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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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Interviews...

De Palma interviewed
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De Palma discusses
The Black Dahlia 2006


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Monday, November 21, 2022
IN 'FABELMANS', SPIELBERG PAYS HOMAGE TO HIS FRIENDS
INCLUDING "A RECOGNIZABLE BRIAN DE PALMA TECHNIQUE," SAYS ODIE HENDERSON @ BOSTON GLOBE
https://www.angelfire.com/de/palma/fabelmans245.jpg

Boston Globe film critic Odie Henderson reviews Steven Spielberg's The Fabelmans:
Fast forward 10 years, and Sam (now played by an excellent Gabriel LaBelle) is inspired to make a Western after seeing John Ford’s “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.” The Fabelmans have moved to a neighborhood in Arizona that looks ripped out of “Poltergeist,” the 1982 film Spielberg co-wrote. His group of friends/co-conspirators enters the frame on bicycles, reminding us of “E.T.” The wistful score by John Williams — one of his best — makes a lovely complement to the visuals by Janusz Kaminski.

But all is not hearts and flowers. Anyone familiar with Spielberg’s work knows of his penchant for exploring divorced families. The director’s own parents split, but the screenplay by Spielberg and Tony Kushner provides a deeper reason for his consistent return to that subject. Mitzi describes her young son’s desire to restage DeMille as a way to control a chaotic situation. The camera makes Sammy Fabelman the ringmaster in his own Greatest Show on Earth.

Sammy also has to deal with several instances of antisemitism in his high school. That subplot is harrowing, but not without humor, albeit of the gallows variety. Sammy’s “revenge,” such as it is, plays as a complex and fascinating delve into the mind of a future filmmaker’s philosophy about the images he creates.

This is Spielberg’s most personal film, and it’s intriguing to watch him pay homage to the directors who made up his group of friends in the early 1970s. There’s more than a bit of George Lucas in the film’s later, California-set high school scenes. The comic, religious guilt that pours out of Sammy’s Christian girlfriend, who prays to an enormous crucifix on her wall before jumping his bones, has all the mischief of Marty Scorsese.

A fantastic, extended cameo by Judd Hirsch as the bonkers Uncle Boris, a man who once worked in the circus, features some advice that sounds scripted by Francis Ford Coppola. “Art is not a game,” he scolds. “Art is like putting your hand in the lion’s mouth.”

Spielberg saves his biggest directorial nod to a friend for the heartbreaking, emotional centerpiece of “The Fabelmans.” Throughout Sammy’s life, his family has always had one extra member, Burt’s best friend, Bennie (Seth Rogen in a fine performance). Though a fellow techie, Bennie has a sense of humor and demeanor that align more with Mitzi’s personality than Burt’s. While editing footage from a camping trip, Sammy discovers just how close these two are. Spielberg reveals this devastating truth using a recognizable Brian De Palma technique: a series of visual cycles that expose more truth with each repetition.

The Fabelmans” ends with a cameo by John Ford, embodied here by a very funny David Lynch. Spielberg’s own career proves that he followed the real-life advice “Pappy” Ford gave him the day they met. His latest film follows the advice of that Ford Western that Sammy saw: “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”


Previously:
Two reviews of Spielberg's Fabelmans

Poltergeist's room full of "Movie Brats"


Posted by Geoff at 12:01 AM CST
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Friday, March 23, 2018
SPIELBERG DEFINES FELLOW MOVIE BRATS
COPPOLA = GODFATHER, SCORSESE = SPEED DEMON, DE PALMA = SPLIT SCREEN
https://www.angelfire.com/de/palma/spielbergrepubblica.jpgThe video does not appear to be working, but Steven Spielberg appeared on stage recently to talk to La Repubblica, and was asked by Mario Calabresi for a one-word definition for each of his fellow "Movie Brats." Spielberg responded, "Francis Ford Coppola is the Godfather, Martin Scorsese is a speed demon, he speaks and thinks very fast, George Lucas is a comedian, and Brian De Palma, I would say, is a split screen". Spielberg also says of Stanley Kubrick, "I met him on the set of The Shining and we remained friends until his death"

Posted by Geoff at 8:04 AM CDT
Updated: Friday, March 23, 2018 8:08 AM CDT
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Friday, March 16, 2018
SPIELBERG SAYS HE HAS ABOUT 60 HOURS OF FOOTAGE
FROM 8MM CAMERA FOLLOWING "ALL OF US", DE PALMA, COPPOLA, LUCAS, SCORSESE IN THE '70s
https://www.angelfire.com/de/palma/tweetamblin.jpg

In a video posted yesterday on the Amblin Twitter page, Steven Spielberg said the following during a press junket for his new Ready Player One, a movie steeped in nostalgia for the 1980s: "I have the most intimate relationship with nostalgia. And it's based on the fact that I have been doing...from, when I was twelve years old, eleven years old, I started taking 8mm movies of my family on camping trips, when I was a kid, growing up in Arizona. And when videotape came in, I started taking videotapes. And then I started taking my 8mm sound movie camera when I was hanging out with Coppola and Lucas and Scorsese and De Palma, and that whole group back in the '70s, and I would [swings hands around as if moving a small camera] ... I've got something like sixty hours of footage of all of us growing up and making movies together. Someday, could be an interesting documentary, if I could get the rights from any of these guys to go public-- probably eighty percent of the footage they would not want released." [laughter]

Posted by Geoff at 1:30 AM CDT
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Sunday, September 24, 2017
'SPIELBERG' TRAILER - CLIPS OF DE PALMA, ETC.
AND FILMMAKER SUSAN LACY TALKS ABOUT SPIELBERG'S PERSONAL ARCHIVE OF 8MM FILMS


The above images are included in the trailer for Susan Lacy's HBO documentary, Spielberg, which hit the web a couple of days ago. On Thursday, PRI's Sam Kim posted a radio interview with Lacy in which they discussed the documentary. Recall that Noah Baumbach and Jake Paltrow's De Palma doc opened with a clip from Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo, a film that had a major effect on Brian De Palma early on. Lacy similarly opens Spielberg with a clip from David Lean's Lawrence Of Arabia, which kicks of the following bit of conversation between Kim and Lacy:
Spielberg (from film clip): A movie came into town called Lawrence Of Arabia, and everybody was talking about it. And when the film was over, I wanted to not be a director anymore, because the bar was too high.

