The 100 Best Movies You've Never Seen (21 page)

Years before shooting Bruce Springsteen's first-ever rock video, “Dancing in the Dark,” maverick director Brian De Palma made a satirical rock-and-roll musical that combined the stories of
Faust
and
Phantom of the Opera
.
Phantom of the Paradise
's story of revenge was born out of De Palma's frustrations working with the big Hollywood studios.

Brian De Palma wrote the first draft of what would become
Phantom of the Paradise
in 1969. The story was born out of a combination of influences. De Palma had been throwing film script ideas around with a young nyu student who suggested a rock musical with the title
Phantom of the Fillmore
. The director found the idea of a contemporary opera house being haunted by a ripped-off composer very appealing in light of his own problems reconciling his artistic vision while working in the framework of the movie industry. “The problem is that even by dealing with the devil, you become devilish to a certain extent,” De Palma said, expressing his distaste for the business side of show business. “You
need
the machine. And once you use it, you are a tainted human being.”

He wrote and sold an early version of the script to Marty Ransohoff at Filmways, but later bought it back when Ransohoff didn't show any desire to develop it into a movie.

Ed Pressman, a producer who would go on to have everything from
Das Boot
to
Conan the Barbarian
and
American Psycho
on his resumé, bought two of De Palma's scripts,
Sisters
and
Phantom of the Fillmore
. They decided to film the horror thriller
Sisters
first, as it would be a less complicated shoot.
Sisters
proved profitable for American International Pictures, who green-lighted
Phantom of the Fillmore
but wanted drastic budget cuts. Pressman and De Palma felt the film could not be made for the kind of money aip was offering, so the film entered development limbo.

It would take the next two years to convince studios and financial backers that a rock-and-roll parody would sell. “Studio people are so far away from the rock scene,” De Palma said in 1975. “They didn't even know about things as big as Alice Cooper. . . . There's a real generation gap.”

During the development period De Palma sought out a composer to write the score for his proposed rock musical. “My original conception was to get a supergroup like The Who or The Rolling Stones to write the whole score,” he told
Filmmaker's Newsletter
in 1975, “but, of course, you couldn't even get them on the telephone.” Instead he made what might have seemed like an unusual choice.

Paul Williams began his show business career as a gag writer for Mort Sahl. While working with Sahl he not only wrote jokes, but also dabbled in song writing. The first tune he wrote, “Fill Your Heart,” wound up as the b-side to Tiny Tim's smash hit “Tiptoe Through the Tulips.” Encouraged by the success of that record, he joined a&m Records as a contract writer, pumping out a series of soft-rock hits for Three Dog Night and The Carpenters. He parlayed his early '70s songwriting success into a movie career, stepping out from the sidelines to appear in a number of films (including
Battle for the Planet of the Apes
) and make the rounds on the chat shows.

With his newfound fame and easygoing nature Williams seemed on top of the world, but beneath the diminutive exterior was a growing bitterness that may have attracted the like-minded De Palma to him. Williams once said that even if he cured cancer, he would still be remembered as the guy who wrote the theme song for
The Love Boat
. That was just the attitude that De Palma was searching for. Williams' chameleon-like song writing skills also came in handy. “What is good about Paul Williams is that he is sophisticated enough as a composer to write satiric music of a certain form,” said De Palma. “I mean he can write Alice Cooper-type music and he can write '50s Beach Boys-type stuff.”

De Palma and Williams came up with a contra deal that would benefit both of them. De Palma would cast Williams in the movie, while Williams would provide a score at a cut rate. “As we got to know one another a little bit, [De Palma] said, ‘You've got to play Winslow [the Phantom],'” remembers Williams. “That was the original thought, for me to play Winslow. Then we got into rewrites on the script, and I wasn't sure I could act behind a mask, so it seemed like the right idea for me to play the slimy mogul, Swan.”

Having raised the $1.1 million dollars to make the film through private investors, shooting began. The title had to be changed to
Phantom of the Paradise
after rock promoter Bill Graham refused to allow the filmmakers to use the Fillmore Theatre as a setting.

