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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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Monday, December 16, 2024
SUSAN FINLEY & MORE - 'PHANTOM' 50TH AT AERO THURSDAY
SARAH BALLANTINE & SAM PRESSMAN WILL JOIN Q&A w/ JUSTIN HUMPHREYS IN SANTA MONICA
https://www.angelfire.com/de/palma/phantomparadiseballantine.jpg

Justin Humphreys will moderate a Q&A this Thursday, December 19, following a 50th anniversary screening of Brian De Palma's Phantom Of The Paradise, at the Aero Theatre in Santa Monica, California. The on-stage Q&A will include Sara Ballantine, producer Ed Pressman’s son Sam Pressman and widow of actor William Finley, Susan Finley.

 


Posted by Geoff at 11:54 PM CST
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Friday, November 8, 2024
'PHANTOM' DISCUSSION ON 'HOW I MET YOUR MONSTER' PODCAST
THE REAL MONSTERS IN THIS MOVIE "CONVINCE YOU TO SELL YOUR SOUL FOR WHAT IS ALREADY A NATURAL TALENT"

Posted by Geoff at 11:44 PM CST
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Sunday, November 3, 2024
WINNIPEG CELEBRATES PHANTOM 50TH WITH PACKED EVENTS
"IT'S VERY POWERFUL, VERY MOVING - THE MUSIC, THE LOVE, AND WHAT YOU WOULD DO FOR LOVE"
https://www.angelfire.com/de/palma/anotheramiel55.jpg

CBC's Artuto Chang reports from Winnipeg about this weekend's celebration of Brian De Palma's Phantom Of The Paradise:
Mary-Ann Vaillancourt was 10 years old when the film premiered. She remembers coming to the now-defunct Garrick Theatre with friends to watch it.

"I stayed for two shows," she said. "And I did it again the next weekend. And I did it every weekend that I was allowed to come out."

Vaillancourt was one of the hundreds of people who showed up for the latest "Phantompalooza," a local event that, this year, marked the film's 50th anniversary.

Craig Wallace, a member of the Phantom 50th committee, said the two planned screenings of a restored version of the film sold out in a day and a half. A matinee, also featuring a Q&A with cast members, was added to meet the demand.

"Winnipeg has brought a lot of people from other provinces here, and they see what we see," said Dean Hunter, singer with Phantom tribute band Swanage, who's also on the committee.

"They might be from all over the world, but they love this movie as much as we do. And we just like to share it with them."

The celebration brought back a lot of memories for fans who attended the matinee Saturday.

Betty Moroz, from Garson, Man., was 14 when she first watched it.

"I thought it was kind of freaky back then," she said, but it stuck with her.

"It's very powerful, very moving. The music, the love and, what you would do for love. Anything for love."

"I have two copies at home," said Stephanie Starr, who came to the screening with her family.

"We love it. We've seen the movies many times before. And of course, you got to get the merchandise, right? I got a couple of buttons."

For other Winnipeggers like Tom Glenewinkel, the matinee was the first time they've actually seen the film.

"Everybody knows all the words to everything," Glenewinkel said. "It was just a great movie to watch, and just to be part of the experience of everybody enjoying it and getting into it."

Vaillancourt brought a C.D. of the movie's soundtrack to the matinee and newspaper clippings about the film she kept with her over the years. V She hoped to meet Paul Williams — star and composer in the film — who decades ago replied to her fan letter. V "'Dear Mary-Ann, thank you for your letter telling me how much you enjoyed Phantom.… P.S. I think I've only seen the movie about four times myself,'" Vaillancourt read, saying that at that point she'd seen the film about 10 times already.

"He made my whole day and my whole summer," she added. "The music is still phenomenal now, and I still listen to it if I want to just be able to sing along, every single word."



