PHANTOM OF THE PARADISE: Brian De Palma's glam rock horrorshow

In 1969, Brian De Palma stepped inside an elevator that was playing a Muzak version of a Beatles song, and something sorta snapped.

He was nearly 30, and he'd spent almost a decade struggling to make it as a director. He'd pitched endless ideas to the studios, usually getting shot down, sometimes getting ripped off. That day, when he heard the Beatles reduced to Muzak mush, he despaired. What was the point of trying to create art? Even if you made something good, corporate America would just turn it into crap.

That moment would inspire De Palma to create Phantom of the Paradise, a strange, glam rock horror musical satire about a genius composer who makes a Faustian pact with a Satanic record producer, gets royally screwed (over and over again—our boy ain't so bright) and winds up a wretched, horribly disfigured, masked creature bent on revenge.

When the major studios rejected the script, De Palma eventually managed to raise half of the film's (meager) budget from a real estate developer. He approached various record companies for the rest, and this was how he crossed paths with Paul Williams, the runtish singer/songwriter ("Just An Old-Fashioned Love Song," et al) who became an unlikely sex symbol in the '70s. Williams turned down the phantom role, sensibly reasoning that he just wasn't physically imposing enough, but he did sign on to play Swan, the film's sinister record exec, and he composed the hummable and occasionally inspired score.

Here's the film's blackly funny opening number Goodbye, Eddie, Goodbye, with subtitles in a language I don't think I've ever even seen before.



Phantom bombed on its initial release, but time has been surprisingly kind to its mix of glam and grotesquerie. The film features just about all the essential ingredients for a midnight cult fave - with a misfit hero, some twisted sexuality, copious pill-popping, gore, rocking musical numbers and a wonderfully incoherent plot - but so far Phantom hasn't enjoyed anything like the recognition of other cult hits of the era like The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

But what Phantom fans lack in numbers, they make up for in sheer dorky enthusiasm. The fan website The Swan Archives examines the film in detail, offering a wealth of interesting info (turns out a young Sissy Spacek worked as a set dresser on the film!) and a lot of deleted scenes that aren't available on the film's rather basic DVD. And then there's this site, featuring Phantom fanfic written over the course of decades by one very, very passionate fan. (Very.)

Let's finish with one of the film's wildest musical numbers, a glam rock Frankenstein freakout called Somebody Super Like You. (If the lead singer seems familiar to you, he's Harold Oblong, a British character actor who was rather ubiquitous for a while in the late '70s.) I've never quite understood if the band is supposed to be literally chopping off arms and legs from people in the audience, or if that's supposed to just be part of the show. It's an especially weird moment in an especially weird movie.



(Parts of this article appeared, in an altered form, in an article I wrote for OC Weekly.)

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