Mission’s progression from spy craft to death-defying action with Cruise at the center of every stunt started almost by accident. Brian De Palma says that after watching the disappointing returns of Carlito’s Way, he needed a hit, and when Sydney Pollack pulled out of Mission to direct a Sabrina remake, super-agent Mike Ovitz pounced. De Palma had never watched the original television series, but he came recommended to Cruise by Steven Spielberg, and so, the match was made. And De Palma had a radical plotline: “The first problem was that Tom wanted Mission: Impossible to be about five guys doing impossible tasks. First thing I said was, ‘We got to kill all the other guys so we can start with Tom as the leader of a new group.’”

Paramount tried to hire the original TV actors, but Peter Graves, the incorruptible lead operative Jim Phelps in the show, reacted angrily upon learning he would become a turncoat in the movie. “I had nothing to do with that,” De Palma says. “Who knows what [co-producers] Paula Wagner and Tom were doing? Feeling out different actors for those parts? I had no knowledge of the original series, never saw an episode. All I knew was there were four or five guys with different specialties that did something on each mission. No characters, just technicians.”

De Palma had other problems. He’d cracked the script after convincing his Carlito’s Way scribe David Koepp to write it with him. “I got Tom finally to commit to the script David had written, and then Paula called me the next day and said, ‘We’ve gotten a go from Paramount, but we want to fire David and hire Bob Towne.’ Paula and Tom thought he was going to bring something more to the script, but that became a big problem.” Luckily, De Palma kept the fired Koepp close at hand. “I had two screenwriters in different hotel rooms in London while I was building sets, each working on their script. David used some of Towne’s ideas in the script he rewrote, and that became the movie.”

As for Cruise and those notorious stunts, De Palma recalls exactly when his star’s fuse got lit. A scene in which Hunt flees after exploding a giant fish tank in a restaurant didn’t look right with the stuntman. “I said to Tom, ‘You’ve got to do this to make it really work.’ I remember when we were just about to shoot it, he came over to me. There was going to be so much water coming out, and glass, and this was really scary. He walked over and said, ‘I’m just an actor.’ I said, ‘Tom, you gotta try.’ And he did it. I think he got into doing all the stunts himself when he realized he could probably do it better than a stuntman.”

By the end, Cruise executed the signature spider web scene where he drops into a vault full of alarm sensors in the CIA’s headquarters, strung from a wire. “He worked out a way to be still when he was so close to the floor, and when we lowered him, he’d flip over, but he figured out that by putting some coins in his shoes to balance his body when held on the rig, he didn’t flip. It was his genius that finally made it work. And then he put his body in quite dangerous situations with the train stunt.”

That “train stunt” is the climax where a speeding train, with Cruise hanging off the side, is chased into the Channel Tunnel by a helicopter. “The wind is blowing by him, at god knows how many miles an hour. You had to tie people down or they’d fly off the set. Then Tom does this flip, and we didn’t get it the first time. So, he did it again.”

De Palma showed a rough cut to his friend George Lucas. “I was mixing at the Skywalker Ranch, and showed it to George,” he says. “We had a very complicated setup scene with Jim Phelps [Jon Voight], having to do with him going to Chicago and setting something up at the hotel. George says, ‘Where’s the scene where they’re all sitting at the kitchen table and Phelps is telling everybody what they’re supposed to do?’”

So, De Palma brought back the cast. “That was a great advantage when our group of directors would look at each other’s movies and say, ‘Wait, you’ve forgotten something.’ Our group was George, Steven [Spielberg], Marty [Scorsese] and myself, and sometimes Francis [Coppola]. I wish that tradition was carried on.”

A romantic angle between Hunt and Phelps’ wife (Emmanuelle Béart) was also scrapped. “This plot was complicated enough,” De Palma says.

De Palma and Towne had a harsh disagreement over the climax. The director favored the train action scene, while Towne wanted a character-based conclusion between Hunt and Phelps, inside the train. “We got into a knock-down drag-out argument in front of Tom that ended when I said, ‘You want to play this scene out in the boxcar? Fine. I think it stinks.’ Tom called me up and said, ‘I’ve been thinking about it, and I think we should do the helicopter chase.’ Tom ultimately made the decision, and he’s a very smart producer. He went with what he thought would be more effective, and fortunately, it was the idea I had come up with.”

