The Palisades Fire roared through Pacific Palisades on Tuesday, and has burned more than 21,000 acres as of Friday afternoon.

Reports Tuesday night appeared to show Palisades Charter High School was engulfed in flames. A Los Angeles-based TV reporter and cameraman were fighting the fires as darkness fell. The cameraman, who went to Palisades High, said: "This is heartbreaking. This is my alma mater. The baseball field is totally gone, some of the buildings are gone."

Despite the carnage the Southern California fires have left in the surrounding community, there’s something the Pacific Palisades community can smile about — the home of the Dolphins is intact.

I went to the Palisades Charter campus on Friday afternoon to see what the status of the school was. What was left? What’s gone? How bad is it?

The answers: A lot. Not a lot. Not that bad — and that’s good.

The backside of the campus saw damage. A number of classrooms and some bungalow-type buildings burned down, but a majority of the campus is unscathed.

The football field and baseball field are fully intact. The front of the school, where a large grass quad sits, is as green as can be. The basketball gym is untouched. The aquatic center is in great shape.

"There’s no telling when students will be back on campus and in classrooms," Fattal writes. "It’s possible some athletic activity, like basketball and soccer practice can take place so those teams can play games, but the overall condition of the school is in good standing considering the apocalyptic images seen from this week’s wildfires in Los Angeles."

Witney Seibold, Slash Film

In Chu's film, future Wicked Witch Elphaba is an illegitimate child born with green skin and "Carrie"-like telekinetic powers, powers which she uses when the local brats make fun of her color. Elphaba will eventually grow up to be a stalwart and not terribly interesting young woman played by Cynthia Erivo. Erivo is an excellent singer and can certainly belt out the show's bigger numbers with a Broadway baby's aplomb, but her performance otherwise is frustratingly subdued. It's as if she's afraid to show any actual wickedness, anger, joy, or any other emotion beyond intense frustration and mild concern.

The same might be said of Ariana Grande (credited in the film as Ariana Grande-Butera for reasons you can read here), who plays Galinda (the future Glinda). Elphaba meets Galinda at Shiz University, presented as a Hogwarts-like school for witches and warlocks (despite it just being the college for all of Oz) where Elphaba's little sister Nessarose (Marissa Bode) has been accepted. Galinda is presented as a vapid, shallow valley-girl-type character, more concerned with fashion and popularity than skill or achievement. Grande, a professional pop star, can likewise hit the high notes, but rarely brings any kind of lifelike expressions to her Beverly-Hills-inflected performance.

Elphaba unwittingly performs a feat of telekinesis in front of Shiz University's headmistress, Madame Morrible (Michelle Yeoh), and the young witch is accepted on the spot, not even having applied. Elphaba and Galinda become roommates, and one might expect the two actresses to downshift into cattiness mode as they discover their mutual loathing for one another. Song lyrics assure the audience that loathing is indeed developing, but I see nothing of that on the lead actresses' faces or in their performances.

A lot happens before the main title appears, most importantly a recap of Elphaba’s birth. Attended to by her ursine nanny Dulcibear and a goat obstetrician, Elphaba’s entry into the world is greeted with shock. When her father, Governor Thropp (Andy Nyman), sees the baby’s pea green skin he shrieks, “Take it away!” In a clever moment right out of Carrie, Elphaba demonstrates her instinctual powers even as a newborn when surgical instruments go flying up to the ceiling.

Wicked’s greatest dramatic asset, even more so than Schwartz’s score, is Holzman’s brutally efficient book. In crafting the stage musical, which charts Elphaba’s rise from undergraduate outcast at Shiz University to the Most Wanted Witch in Oz, Holzman and Schwartz identified the exact amount of exposition, backstories, and comic asides that they needed to expand a fantasy world and communicate their characters, cutting every second of excess fluff. On stage, Elphaba finishes belting the roof-raising “The Wizard and I,” in which she dreams of becoming famous and being “de-greenified,” and then immediately steps a few feet stage left to launch into a rageful duet, “What Is This Feeling?,” with Glinda. There’s no transition, no perfunctory dialogue—the show just barrels shrewdly from essential moment to essential moment.

