Here is the text of the letter, as printed in the November 29, 1960 edition of the Columbia Daily Spectator:

Managers' Movies

To The Editor:

The Board of Managers has done it again. No great work of film art seems to be safe from their clutches. They carelessly prance on mutilating everything tihat comes within their leprous grasp.

They began their ignominious career by utterly defiling J. Arthur Rank's The Red Shoes. Never let it be said that the Board of Managers didn't carefully prepare their grizzly rape of this film. First they assaulted it aurally by distorting Brian Easdale's beautiful ballet score until it sounded like primeval gurglings from the depths of a quicksand swamp. But that was just the beginning of the evening's nightmare. Next the harpies preceeded to ravish the visual elements of the film. First, they managed to destroy the tempo of the film by creating fade-outs and black-outs at the discretion of the projectionist. Secondly, they caused fifteen minute breaks between reels so as to distroy any dramatic tension or mood the previous reel had created. I walked out of this destruction of an art form as many people did—even though this is one of my favorite films. But I came to tihe J. Arthur Rank version not the distortion of the Board of Managers!

This whole past nightmare was relived ... in The Board of Managers presentation of John Ford's The Grapes of Wrath and Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal. The Film had not been on two minutes before I realized, to imy horror, that the phantom of the film was at his black art once more. The nightmare proceeded with the customary fade-outs and ultra low key projectionproduced by the phantom's hand across the projector lens.

There is absolutely no excuse for the complete incompetence which saturates ihe Board of Managers Film Series. They can't hide behind the ruse of technical difficulties" because they have new equipment thus making the only difficultieshuman inadequaties. I project a film series at Barnard and Sarah Larwence and never have I had difficulties mildly comparable to those that are visited upon the Board of Managers. And finally if the Board of Managers don't enact radical improvements in their presentations then they should not be allowed to continue defiling Film Art.

Brian De Palma '62
Columbia College

Phantom of the Paradise, the cult classic 1974 Brian de Palma film that reworked Phantom of the Opera and starred songwriting icon Paul Williams as the manipulative music producer known as Swan, is being made into a stage musical by Williams and Sam Pressman, whose father, Ed Pressman, produced the original.

“I’m excited about having a chance to deliver what fans have been suggesting for years… POTP as a stage musical,” Williams said in a statement to MovieMaker. “I think it’s time has come!”

In addition to starring in the film, which De Palma wrote and directed, Williams composed the score and wrote the songs. Pressman told MovieMaker that he and Williams have spoken to multiple potential writers for the stage musical, including American Psycho and The Shards author Bret Easton Ellis — though no commitments have been made.

Pressman told MovieMaker that he, Williams and Ellis had “such an amazing dinner — Bret’s such a true fan of Phantom and of Paul, and it was awesome to introduce the two of them in person.”

Ellis has also mentioned the meeting on his podcast, though again, nothing is settled in terms of the stage musical’s writer.

Asked about De Palma’s potential involvement in the new stage play, Pressman said there were potentially “different paths… it’s just so early.”

De Palma has been considering a Phantom of the Paradise stage musical for decades. Pressman noted that he recently revisited a libretto, or book, that De Palma wrote for a prospective stage version of the film back in 1987. Pressman has also discussed the project with De Palma.

“We certainly want Brian to feel honored,” Pressman said. “I went to go see Brian last fall, to talk about the dream. Phantom was an early and significant film for him and I’d say the favorite film of my father in his career. I think the chaos and originality of the whole experience was deeply inspiring.”

Pressman noted that the plan is to open the stage play “not on Broadway” but “building to that stage.”

The Independent's Kevin E G Perry's obit of Harris includes this paragraph:

Yulin landed one of the most memorable roles of his career in Brian De Palma’s Scarface in 1983, playing corrupt police officer Mel Bernstein alongside Al Pacino’s titular drug lord. In a 2023 retrospective of the film for The Independent, Geoffrey McNab praised their work together, writing: “In certain moments here, for example, when [Pacino] confronts his sleazy, double-crossing mentor Frank Lopez (Robert Loggia) and the crooked cop (Harris Yulin), he behaves as if he is on the Old Vic stage in some blood-soaked tragedy. He’s hammy but magnificent.”

Harris Yulin, a chameleonic character actor who for more than six decades portrayed guys whom critics described as unsympathetic, soulful, menacing, corrupt and glowering, both onstage and onscreen, died on Tuesday in Manhattan. He was 87.

