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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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De Palma interviewed
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De Palma discusses
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Scarface: Make Way
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The Carlito's Way
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italkyoubored

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De Palma a la Mod
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Entries by Topic
A note about topics: Some blog posts have more than one topic, in which case only one main topic can be chosen to represent that post. This means that some topics may have been discussed in posts labeled otherwise. For instance, a post that discusses both The Boston Stranglers and The Demolished Man may only be labeled one or the other. Please keep this in mind as you navigate this list.
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Ambrose Chapel
Are Snakes Necessary?
BAMcinématek
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Beaune Thriller Fest
Becoming Visionary
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Bill Pankow
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Carlito's Way
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Frankie Goes To Hollywood
Fury, The
Genius of Love
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Get To Know Your Rabbit
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Hi, Mom!
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Print The Legend
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Tuesday, June 30, 2009
BRILLIANT STRUT
EXTRA RECALLS WORKING ON SET OF CARLITO'S WAY

Nick Leshi posted today about his experience working as an extra on the set of Carlito's Way-- here are some excerpts:

Even though you can't see a glimpse of me in the final film, it's still one of my fondest memories.

I had done some stage work before and had just finished a stint as an extra on Law & Order, so to me this was the big time. I first had to go to Kaufman Studios in Astoria to get fitted for my costume. This was a period gangster film, so they had me decked out in platform shoes, bell-bottom pants, a polyester shirt like the kind Larry used to wear on Three's Company, and big framed slightly tinted glasses. Gotta love the disco era!

The film shoot took place at the Palladium, the old night club in Manhattan. It seemed like there must have been over 200 other extras for the scene in which Carlito Brigante and his lawyer were celebrating his release from prison. Even though I was one of many, I was thrilled to be on the same set as actors Al Pacino and Sean Penn, and director Brian De Palma...

...I was one of the lucky ones chosen to be near the principle actors. They had me walk behind the table where Pacino and Penn were doing their scene. I did it a bunch of times, and each time I strutted like I was the king of the world.

I stayed professional and focused while cameras were rolling. At one point between takes, I made eye contact with Pacino and I couldn't resist giving him two big thumbs up and a goofy grin. (I swear, I was still in character as a goofy nightclub patron!) Al Pacino just rolled his eyes at me. Correction -- Carlito Brigante rolled his eyes at me!

Months later, I went to see the movie and I wasn't surprised to see no trace of my brilliant strut on the silver screen. It didn't bother me too much. It was still a wonderful experience that I'll never forget.


Posted by Geoff at 11:57 PM CDT
Updated: Wednesday, July 1, 2009 12:04 AM CDT
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Monday, June 29, 2009
RABBIT AVAILABLE JULY 7
AS A WARNER BROS. ARCHIVE TITLE
Get To Know Your Rabbit, which was mostly directed by Brian De Palma (see my post from last week), will be made available as a Warner Bros. Archive title beginning July 7th. You can place pre-orders right now at the Warner Archive shop (thanks to Ryan for the heads up!). So it doesn't look like Warner Bros. is planning a wide DVD release of the title, but we do get to own a widescreen edition of this rare and overlooked work from De Palma. Looking forward to it.

Posted by Geoff at 6:55 PM CDT
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Wednesday, June 24, 2009
ARMOND WHIITE ON HURT LOCKER
AND OTHER VIEWS ON REDACTED, CASUALTIES OF WAR

Armond White reviews Kathryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker in this week's New York Press, and the second word of his review is "Brian De Palma"--

Although Brian De Palma lost his artistic bearings on the anti–Iraq War bandwagon, director Kathryn Bigelow found her perfect subject. That’s the difference between De Palma’s confused, preachy Redacted and Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker. Bigelow (working from a script by Mark Boal) stays focused on the personalities of soldiers during Bravo company’s last 39 days of rotation in 2004 Baghdad. An early reconnaissance jest (“It’s my dick.”) between Sgt. Sanborn (Anthony Mackie) and Sgt. Thompson (Guy Pearce) recalls De Palma’s ribaldry, but it also indicates Bigelow’s erotic view of masculine endeavor—here defining the propensity for violence and bravery during war.

It's nice to know that White is chalking up his dislike of Redacted to De Palma "losing his artistic bearings" because he supposedly jumped on the anti-Iraq war bandwagon, but I would counter that with Redacted, De Palma had just begun to discover new artistic bearings that were compromised even within that film's already meager budget. In the introduction for this interview with the British artist Legofesto, writer Andy Carling describes how De Palma had wanted to use Legofesto's recreation of the rape and murder of a Mahmudiya family by soldiers in Redacted. He quotes De Palma discussing the things he had to leave out of his film:

It started with small things, like the Legofesto site for example. Here’s a site that actually reconstructs the incident with Legos, shows a Lego figure being raped, blood on the floor, etc. and is critical of the event, but the lawyers come and say, we can’t use it because it has a brand name - Lego. Not that they are to blame. If you put it in its real context - an Internet blog using Lego figures to illustrate an event, I could not see the problem, but legal vetting is set to safeguard and in that respect, who wants the possibility of going to war with Lego?

