” He puts the director with whom he has had his longest and closest association into that same category: Brian De Palma. The pair teamed on five films in the 1980s, including Dressed to Kill (1980) and Scarface (1983).

The editor was initially attracted to working with De Palma when the director interviewed him for Dressed to Kill at the behest of De Palma’s longtime editor, Paul Hirsch, ACE, a friend of Greenberg’s, when Hirsch’s schedule precluded him from taking the gig. The reason he wanted to do the film, Greenberg says, was the fact that De Palma had crudely storyboarded the entire movie himself, including minute details.

“He had me down to his office, which was a residential apartment in Manhattan,” Greenberg recalls. “He took me into a small dining room that was, because of the size, completely mirrored to make it appear larger, I guess. On the dining room wall, all around, he had taped three-by-five-inch file cards, storyboarding the whole film. All the drawings were his — simple stick figures most of the time, where he would try to indicate camera movement with little arrows and stuff like that.

“That might seem threatening to another editor,” he continues. “But to me, I thought, ‘Here was a director who knew how his film should be edited.’ I liked that the director knew a little bit about editing, and I felt encouraged. I loved editing that movie. It wasn’t necessarily just the performances or the hooks, the usual things that get you into it. I was doing it completely for the camera work — the way he used the camera, and that was very exciting.”

Still, Greenberg insists the fact that he worked with De Palma five times — more than he worked with any other single director — “was just a coincidence.” Indeed, he emphasizes that he is an editor who never pursued a single collaborative partner on which to hang his hat.

“I don’t think of myself that way in a working sense,” he offers. “I don’t think I generate a lot of confidence in directors in that way. Consequently, although maybe Brian De Palma is an exception, I don’t think I inspire that kind of ‘I’ll just continue working with him’ thing with directors. But then, I never wanted to do that anyway.”

Indeed, Greenberg says he doesn’t view “collaboration” as being just about his relationship with the director. Nor does he express common concerns among editors about being asked to re-cut his work, or even having others re-cut his work. He’s experienced it all over the years — from having wide latitude to having almost no latitude at all. And it’s all fine with him, he says, because, in his view, the nature of a collaborative art like filmmaking involves a work being in a sense passed around and “embellished” by different people repeatedly, a process he says he loves.

“Usually, the task goes from one to the other, so that at every step in passing it, it is embellished and then witnessed by other people, whatever the embellishment was,” he explains. “That is the kind of collaboration filmmaking is. It isn’t a sure thing, but it is a wonderful thing. Being able to pass a responsibility, and different ways of seeing things, from one person to the other, even if it goes on and on — I think that’s terrific. Because, if you have an open mind, what you can do is change what you had done originally, and make it something you could never have thought of on your own. That’s why I’m never threatened by anybody who wants to re-edit my work. I feel like maybe their ideas will spark more ideas in me.”


Greenberg, who also worked on Bonnie And Clyde, Heaven's Gate, and Reds, was nominated for two more Oscars in 1980, for Kramer vs. Kramer and Apocalypse Now.

Posted by Geoff at 2:19 PM CST
Post Comment | View Comments (1) | Permalink | Share This Post
JERRY GREENBERG HAS DIED AT 81
OSCAR-WINNING EDITOR WORKED ON 5 DE PALMA FEATURES & SPRINGSTEEN VIDEO
https://www.angelfire.com/de/palma/jgreenberg2016.jpgJerry Greenberg, the Oscar-winning editor (for The French Connection) who collaborated with Brian De Palma on six projects, passed away yesterday at the age of 81. Greenberg worked on five features with De Palma: Dressed To Kill, Scarface, Body Double, Wise Guys, The Untouchables, and the music video for Bruce Springsteen's Dancing In The Dark. In Susan Dworkin's 1984 book Double De Palma, De Palma said of Greenberg, "I can just talk to him on the phone, and he'll know exactly what I want. And can even do it better."

In an interview about a year ago with CineMontage's Michael Goldman, Greenberg said it was only coincidence that he ended up working with De Palma more than any other director:
Greenberg says his success on his two films with Friedkin was in part a result of the fact that his collaborator was a director “of considerable ability when it came to taking a point of view on how a film is to be presented.” He puts the director with whom he has had his longest and closest association into that same category: Brian De Palma. The pair teamed on five films in the 1980s, including Dressed to Kill (1980) and Scarface (1983).

The editor was initially attracted to working with De Palma when the director interviewed him for Dressed to Kill at the behest of De Palma’s longtime editor, Paul Hirsch, ACE, a friend of Greenberg’s, when Hirsch’s schedule precluded him from taking the gig. The reason he wanted to do the film, Greenberg says, was the fact that De Palma had crudely storyboarded the entire movie himself, including minute details.