Posted by Geoff at 12:01 AM CDT
Updated: Monday, November 4, 2024 12:08 AM CST
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Friday, November 1, 2024
PHANTOM OF THE PARADISE OPENED 50 YEARS AGO TODAY
WITH "FREE T-SHIRTS TO FIRST 100 PATRONS" AT THE NATIONAL THEATRE IN LOS ANGELES
https://www.angelfire.com/de/palma/latimesnov1st1974c.jpg

LOS ANGELES TIMES, Nov 1 1974 - "GOTHIC EXPRESSIONIST FEEL"


"I JUST GOT CAUGHT UP IN THE VIBE THAT IS BRIAN DE PALMA"

A great read over at Bloody Disgusting: "The Phantom Lives: An Oral History of ‘Phantom of the Paradise’" - including these nice bits from Paul Williams:

I had become friends with Liza Minelli. Liza was going up to Harrah’s in Lake Tahoe to play Harrah’s for a month. And she said “I want you to open for me.” I’m doing two shows a night with nothing to do during the day and I’m writing the songs. I had my road band with me. And my road band is the one that played on the Phantom soundtrack, on Bugsy Malone. We became so close that I’d walk in and start singing something and they’re playing chords behind me. And I could walk in and go “Okay, we’re doing a Beach Boys thing. Bum-ba-ba-da-bum… Upholstery.” And all of a sudden, it’s sounding like a Beach Boys record.

Because we were fans of the music that we were satirizing – certainly all of us knew it well enough to recreate it. I had never written anything like “Somebody Super Like You” or “Life at Last”. But I just became a member of a rock and roll band. I became a member of a metal glam band. And the script is the bible. And the script was very fluid and it was developing along the way, and I just got caught up in the vibe that is Brian De Palma. Something happened and it came out of me musically.


And this bit, again from Paul Williams:
It was so much fun, as you can imagine. And Brian seemed to embrace this total, very uncharacteristic for him sentimental side. I remember putting this little piano thing in when Bill is dying. And Brian said “Oh my god. There won’t be a dry eye in the house.” And my side of it is “And let’s show a really good closeup of the face in the record press.” It’s like we traded personalities during the shoot.

AMAZING HANDHELD SHOT

There's another very nice tidbit from Paul Williams included in Laurent Bouzereau's latest book, The De Palma Decade:

Larry Pizer was the great cinematographer on the film, but Ronnie Taylor, who became an Academy Award-winning DP with Gandhi [1982], was the camera operator. He did that amazing handheld shot from the point of view of the Phantom, which starts outside the Paradise, goes backstage, up the stairs, and ends inside the wardrobe storage room where he selects his leather outfit, finds the one-eyed mask, and puts it on, literally, over the lens of the camera. This was done in one shot before the Steadicam [existed], and it is spectacular.

Posted by Geoff at 12:19 AM CDT
Updated: Friday, November 1, 2024 12:25 AM CDT
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Thursday, October 31, 2024
THURSDAY - TODAY IS THURSDAY.
https://www.angelfire.com/de/palma/thursday145.jpg

BREAKFAST -


Posted by Geoff at 1:04 AM CDT
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Tuesday, October 29, 2024
CRITICAL POPCORN DIVES INTO 'PHANTOM' SOUNDTRACK
NICK BARTLETT: "IT's A VIBRANT, UNIQUELY ODD FILM; ONCE SEEN, NEVER FORGOTTEN"
https://www.angelfire.com/de/palma/phantomparadise335.jpg

For the 50th anniversary of Brian De Palma's Phantom Of The Paradise, Critical Popcorn's Nick Bartlett dives into the film's soundtrack, song-by-song, all composed by Paul Williams. Here's what Bartlett writes about "Somebody Super Like You" -
You could reasonably make the claim that over the course of the film Paul Williams predicted numerous trends in the music industry. With Somebody Super Like You, he seemed to pre-empt the theatre of bands like Kiss and Goth Rock. Throughout the film, Swan’s group The Juicy Fruits pop up in a variety of guises, performing variations of the Phantom’s work. For this song the group are all dressed as somnambulist Cesare from The Cabinet Of Doctor Caligari, with a stage set that recreates the German expressionist mise en scene. Now called The Undead, this Frankenstein-inspired anthem celebrates an ideal man, assembled from various body parts, creating a campy, terrifying experience. The bone-chilling screams from singer Harold Oblong are incredible, as are his distinctive vocals, full of little tics – “Somebody sssssuper like you!

Incidentally, this was the highest charting song from the soundtrack. It went platinum, but curiously, only in Winnipeg!