De Palma did not even originally plan to have a screenplay for Redacted, but was forced to write one and to follow it by the studio. He must have realized he would need one to get financing for a future movie in the same vein as Redacted, so he wrote a script tentatively titled Shoot The Messenger, a project which would have used a form similar to that of the purposely fractured yet streamlined Redacted. It is a shame that financing could not be found for a more radical project such as Shoot The Messenger, which purported to use another internet-like web of sources to delve into the way stories are invented and sold to the public as a way of distorting the truth.

In a double-review of Errol Morris' Standard Operating Procedure and Nick Broomfield's Battle For Haditha, Phil Nugent delved into a discussion of De Palma's war films:

In Haditha, as in some of the Vietnam war movies such as Full Metal Jacket, war puts decent young men into situations where they're temporarily driven insane, which means they cannot be judged. Some reviewers--and, it seems, the director himself--have taken the opportunity to use Broomfield's movie as a club against Brian De Palma's Redacted, just as De Palma's Vietnam movie Casualties of War was denounced by the critics who'd hailed Full Metal Jacket and Platoon as realistic and morally tough-minded. Part of De Palma's message in both his war movies was that atrocities happen when there's an instigator there to get the ball rolling. The other Vietnam movies were part of a culture that sought to make peace with Vietnam vets who felt they'd been maligned and even demonized as part of the overall effort to criticize the war when it was going on, and they did that in part by saying that "war" is so deranging that those who'd done bad things in the field shouldn't be held responsible for anything at all, though they did have the option of feeling sorry for themselves. The ball somehow gets itself rolling. Haditha, portraying American soldiers going batshit psychotic for a brief bloody spell and then switching back to their normal selves, like the Hulk turning back into Bruce Banner, just in time to deliver a climactic soul-searching speech to the bathroom mirror, is a continuation of that trend, and it may seem a very comforting approach for people who want to express horror at what goes on in Iraq but who are terrified that if they seem to criticize any individual soldiers, they'll be accused of not "supporting the troops." What's missing from this attitude is any awareness of, let alone respect and sympathy for, the soldiers who don't go batshit and manage to hang onto their moral bearings, such as the soldier who reported the actual abduction and rape that formed the basis for the story told in Casualties of War, or the helicopter pilot who broke up the My Lai massacre, and all the numberless members of the military who go through just as much hell as anyone in war but resist the urge to run amok. One of the most resonant interviews in Standard Operating Procedure is with a guy who explains that he didn't break up the fun at Abu Ghraib and who agreed to take some pictures because, "Me being the kind of person I am, I try to be friends with everybody. I'm a nice guy, so I took [the picture]. I try not to have anybody mad at me." (This sap goes on to say that the fact that he got in trouble for his actions proves that "being a nice guy doesn't pay off," and then laments, or boasts, that since he got home, people say he's not as nice as he used to be.) The Iraq war was unnecessary, and served no good purpose, but once the president decided that he really, really wanted it, it didn't take too much work from the government to sell the media on making it seem that if you wanted to be a nice guy, if you didn't want anybody mad at you, you had to want this war too. The heroes of My Lai and the Casualties of War rape case and other nightmares were the ones who were willing to be disliked, who thought it was more important to do the obvious right thing than to be thought of as nice guys, and who, by their very existence, show the "War makes you crazy and absolves you of responsibility" school of thought for the self-protective, buck-passing line of horseshit that it is. The people at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere did unforgivable, monstrous things for the best and worst of reasons: they didn't want to be thought of as troublemakers.


Posted by Geoff at 12:19 PM CDT
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Sunday, June 21, 2009
RABBIT DVD FROM WB
RUMORED FOR THIS SUMMER...
When Warner Bros. opened up its archive vault last March, making many of its overlooked films available via on-demand DVDs for $19.95 each (or $14.95 for a digital download version), I put in a request for Brian De Palma's Get To Know Your Rabbit, a 1972 WB release that has never been available on DVD. Looks like we won't have to go the on-demand route after all-- according to a posting on GreenCine's Twitter page, Warner Bros. plans to release Get To Know Your Rabbit on DVD this summer (and, mind you, today is officially the first day of summer). If true, this will complete the availability of each of De Palma's feature films in the DVD format, in one country or another (Dionysus In '69 has only been released on DVD in France).