De Palma's shooting script tells the story of Winslow Leach (William Finley), a gifted but unknown composer whose magnum opus, a rock cantata based on the
Faust
legend, has been stolen by Swan (Paul Williams), a strange rock impresario. To get Winslow out of the way Swan frames him for a crime, has his teeth removed in a monstrous “hygiene” procedure, and has him thrown in jail. Of course Winslow breaks out of his cell, determined to wreck havoc at Swan's warehouse. They say bad things come in threes, but the torment is not yet over for Winslow, who gets jammed in a record press where he is hideously disfigured and loses his voice.

Not one to let mutilation get him down, Winslow vows revenge on Swan. Donning a leather suit, cape, and a hawk-like metallic mask, he haunts Swan's new extravagant nightspot The Paradise. Swan confronts him and offers a deal. Winslow agrees to stop terrorizing The Paradise in exchange for control over his music. Winslow will agree under one condition: he wants the beautiful Phoenix (Jessica Harper) to sing his cantata. Swan ignores Winslow's request, and turns the beloved cantata over to a heavy metal band fronted by the sexually ambiguous Beef (Gerrit Graham). Winslow goes mad and exacts his revenge in increasingly bloody ways.

It is my long-held belief that most rock music movies suck. It is difficult to translate the excitement of a live performance to the screen, and very few filmmakers are able to pull it off. Despite the occasional cheesy song in
Phantom of the Paradise
, the musical performances are fun, and don't get in the way of the story. The concert scenes have a filmic feel to them that many rock movies miss. Most often concert footage is of the banal
Midnight Special
variety, but De Palma takes full advantage of his celluloid canvas and presents exciting musical numbers. Shot a full two years before
The Rocky Horror Picture Show
— a movie to which it is often compared —
Phantom of the Paradise
may have been the first film to really exploit the carnivalesque aspects of glam rock, using the visually androgynous character of Beef to simultaneously entice and repel the audience.

But it is the story that sets this movie apart. The tale of
The Phantom of the Opera
has been told and retooled hundreds of times, but De Palma manages something that many others have not been able to do: he tells us a story that is familiar, but manages to keep us off balance, unsure of what will come next. What starts off as comedy turns into tragedy. The outrageous nature of his telling of the Phantom's story masks his deeper message about the nature of greed in the entertainment business, a notion that seems more relevant now than when this film was made. He gets his point across subliminally, while keeping the viewer entertained with his great visual flair and wicked sense of humor. There's something for everyone here: comedy, horror, music, and social satire.

The Phantom of the Paradise
was not a success when it was released in 1974, but became a cult hit through midnight screenings.

Pitch Black
is a science-fiction film that plays on one of the most human of all phobias — fear of the dark. Directed by David Twohy, the movie is run-of-the-mill sci-fi propped up with razzle-dazzle special effects and an illuminating performance from former bouncer Vin Diesel as Richard B. Riddick, the convicted murderer with a soft spot.

Pitch Black
begins with a bang. Literally. A spacecraft crashes, killing most of the crew and passengers. Counted among the survivors are the pilot Fry (Radha Mitchell), a bounty hunter (Cole Hauser), his prisoner Riddick (Diesel), and a holy man named Inam (Keith David). In the confusion that follows the bumpy landing, Riddick escapes. Apparently life on the arid, deserted planet with three suns beaming down 24-7 is preferable to a life in chains. As the other survivors search the wasteland for Riddick, they too are being hunted. A species of light-sensitive aliens are tracking their movements, waiting to strike.

Riddick's stock rises when it is discovered that their new world is about to be plunged into darkness by an eclipse. Riddick, you see, had black-market implants shot into his corneas before escaping from an underground prison, and can see in the dark. The ragtag group must learn to trust Riddick as he is their best defence against the aliens, who are lethal and who only reveal themselves under the cloak of darkness.