Posted by Geoff at 12:01 AM CDT
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Sunday, October 27, 2024
'SO FULL OF SOUL' - PHANS EXPERIENCE 'PARADISE' IN DALLAS
PAUL WILLIAMS & ARI KAHAN PRESENTED AT THE MAJESTIC THEATRE LAST NIGHT
https://www.angelfire.com/de/palma/majesticpost1.jpg

Paul Williams from the stage after last night's screening: "The idea of the evil record producer – I mean, that’s the camouflage. That’s the veneer. But what is underneath all of it – what is my favorite thing to watch, as an actor, is the bathtub scene. Because you see who Swan was. You see this little guy who’s, just today, ‘I’ve decided to kill myself.’ He’s just, you know, what might be a little dude, you know. ‘Cause I have seen this face, incidentally, ravaged by the fullness of time, and it ain’t bad!" [audience laughs]

WFAA's Paul Wedding has an article about the evening's event:

DALLAS — "The Paradise — the ultimate rock palace."

That was the Majestic Theatre in Dallas 50 years ago during the filming of the horror musical cult classic, "Phantom of the Paradise." Although considered a box office bomb upon initial release, its influence and fandom have carried on all these decades later.

And on Saturday night, The Majestic got to play the part of the ultimate rock palace once again.

A screening of a restored version of the film was played in the theatre, with a big name in attendance. Paul Williams, a legendary award-winning composer and songwriter, who wrote all of the songs for the film and played the film's antagonist, spoke afterward about the making of the film.

It's not often someone gets to see a movie in the very location it was filmed. So to be able to see a scene in the movie that takes place on a balcony, and then to turn your head and look at that very same balcony — where fans dressed up as the eponymous phantom of the paradise are sitting — is a one-of-a-kind experience.

Shooting the concert scenes of the movie with Dallas residents as extras — some of whom were in attendance for this screening — was not the usual concert. Advertisements in local papers invited extras for a filming of "Phanton (sic) of the Paradise) at 9 a.m. on Thursday. But as Williams tells it, not many people really showed up.

"The fact is that it was cold, and there were not nearly enough people in the audience so there was a lot of moving around," Williams said about the filming of the movie, which took place around Christmas and New Year's.



Posted by Geoff at 11:44 PM CDT
Updated: Sunday, October 27, 2024 11:50 PM CDT
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Sunday, October 20, 2024
PHANTOM TUESDAY AT NORTHWEST FEAR FEST IN EDMONTON
PAUL WILLIAMS TALKS TO EDMONTON JOURNAL AHEAD OF CLOSING NIGHT SCREENING
https://www.angelfire.com/de/palma/northwestfearfest85.jpg

"I want to talk about the Canadian fans," Paul Williams tells Edmonton Journal's Fish Griwkowsky during a Zoom call ahead of this Tuesday night's screening of Phantom Of The Paradise at NorthwestFEARFest. "When Brian De Palma and Bill Finley went to see the movie in New York, I heard there were six people there, including Brian and Bill. Nobody raved about it, except a few fans in two cities: Winnipeg and Paris. I’m not sure why, but there would always be a couple people who were just fanatics and made everyone they knew watch it. And this year I introduced it as the closing film to the Cannes Film Festival! And the film stayed alive just because, I can’t even call them fans at this point, because of family and what they did. And amongst those fans, Guillermo del Toro wants me to write the words for a musical based on Pan’s Labyrinth. And among those fans emerges Daft Punk, and I end up writing two songs and singing one on Random Access Memories, and the next thing you know I’m accepting the Grammy for Album of the Year. So when you start talking about Phantom of the Paradise, I can’t even muster the language to show you how grateful I am, and it begins in Winnipeg and Paris."

Here's Griwkowsky's intro to the Edmonton Journal article:

Living a life of unparalleled collaboration, Paul Williams is surely the only person on Earth able to claim a direct creative pipeline to David Bowie, Barbra Streisand/Kris Kristofferson and Kermit the Frog, all of whom sang his lyrics to the world — including Hunky Dory’s Fill Your Heart, A Star Is Born’s Grammy-winning Evergreen, and the immortal Muppet Movie opening theme, Rainbow Connection.

Remarkably, it’s just the tip of Williams’ creative iceberg.

His staggeringly diverse accolades stretch back to a different Grammy win with Daft Punk in 2014, singing with a lit cigarette in full Battle for the Planet of the Apes makeup on Johnny Carson in ’73, co-writing We’ve Only Just Begun and Rainy Days and Mondays for The Carpenters — never mind penning the words to The Love Boat theme!

