Brian De Palma's Phantom of the Paradise -- C or D?

Search: Beef!

Oh yes.

And a glam star called Beef who claims "I know drug real from real real."

http://www.commeaucinema.com/images/galerie/big/5684_PHANTOM-OF-THE-PARADISE-04%5B.jpg

Tried watching again ... thought it was total shit. The product of too much cocaine and not enough original material. Albeit the concept of originality can easily be brought into question, functionally you get what i mean.

As far as Phantom of the Opera homages go ... Opera by Argento! It's more fun!

They only knew who Paul Williams was from Smokey and the Bandit, but I filled them in on Muppets/Carpenters/Three Dog Night etc.

Erm... HOW CAN I FIND THIS FILM?!??!!?

Is it out on DVD?

Just the trailer makes it look like the best film ever made... (I was just googling T.O.N.T.O. and this came up...

i too discovered this classic while googling t.o.n.t.o.

and yeah i have it on dvd. should be pretty easy to find for around 10 bucks.

"Wow! I put it on my Netflix queue this morning. Stay tuned...

― Alfred, Lord Sotosyn (Alfred Soto), Friday, 5 January 2007 01:37 (2 years ago)"

uh, Soto, your report is due...

It looks great but oddly the music totally fails (and I am in general a huge fan of Paul Williams' other musical work). Also its too long. Kinda worth it for the setpieces alone though.

^ realest possible criticism. it's a cool movie, but fucked by shitty music (that the film grossly overindulges) and hilarity-killing bloat. too bad, cuz the great is GREAT.

this is on karagarga - no seeders tho

Déborah Znaty - Paradise Regained: Brian de Palma's 'Phantom of the Paradise' (2006)

exclusive bonus material from the DVD of the new french edition of Brian de Palma's great movie : Phantom of the Paradise

- a 50 minutes interview, Paradise regained, where the principal cast members recall their first meetings with De Palma, working on the film, and then the repurcussions afterward, providing many anecdotes along the way.
- a 9-minute doc focuses on costume designer Rosanna Norton, who contradicts Finley's memory of the origin of the Phantom mask's design.
- two trailers, the shorter of which includes a gorier version of Winslow's damaged face than was seen in the film's final cut.
- also Finley provides a "useless, but funny" 30-second fake ad for a Phantom figurine

"I want you to stop terrorizing the Paradise and rewrite your cantata!" lol

Beef = Jobriath, Swan = Elton, and there's an Alice Cooper piss-take in there, but who is the Phantom supposed to be? David flippin' Bowie?

I saw this yesterday, the opening sequence with The Juicy Fruits is incredible

This came out when I was four. The ads scared the living shit out of me. I've never seen it, and part of me doesn't want to, because I know it will be cheesy and not scary at all and will ruin that memory for me.

Five years after my last post: I didn't go straight to hell as Eric H. suggested, but I did catch the first hour or so of this film a few months back & was kinda liking it...too bad I fell asleep before I could see it all. (Tiredness, not boredom.)

'the hell of it' could basically be in BUGSY MALONE. so ace obviously but... this film is HORRIBLE.

^

Horrible does not in any way exclude the possibility that it is immeasurably entertaining. Netflix is delivering it to me (again) tomorrow.

"Some material may not be suitable for teenagers" you're darn tootin.

*Pre teenagers! it was a PG! heckfire...

Beef = Jobriath, Swan = Elton, and there's an Alice Cooper piss-take in there, but who is the Phantom supposed to be?

Randy Newman, no? I think he talked about his Faust idea for decades before actually doing it. Also Beef seems more like Alice Cooper to me.

Watching this on FXM right now--preposterous, but a beautiful and ambitious flop. Bonus: the sequence where the Phantom breaks out of prison and into Death Records is a homage to slapstick, with suitable accompaniment.

BEEF

https://silver.afi.com/Browsing/Movies/Details/f-0100000692

A screening at AFI Silver, with a "live shadowcast by Bloody Mayhem Theatrical." Does this pique anyone else's interest?

Swan = Elton

I thought the character was a mashup of Truman Capote and Andy Warhol.

BEEF

Swan's biography is probably closer to Phil Spector than any other real-life figure.

Watched this for the first time a couple weeks ago. Today, in the midst of an early 1990s alt-rock phase I'm going through, I decided to listen to Stone Temple Pilots' Core for the first time. I can't stop picturing Beef singing these songs.

Finally this last night. Not perfect, partly because the music seems to be recorded and mixed badly, but definitely worth seeing for various reasons. MoMI was kind of a perfect place to view it

Carburetors man, that's what life is all about.

Interesting that the "60s song" in this is early Beach Boys pastiche instead of a hippie thing, possibly for more contrast with the shock/glam of the Undeads and Beef.

How many times have you seen?

They used to show this every Halloween on Toronto's CITYTV, all the young people knew Winslow Leach, Beef and Swan. In fact I compared Swan's climactic wedding/assassination to Taylor Swift's the other day.

Beef totally seems like he is from a Paul Morrissey/Andy Warhol movie

Movie that this vaguely reminded me of is Get Crazy.

love that the premise of this movie involves people going out to the club on Friday night to hear the hottest new rock cantatas

I can't believe I didn't revive this to talk about seeing this last month on a big screen -- in the best of circumstances! To quote myself from FB:

Okay, unexpected greatness time! So I mentioned with a post last night that I was at a nice big-screen viewing of the legendary _Phantom of the Paradise_, an early Brian de Palma film starring Paul Williams and Jessica Harper among others mashing up Faust, the Phantom of the Opera and early 70s music industry madness in equal measure. It's absolutely worth viewing, but what I hadn't realized at all until things got under way was that I was seeing something truly amazing. So there's a fellow named Ari (Cohn is the last name, I think?) who has maintained the ultimate resource on this film at swanarchives.org for many years. Turns out he's behind a still-formally-unreleaseable restoration cut of the film. Basically, it puts back in the 'Swan Song' branding and designs throughout instead of just the Death records logo on its own, takes it back to the original title of simply _Phantom_ (as apparently Fox feared it would be confused with the comic character the Phantom) and finally -- and this was deep film geekery -- fixing a terrible mastering job done in the early 2010s for Bluray. (This is a known issue for a lot of major studio films then -- a lot of stuff was imported over with bad color corrections and standards, think orange/teal, too intense dark tones etc.) But! As that first point might indicate, the reason why the Swan Song stuff had to be taken out in the first place was due to a certain L. Zeppelin as a corporate entity, and they're still not letting it get released! (Ari's excellent talk about all this beforehand went into everything in detail, it was essentially the perfect bonus feature, except a presented-live slideshow.) So basically, a bit like the occasional _Cocksucker Blues_ screenings, because he was in the room, mysteriously the proper cut was screened here and only here, as opposed to all the other Drafthouse screenings yesterday. A really brilliant way to get to see the film as best as I ever will, on a big screen -- lucky to have been there!

So that was the good news -- but the sad news now is that Beef himself, Gerrit Graham, has sadly died. But a hell of a long run at doing a ton of things in general, seems like a good live had:

https://variety.com/2026/film/news/gerrit-graham-dead-grateful-dead-co-writer-1236867006/

LIFE had, etc.