It seemed an appropriate choice to accompany several Billy Corgan quotes from yesterday, in which the Smashing Pumpkins mastermind discussed the possibility of a Pumpkins movie, and mentioned "that one weird Paul Williams movie" along with Tommy and Pink Floyd The Wall as points of reference. Here's an excerpt from the Forbes article by Steve Baltin:

If Corgan has his way it would be bigger than an animated series, as he wants to turn the trilogy of albums, Melon Collie, Machina and the third album the band is working on now into a series of feature films in the vein of classic rock movies like the Who's Tommy and Quadrophenia and Pink Floyd's The Wall.

"My dream scenario is we'll not only play Melon Collie, Machina and the record we're working on now in mass theatrical stagings, but then I'll someday get to make a movie," he says. "And if those things ever get made into movies they would probably most likely have to be animation cause nobody's gonna write me that big a check," he adds laughing.

But he does have an idea on how the trilogy of Pumpkins' albums could make their way onto the big screen. "I have floated out here and there some kind of crowd-funding scenario and for whatever reason there seems to be a lot of energy there that fans would be interested in," he says. "So it's possible. Maybe it's one of those things if fans put up a million and I put up a million maybe we pull it off. I own all the music so that's the good part. But that's a lot of work."

When asked about reference points for what the Pumpkins films might be like he mentions the aforementioned Who and Pink Floyd films. "It helps if the album is classic," he says laughing. "There is that one weird Paul Williams movie where he's like a Phantom Of The Opera thing (Phantom Of The Paradise)."

Phantom Of The Paradise isn't the only unusual rock movie from the late '70s and early '80s, the same era that also saw the Village People's Can't Stop The Music, KISS Meets Phantom Of The Park and the much-maligned film adaptation of the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club [Band] starring Peter Frampton, the Bee Gees and more.

What does Corgan see when he looks at that era of rock movies? "You just see cocaine, right?" he says laughing. "You look at some of these and you think, 'There's gotta be cocaine in there somewhere because this doesn't make any sense.'"

Alright, so if the Pumpkins albums ever get turned into film expect more Pink Floyd The Wall than Phantom Of The Paradise.

Brian De Palma’s Assistant Sam Irvin Reveals All About the Making of DRESSED TO KILL

Sam Irvin, director of ELVIRA’S HAUNTED HILLS, co-executive producer of GODS AND MONSTERS and former personal assistant to Brain De Palma, celebrates the 40th Anniversary of De Palma’s DRESSED TO KILL, with the publication of his personal experiences during the making of this classic horror-thriller, starring Michael Caine, Angie Dickinson and Nancy Allen.

Having been De Palma’s personal assistant during the late-70s and early-80s, Irvin definitely has a story or two to tell about Hollywood’s last golden age This special issue of BOOBS & BLOOD magazine is entirely devoted to Irvin’s definitive behind-the-scenes account of DRESSED TO KILL. In addition to this game-changing fan favorite, Irvin also writes of his time working on other De Palma features such as THE FURY, HOMES MOVIES, BLOW OUT, and several unmade De Palma projects. Packed with photos and artwork (many previously unpublished), the issue comes out just in time for the Holidays.

As Irvin says, “Working intimately with De Palma on DRESSED TO KILL allowed me to see his unique filmmaking process unfold before my very eyes in real-time. Despite my formal education in cinematic arts, my real film school was the time I spent with De Palma. Every riveting minute of it.”

B&B editor publisher Miles Flanagan states, “We’re so proud to have Sam donate his services for free as a writer for this very special issue. As someone who was De Palma’s personal assistant, Sam’s insightful account of the making of DRESSED TO KILL and De Palma’s work during this time is invaluable.”

Continued Flanagan, “We hope this will be our biggest seller to date and be a big fundraiser for the KEEP A BREAST FOUNDATION. That would definitely make my Christmas.”

All profits from BOOBS & BLOOD magazine are donated to the KEEP A BREAST FOUNDATION. So if you buy this, it truly is the gift that keeps on giving.

The DRESSED TO KILL Special Edition is available online:

https://www.magcloud.com/browse/issue/1877350

www.boobsandblood.com

Happy Halloween everyone!! I am a die hard Stephen King fan, so I decided to do this little piece after recently rewatching Carrie for the 100th time! I absolutely love everything about this movie. Hope everyone is making the best of their spooky holiday!