Sam Kim: That was great!

Susan Lacy: Yeah. The minute he told me that story, I knew that I was going to open with that.

SK: Of course.

SL: But I didn’t tell him that. And so when he saw the film for the first time, I think he said something like, “Pretty bold of you, to open a film about a filmmaker with somebody else’s movie!” I said, yeah, and he said, “I love it!” It’s about inspiration, it’s about what he aspired to.

SK: And about what you see when you’re an adolescent, you know, which affects us all. One of the great parts of this film of yours are these—a lot of these 8mm films that he made as a kid…

SL: They’re amazing, aren’t they?

SK: They’re totally amazing! Did he have them all?

SL: Yeah. He keeps a pretty good archive.

SK: I’ll bet!

SL: But, he’s very protective of them.

SK: Right.

SL: All that footage you see in the film of him hanging out with Paul Schrader and De Palma and…

SK: Never seen any of that, either.

SL: Even his own staff hasn’t seen most of it.

SK: That was his…?

SL: All of it was shot by him.

[Film Clip, possibly Spielberg’s voice] This is Martin Scorsese, director of Mean Streets.

[Spielberg’s voice again, but this time closer to the microphone]: This is Brian De Palma, wild as ever!


Posted by Geoff at 11:31 AM CDT
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Wednesday, August 30, 2017
HBO'S 'SPIELBERG' DOC TO PREMIERE AT NYFF
DE PALMA, SCORSESE, LUCAS, COPPOLA, OTHERS APPEAR IN THE FILM
Earlier this summer, HBO announced that Spielberg, a documentary on Steven Spielberg by Susan Lacy, will premiere on the channel October 7th. This week, it was announced that the film will have its world premiere at the New York Film Festival, which runs September 29 through October 15. The documentary includes new interviews with Brian De Palma, Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas, John Williams, Tom Hanks, Robert Zemeckis, and several others.

According to The Hollywood Reporter's Ashley Lee, "The film spans from his early love of moviemaking while growing up in all-American suburbia, through his rise to fame with Jaws, to his establishment of a film-and-TV empire with DreamWorks, and beyond." Lee states that Spielberg and Lacy will both be in attendance for the film's premiere at the festival.

Last month, Deadline's Lisa de Moraes posted some things Lacy said about the doc at a Television Critics Association session:

“He in no way tried to steer this film; he did not see it until it was finished,” Susan Lacy told TV critics of her Steven Spielberg docu for HBO, when asked what the director told her he did and did not want to see in the 2 1/2-hour project.

“We did not talk about what I was going to do and wasn’t going to do,” she bristled at Wednesday afternoon’s TCA Q&A on Spielberg, which debuts October 7.

Lacy conducted nearly 30 hours of interviews with Spielberg for the doc.

“I’m a very in-depth interviewer,” she boasted. “We were still deeply in childhood after two hours. He is very shy about interviews; he does very few. [It’s] quite an extraordinary experience to hear him really open up.”

...

“Every actor I interview – and I interviewed everybody – they were most impressed with how much he understands the process of filmmaking and how he sees ahead when he’s shooting,” she said. “Very few filmmakers have that skill. I did so much research.”

Lacy did not, however, interview Spielberg’s wife Kate Capshaw or any of their children for the bio. “She did not want to do an interview for the film; they are very private in terms of their family life,” Lacy explained. “I made the decision not to interview the children,” though she did interview Spielberg’s sister and parents because “they were there at the birth of him becoming a filmmaker.”

Spielberg does not delve into his personal life much, she said, though he does discuss the impact his parents’ divorce had on him and how it informed E.T., for instance.

Lacy also did not dwell on how long it took the the Motion Picture Academy to recognize Spielberg with a Best Picture Oscar. She said she felt the statement about his winning it for the first time with Schindler’s List, after having made six of the top-grossing movies of all time, made the point.

She also did not delve into Spielberg’s involvement with DreamWorks or his work in TV, focusing purely on his directing of movies.

“He is a populist and an artist,” she described. “He’s an incredibly personal filmmaker.”

Lacy added: “For the most commercial filmmaker in history, I do not think box office has ever been what has driven him. What’s driven him is what interests him and what he thinks is important to say.”

The decision to make a 3 1/2-hour black-and-white movie about the Holocaust, she said as a for instance, “did not come out of focus groups. It could have been a huge flop.”

Spielberg explores the directors’ thoughts on Jaws, E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial, Raiders of the Lost Ark, The Color Purple, Schindler’s List, Jurassic Park and Saving Private Ryan. One TV critic at the session noted that the doc does not discuss at any length those of his movies that were not as successful.

“If it isn’t in the film doesn’t mean we did not talk about it,” she countered. “It means I had a 2 1/2 hours.”

Lacy previously helmed PBS’ American Masters for three decades; TV critics wondered what it was like for her to work with HBO’s documentary chief Sheila Nevins. Lacy called it “nothing but pleasure for me.”

“We kiss every morning and hug every night,” joked Nevins.


Posted by Geoff at 7:42 AM CDT
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