De Palma and the Harsh Reality of Being an Older Filmmaker in a Culture That Worships Youth and Reviles the Elderly
I recently watched Noah Baumbach and Jake Paltrow’s 2015 documentary De Palma for The Fractured Mirror, my upcoming book on American movies about the film industry which you can preorder here.
From a style perspective, De Palma isn’t much. The film consists entirely of De Palma sitting in a chair and talking about his movies in chronological order along with a flurry of excerpts both from De Palma’s sprawling filmography and the movies that inspired him.
That’s ironic since De Palma is among our most stylish and distinctive auteurs. It ultimately doesn’t matter, however. Clips from De Palma’s movies provide all the style and visual excitement the filmmakers could possibly want.
De Palma makes for a fascinating subject. He holds nothing back. He seemingly has nothing left to lose. It’s not as if he’ll cost himself a multi-million dollar gig directing a Marvel movie if he’s excessively candid. His career as a Hollywood movie director is fundamentally over so he sees no point in not saying whatever the hell he wants.
The Scarface director tells wonderful stories and paints a vivid picture of what it must have been like to be one of the leading lights of New Hollywood and a close friend of other giants like Paul Schrader, Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas, Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg.
De Palma might feel like a really nifty DVD extra elevated to documentary feature film status by the quality and quantity of De Palma’s great anecdotes but it’s also a very satisfying exploration of what it’s like to make your living as a professional filmmaker.
De Palma says a lot of things that have really stuck with me in the twelve hours since I saw the film. I was particularly struck by a revelatory moment in the documentary where De Palma says that directors do not plan out their careers meticulously, as audiences and moviegoers might think.
Directors don’t necessarily make the movies they want to make so much as the movies that they are able to make. That's true even of giants like De Palma or Scorsese.
De Palma, for example, desperately wanted to make a movie based on the novel Prince of the City. He wanted it so badly that he spent an entire year hanging out with Robert Leuci, the NYPD detective that inspired Robert Daley’s book of the same name.
Prince of the City was eventually adapted into a critically acclaimed motion picture but the director was Sidney Lumet, not De Palma.
Around the same time that De Palma was working on Prince of the City Sidney Lumet was working on a screenplay with playwright and screenwriter David Rabe. The project? A remake of the classic gangster movie Scarface. Needless to say, that also got made, but not with Lumet in the director’s chair.
On a similar note, audiences might have wondered why John Singleton directed movies like 2 Fast 2 Furious and the Taylor Lautner vehicle Abduction instead of personal projects like Boyz N The Hood and Baby Boy.
The answer, depressingly but predictably enough, is that 2 Fast 2 Furious is a movie that could get green-lit and make money whereas small movies like Baby Boy could take forever to get made and then flop in theaters.
Baby Boy was in the works for so long that its intended original star, Tupac Shakur, had been dead for a half decade by the time the movie hit theaters in 2001.
Veteran directors like De Palma are seen by studios not as great auteurs who have single-handedly enriched film through their artistry but rather as irrelevant old dinosaurs decades removed from their greatest successes.
Even Scorsese is subject to the whims of the market. He only ended up directing After Hours, for example, because a version of The Last Temptation of Christ that would have starred Aidan Quinn in the lead role fell apart.
As far as the studios are concerned, directing is a young man’s game. It’s like Logan’s Run but filmmakers are put out of their misery around the time they hit 50 instead of 30.
To them De Palma isn’t the legendary director of Carrie, Sisters, Blow Out, Mission Impossible and The Untouchables; he’s a weird, non-commercial old man who hasn’t had a hit in 27 years and has seemingly no interest in making corporations money or even making films in his home country any more.
De Palma notes in De Palma with sadness that the movies that directors make early in their careers are overwhelmingly better than the ones they make in their sixties and seventies.
De Palma isn’t saying anything new but seeing an artist of his stature be so honest, frank and pragmatic about his fate and the fate of so many directors who did great things in their youth then struggled mightily to get any movie made is striking.
It’s enough to make you wish that our government financed the films of these elder auteurs who have fallen out of favor with the industry but that would go against our country’s longstanding commitment towards doing nothing to fund or promote the arts when that money can be used for tax cuts for billionaires instead.
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