The movie grossed $457 million worldwide and De Palma was invited back for the sequel, but he could see it would scale more toward action, and outside of The French Connection, he’s never seen a car chase he admires. “When Tom asked me to direct the second one, I said, ‘Are you kidding? Who wants to do another one of these things again?’ I accomplished what I wanted, which was to make the biggest hit I ever had. And I have no belief you should spend your time making sequels.”

Wagner was involved with the first three films but has obviously kept an eye on, from afar, the subsequent five Mission: Impossible pictures. She’s “thrilled,” indeed “absolutely thrilled” about its success “and to see what Tom has done with this and his team, and Chris McQuarrie.”

She’s rightly proud of the work Brian De Palma did on the first movie released in 1996, and she still gets excited by his vision of it, as do I!

“All the twists and the turns, and it was the first three, which were the ones I was involved with, where it was really finding itself. What is this we asked ourselves? We know it’s something amazing, but what is it and what are the concepts? And who is Ethan Hunt? That was always a big question. And I’m proud of everyone that has taken this series to make it what it is today.

“It’s a movie, and it was always designed that way to bring people into the theater, get them out of their houses into the theater.” she adds.

I mention the stellar lineup of actors cast for the first Mission: Impossible movie. Vanessa Redgrave, for starters!

“What happened,” Wagner explains, “is her agent called me and said, ‘Do you have any male roles for Vanessa Redgrave to play? She always likes to play things kind of out of the box that aren’t the obvious.’ I said, ‘Well, that’s interesting.’ I said, ‘Let me talk to Tom and Brian.’ So we all conferred about this. And the idea came up to have her play Max, the villain in Mission 1. So that role was originally a man … but when Vanessa Redgrave wants to play a male role in your film, you go for it,” she shrugs.

Cruise talked a little more about his quest for cinematic motion during an on-stage conversation yesterday at the British Film Institute, according to The Independent's Greg Evans:

“ I love the theme music,” Cruise joked. “ I thought it'd be interesting to take a Cold War TV series and turn it into an action movie.  I wanted action and suspense and lots of motion. I studied silent movies, Fantasia (1940) and musicals. How do you utilise motion?

“ I was constantly working and developing my abilities and developing technology.  It was such early days that the harnesses that I was wearing were very new and the cables were very new and we were all experimenting.

“ I remember the scene where I got blown from the helicopter to the train and there were pipes from the camera rig sticking out and I was like: ‘Guys, I might impale my skull’. No one had thought about stuff like that.”

Mission: Impossible [Brian De Palma, 1996] was your first film as producer.

Yes, with Sherry Lansing, who was the first female head of a studio-Twentieth Century Fox. I met her when I was doing Taps. And she was always a huge supporter of mine. And when she moved to Paramount, she came and said, Look, please start a production company. And I looked at the landscape, and I wanted something that was exploring motion in a different way. I wanted to go make a film foreign, it was always my passion to go to different countries. And I said, "Look. I will take Mission: Impossible, and I want to produce this as my first producing gig. And I remember, at that time, people were like, "What are you making a TV series for, into a movie?" You know what I mean? I remember. I was like. "I think it's gonna be cool, you know, we'll see what happens!"

I'm fortunate that my first time that I produced a film was with Brian De Palma, an incredibly skilled filmmaker. He started his career in the 60s and the guys that he was training with, some of them were from the 30s and 40s and 50s. So, that wealth of knowledge, that craftsmanship that has been passed down to me, that's stuff that I very much value.

Although Norton had said she was fired from the movie Tron (1982), she shared an Oscar nomination for her work on that film with Elois Jenssen. The Variety obit by Pat Saperstein highlights Norton's work in designing "Sissy Spacek’s iconic prom dress for Carrie:

“We had no money,” she recalled in a video interview about “Carrie.” She found many of the prom outfits in a store in the Valley that was going out of business, she said. But she had Carrie’s simple pale pink satin dress custom-made by a seamstress after changing the color from the original red in the book to create a more striking contrast with the blood that is splashed on Spacek.

“At the time, prom dresses and bridesmaid dresses and things were very fussy. They had all these ruffles and detail and I wanted to do….a bias cut dress and I wanted it to be really simple and look as if she could have made it herself,” she told Birth Movies Death. “It didn’t have a lot of ruffles or detail work. It’s sort of a classic 1930s bias cut dress. I wanted her to look different from everybody else but beautiful at the same time, and all the other girls, they looked like teenage girls wearing these sort of ruffly, fancy, gathered dresses.”

Other films included Joan Micklin Silver’s Chilly Scenes of Winter (1979), Airplane! (1980), Airplane II (1982), RoboCop 2 (again with Nancy Allen, in 1990), Cisco Pike (1971), and The Stunt Man (1980).

