INTERVIEW: BRIAN DE PALMA From “Sisters” to “Carrie” to the new “Passion,” he’s been thrilling us in the most stylish ways. Plus: horrific highlights from decades of De Palma.

FEATURE: THE “PASSION” MASK How to make a face that suits two of the screen scene’s most accomplished actresses.

INTERVIEW: P.J. SOLES She turned a small part in “Carrie” into a memorable mean girl. Plus: Pino Donaggio and William Katt on making beautiful music with Carrie.

PREVIEW: “CARRIE” She’s headed for the prom again this year, and director Kimberly Peirce is chaperoning.

FIRST RITES “Carrie” on through the changes

Guare's Cop-Out is a surreal play in which two policemen, one in uniform and one in plainclothes, are played by the same actor, who interchanges (amidst stage blackouts and musical cues) between the two counterpoints of straight-laced police work (the stuttering uniformed one) and noirish absurd fantasies (the smooth and cocky plainclothes one). Each man interacts with a woman, the only other performer in the piece, and she alternates along with him. At one point, the plainclothes cop is drawn into an avant-garde play (a play-within-the play) which finds him under the covers, servicing Marilyn Monroe under the guise of several U.S. presidents, from Washington to Lincoln to Roosevelt, etc. The actor pops up from under the covers to deliver each president's gag-line as Groucho Marx might (complete with cigar), singing crude songs, etc.

The driving "plot" of the play is a whodunnit detective story, with a marked contrast between the cops who, played by the same actor, seem like two sides of the same personality. This aspect, of course, would have fit right in with the types of films De Palma would go on to make throughout his career, and it seems likely he might have envisioned some sort of split-screen for the film version, having just finished the split-screen Dionysus In '69. It certainly would have been an interesting film.

DE PALMA AUDIO SNIPPET
While you're at the Hollywood Outbreak link, check out Srisavasdi's snippet of audio from an interview he did with De Palma for Femme Fatale a little over a decade ago, in which the director talks about leaving enough room in a screenplay to allow for visual design. Great stuff!

Last September, Fleming reported that Pacino was attached to play Paterno. At that time, Nicita was named as the producer, and the project was being shopped around. In that September post, Fleming wrote, "The narrative arc of the movie that will be shopped is obvious. A man becomes the winningest coach in college football history and builds a powerhouse football program that turns him into a campus deity. When his former defensive coordinator Jerry Sandusky is revealed to be a pedophile and it comes out Paterno was told and helped hide the scandal, the coach was summarily fired. He died shortly after of cancer — and many feel of a broken heart — and the school had little choice but to raze a fabled statue of Paterno just as the NCAA dropped the hammer with sanctions against the school that included removal of Paterno’s wins going back to the cover-up. Sandusky was found guilty on 45 counts of sexual abuse against young boys and is expected to spend the rest of his life in prison."

Fleming was soon flooded with e-mails, and updated the post with this:

"The administration at Penn State chose to protect its cherished powerhouse and lucrative football program, and went against the contract that any institution of higher learning has, which is to protect the young and vulnerable. The idea that this just somehow happened, and nobody but Sandusky was to blame, is something I will never embrace. Had that been the case, I doubt the university would have fired Paterno and later torn down his statue, or that the NCAA would have leveled devastating sanctions against the football program at the expense of current players who had absolutely nothing to do with any of this and who didn’t deserve punishment that was delivered to send a clear message about prioritizing what is important. Regretfully, that is Paterno’s enduring legacy now. But keep the emails coming!"

"There are so many themes to deal with here, from Paterno’s rise and his loyalty to a football program he spent his life building, to the obvious question of how a molder of young men could possibly have stood silently by when told that one of his former coaches started a charity for underprivileged kids and used it as a way to ingratiate himself into vulnerable young fatherless boys for sexual encounters? The failure of Paterno and university officials to act allowed Sandusky to continue molesting boys for years, which was borne out in court testimony leading to his conviction and incarceration. Posnanski was working on a book about Paterno and was well into it when the scandal broke. The book is as much about what made Paterno tick as anything else, and capturing complex characters is something Pacino does well. He played a conflicted pro football coach in Any Given Sunday, and Jack Kevorkian in the HBO film You Don’t Know Jack."

At the start of his post on the film, Prime writes, "In 1987, Brian De Palma and iconic key collaborators including spitfire screenwriter David Mamet and legendary composer Ennio Morricone, set out to realize a historical crime epic like none other. De Palma is a larger than life director known to embrace bold stylistic choices, Mamet writes dialogue that comes out of some kind of curse-laden meta-reality, and Morricone’s score contains in itself a storybook quality, that every moment is deliberately crafted to dramatize history, to realize a respectful spectacle."

I loved that location. And that’s a real mausoleum?
Yes.