This isn't the only bad news. They discover the remnants of a scientific research team. A
dead
scientific research team who were brutally killed by the carnivorous aliens during a similar eclipse 22 years earlier. It turns out these things live beneath the planet's surface, and get very hungry waiting for the darkness to come.

The plot of
Pitch Black
is fairly routine. Even casual sci-fi fans will have seen much of this before. As the necessities of survival start to dwindle, the inevitable backstabbing and in-fighting begins, and the characters meet their doom one by one, in increasingly horrible ways. We've seen all this before in everything from
Scream
to
Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy
.

The main thing that saves
Pitch Black
from “been there, done that” territory is the unexpected relationship twists among the survivors. Screenwriters Twohy and Jim and Ken Wheat manage to insert a gripping human drama amongst the action. “Because we're not all name actors,” says Cole Hauser, “you can't assume, ‘Okay here's the hero, here's the bad guy, and here's the leading lady that's going to get the good guy and ride off into the sunset.'”

Strong performances help sell this, particularly Vin Diesel's. His Riddick is a muscle-bound killer, a loner whose deep raspy voice is both sexy and scary. He's an action-bound character, but a smart one, who has a winning combination of street smarts and natural intellect. This is the character that keeps the movie afloat, and the one with all the best lines.

“Human blood has a coppery taste,” Riddick tells the bounty hunter. “But if you cut it with peppermint schnapps it goes away.”

Diesel says he derived much of Riddick's tough guy persona from the nine years he spent as a bouncer in Manhattan nightclubs. “He was like a lot of guys I worked with. I'm drawing heavily from my own experiences. As a bouncer you learn to exude a certain confidence, and you have to learn a lot about people. You have to know what a person is going to do next. You have to read whether they're going to get physical in the next second or whether you can handle a situation with diplomacy and talk something out, or if it is going to erupt into violence.

“You learn about camaraderie because when you are bouncing you have to rely on the other bouncers. You have to rely on the phalanx of soldiers and work together to protect one another against a club filled with 3,000 people.”

Think of Riddick as an imposing intergalactic bouncer; instead of battling club goers he's taking on aliens. Either way, they only come out at night and turn ugly when they don't get their way.

Twohy has created a spectacular world using a blend of natural locations and digital effects. Shot in the Australian outback,
Pitch Black
's vision of the futuristic planet is deserted, bleak, and unforgiving. The town of Coober Peety in Queensland turned out to be just the place to create the gritty new world. “It is as barren as it appears,” says Twohy. “That is why we went there. I was looking for a blank slate terrain — no telephone poles, no trees — and then by doing some practical applications on the set or in a computer, I can add architecture to the terrain. A lot of stuff was layered in after the fact.”

Shooting on location is always difficult, particularly when the site is near an ancient burial ground. “In the days of
Mad Max
, which was shot there before us, you could do whatever you wanted,” says Twohy. “It was wide open terrain. You could rip up the landscape. Today it is very ecologically sensitive. The aboriginals tell you where you can and can't shoot. We never got a clear picture since their history is oral, not written. You had to grab an aboriginal and say, ‘Is this sacred ground? Is this not sacred ground?' And it would change from week to week. Just another of the vagaries of the filmmaking process. . . .”

Twohy uses his monsters sparingly, never giving the audience the chance to get too comfortable with the sight of them. It's a lesson from old horror movies: what you have to imagine is always more terrifying than what you can clearly see. When we do see the winged predators they seem slightly familiar, like alien bats, or a vicious hybrid of a pterodactyl and the stomach-bursting creature from the first
Alien
movie. “We were likening them to air-sharks,” says Twohy, explaining that they are relentless killers with the ability to fly. That we hear them before we see them is a masterful touch that builds suspense and a feeling of dread long before you have even laid eyes on the creatures.

Pitch Black
cost $22 million, cheap for an effects-heavy sci-fi film, but did only lukewarm business at the box office. A sequel,
Riddick
, was commissioned largely based on Vin Diesel's popularity after the release of such films as
The Fast and the Furious
and
xxx
. His salary for the sequel was $11 million, half of the entire cost of the first movie.