The film, conversely, takes its sweet time, adding longer scenes between every song, including lots of silly banter for Glinda’s reimagined entourage (Bowen Yang and Bronwyn James), even if there’s almost no changes to the plot. On screen, Wicked feels self-consciously elongated whenever it stretches beyond the musical’s exoskeleton, as if the idea of making a lengthy movie predated the plan for what to do with all the extra minutes. The scene in which Glinda reaches out to Elphaba by mirroring her awkward dance moves at a party can be a tearjerker on stage, but the slow-motion treatment here as the dance goes on and on drains it of emotional energy.

Wicked’s frequent patches of sluggishness are particularly frustrating because so much of the film—especially the songs—is glorious. As in In the Heights, Chu excels at timing shots to match the music precisely, treating Schwartz’s music with an invigorating reverence. When Glinda sings the line, “Of course, I’ll rise above it,” the melody leaps up on the word “rise” and the camera pans upward. Since Chu’s stylistic vigor is essentially playful, Wicked shimmers most distinctively in the comic set pieces, especially “What Is This Feeling?,” choreographed with giddily vicious energy. Much of the broader musical staging, like the ensemble’s dizzying leaps across a series of spinning clock faces in “Dancing Through Life,” is stunning.

Between Oz’s stark, bright colors, the sweeping shots of winged monkeys in flight, and soaring gestures toward the iconography of The Wizard of Oz, Alice Brooks’s cinematography can sometimes offer an exhilarating sensory overload. In the opening sequence, undergirded by newly percussive orchestrations, the camera captures an incandescent rainbow before flying over Dorothy and company making their way across the Yellow Brick Road. Wicked was, perhaps, the last great mega-musical, following in the footsteps of less nimble, more somber shows like Les Misérables and The Phantom of the Opera: Unlike those musicals’ lackluster stage-to-screen adaptations, the world rendered here actually feels huge and wild and full enough to encompass a reality worthy of the largesse suggested on stage.

For devotees looking to see Wicked explode on to the screen, then, Chu’s vision won’t disappoint. Neither will his commitment to ceding several minutes of the film to a series of Broadway cameos that go on for long enough that newcomers to the Wicked-verse may be completely lost. If the utterly campy sequence, which unsubtly pokes fun at a rumored behind-the-scenes feud from 2003, isn’t targeted at casual audiences, the filmmakers are, at least, unapologetic and self-aware in catering to the viewers primed to care the most.

Fortunately, neophyte audiences won’t require any extra knowledge to fully appreciate the freshness blooming from the central performances. Erivo blends her film experience and Broadway bona fides to offer an Elphaba that marries the smallest of gestures—a sweet, inward smile before she launches into her hopeful “The Wizard and I,” for example—with the stadium-sized bravado of her “Defying Gravity.” Though the screenplay’s additions flesh out her character superficially—Elphaba pedantically corrects Glinda’s grammar—Erivo offers a slightly snarky sweetness that makes the role feel unusually layered.

Erivo uniquely takes advantage of all the extra runtime to deepen her characterization, carefully exploring Elphaba’s self-loathing (she blames herself for her mother’s death and her sister’s disability) and the past hurt that fuels her burgeoning activist bent. And the presence of a Black actress in the role reinforces how much Wicked is a barely disguised allegory about skin color and the flammable potency of vilifying the Other for political gain. Erivo actually pushes back against the script’s emphasis on Elphaba’s Carrie-like powers that wreak havoc whenever her emotions get the better of her: She makes Elphaba’s overlooked wit and care and intelligence infinitely more interesting than her magical potential.

Aiding in this redefinition of the character, of course, is the actress’s voice. While Elphabas on Broadway have famously added flamboyant vocal riffs to “The Wizard and I” or “Defying Gravity,” they’ve been constrained by certain stylistic limitations about adapting the score. Erivo seems to have freer rein to shape the role around her own gifts. Especially in the tenderly wistful ballad “I’m Not That Girl,” she weaves liquid melismas into the melody, tendrils of Elphaba’s longing that will surely become a new gold standard for interpreting the song.