His wife, Kristen Lowman, said the cause of his death, in a hospital, was cardiac arrest.

Inspired to pursue an acting career when he first took center stage at his bar mitzvah, Mr. Yulin never became a marquee name. But to many audiences he was instantly recognizable, even as a man of a hundred faces.

He played at least as many parts, including J. Edgar Hoover, Hamlet and Senator Joseph McCarthy. Other roles ranged from crooked cops and politicians to a lecherous television anchorman.

“I’m not always the bad guy,” he told The New York Times in 2000. “It just seems to be what I’m known for.”

He wasn’t just any bad guy. One reviewer characterized him as “an eloquent growler.” Another wrote that “his whiskeyed voice sounds just like that of John Huston.”

Honors followed. Mr. Yulin was nominated in 1996 for a Primetime Emmy Award for playing a crime boss on the comedy series “Frasier.” For his work in theater, he won the Lucille Lortel Award from the League of Off-Broadway Theaters and Producers for his direction of Horton Foote’s “The Trip to Bountiful” in 2006. In the late 1990s he won Drama Desk nominations for acting on Broadway in “The Diary of Anne Frank” and Arthur Miller’s “The Price.”

Early in his career, in 1963, he was cast in “Next Time I’ll Sing to You,” starring James Earl Jones and Estelle Parsons, Off Broadway at the Phoenix Theater. The play bombed, he recalled to The Times in 2000.

Mr. Yulin made his Broadway debut in 1980 in a revival of Lillian Hellman’s “Watch on the Rhine.” He also appeared in Broadway productions of Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s “The Visit” (1992) and Henrik Ibsen’s “Hedda Gabler” (2001). And his performance in 2010 as Willy Loman in Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman,” at the Gate Theater in Dublin, got rave reviews.

Mr. Yulin’s first major film was the offbeat comedy “End of the Road” (1970), as a college teacher opposite Stacy Keach. He played Wyatt Earp in “Doc” (1971); a corrupt Miami police detective in “Scarface” (1983), alongside Al Pacino; an irate judge in “Ghostbusters II” (1989); and a White House national security adviser in “Clear and Present Danger” (1994), with Harrison Ford.

Reviewing “Doc” in 1971, Roger Ebert wrote that Mr. Yulin and Mr. Keach “have such a quiet way of projecting the willingness to do violence that you realize, after a while, that most western actors are overactors.”

On television, beginning in the 1960s, Mr. Yulin appeared on “Ironside,” “Kojak,” “Little House on the Prairie” and other shows. In the following decades he took on roles in the 1985 mini-series “Robert Kennedy and His Times”(playing Senator McCarthy), “Murphy Brown” and “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” More recently he was seen on “The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt” and “Ozark.”

“Mr. Yulin’s characters are quintessentially weary of this world, worn out by its ugliness and many disappointments,” Tara Ariano and Adam Sternbergh wrote in the book “Hey! It’s That Guy!” (2005), a who’s who of character actors. “No one knows better than those characters all the ways in which humanity and its various institutions can be corrupted and destroyed — primarily because Yulin’s characters have been tasked with destroying them.”

Mr. Yulin was born Harris Bart Goldberg on Nov. 5, 1937, in Los Angeles. Abandoned as an infant on the steps of an orphanage, he was adopted when he was 4 months old by Dr. Isaac Goldberg, a dentist, and his wife, Sylvia. (Yulin was a surname in Dr. Goldberg’s family in Russia; Mr. Yulin adopted it for professional reasons.)

He attended the University of Southern California without graduating and served in the U.S. Army for a year. He then embarked on a short-lived career as an artist in Italy. “I tried to be a painter for a while in Florence, and I was extremely bad at it,” he told The Times in 2000.

In 1962, after trifling with architecture as well, he moved to Tel Aviv, where friends urged him to try directing and acting. He did. At some point, through one of his father’s patients, he was introduced to the actor and drama coach Jeff Corey.

Mr. Yulin married the actress Gwen Welles in 1975; she died in 1993. In 2005, he married Ms. Lowman. His stepdaughter, the actress Claire Lucido, died in 2021 at 30. His wife is his only immediate survivor.

In addition to acting and directing, Mr. Yulin taught at the Juilliard School and the Graduate School of the Arts at Columbia University.