Insanely, the list goes on, including voicing the beloved Batman Animated Series’ Penguin amid countless guest spots on everything from Babylon 5 to The Hardy Boys, occupying a Hollywood Square in the midst of it all.

To try and zoom in like that helicopter shot into Kermit’s swamp, the 84-year-old legend is here Tuesday at Metro Cinema for NorthwestFEARFest’s closing–night, 50th-anniversary screening of Brian De Palma’s beautifully weird and musically wondrous cult classic Phantom of the Paradise, scored by and indeed starring Williams.

In a long and magnificent conversation I can just barely sample here, the Oscar/Grammy/Golden Globe-winner talks about it all, laughing as he asks to flip from the phone over to Zoom, “I’m so f—ing old, I listened to everything at 11 for 40 years!”


Posted by Geoff at 11:34 PM CDT
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Friday, October 18, 2024
CHECK OUT THIS MAJESTIC SCREEN PRINT FOR PHANTOM 50TH
DESIGN BY NATE ASHLEY - FRAMEABLE & ONLY AVAILABLE AT THE SHOW IN DALLAS
https://www.angelfire.com/de/palma/majestic50thscreenprint75.jpg

Posted by Geoff at 11:47 PM CDT
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Wednesday, October 9, 2024
MATT ZOLLER SEITZ - 'PHANTOM' 50TH ARTICLE FOR D MAGAZINE
TALKED TO DE PALMA, WILLIAMS, HARPER, HIRSCH, ARI KAHAN, STEPHANIE ZACHAREK
https://www.angelfire.com/de/palma/dmagphantom.jpg

Such an exciting time, with Body Double turning 40 and Phantom Of The Paradise turning 50. Matt Zoller Seitz has written an article about Phantom Of The Paradise for the October issue of D Magazine. And Seitz drops in a reference to De Palma's Home Movies in the opening paragraph.

"Of all the movies shot in Dallas," Seitz begins, "Brian De Palma’s Phantom of the Paradise is the most singularly odd. Considering the existence of RoboCop, JFK, Logan’s Run, Office Space, and Mars Needs Women, that may seem like a bold statement. But if you’ve seen Phantom—a rock-and-roll black comedy horror riff on The Phantom of the Opera, The Picture of Dorian Gray, and the legend of Faust shot mostly in the 1,704-seat Majestic Theatre—you’ll nod in agreement. (Those who know, know.) Then you’ll keep nodding and nodding until you’re bobbing your head in time to one of the incandescent songs burned into your memory by Paul Williams, Phantom’s songwriter and costar, whose performance as the film’s villain, Swan—a record producer who signed a pact with Satan, steals songs from a brilliant but unknown composer named Winslow (William Finley), and ruins the poor man’s life—represents the only instance in 1970s American cinema in which a 5-foot-2 actor can be said to loom."

It's a great article, and you'll want to read the entire thing, of course - but here is a brief excerpt:

In an act of programming chutzpah worthy of Winslow, Phantom of the Paradise will be screened October 26 at the Majestic Theatre with Paul Williams in attendance. That means viewers will have the unique opportunity to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the film in the presence of the actor who plays the bad guy and watch the hero garrote, bludgeon, crush, stab, and electrocute his enemies on a 30-foot-high screen in the same venue where the movie was shot.

Phantom was born in a moment of Winslow-like righteousness. Sometime in 1969, De Palma was riding in an elevator when he heard a bland Muzak arrangement of the Beatles song “A Day in the Life.” “I thought, ‘Boy, they sure managed to take this really original song and turn it into pap!’ ” he says.

The incident sparked his imagination. He had recently been in England shooting footage for a documentary about rock-and-roll artists, including The Who, The Animals, and The Rolling Stones. “We were shooting them in all the original clubs where they’d played,” De Palma says, “and the producer [of the documentary] also knew Bob Dylan, so I’d spent some long evenings up where Dylan was, so I’d gotten to learn a bit about the music industry.”

