Speaking of the latter, the collection also boasts several scripts associated with that project, which began life as a screenplay by De Palma and Chuck Hirsch titled "Son Of Greetings." The De Niro collection contains the latter screenplay, also with the actor's notes, as well as an annotated typescript of the original story by De Palma and Hirsch. Also most likely related to that project is an original film treatment (circa 1970) by De Palma titled "Home Movie," which includes one single note written by De Niro. De Palma would go on to make a film titled Home Movies in 1979-80, but this treatment seems more likely something like the David Holzman's Diary-inspired section of Hi, Mom! that ended up transformed into the film we have today. But who knows-- perhaps when we visit the museum and look at the collection, we'll find something entirely different.

THE WEDDING PARTY & THE UNTOUCHABLES
Also in the collection is an undated shooting script for De Niro's first film, The Wedding Party, complete with De Niro's notes. There is also a June 1964 calendar marked out with scenes from the project. There is also an early and incomplete draft of David Mamet's screenplay for The Untouchables, again with De Niro's notes, as well as a version dated July 22 1986, and subsequent revisions from September and October. There are also several photographs of Al Capone with De Niro's notes, and two copies of Neil Elliott's My Years with Capone, one of which is annotated by De Niro. There are also Untouchables-related production materials, including make-up/hair continuity, wardrobe polaroids, publicity materials, a premiere invitation, and a copy of John Kobler's 1971 book Capone with Mamet's handwritten notes throughout the text.

Also included in the collection are production photographs from Hi, Mom!, and publicity flyers and photographs from Greetings. Oh, and a couple of other gems of interest: two correspondences from De Palma to De Niro, along with notes from Scorsese, Spielberg, Coppola, Frankenheimer, and several outgoing letters from De Niro. View the preliminary inventory list right here.

DE NIRO CHANNELS SPRINGSTEEN
And finally, the real reason I chose the above image from Taxi Driver: according to the Daily Express, Clarence Clemons, who coached De Niro on how to play saxophone for Scorsese's New York, New York, recently told the New York Daily News that De Niro got the famous "You talkin' to me" line in Scorsese's Taxi Driver from Bruce Springsteen. "[De Niro] had been to one of our concerts," said Clemons, "and the audience was yelling out 'Bruce!' In those days, Bruce would stop onstage and say, 'You talkin' to me?' De Niro was kind of channeling him."

Metro France: You know already [all the good things] that people say about Inglorious Bastards. Quentin Tarantino remains one of the biggest cineastes of his generation. A well informed cinephile also, who has spent much time in Cannes theaters these past few days...

Is there a film that you've particularly liked since you arrived?

"I can't really speak about the other films in competition because if I mention two, they will ask me why I didn't mention two more! But if there is one that I would gladly defend, it's Kinatay by Brillante Mendoza because it seems [to be] receiving the worst critics up to now. But me, I found it extraordinary."

Precisely, what is your critique [of the film]?

"For a film that puts you in the witness position, I believed it from the beginning to the end, an impression strengthened by the fact that the story is told in real time. The situation is at the same time horrible and ordinary, almost boring. And it is rather crazy that such a thing could be boring! In some aspects, Kinatay reminded me of Casualties Of War, the film of Brian De Palma. We are witnesses of a murder of this prostitute in Manila, a "disposable" being, if we refer to the world she lives in. And the filmmaker [makes] us aware of her humanity, showing her pain. I also adored the flight in the car, in the dark, exciting because we can make out the forms and the sounds."

Do you still go as often to the movies?

"From age 17 to 22, I was filling up a detailed list of all the films I would see in a year. I was averaging 197 to 202 per year and at that time I was broke! I am doing much less today. In real life, my own movies get in the way and one has to be a journalist to see so much!"

To be fair, Greetings’ budget was rock bottom, even lower than Penn’s and Coppola’s films. It is a counterculture document, but in a ground-level, distracted, self-critical fashion, attentive to the sights and sounds of its era, yet more caught up in analysing new habits in perceiving the world. It’s also a cinephile’s work that bears relation, in a way, to the films of Charlie Chaplin and the Marx Brothers, with its three heroes as screwball foils interacting with a specific environment, surviving, and contending with the forces that assail them. Nonetheless, the film does have a specific political and social idea to communicate. It’s not found in scenes such as when Lloyd encounters a zealous radical magazine seller, or in the draft-dodging hijinks. Lloyd’s paranoia, Jon’s fetishist interest in realising voyeuristic fantasies, and the way these tendencies cross-pollinate in efforts to capture the obscured truth on film reveal the leitmotifs of De Palma’s career. It’s easy, for instance, to point to Lloyd’s constant citation of Blow-Up and his general obsession with assassination and political skulduggery and note that both inspired Blow Out (1981).

Much of the success of the picture rides on Miss Lohman, who is really getting away with something here; she manages to be both utterly sincere and in on the joke, without tipping her hand either way. It's a tart, kicky performance, the kind of work that Nancy Allen used to do so well in those old Brian De Palma movies.

Zabriskie Point is part of Warners’ Directors Showcase package bringing back such overlooked films as John Boorman’s very fine Beyond Rangoon and Hal Ashby’s Looking to Get Out, but Antonioni’s masterpiece has already had notable influence: Bruno Dumont misunderstood and disgraced it in his horror-show/parody Twentynine Palms but Brian De Palma paid great tribute in The Fury. Daria’s affair with businessman Rod Taylor is repeated in De Palma’s John Cassavetes/Amy Irving finale where moral and generational conflict literally explode. It was Antonioni’s idea to unleash his heroine’s frustration while critiquing the spiritual emptiness of materialist excess.This still-amazing and thoughtful sequence (volatile yet measured and thematic) invented the “cinegasm.”

Tarantino surely saw similarities between Kinatay and De Palma's Casualties Of War, where the audience is driven to identify with a soldier who finds himself caught up in a kidnap-rape-and-murder situation that he feels helpless to do anything about. Mendoza opens the film (which I haven't seen) with the young man's wedding, and these daytime scenes are shot in 35mm. The night of the horrifying mission is shot in HD, as Mendoza, according to his press notes, attempts to show that "like the character, the city of Manila is full of mystery. It becomes a totally new character at night."

In the press notes, Mendoza presents his film as a Christian morality experience (the prostitute is named Madonna) that he states was based on a true event that he heard about first-hand from a criminology student. Mendoza wanted the audience to feel, like the young man, "trapped as both victim and accomplice." Screen Daily's Mike Goodridge wrote in his review of Kinatay, "Offering audiences no relief or redemption, it is perhaps most notable for its daring in attempting to capture the moment a young man crosses the line into irrevocable evil."

A couple of clips from Kinatay can be watched at YouTube. Click here to access the Cannes press notes. IFC's David Hudson has links and quotes from several other reviews.

That's a very interesting thing because, when we were making it, that movie was huge. We couldn't make a move anywhere in New York City. Everyone was talking about it: "They took this book that had entered into the national consciousness and now they're making a film out of it and everybody is miscast!" Everybody was miscast, me particularly. Brian De Palma deals with iconography more than filmmaking. He is the most uncompromising filmmaker-- both in a good way and a bad way-- that you'll ever come across. This is the guy who made Scarface. Motherfucking Scarface. So his take on it was just one of those things. You can't take a book like that, that has changed the way people talk and think-- Masters Of The Universe, Styrofoam peanuts, and $900,000 a year and still going broke-- and change it into a palatable movie, or alter the thrust of what the source material is talking about. It may not translate in a way that is going to work.

(Since I could not find a scan of the Empire cover mentioned above, I dug up this American Cinematographer cover from the same period.)