Get To Know Your Rabbit was made right after De Palma's Hi, Mom! in 1970, but, after the studio fired De Palma and completed the film with another uncredited director, it sat on a shelf until Warner Bros. dumped it into theaters in 1972 as part of a double bill. De Palma ran afoul of the studio when he suggested a new ending which would see star Tommy Smothers' tap-dancing magician escape the dual traps of conformity and commodification by appearing to make a bloody mess of a live rabbit on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. Smothers also got nervous about De Palma's direction, and since the whole project was conceived as a vehicle for the star, De Palma was locked out. Despite the compromised vision, though, what remains in the bulk of the film is a comedy that flows with De Palma's sardonic sense of the absurd, as a continuation of the countercultural indifference on display in Greetings and Hi, Mom!. There are some nice recent evaluations of the film by Daniel Kremer at conFluence Films and (from 2006) Nicolas Rapold at Reverse Shot.


Posted by Geoff at 9:32 PM CDT
Updated: Monday, June 22, 2009 1:45 AM CDT
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Thursday, June 18, 2009
ANCIENT LAKE ON MARS
DEEP IMPLICATIONS FOR DISCOVERY OF PAST LIFE
From a University of Colorado press release yesterday: A University of Colorado at Boulder research team has discovered the first definitive evidence of shorelines on Mars, an indication of a deep, ancient lake there and a finding with implications for the discovery of past life on the Red Planet.

Estimated to be more than 3 billion years old, the lake appears to have covered as much as 80 square miles and was up to 1,500 feet deep -- roughly the equivalent of Lake Champlain bordering the United States and Canada, said Gaetano Di Achille, who led the study. The shoreline evidence, found along a broad delta, included a series of alternating ridges and troughs thought to be surviving remnants of beach deposits.

"This is the first unambiguous evidence of shorelines on the surface of Mars," said Di Achille. "The identification of the shorelines and accompanying geological evidence allows us to calculate the size and volume of the lake, which appears to have formed about 3.4 billion years ago"...

...The deltas adjacent to the lake are of high interest to planetary scientists because deltas on Earth rapidly bury organic carbon and other biomarkers of life, according to CU-Boulder Assistant Professor [Brian] Hynek. Most astrobiologists believe any present indications of life on Mars will be discovered in the form of subterranean microorganisms.

But in the past, lakes on Mars would have provided cozy surface habitats rich in nutrients for such microbes, Hynek said.


Posted by Geoff at 11:59 PM CDT
Updated: Friday, June 19, 2009 12:03 AM CDT
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Saturday, June 13, 2009
IS DE PALMA A MAGICIAN?
"NOPE-- IN 1980, HE WAS JUST THAT GOOD"
Billy at Tower Farm Reviews has posted a highly entertaining review of Dressed To Kill. Here is an excerpt from the introduction:

Few Hollywood directors in the 70s and 80s were doing things on film as sleazy as Brian De Palma was. Take Dressed To Kill, for example, which is a charming tale involving rape fantasy, adultery, venereal disease, murderous transsexuals, high-priced hookers and Dennis Franz. Now, in the hands of anyone else, this would look like exactly what it is: Tinto Brass-level, grade-Z Eurotrash. Hell, set it in Nazi Germany and you’ve got something like Salon Kitty. But, in the split-screened, slow-motioned hands of Brian De Palma, it somehow becomes a respectable American thriller that is often viewed as the 1980s answer to Psycho.

How is this possible? This is a movie that involves female masturbation in the opening shot! Is Brian De Palma a magician? Are all those fancy crane shots actually just ways to hypnotize the audience into thinking that Angie Dickinson’s nether-regions are artistic statements?

Nope. I’d have to say that in 1980, Brian De Palma was just that good.


Posted by Geoff at 10:27 PM CDT
Updated: Saturday, June 13, 2009 10:28 PM CDT
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Thursday, June 11, 2009
FOURTH MISSION DEVELOPING
ABRAMS INVITED TO PRODUCE WITH CRUISE
According to a blurb in the latest issue of Tv Guide, Tom Cruise has invited J.J. Abrams, who directed MI:3, to produce a fourth feature film in the Mission: Impossible franchise. You can read the entire blurb at left, but Abrams says that he and Cruise have a "really cool idea" for a new film, which may have a new director, unless Abrams decides to stay on and direct again. Cruise is smart to stick with Abrams for such a project, given that Abrams is currently on a high with Paramount, the studio for which he just made the Star Trek movie, which is a big hit. Paramount, of course, owns the rights to the Mission: Impossible franchise.

The scan of the article at left is courtesy of Spoiler TV.