By that point, De Palma had also spent a few years in the film business, which had its own parasites and predators. “I figured out pretty clearly what I wanted to do,” he says: a rock-and-roll horror film with original songs. Phantom’s antagonists would be the innocent and idealistic composer Winslow, whose Faustian rock-and-roll tragedy becomes a meta-commentary on the movie you’re watching, and Swan, who leeches Winslow’s gifts to ensure the success of the new concert hall he’s opening, then strips the composer of his art, his dignity, his face, his voice, his soul, and even his ability to die. (The contract signed in blood by Winslow specifies that he can’t die until Swan does; you can probably guess what the loophole is.)


FINLEY'S IDEA, CIRCA 1964 - A MOVIE ABOUT MODS & ROCKERS WITHIN A THEN-BURGEONING SCENE IN LONDON

The documentary De Palma is talking about was to be titled Mod. Robert Fiore had collaborated with Brian De Palma on several films in the 1960s. Along with Bruce Rubin, Fiore did a little of everything in the De Palma camp. He was the sound recordist on Murder A La Mod (a clip from which ended up playing on a TV in a scene from Blow Out years later). Fiore was the cinematographer on Greetings, and shortly after, co-filmed the split-screen documentary of Richard Schechner's Dionysus In '69 with De Palma and Rubin (the latter recorded the film's sound). Fiore was the cinematographer on To Bridge This Gap, a documentary by Ken Burrows and De Palma, which was edited by Rubin.

There was one other project, a lost documentary from earlier in the 1960s that was to be titled Mod. Fiore, De Palma, Rubin, and William Finley had all shot footage in England. It was Finley's idea, circa 1964, a movie about mods and rockers within a then-burgeoning scene in London. In Justin Humphreys' book, Interviews Too Shocking To Print, Rubin explains that Finley's father had died and left him money, which he was going to use to finance the film. "And I was amazed at the audacity of somebody taking money that they had inherited and immediately spending it on making a movie," Rubin tells Humphreys. "But he was so enthralled by what was going on in London - the whole new music scene and he wanted to document it - to get it on film before it went away because this was the moment of birth for that whole [movement]. I mean, The Beatles were just coming out, and The Stones, and everybody - The Animals, Herman's Hermits, on and on."

After arriving in London ("there was a whole group of us," Rubin says in the book), Finley asked if Rubin would go to France with De Palma to pick up a light Eclaire sound camera, mentioning that he also needed another person to work on the film. Rubin had known Fiore from film school, and De Palma had known Fiore, as well. Fiore happened to be on a Fulbright grant in Paris, "and so he agreed to come back from Paris with us to work on the film," says Rubin, adding that they all had "an incredible two days" in Paris before heading back to London, where they worked on the film for two weeks, "through Christmas and New Year's."

Rubin continues in Humphreys' book:

"Bob Fiore and I went to Birmingham, I think... We drove up there and we went to the Beatles' Cavern (The Cavern Club in Liverpool] and there was a group showing there that night called Herman's Hermits. We got permission - I had a card that said I was from ABC News. I don't know how I got it but people thought that's who I was. They made a lot of things available. We went in and I had enough film to shoot one act of the concert. And it was Herman's Hermits, so I got the camera and Bob Fiore was my sound man at that point. I shot this amazing, exciting number using every element of the zoom lens. It was really very, early '60s exciting experimental cinema. I really shot a great roll of film of Herman's Hermits.

"And then, right after it was done, and we were out of film, the announcer onstage says, 'And, now, everybody - here's Herman!' I had shot the whole backup group without their leader, so I had wasted every bit of film of some of the most brilliant filmmaking of all-time.

"We were very ragtag as a group and we did what we could do. We did shoot some stuff of a group called The Who in a room in a hotel but nobody had ever heard of them, really, but people were saying, 'This is going to be a big group.' It was a small hotel performing area in a restaurant, like. I did shoot some of their performance."


Much of the film shot in England was impounded by Customs agents at the airport. Finley did not want to pay Customs taxes, so they had tried, unsuccessfully, to pass the rolls of film off as bits of tourist footage shot by each individual. On top of all that, the agents ran the film rolls through x-rays, likely destroying much of the images. Rubin, who was paid by Finley to transcribe the sound tapes they all recorded, says that Finley did manage to get some of the film back at some point, but doesn't know much more than that. Mod remains, for now, a lost film.

Posted by Geoff at 12:01 AM CDT
Updated: Thursday, October 10, 2024 12:21 AM CDT
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