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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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Saturday, March 10, 2018
'THE FURY' TURNS 40
DE PALMA'S FOLLOWUP TO 'CARRIE' OPENED ON THIS DAY IN 1978
https://www.angelfire.com/de/palma/furybedsidesmall.jpg

Brian De Palma's The Fury opened in U.S. theaters on March 10, 1978. Following the success of Carrie in 1976, De Palma worked with producer Frank Yablans on a larger-scale picture with the biggest budget of his career at that point. Yablans had helped finance De Palma's Greetings and Hi, Mom!, and De Palma included several of his regular players within the large cast (during filming, De Palma began to realize early on that there were too many characters and asked screenwriter John Farris, author of the original novel, to condense where possible). In the shot above is Charles Durning, who had played the landlord in Hi, Mom! (and, of course, had also appeared in De Palma's Sisters). Below is a shot near the beginning of the film, where Amy Irving, fresh off of her role as Sue Snell in Carrie, walks a Chicago beach front with Melody Thomas (who had, incidentally, played the child version of Tippi Hedren in Alfred Hitchcock's Marnie). Stalking them is De Palma's old friend William Finley as the psychic Raymond Dunwoody, a character who ended up with less lines and scenes than originally written, via the aforementioned cuts De Palma had asked for from Farris.

And then there is Rutanya Alda (below), who had been in both Greetings and Hi, Mom! (and who was about to work with Robert De Niro again in Michael Cimino's The Deer Hunter)...

Before he had made Carrie, De Palma had pleaded in vain to direct the film version of Robert Stone's Vietnam/counterculture novel Dog Soldiers. That film ended up being directed by Karel Reisz, with the title changed to Who'll Stop The Rain. Even though that film arrived in theaters a few months after De Palma's The Fury, cinematographer Richard Kline had already finished shooting it before De Palma asked around about him and hired him for The Fury. De Palma explained to Paul Mandell at Filmmakers Newsletter that he had liked the way Kline had lit some of the films he'd worked on. "So we sat down, looked at the book, decided what kind of filming style we wanted to use, and then did it. And we worked together quite well."

See also:
SYFYWire: Brian De Palma's The Fury at 40


Posted by Geoff at 11:58 PM CST
Updated: Sunday, March 11, 2018 2:13 AM CST
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Sunday, February 18, 2018
TWEET - ANDREW SARRIS SEES 'THE FURY' IN 1978
QUOTED FROM 'VILLAGE VOICE'
https://www.angelfire.com/de/palma/tweetclosemindfury.jpg

Posted by Geoff at 10:56 PM CST
Updated: Sunday, February 18, 2018 11:00 PM CST
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Wednesday, February 22, 2017
CINEMA CATS FIND KITTY CAMEOS IN 'THE FURY'

Posted by Geoff at 11:48 PM CST
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Wednesday, February 8, 2017
CNN - 'MORE THAN A TOUCH OF THE FURY' IN 'LEGION'
MARVEL X-MEN SPIN-OFF FROM 'FARGO' SHOWRUNNER PREMIERED ON FX NETWORK TONIGHT


Legion premiered tonight on FX-- here's an excerpt from a review posted yesterday by CNN's Brian Lowry:
"The superhero show that dares to be boring" is a strange selling point, but that's a pretty fair description of "Legion," a loosely connected offshoot of the "X-Men" comic book franchise that operates on an almost wholly cerebral level, including its treks -- slow, surreal and trippy -- through a highly developed mutant mind.

As such, enjoying this FX series will require not only considerable patience but realistic expectations, as series overseer Noah Hawley -- fresh off a triumphant run with "Fargo" and its prequel -- is content to gradually drill down into his protagonist's psyche, without much apparent concern about excitement or pacing.

Dan Stevens (formerly of "Downton Abbey," soon featured in "Beauty and the Beast") stars as David Haller, a man who grew up in and out of institutions. He's not crazy, though, but rather blessed (or cursed) with extraordinary mutant powers that he's been unable to control, which have risked driving him mad.

Subjected to experimentation by shadowy government officials, there's more than a touch of Brian De Palma's "The Fury" in David's plight, although the series was actually adapted from comics spun out of the "X-Men" universe.


Posted by Geoff at 10:16 PM CST
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Wednesday, January 4, 2017
WATCH & TWEET 'THE FURY' TONIGHT

Posted by Geoff at 8:22 PM CST
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Monday, December 19, 2016
'THE FURY' IN MINNEAPOLIS MONDAY & TUESDAY
7PM AT THE TRYLON, IN 35MM, PART OF KIRK DOUGLAS CENTENNIAL SERIES


Brian De Palma's The Fury will screen from a 35mm print tonight and tomorrow (Monday December 19 and Tuesday December 20) at The Trylon microcinema in Minneapolis. The screenings are part of the Trylon's Kirk Douglas Centennial series (The Fury also screened there yesterday afternoon), which also included Spartacus, The Vikings (both of which have already screened), and also includes Lonely Are The Brave, screening December 25-27.

Posted by Geoff at 8:07 AM CST
Updated: Monday, December 19, 2016 8:08 AM CST
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Friday, December 9, 2016
KIRK DOUGLAS TURNS 100
TRIBUTES FROM SAM IRVIN, NANCY ALLEN, MORE


Kirk Douglas turns 100 today. Yesterday, Sam Irvin posted the following on his Facebook page:

"KIRK DOUGLAS' 100th BIRTHDAY! Friday, December 9, 2016! Thirty-nine years ago in 1977, I had the great privilege of working as a production assistant and extra on Kirk's supernatural thriller THE FURY directed by Brian De Palma. I was also lucky enough to interview him for CINEFANTASTIQUE magazine as part of my journal on the making of that film. Then, the following year, I associate produced and production managed De Palma's HOME MOVIES starring Kirk who was also an investor on the film. He was a powerhouse -- full of ideas, excited by the entire process of film-making. He made it a point to learn every name of every actor and crew member by Day 2, a respectful tradition that I adopted and religiously practice to this day on my own films. CONGRATULATIONS, KIRK!!!!"