“He had me down to his office, which was a residential apartment in Manhattan,” Greenberg recalls. “He took me into a small dining room that was, because of the size, completely mirrored to make it appear larger, I guess. On the dining room wall, all around, he had taped three-by-five-inch file cards, storyboarding the whole film. All the drawings were his — simple stick figures most of the time, where he would try to indicate camera movement with little arrows and stuff like that.

“That might seem threatening to another editor,” he continues. “But to me, I thought, ‘Here was a director who knew how his film should be edited.’ I liked that the director knew a little bit about editing, and I felt encouraged. I loved editing that movie. It wasn’t necessarily just the performances or the hooks, the usual things that get you into it. I was doing it completely for the camera work — the way he used the camera, and that was very exciting.”

Still, Greenberg insists the fact that he worked with De Palma five times — more than he worked with any other single director — “was just a coincidence.” Indeed, he emphasizes that he is an editor who never pursued a single collaborative partner on which to hang his hat.

“I don’t think of myself that way in a working sense,” he offers. “I don’t think I generate a lot of confidence in directors in that way. Consequently, although maybe Brian De Palma is an exception, I don’t think I inspire that kind of ‘I’ll just continue working with him’ thing with directors. But then, I never wanted to do that anyway.”

Indeed, Greenberg says he doesn’t view “collaboration” as being just about his relationship with the director. Nor does he express common concerns among editors about being asked to re-cut his work, or even having others re-cut his work. He’s experienced it all over the years — from having wide latitude to having almost no latitude at all. And it’s all fine with him, he says, because, in his view, the nature of a collaborative art like filmmaking involves a work being in a sense passed around and “embellished” by different people repeatedly, a process he says he loves.

“Usually, the task goes from one to the other, so that at every step in passing it, it is embellished and then witnessed by other people, whatever the embellishment was,” he explains. “That is the kind of collaboration filmmaking is. It isn’t a sure thing, but it is a wonderful thing. Being able to pass a responsibility, and different ways of seeing things, from one person to the other, even if it goes on and on — I think that’s terrific. Because, if you have an open mind, what you can do is change what you had done originally, and make it something you could never have thought of on your own. That’s why I’m never threatened by anybody who wants to re-edit my work. I feel like maybe their ideas will spark more ideas in me.”


Greenberg, who also worked on Bonnie And Clyde, Heaven's Gate, and Reds, was nominated for two more Oscars in 1980, for Kramer vs. Kramer and Apocalypse Now.

Posted by Geoff at 12:01 AM CST
Post Comment | Permalink | Share This Post
Monday, October 23, 2017
'THE CASE OF THE BLOODY IRIS' & 'DRESSED TO KILL'
ELEVATOR SCENE IN ITALIAN GIALLO IS ECHOED & ENHANCED IN DE PALMA'S FILM


Thanks to Patrick for linking us to a recent Cahiers du Cinéma "Des giallos à gogo" video posted on YouTube, featuring the opening scene from Giuliano Carnimeo's Perché quelle strane gocce di sangue sul corpo di Jennifer? (1972). Released internationally with the title The Case of the Bloody Iris, the film opens with a shocking murder of a woman on an elevator. The woman's blond hair, and the close-up of her face and her terrified eyes watching a knife in the hand of the killer, bear such a striking resemblance to similar shots of Angie Dickinson's elevator murder in Brian De Palma's Dressed To Kill, it seems apparent that De Palma must have seen Carnimeo's film sometime before storyboarding and filming this sequence. The killer raises the knife and then brings it down in a slashing motion across the woman's neck in very much the same way the killer does in De Palma's film. The people waiting outside the elevator until it arrives also reminds of Nancy Allen's Liz and her client waiting obliviously for the elevator in Dressed To Kill. In both cases, the female character who is first to see the victim in the elevator turns out to be a major character in the film, and the relative sequences serve as her introduction.

Yet the De Palma sequence also differs from Carnimeo's sequence in many ways. De Palma has added the Hitchcock touch of Liz witnessing the killer and then herself holding the bloody weapon, making her an immediate suspect. And he has mixed in several other elements: the meeting of the eyes between victim and witness, as one exits the film's narrative and the other takes it over; the deliberate echoes of Hitchcock's Psycho shower scene; the intercutting of Liz's conversation with her client and the horrible murder taking place in the elevator cabin while they wait (creating a dark comic irony); the entire movie leading up to Dickinson's Kate Miller getting on the elevator, feeling guilty about her one-night-stand, realizing she has left her wedding ring upstairs in the stranger's apartment, and being stared at by a young girl who seems to sense the woman's guilt.