If Grande’s fluttery Glinda doesn’t equivalently redefine the role, it’s still an astutely funny, splendidly sung performance. Whenever Grande hits especially high soprano notes, Glinda’s on-screen posse breaks out into applause, perhaps a little meta wink at the naysayers who doubted whether Grande had the vocal chops to sing the role. She not only does, but she’s also refreshingly unafraid to make Glinda quite cruel at the start of the film. Most Wicked castings tend to tilt toward one protagonist or the other—it’s Elphaba’s story or it’s Glinda’s, depending on who’s in the roles—but the pairing here provides a lovely balance, with Holzman and Dana Fox’s extended script giving them both, at least, extra room to grow.

"It initially started as a conversation that Amazon initiated, and they said, 'Hey, would you have any interest in Carrie?'" Flanagan told MovieWeb in a recent interview. "And I had to think about it, because my first instinct is always — why? It's been done perfectly by De Palma, it's then been done three other times after the fact. Why do it again?" He explained: "Carrie White is a story about high school violence and bullying, and that feels immediate and important today, unfortunately, even more kind of sharply relevant than I think it was when he wrote it. So there felt like a chance for some true modernization beyond just changing the time period, and to use it to talk about the issues that affect high school kids in America today. You know," elaborated Flanagan, "Carrie White walking through a metal detector is interesting to me. Carrie White with social media. The iconic scene in the locker room is very different when people have phones in their hands. So that was the first germ of an idea, like, there is room for this to actually have a lot to say that's very relevant. And I can't spoil the changes that we made in order to kind of find a story that felt like it needed to be told. But we made some pretty substantial changes."

Flanagan continued: ""When I brought it to Stephen King — because that's the other side of this, if Steve says no, he doesn't want to see it happen, we're not going to do it; I'm not about to do that in that relationship. And so when I mentioned it to him and said, 'What do you think about Carrie for TV?' He said, 'Well, why? Leave her alone . She's good, she's done. I'd rather we focus on other things.' But when I sent him kind of the layout of how I saw it could work, he really liked it," added Flanagan. "And he came back and said, 'Actually, yes, I think this is interesting, and I think this could be really relevant and could be really exciting.' And so that was when I said yeah, we should do this. I can't talk more about it, other than we're in the writers' room. We're having a great time, and I think we're going to tell a story that will be surprising and impactful, very relevant to our modern society and to issues in our country."

"My oldest son is 14 years old," explained Flanagan on a more personal note, "and I look at him as I'm working on this story, and think it's important for his generation. I think there'll be something in there that I hope will be useful to them in this world. But yeah, I'm really glad we're doing it. I'm having a blast." Flanagan concluded: "But it was a surprise to me as well that it emerged as a priority. Because my initial reaction was, why do it? Which, in fairness, I had the same reaction when we first talked about adapting The Turn of the Screw for [The Haunting of] Bly Manor . It's been done dozens of times, that thing is just worn out. Why? Why approach it? And we found an approach that made it feel like, yes, absolutely, this is a story worth telling. So, yeah, I think it's going to be very, very interesting for people, and I think it'll be surprising."

Fargeat has always gravitated towards a smorgasbord of different genres, including “action, Westerns, horror, body horror, sci-fi, fantasy”. The filmmaker tells me that she adored “everything that allowed me to go outside of reality and be in a world where the rules were different and were a great window to creative, often crazy imaginations. It goes from the first Star Wars trilogy to the movies from [David] Cronenberg, which had a big impact on me.” She also cites Paul Verhoeven’s RoboCop and the surrealism of David Lynch: “They all played specific roles at different ages of my life, building my imagination and my way of envisioning the world.”

Growing up in France, Fargeat recalls feeling “quite bored” and that everyday life was “inadequate”; the entertaining adventures and “sense of rebellion” in genre films provoked “strong emotions, whether it was fear, passion, thrill… I was feeling alive.” Dark comedy played a large role in her cinematic coming-of-age as well, particularly the silent satire of Charlie Chaplin. “It’s really two legs that I have with me,” she says. “The more genre, imaginative one, and the more satirical comedy—which is also something that creates strong emotions.”