In that meeting, we see a variation of the meeting in Body Double between Jake Scully and Sam Bouchard in the bar, which itself is a variation of the date between Jon and Judy in Hi, Mom!. In each of those previous scenes, a person (Jon in Hi, Mom! and Sam in Body Double) is attempting to manipulate the person they are speaking with through lies and improvisation.

In the case of Mission: Impossible, however, Ethan is not so easily duped, and Jim Phelps knows it. In fact, as much as Jim works from his own script that Kittridge was the mole, he watches Ethan intently to see if he is buying it. Ethan is also watching intently, because as soon as Jim Phelps tries to tell him that Kittridge is the mole, Ethan knows that none of it adds up. In his mind, he plays out the only scenario that seems to make sense, even is acting for Jim as if he believes his lie about Kittridge.

Martin Scorsese had a very similar dynamic in play in his 1991 remake of Cape Fear, a discussion that is punctuated by a hilarious cut to Nick Nolte forced to sleep on the couch. And to bring it all back home, the son-of-a-bitch being discussed in the Scorsese film is Robert De Niro. See it all below:

Then the host brings up a radical possibility that makes the other two involved in the discussion stop to think: was Sam Bouchard the man who is, er, with Carol when Jake Scully walks in on them? It would make Sam's scheming even more extreme, but I do think after the people on this podcast go back and review the film, they will spot the telling moment when Sam, already on the lookout for a poor schmuck to play the part of the witness in his murder scenario, overhears Jake asking a friend if he knows of any apartments available.

Sam Bouchard here is a bit like Jon (Robert De Niro) trying to manipulate Judy (Jennifer Salt) in Hi, Mom!, taking what his pawn gives him and then bonding with him, improvising a story that may have been roughly sketched in his mind beforehand. Although De Niro's Jon in Hi, Mom! has actually weaved his way into Judy's life after surreptitiously spying on her with his camera from across the street, I think we can see the very moment in Body Double when Sam Bouchard begins to pay attention to Jake Scully:

Yockey, at the time working as a writer on the TV show “Supernatural,” was hired to oversee adapting “The Flight Attendant” to the screen.

“What Chris did so beautifully is create this kind of pressure cooker for Cassie,” Yockey said. But to adapt the story for a series, Yockey wanted to amplify some of the novel’s scenes.

“This event, this traumatizing event of waking up next to Alex’s body, kind of sends her on this ultimate journey that kind of makes her face the truth,” said Yockey, adding that the central theme of “The Flight Attendant” is “What happens when you have to stop lying to yourself?” He wanted to take a thriller and make it darkly comedic, in the vein of directors Alfred Hitchcock or Brian De Palma.

Yockey realized early that Cuoco was the right person for the job. “You kind of know 10 minutes after talking to her the first time, she has this incredible professional drive and this incredible specificity, but it’s there, this effervescence, this charm, this sense of ease that wants to pull you in,” Yockey said.

Bohjalian had almost no role in adapting the book for the screen. He had phone conversations and text exchanges with Cuoco early in the process and met her at a shoot in New York City last December.

“One of the great things about Kaley that was clear to me early on was how much respect she had for the material and how well she understood Cassie Bowden,” Bohjalian said, “so I knew it was in the best hands imaginable.”

He met Yockey at that December shoot as well. Bohjalian said he was struck by “how brilliantly he had plotted out what he wanted to do to turn this novel into eight hours of really fun, surprising, interesting television.”

The limited series equivalent of a comedically nasty, but pleasingly intoxicating beach read, The Flight Attendant is an intricately drawn mystery that moves at a swift, effortlessly bingable pace. A project that finally gives star and producer Kaley Cuoco a proper, headlining showcase, The Flight Attendant deliriously rolls through its twists and turns through the lens of an unreliable, frequently blackout drunk narrator and the input of a long dead corpse. If that sounds strange, you’d be right, but within the weirdness of The Flight Attendant is an effective character study and a genuinely fun whodunit. The fact the show – adapted by series creator Steve Yockey from a novel by Chris Bohjalian – seems to have little clue where it’s heading next is part of the fun, and a great reflection of the trainwreck main character at its centre.