Nancy Allen then posted a comment on Irvin's post: "We sure had some fun making Home Movies. Kirk was wonderful! How fortunate we were to work with him."

Meanwhile, this past Sunday, Live Mint's Uday Bhatia posted a tribute looking at five of Kirk Douglas' most memorable scenes, and included one from The Fury:

Last action hero

Along with George Miller’s The Man from Snowy River (1982), The Fury represents the best of late-period Douglas.

In this 1978 film by Brian De Palma, he plays Peter Sandza, an ex-CIA agent who survives an assassination attempt and resurfaces years later in search of his telekinetic son, who has been kidnapped by a shadowy intelligence organization.

Pursued by his son’s captors, he takes two bumbling beat cops (one of whom is played, hilariously, by Dennis Franz, the future NYPD Blue star) hostage and commandeers their vehicle. De Palma, master of the elaborate chase, wasn’t fond of cars, a possible reason why the sequence is played mostly for laughs.

De Palma gave impetus to several fledgling actors—John Travolta, Robert De Niro, Margot Kidder—in his early films, but this was the first time he worked with a huge star.

Douglas is very much the old-school pro in the film, and in this scene. He deadpans through most of it, which only serves to make the panic of his co-passengers more hilarious; his sideways glance when one of them says, belatedly, “Somebody’s after you, is that it?” is a minor classic. Few actors over 60 would have consented to ending a big action sequence with their pants around their ankles. That Douglas does this without looking ridiculous is testament to his willingness to subvert his own virile image, and belief in his own star quality.


Posted by Geoff at 10:59 AM CST
Updated: Friday, December 9, 2016 11:00 AM CST
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Monday, October 10, 2016
TWEET CLAIMS DE PALMA HELPED CASSAVETES
HELPED WITH EDITING THE CAR ACCIDENT IN 'OPENING NIGHT'

Posted by Geoff at 6:30 PM CDT
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Tuesday, August 2, 2016
TWEET - HAUNTED ART OF 'THE FURY'

Posted by Geoff at 2:43 AM CDT
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Tuesday, June 28, 2016
DEN OF GEEK LOOKS AT 'THE FURY'
DISPLAYS A "FASCINATION WITH THE AESTHETIC POWER OF COMICALLY OUTRE VIOLENCE"


Yesterday, Den Of Geek's Ryan Lambie posted an article about why Brian De Palma's The Fury "deserves a revisit"...
Sissy Spacek’s blood-soaked rampage at the end of Carrie is so effective because it takes on the tone of a blackly comic fireworks display. Like the build up to a great, very grim joke, De Palma makes us anticipate Carrie White’s prom humiliation for several stomach-churning minutes: Amy Irving’s fellow pupil at the prom, spotting the rope that leads to the bucket of pig’s blood at the school prom. Nancy Allen licking her lips in expectation as she prepares to send the bucket of blood pouring all over poor Carrie’s head. The girl’s response, of course, is one of pure rage, and De Palma captures every moment of it in slow-motion, split-screen and intense red filters. It’s horrific, for sure, but there’s also a suggestion of slapstick in the electrocutions and fiery deaths. It's the friction between horror and black comedy, I'd suggest, that makes De Palma's work in Carrie and his other great films so effective - just as it did in Hitchcock's thrillers (the 2013 remake, by contrast, makes Carrie’s prom melt-down into a more straightforward horror sequence).

The same fascination with the aesthetic power of comically outré violence is there in abundance in The Fury. A car chase in thick fog ends with a car flying off a jetty on fire. Robin uses his psychic powers to send a fairground ride spinning out of control, with distinctly messy results (for unexplained reasons, the ride is populated almost entirely by what appear to be princes from somewhere in the Middle East).

It’s in these scenes that De Palma’s baroque camera movements, which are largely low-key and understated during the scenes of exposition, suddenly come to the fore. A scene where Gillian demonstrates her supernatural powers on a train set could have been shot with a conventional series of cuts. Instead, De Palma uses a clever split-screen effect, which shows the train whistling by the camera in the lower half of the shot and Gillian’s staring, ice-blue eyes at the top. It’s an instance of De Palma producing a visual set-piece out of almost nowhere.

He pulls a similar feat near the film’s midpoint, where Gillian learns that the Paragon Institute she volunteered to join, and where Robin was also sent for a time, isn’t quite as idyllic as it first appears. While chatting to the seemingly benign Dr Cheever (Charles Durning), Gillian accidentally slips and grabs his hand to steady herself. As in Stephen King’s later The Dead Zone (adapted by David Cronenberg to memorable effect), this physical connection creates a psychic image of the future in Gillian’s mind. She sees Robin running from Dr. Cheever and falling from a window.

Again, De Palma uses a visual effect to put two pieces of action in one image: Amy Irving’s shot in front of a blue screen with the action projected behind her, thus allowing both foreground and background action to appear in focus. It’s only a brief moment, but it’s also a critical moment in the story, and De Palma’s filmmaking cleverly highlights it and underlines it twice.


Posted by Geoff at 11:58 PM CDT
Updated: Wednesday, June 29, 2016 12:09 AM CDT
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