In The Substance, satire converges with body-horror to metaphorically metamorphosize into its own beast. Fargeat lists Cronenberg’s The Fly as a definite inspiration for the literal metamorphosis featured in her film, as well as the enduring imagery of the blood tsunami pouring out of the elevator in The Shining, and, of course, the climactic prom scene from Carrie. (While the filmmaker admits that she hasn’t yet seen Society, it’s now on her watchlist since so many people have mentioned it after witnessing her penchant for grotesquely organic practical effects).

“All those movies, filmmakers have seen the work of other filmmakers who’ve digested what they’ve seen and what other filmmakers did,” Fargeat says. “I love the fact that there is some kind of common creativity somewhere that each one redigests in its own way, with its own world and its own theme. I truly believe that we are, in the end, the result of what we watch, what we read, what we’re exposed to, and all of this lives with us… We are growing ourselves, feeding ourselves from all those influences, whether they are conscious or unconscious.”

So much of Carrie now looks, 48 years on, unsubtle to say the least – and yet De Palma is a master of making that lack of subtlety work cinematically. The frankly outrageous soft-porn aesthetic of the initial girls’ locker room scene gives us Spacek almost languorously soaping herself in the shower, in a way that is madly inconsistent with her character. And yet without that absurdly provocative sequence, the “period” moment wouldn’t have been so transgressive, so nasty, so tactless. This is crass, this is the male gaze, sure – and yet it is subverted by its casually explicit violence and vulnerability. It’s impossible to feel anything other than genuine protective concern for a female character who is later to show that she doesn’t need anyone’s protection.

And that staggering, drawn-out prom sequence, in which Carrie evolves from ugly duckling to swan to something else entirely – its meaning and atmosphere changes on a subsequent viewing. The first time you watch it, the denouement is a shock, despite the fact that in previous scenes you’ve seen the nasty planning that has gone into it. But the second time, the scene is, end to end, an unbearable ordeal of pure evil: minute after minute goes by while Carrie progressively relaxes and begins to enjoy herself with the wonderful boy who’s taken her on this date. And then, when she unleashes her gonzo uproar of telekinetic rage, De Palma fragments the spectacle with a split-screen: a crazy death metal of carnage.

Carrie is about all the things it didn’t know it was about: internalised misogyny and self-hate, and the theatre of cruelty involved in high school popularity. It isn’t explicitly about school shootings and yet it shows you, like no other film I have ever seen, the horrifying wish-fulfilment ecstasy of such horrific acts. De Palma is the only director who could have done it.

“To me, Carrie is timeless in the sense that it deals with the notion of being different and with bullying. Those themes sadly are timeless,” says Laurent Bouzereau, author of new book The De Palma Decade: Redefining Cinema with Doubles, Voyeurs, and Psychic Teens.

Carrie begins in the same way as the novel. The 16-year-old anti-heroine (Spacek) experiences extreme humiliation in the school showers. She’s pictured in slow motion, looking blissfully happy under the steaming water. Then the trauma begins. She begins to bleed from between her legs, doesn’t understand why, and is overwhelmed by terror. Her religious zealot mother (Piper Laurie) hasn’t taught her anything about her monthly cycles. The other girls mock her, throwing tampons and towels in her direction as she cowers in the corner of the shower cubicle.

“What made him [King] think that a bunch of guys intent (as King puts it) on looking at pictures of cheerleaders who had somehow forgotten to put their underpants on would be riveted by an opening scene featuring gobs of menstrual blood? This is, to put it mildly, not the world’s sexiest topic, and especially not for young men,” Margaret Atwood (author of The Handmaid’s Tale) observed in a recent New York Times article.

Atwood is a huge admirer of the King novel, which she regards as being as much about “all-too-actual poverty and neglect and hunger and abuse” as it is about the “weird stuff” – namely the extrasensory powers that Carrie soon develops.

King was the quintessential blue collar writer. The story of how Carrie first came to be published has long since passed into US literary myth. The down-at-heel author was living in a trailer, working as a teacher in a small town called Hampden and was living in nearby Hermon, a place he later described as the “asshole of the world”. He was trying to write for men’s magazines but not getting very far. He threw an early draft of Carrie into the bin – but the pages were salvaged by his wife Tabby, who was instantly fascinated by her husband’s strange tale about the tormented teenager. “She wanted to know the rest of the story. I told her I didn’t know jackshit about high school girls,” King remembered in On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft. She told him, “You’ve got something.” The publishers agreed and his career was launched.