The tone of The Flight Attendant plays like Paul Feig’s A Simple Favor by way of vulgar auteur darling Brian De Palma, complete with an obvious affinity for multiple split-screens in every episode.The Flight Attendant is nasty business, but a lot of it is played for cheeky laughs that are both in bad taste and yet wholly appropriate given the outlandish premise. While The Flight Attendant handles Cassie’s alcoholism as appropriately tragic, the character herself comes down perfectly between self-awareness and obliviousness. Cassie isn’t a dummy, but she’s prone to doing stupid things in hopes of numbing the pain of her existence. She needs help, but her friends and co-workers have known her to be a functional alcoholic for so long that they figure Cassie will just figure things out on her own and come out on top in the end.

Do you see a lot of potential in cinematography thanks to how lightweight cameras have become?
Well, in a sense. But I was influenced a lot on this film by things I saw many years ago in “Das Boot,” the Wolfgang Petersen submarine film. It was a huge inspiration for me as a DP. I was obsessed with knowing how they got the camera to go through the really small bulkhead doors in a submarine. They had built the submarine on a soundstage but they had built it with all the real dimensions. You can cheat all you want in movies, but they didn’t do it. So it was the camera operator who was running through these tiny doors, holding the camera by hand, not on the shoulder, kind of like a hybrid between handheld and Steadicam. It worked fantastically.

The cinematographer’s job is to light things, but there are a number of scenes in “The Outpost” that take place in near darkness.
It’s a natural instinct, for sure, to light scenes properly. If you’ve seen my previous work, you always have a clear sense of what’s going on, so I had to force myself a bit here. Rod was really pushing me for the darkness. We had a lot of real veterans on the location and even in the movie. They were all telling us that at night, they wouldn’t even start fires or shine lights. They would not go outside the barracks if there was a full moon. If it was total darkness, they only had little glow lights around their neck. We wanted to preserve that for the film, but it’s very challenging. Anyone who looks through their iPhone camera at night can understand that. So I did a lot of tests on the night lighting. And then after we finished shooting the night scenes, I still dropped the exposure down a bit in post-production.

The battle sequence is really 45 minutes of relentless combat. It’s not quite done in real time but it’s very visually consistent. How did you manage that?
It was an all-location shoot, obviously. Unfortunately, we had an accident in pre-production when one of the actors (Scott Eastwood) broke his ankle badly. But it meant that we got extra time to spend as production shifted back a bit. I did a lot of brainstorming – first splitting up the whole big puzzle of the battle, then assigning each piece to the best part of a day to shoot, and then reassembling it all. So one morning we would shoot the first part of a shot. But we’d save the second part of the same shot for the next morning, so we would have consistent light.

Were those long shooting days?
Well, we were shooting without lunch breaks. That’s actually a big plus for us in the camera department. You keep the momentum going. When everybody takes a break for an hour, by the time you get the machine going again, it’s already late afternoon and the lighting is completely different. It meant a lot that we were able to complete a sequence with the same look from beginning to end.

Also some of the shots in the ambush sequence are lengthy.
That was the other big advantage. We were shooting long shots and when you are doing that, it’s a big plus for continuity. You definitely dedicate more time in planning and rehearsing and choreographing the shot. But then when you start shooting, you get the result in this little window, after two of three takes. There was a period during the final sequence where we were shooting only two shots a day.

What’s your philosophy about long takes? Do you love the challenge or is it too much trouble?
It makes the job more complicated but I love it. My background is in Steadicam and long takes are part of the magic of Steadicam. Also, when I began working, I was doing a lot of longer Steadicam shots and that’s how I built my career. I would just be called in for a day, because it was extremely expensive 20 years ago to have a Steadicam on set all the time.

What’s your favorite long shot in movies?
I love Brian De Palma and the way he does them. Spielberg is a master as well. There is one in “Carlito’s Way,” Al Pacino is hiding from some guys in Grand Central Station in New York. That was done with Steadicam by a camera operator named Larry McConkey, who’s one of the legends in the movie business.

Do you still strap on the Steadicam?
From time to time. I didn’t on this movie because it was very physically demanding. I didn’t want the physicality of the operating to interfere with the goal we were going for. I had an incredible operator from Canada called Sasha Proctor, who was in much better physical shape than I was. I did it for 20 years, so I’ve got the scars on my back.