In the earlier giallo, the victim is someone the viewer has never met before. In De Palma's film, the viewer has already become very intimately involved with the woman before she ever steps into that fateful elevator.


Posted by Geoff at 12:21 AM CDT
Updated: Monday, October 23, 2017 12:24 AM CDT
Post Comment | View Comments (3) | Permalink | Share This Post
Thursday, September 28, 2017
'DRESSED TO KILL CANCER' EVENT OCT 25 IN L.A.
NANCY ALLEN & OTHER CAST TO APPEAR; $100 VIP GETS PHOTO-OPP, Q&A, AFTER-PARTY, ETC.


The Criterion Collection and weSPARK will present a special screening of Brian De Palma’s Dressed to Kill at 8:30pm on Wednesday, October 25th, at The Theatre at Ace Hotel in downtown Los Angeles. Nancy Allen, who is also executive director at weSPARK, will be in attendance, and the press materials mention that other cast will be there, as well.

Two types of tickets are available for the event:

$35 for Unreserved Orchestra Seating with Commemorative Poster, Q&A and After-Party Attendance.

$100 for VIP Reserved Seating with Private Pre-Party, Dressed to Kill Blu-Ray DVD + Photo Opp with Nancy Allen and Cast, Commemorative Poster, Q&A and After-Party Attendance.


Posted by Geoff at 6:38 PM CDT
Post Comment | View Comments (1) | Permalink | Share This Post
Saturday, May 6, 2017
DONAGGIO'S DTK SHOWER THEME ON REFN ALBUM
COMPILES MUSIC REFN LISTENED TO WHILE WRITING & FILMING 'THE NEON DEMON'


Last month, Nicolas Winding Refn released The Wicked Die Young on CD and vinyl. A compilation of music he listened to while writing and filming The Neon Demon, it includes Pino Donaggio's Shower Theme from Brian De Palma's Dressed To Kill. "The fourteen tracks on this compilation represent the various ideas I had while preparing The Neon Demon and each song represents a specific emotion," Refn states in promotional materials for the collection. "Some of the tracks are from the past and some the present including new material by Cliff Martinez, Julian Winding, and Electric Youth. Since I wanted my film to be both a horror film and a melodrama with camp, glitter, and vulgarity, as well as a comedy and of course a little science fiction, all these various tracks made me able to step into a parallel world to tell the story."

Refn acknowledged two other De Palma/Donaggio collaborations last summer when Carrie and Body Double screened at Picturehouse cinemas in the U.K. as part of a series titled "Nicolas Winding Refn Presents…" Each film was promoted with Nicolas Winding Refn's verdict: "a visual feast" (Carrie), and, "They should make more movies like this nowadays" (Body Double).


Posted by Geoff at 10:49 PM CDT
Post Comment | Permalink | Share This Post
Tuesday, January 24, 2017
JOBLO'S FACE-OFF - 'PSYCHO' v. 'DRESSED TO KILL'
TURNS OUT TO BE RATHER DISAPPOINTING, SHORT-SIGHTED VIEWPOINT
With M. Night Shyamalan's Split released last week, there have been a lot of articles and reviews mentioning Brian De Palma and especially Raising Cain. JoBlo.com's Cody Hamman posted a "Face-Off" column pitting Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho opposite De Palma's Dressed To Kill, with disappointing remarks such as De Palma's main character, Kate Miller, not coming off as "very likeable, so her death doesn't have much emotional impact despite the fact that we've just spent more than 30 minutes watching her." (I am always flummoxed by criticisms that this or that character is not very likeable.) There's also this, regarding Dressed To Kill: "It's an interesting story of a psycho with multiple personalities, but the way the film mishandles the concept of gender reassignment surgery, treating it as a joke at times, can be rather cringeworthy when you look at it 37 years later."

And then Hamman completely lost me with this short-sighted gem: "De Palma takes wordless sequences to an extreme in DRESSED TO KILL. In the first 35 minutes of the film, the characters exchange maybe around 7 minutes of dialogue. The silent seduction at the museum takes up 10 minutes, and as the film goes on there will be several more lengthy stretches without dialogue. Composer Pino Donaggio plays some good music over these sequences, but that doesn't stop them from coming off as being painfully dull to me. Unable to connect with the characters, I don't care what they're doing when they're not speaking, so as these sequences drag on and on I struggle to keep my attention on the film."