De Palma was far too baroque a filmmaker to show much interest in the social realist elements of King’s novel. Instead, he directs in a stylised and extravagant way. The maverick auteur throws in moments of incongruously morbid humour, using split screen to add to the epic quality of the storytelling. He cuts the main set piece – Carrie being drenched in pig’s plasma at the end of the school prom – in exhaustive detail, choreographing it as if it were a complex battle scene.

Carrie is steeped in blood from beginning to end. The director, though, was at pains to explain this was make-believe, made from corn syrup and dye and designed to be “theatrically red”.

As a youngster, the filmmaker had spent a lot of time in hospital, watching his father, an orthopaedic surgeon, at work.

“He [De Palma] worked in the wards from a very young age and saw absolutely horrendous things, which made him somewhat immune to violence and blood,” Bouzereau tells me. “You can’t imagine how much blood is flying around in an operating room,” the director himself recalled in the 2016 documentary De Palma. The implication was clear: if he’d really wanted, he could have made the film far nastier and far darker.

Carrie was as much a distorted fairytale as a conventional horror pic. The tone veers from creepiness to high camp; nearly 50 years on, it continues to wrongfoot and discomfit audiences. Atwood points out that the novel was written when “the second wave women’s movement was at full throttle” but the early scenes of the film showing naked teenage girls cavorting in the changing rooms are uncomfortably voyeuristic.

At times, for instance when Carrie uses her psychic powers to make kitchen knives fly off walls, or when a blood-stained arm suddenly shoots out of a grave, the movie skirts close to the madcap Gothic world of a Tim Burton fantasy. Spacek, though, plays her character with such earnest and emotional rawness that she defies audiences to laugh at her.

The young star had painted sets on De Palma’s earlier 1974 movie, Phantom of The Paradise (she was married to the production designer Jack Fisk, whom she met on her breakthrough film Badlands). When she did her screen test, she was already in her mid-twenties, far too old and also seemingly far too demure for a tortured soul like Carrie. She smeared vaseline in her hair, dirtied herself up and behaved in such a feral manner that De Palma knew instantly he had to cast her, despite the studio’s misgivings.

Spacek explained how she got in character: “I went to that place where all teenagers spend a lot of time, where you’re the victim and everybody hates you and you’re locked in your room, writing poetry and hating your mother.”

Filmmaker and historian Laurent Bouzereau has been thinking and writing about Brian De Palma for most of his life, ever since he wandered into a movie theater to see “Obsession” and acquired an obsession of his own.

Since then, Bouzereau has probably devoted more hours to exploring and explaining De Palma’s oeuvre than any other critic; he was the author of the first English language book-length critical study on the director, “The De Palma Cut,” and has produced endless hours of supplementary features for Laserdisc, DVD, and Blu-ray releases of De Palma classics like “Carrie,” “Dressed to Kill,” and “Body Double.”

Now, Bouzereau has synthesized all he’s learned about his master’s origins in “The De Palma Decade: Redefining Cinema with Doubles, Voyeurs, and Psychic Teens.” It’s a book devoted to the period in which De Palma created and perfected the visual language for which he would become famous in movies including “Sisters,” “The Fury,” and his masterpiece, “Blow Out.” Bouzereau moves not in chronological but thematic order through De Palma’s 1970s and early 1980s output, grouping films together according to their visual and philosophical preoccupations and looking under the hood to see how and why De Palma achieved his effects.

Bouzereau does so via a combination of interviews and his own observations after over 40 years of study; as a result, “The De Palma Decade” becomes not only a critical biography of De Palma but a sort of autobiography for Bouzereau himself as he traces his own evolution as a moviegoer (and a gay man responding to De Palma’s complicated treatment of sexual orientation) via his responses to De Palma’s work. Below is an exclusive excerpt from the book’s section on “Carrie,” in which De Palma and members of his cast and crew recall the casting of one of his most iconic films.