Brian De Palma's AMBROSE CHAPEL gleefully blends thriller tropes with farce, virtuoso set pieces, and a meta-awareness of cinematic history.
Mind control.
Repressed trauma.
Virtual reality.
Political manipulation.
Gendered power dynamics.

May 26th.

There was obviously a lot of research involved in writing a complex thriller like Black Bag, especially when it comes to figuring out the inner workings of an agency where much of its activities are so top secret, they're referred to as "black bag" i.e. need-to-know. While talking covertly to operatives to prepare his Mission: Impossible script, David Koepp began to dig deeper into their personal lives during his confidential interviews. Speaking with Cinema Daily US recently, Koepp explained that he was doing research for what would become a very different action-driven spy thriller when he learned more about how couples in the field work together. “I would start asking about people's personal lives, because it struck me that a profession where you lie for a living has to be a hard one to have personal relationships in," he said in the interview. "To a person, they would say, ‘Yeah, it's brutal. It's a real conundrum.’ The line actually showed up in Black Bag: ‘If I date someone outside the community, they don't understand, and they don't have any clearance, so I can't talk about anything. And if I date someone inside the community, I don't trust them, because they're liars, and so am I.’ I just kind of carried that nugget in my head as an approach to a spy movie I haven't seen before, and I'd like to see it.”

Other aspects of the film, such as George's proclivity for fishing, also came out of Koepp's later research, once he discovered that a legendary CIA spy named James Jesus Angleton enjoyed bass fishing. That seemed like it might be relevant to George's occupation, as he spends his time fishing for the truth, but that was just a tangential tidbit Koepp put into his script, as he kept exploring some of the problems that might arise when couples, married or otherwise, work together in any capacity. Those problems are frequently on display in Black Bag, as some of the players around George and Kathryn begin revealing their own indiscretions, often with each other, leading to moments that go far beyond merely being awkward.

Although the initial idea for Black Bag was in Koepp's head back in the mid-'90s, he struggled to get around to writing it, especially as other movies came along that seemingly explored the same topic, although in a very different way than his film. “I keep a lot of script ideas in various files," Koepp has admitted. "I was going to work on it, and then True Lies came out, the James Cameron movie, and they're married. And I thought, ‘Oh, well, that kind of steals my area.’ And then I was going to work on it again, and Mr. and Mrs. Smith came out. Then I realized that marriage is a common institution; I don't think I have to wait.” It took two unplanned breaks in the industry, the COVID pandemic and the writers' strike, to finally give Koepp the opportunity to sit down and flesh out his earlier idea into a full script.

Watching Black Bag, I was struck by a moment from a scene in which Michael Fassbender's spy goes fishing. Out on the water, he finds it an ideal place to think, and he begins recalling the dinner he'd hosted the night before, which he'd designed to fish out a rat among fellow spies, including his wife, played by Cate Blanchett. The film here reminds of the great scene in De Palma's Mission: Impossible where Jim Phelps has made contact with Ethan Hunt in London. Over coffee, Ethan begins flashing back to the disastrous night in Prague, and, despite Ethan's words to Phelps, we see things either as Ethan remembers them, or as Ethan believes they likely happened. Of course, Ethan finds it too painful to believe the truth about Claire, and closes his eyes and tries to wipe the thought from his mind, inventing an alternative scenario that he struggles to accept.

There is a similar echo of that moment in the Black Bag fishing scene. As Fassbender's George Woodhouse remembers each face from the dinner the night before, staring back at him, the montage of faces ends by lingering on Blanchett, and then cuts back to George in the fishing boat, closing his eyes, apparently pained by the thought of even considering her as the culprit.

In this clip of "Talking MEWShop, Editor Paul Hirsch, ACE, talks about taking the job for "Empire Strikes Back," instead of working on "Dressed to Kill." In doing so, Paul introduces Brian De Palma to legendary Editor Jerry Greenberg, ACE, to work on it. This led to Brian and Jerry working on many films until Paul returned for "Mission: Impossible."

He is the author of a memoir titled "A Long Time Ago in a Cutting Room Far, Far Away." You can purchase Paul's book here: https://www.amazon.com/Long-Time-Cutt...