Posted by Geoff at 2:02 AM CDT
Updated: Thursday, June 11, 2009 2:04 AM CDT
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Tuesday, June 9, 2009
THE FUSS & THE FURY
EMERSON ASKS: "CAN A MOVIE RUIN A GOOD REVIEW?"
Today Jim Emerson's Scanners blog discusses the way a film review can set expectations for a work that make actually viewing the thing a letdown. His first example is Pauline Kael's "intoxicating" review of Brian De Palma's The Fury. Emerson writes: The movie itself was a bit of a letdown for me after that review, but Kael's enthusiasm proved infectious. I'm sure I've seen The Fury at least half a dozen times and it remains one of my favorite De Palmas (and Carrie Snodgress is one of the most heartbreaking of the tender, funny oddball heroines of early-ish De Palma, alongside Sissy Spacek, Betty Buckley, Amy Irving, Genevieve Bujold and Angie Dickinson). Kael's description of the movie's climactic crescendo has never left me:

This finale -- a parody of Antonioni's apocalyptic vision at the close of Zabriskie Point -- is the greatest finish for any villain ever. One can imagine Welles, Peckinpah, Scorsese, and Spielberg still stunned, bowing to the ground, choking with laughter.

Well, once that image has been implanted in your head to accompany the one(s) in the movie (and the villain is John Cassavettes, so there's even more auteur glee on display), it's hard to shake it.

Emerson discusses a couple of other examples before getting into a discussion of A.O. Scott's review of Sam Mendes' Away We Go, and how the review impressed him so much that he is now hesitant to see the actual film.


Posted by Geoff at 1:14 PM CDT
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Monday, June 8, 2009
KATT TALKS CARRIE
ON SCI FI PULSE RADIO YESTERDAY

William Katt was interviewed for yesterday's SciFiPulse Radio podcast. Katt talked about working on Carrie, saying that he had seen Brian De Palma's earlier films, such as Greetings, Hi, Mom!, and Get To Know Your Rabbit. Katt recalled that as they set out to make Carrie, there was a general feeling in Hollywood that this was going to be De Palma's breakthrough film. Katt said that during a two week period before filming, the actors would meet at De Palma's California apartment and improvise scenes together, while De Palma recorded them on a reel-to-reel tape, and then had the script revised accordingly. Katt said this rehearsal process made for a very relaxed set on Carrie, because the actors were already comfortable with each other, and had already played out the scenes together a number of times. Katt also discussed other projects throughout his career, including, of course, his TV show The Greatest American Hero.

Posted by Geoff at 3:02 PM CDT
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Sunday, June 7, 2009
HURD INTERVIEW IN FULL
"GREAT" CASTING IDEAS, BUT NO SPECIFICS YET
In alignment with the Produced By 2009 Conference in Culver City, which began Friday and continues through today, JoBlo has posted the full text of Jimmy O's recent interview with Gale Anne Hurd (see my post from May 19 2009). In one part of the interview, Hurd is asked about her strategy, and says the key is "the best movie you can" make. She then moves into a discussion about marketing:

But at the same time, make sure that when the film is marketed, it is marketed properly, and that the studio is selling the same film that the filmmakers made. Because you can’t do a bait and switch. And that is primarily because of the internet, and the fact that the first fans that see a film, when they are lead to believe they’re seeing one thing and they see it and it is something else, that word gets out. You don’t have the weekend anymore. And also, box office grosses are reported in the mainstream press, immediately available on-line and I do think that the consumer is now aware of what films are underperforming. And I think that there are remarkable films that under perform on a Friday and because that becomes a story, people who otherwise might’ve gone to see a film, an actually remarkably good film, won’t go to see it for whatever reason, its been branded unsuccessful. You know, after one night.

Jimmy O's interview concludes with a slightly extended discussion of The Boston Stranglers:

[Jimmy O] What is next for you that you are really excited about?

[Hurd] The film that Brian De Palma, my ex-husband and I are working on together is THE BOSTON STRANGLERS. Which is the true story of something that we think we all know the true story now, but we don’t. Which is that Albert Desalvo, who was branded the Boston Strangler, there was a movie about him, Tony Curtis played Albert Desalvo… as it turns out, he was never convicted of the crime.

[Jimmy O] How far along?

[Hurd] The film is set up at Overture, and we are in the process of casting and we hope to shoot in the fall.

[Jimmy O] Anyone that you are looking at specifically, that you’d hope for?

[Hurd] Not at the moment. Great ideas though.

On Wednesday, The Los Angeles Times posted edited highlights from a producers panel that Hurd participated in as a lead-in to this weekend's conference.


Posted by Geoff at 11:43 AM CDT
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