Brian De Palma

Tommy Smothers, Orson Welles, Brian De Palma.

After Paul Schrader's Facebook attack on Brian De Palma, I was inspired to watch a documentary--essentially a long, long interview with De Palma--on Netflix.

There were some interesting bits of information. Orson Welles appeared in one of his movies and never memorized his lines. I heard Welles had done that on Catch 22. Buck Henry said that Welles concealed the fact that he hadn't learned his lines by asking Mike Nichols to give him line readings---to tell him how he wanted him to say each line. That way Nichols would get the performance he wanted and it would go faster.

He discussed some of his failures, Feminist attacks on his work (which don't seem unreasonable) because he keeps murdering women in his movies.

But I don't know what Schrader's problem is. I have a terrible movie of his on TV as I write this, Dog Eat Dog. It starts with Willem Dafoe brutally murdering a mother and her young daughter while funny music plays on the soundtrack. And Schrader was 70 when he directed this stupidity. According to Wikipedia, it raked in a little over $69,000 at the box office.