He acknowledged his stature in the acting world in an interview with The Irish Times in 2010. “I’m not that high-profile,” he said. “I just do the next thing that comes along.”

Here's an excerpt:

The specificity of the camera positioning and slow-motion orchestration in the title sequence is stylistically reminiscent of director Brian De Palma. Anderson said he wasn’t consciously thinking of De Palma when designing the title sequence, but he doesn’t deny the influence or direct connection.

“I think when you’re making something, you’re thinking of the things even that you’re not thinking of [them].  It’s in there,” said Anderson of De Palma’s influence on the scene. “You’re using all the paint on the palette, so for me it’s a natural thing. I’ve seen all [De Palma’s] movies, and I’ve seen them again and again, so I think it’s a part of my — it’s gone into my DNA.”

To hear Wes Anderson’s full interview, subscribe to the Filmmaker Toolkit podcast on Apple, Spotify, or your favorite podcast platform.

DE PALMA, MANA, CINEMA BY FRENCH ESSAYIST JEAN-FRANÇOIS BUIRÉ


Some notes from the publisher about the book De Palma, Mana, Cinema by Jean-François Buiré, which focuses on Brian De Palma's Carlito's Way (1993). It was published in France by Pot d'Colle Editions in September 2024, and can be ordered here.

- In the field of cinema, Jean-François Buiré is an essayist (notably in the French journals Trafic, Cinéma, Cinémaction and Cahiers du cinéma, and for various video distributors), a teacher (in film departments at French universities and at a film school in Lyon), a creator of educational videos and a lecturer. He has directed ten short fiction films. Some of his work (in French) is available here: https://vimeo.com/jeanfrancoisbuire

-Carlito's Way was released in the United States in 1993 and in France the following year under the title L'Impasse. Though emotionally and dramatically intense, it received only a lukewarm reception and, thirty years later, remains relatively unknown — at least compared to other works by Brian De Palma, such as Scarface, released ten years earlier. Both are Latino gangster films starring Al Pacino in the lead role, but whereas Scarface is harsh, cold and ironic, Carlito's Way is melancholic, lyrical and vibrant. Through the journey of its protagonist — a former gangster, aging and trying to escape a past that keeps pulling him back —, the very powers of cinema are brought into play. In his analysis of the film, Jean-François Buiré compares these powers to those of magic: he sees the character of Carlito Brigante as a weary mage, wielding his faltering powers in the disenchanted New York of the 1970s and constantly at risk of losing his mana, the elusive principle of efficacy characteristic of belief-based magical societies.

There’s something cruel about Brian De Palma’s output being a strictly literary endeavor as of late. His films are such sumptuous visual experiences, as a critic I find it can sometimes be difficult to convey the intoxicating pleasures of their mellifluous camera movements and exquisitely-timed payoffs. There’s a musicality to De Palma movies and words don’t always do it justice. Alas, a new Brian De Palma film hasn’t opened in area theaters since his 2007 “Redacted,” with 2012’s lurid, underrated “Passion” and 2019’s budgetarily crippled, but not uninteresting “Domino” banished to straight-to-video bargain bins.

Die-hard fans have had to content ourselves with the likes of “Are Snakes Necessary?” The director’s 2020 debut novel (co-written with Susan Lehman) reads like a De Palma movie you’re watching in your head, dense with allusions to classic Hollywood, extravagant, unfilm-ably expensive set-pieces and characters saying that they felt like they were seeing things in slow motion. It was a fun way to pass the time and somewhat frustrating as a substitute for a movie. AMBROSE CHAPEL is even more so. This unproduced screenplay penned by De Palma in the 1990s and recently published by Sticking Place Books is a glimpse of what might have been – the blueprint for a most eccentric thriller.

Hailed as “The Masterpiece That Wasn’t” in an introduction by the estimable film archeologist and Edward Burns superfan James Kenney – a heroic scholar who discovered Peter Bogdanovich’s discarded director’s cut of his final film on eBay – “Ambrose Chapel” was written between 1993’s “Carlito’s Way” and 1996’s “Mission: Impossible,” but finds the filmmaker in the playful, self-referential mode of his 1992’s “Raising Cain.” Kenney smartly cites the screenplay as the missing link between “Cain” and the filmmaker’s 2002 rapturously naughty “Femme Fatale.”