Paul Hirsch, ACE, has edited over 40 films, among them the first "Star Wars" written and directed by George Lucas, for which he received an Academy Award in 1978, and "The Empire Strikes Back"; 11 films for Brian De Palma, including "Carrie", "Blowout" and "Mission: Impossible"; four for Herbert Ross, including "Footloose", "The Secret of My Success" and "Steel Magnolias"; three for John Hughes, including "Ferris Bueller's Day Off" and "Planes, Trains & Automobiles"; and "Falling Down" for Joel Schumacher. In 2005, he received his second Academy Award nomination for "Ray", a biopic based on the life of Ray Charles, directed by Taylor Hackford.

Manhattan Edit Workshop is a New York Film Editing School offering a full range of basic to advanced training courses, from the Avid, Autodesk, Assimilate, Blackmagic and Apple products to the complete suite of Adobe applications.

Manhattan Edit Workshop's mission is to provide the highest quality education for filmmakers and editors. Focusing on both the art and technology inherent to our craft. We foster a "learn by doing" approach in an atmosphere where mistakes are encouraged as part of the process and the only "silly" question is the one that isn't asked.

Pointer was mother to Amy Irving - and she was also Amy Irving's on-screen mother in Carrie (1976). This was the second time that Brian De Palma had cast a real-life mother-daughter duo in one of his films, having done so in Sisters (1972), with Mary Davenport playing mother to her real-life daughter Jennifer Salt. Earlier this month, in a Criterion "Closet Picks" video, Amy Irving pulled out a copy of David Lynch's Blue Velvet (1986), in which Priscilla appeared as Kyle MacLachlan's mother. "Mom's a hundred years old now," Amy says in the video, "and still going strong. And she and I do this kind of film sessions at her assisted living facility. And Blue Velvet was one of them."

Here's an excerpt from the Los Angeles Times obituary:

For 44 episodes of CBS’ series “Dallas,” Pointer played Rebecca Barnes Wentworth, Pamela and Cliff’s mother and the head of a rival oil family. In the 1976 movie “Carrie” she played Mrs. Snell, mother to Sue Snell, who was played by her daughter Amy.

She was just shy of her 101st birthday, according to a family statement obtained by The Times.

“Priscilla had a long acting career. She met her first husband Jules Irving in Europe just after WWII in an army production of ‘Brother Rat,’” the statement said. “They returned to the U.S. and formed the Actor’s Workshop in San Francisco. The company eventually took over the Vivian Beaumont Theater in NYC.”

Pointer, who was born in New York City on May 18, 1924, began her stage career in the city the 1940s. She was was married to Irving from 1947 until his death in 1979, moving out west with him after the war. They returned to New York City as the San Francisco troupe was winding down and Irving served as artistic director of Manhattan’s Lincoln Center from 1965 to 1972. The couple moved to Southern California after he retired, settling down in Santa Monica.

After her first husband died, Pointer married Robert Symonds. The two knew each other from San Francisco, and Symonds had moved to New York from California to work as Irving’s associate director at the Lincoln Center.

Symonds recalled meeting Pointer for the first time at the Actor’s Workshop in San Francisco, where she was “sitting at a desk typing a letter,” he told The Times in 1997. “I remember she was very, very pretty.”

Former Times staff writer Daryl H. Miller dubbed Pointer a “natural beauty.”

“Whether hunkered on the floor petting a dog or sitting pertly on a couch,” he wrote, “she is regal yet casual, arresting yet homespun.”

Amy Irving told The Times in 1997 that her mother and Symonds were “unbelievably well-suited” as a couple. “I know my mom and dad were deeply in love with each other, but Mom and Bob have so much in common,” she said. “There’s such harmony in their lives, a really nice balance. They spark each other.”

The couple’s joint projects included the 1984 Blake Edwards film “Micki & Maude,” in which they played Ann Reinking’s parents, and the 1993 South Coast Repertory production of “Morning’s at Seven,” in which they played brother- and sister-in-law. “First Love” at the Odyssey Theater in 2003 and the 2000 production of Athol Fugard’s “Road to Mecca” at the Fountain Theatre in Hollywood were also twofer shows.

When Pointer and Symonds worked together on the 1997 production of “Fighting Over Beverly,” also at the Fountain, they rehearsed at home and carpooled across town to the theater, but their characters weren’t supposed to have seen each other in 50 years.

“That really requires acting,” Pointer told The Times, “because instead of having known him for 43 years, I have to pretend — and so does he — that we haven’t seen each other since we were 18.”

“The unflappable Pointer sails above the general mayhem with a ladylike aplomb that makes her subsequent emotional epiphany all the more moving,” The Times wrote about Pointer’s performance in that show.