Posted by Geoff at 8:10 AM CST
Updated: Thursday, January 26, 2017 12:08 AM CST
Post Comment | View Comments (1) | Permalink | Share This Post
Monday, August 22, 2016
'DRESSED TO KILL' SOUNDTRACK FRESH REMASTER
INTRADA NEEDED TO RE-PRESS POPULAR TITLE, DECIDED TO RE-DRESS, AS WELL
Intrada announced today a newly re-dressed, re-mastered, and re-worked version of Pino Donaggio's Dressed To Kill soundtrack. Intrada previously released a Special Collection limited version of this title in 2013.

Here is how Intrada describes this new edition: "Re-dressing a popular Intrada title! As needs to re-press Dressed To Kill arose, Intrada elected to return to original source mixes and remaster entire CD, making new enhancements to audio as well as judicious changes to original track assembly. Additionally, slightly re-worked packaging design by Kay Marshall enhances this new remastered edition."

The changes to the track assembly involve more separation of cues, including "Mike Arrives" (which had previously been included in the track "Marino And Elliot"), "Policewoman Follows Liz" (which had previously been part of "Peter Sets Camera"), "After Flight" (previously part of "Liz Chased By Hoods"), "Elliot And Levy" (previously part of "Liz And Peter Watch Film"), and "Romantic Interlude" (previously part of the track now called, simply, "Liz And Peter").

(Thanks to Bill!)


Posted by Geoff at 11:58 PM CDT
Updated: Tuesday, August 23, 2016 12:12 AM CDT
Post Comment | View Comments (1) | Permalink | Share This Post
Friday, July 1, 2016
TWEET / REPRINT- VILLAGE VOICE LOOKS BACK
AT SARRIS-HOBERMAN DEBATE OVER 'DRESSED TO KILL'

Posted by Geoff at 7:55 AM CDT
Post Comment | Permalink | Share This Post
Tuesday, January 26, 2016
PODCAST COMMENTARY TRACK FOR 'DTK'
INFORMED DISCUSSION ENSUES
A Podcast titled Illusion Travels By Streetcar posted a commentary track yesterday for Brian De Palma's Dressed To Kill. The informed discussion/commentary is designed to run while you watch the film with the sound not-too-loud, and is actually pretty good. Near the beginning, Tom Sutpen shares the De Palma quote from early in his career about wanting to be the American Godard, and asks Jeremiah McNeil what he thinks of the idea that later De Palma films such as Dressed To Kill are seen "as an abandonment of that early intention."

"There is a critical misunderstanding in that assumption," McNeil replies. When asked to elaborate, he says, "There is no De Palma film that bears the mark of his authorship that is not in some way a comment on the film itself. And the fact that the person watching is committing an act of voyeurism, and is engaging with an art object. That kind of self-reflexivity is Godardian in its intention, or even Brechtian in some cases." And then the podcast is off to the races after that.

Posted by Geoff at 1:22 AM CST
Updated: Tuesday, January 26, 2016 1:22 AM CST
Post Comment | Permalink | Share This Post
Tuesday, January 12, 2016
DAVID MARGULIES HAS DIED
CHARACTER ACTOR PORTRAYED DR. LEVY IN 'DRESSED TO KILL'
David Margulies, who played Bobbi's psychiatrist Dr. Levy in Brian De Palma's Dressed To Kill, passed away Monday afternoon, according to Deadline (and thanks to Ryan for the early word). He was 78. A New York character actor of the stage and screen, Margulies played the Mayor of New York in the Ghostbusters movies, and worked with Woody Allen on more than one occasion, including in Martin Ritt's The Front and Allen's own Celebrity. According to the Deadline article, he had "recently finished filming his role as Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel in the upcoming ABC miniseries Madoff with Richard Dreyfuss, scheduled to air February 3."

Margulies' psychiatrist in Dressed To Kill has an intense scene in a stairwell with Michael Caine's Dr. Elliott-- a scene that is perhaps even more intense, verging on the surreal and comic, upon repeat viewings when the viewer knows who's who and what's what. Margulies' other big scene in the film also plays with a subtle comic tension lying underneath, as his Dr. Levy explains to our characters, who are gathered in the police station, exactly how Bobbi's psychosis brings him to murder. The scene, of course, echoes and parodies the psychiatric explanation scene near the end of Hitchcock's Psycho, released twenty years earlier.


Posted by Geoff at 10:34 PM CST
Updated: Tuesday, January 12, 2016 10:39 PM CST
Post Comment | Permalink | Share This Post

Newer | Latest | Older