Shock Value - Jason Zinoman [85]
AS CARRIE returns to the bird’s-eye view of the opening shot right before the credits, Bernard Herrmann’s shrieking violins from Psycho can be heard. Herrmann was going to compose the music for the movie, but he died over the holidays in 1975 right after finishing the score of Taxi Driver. Replacing him was Pino Donaggio, whose work De Palma admired on the thriller Don’t Look Now. He went on to write a score with echoes of Herrmann, and even included a strategically placed Herrmann quote when Carrie rises out of the grave in the movie’s coda. De Palma paid his respects to the man who taught him that he couldn’t simply ape Hitchcock. Carrie wasn’t the only one returning from the dead.
In Carrie, and the rest of his work, dreams don’t seem like interruptions so much as continuations of an already surreal style. The movie is too seemingly contradictory and strange for simple realism: meticulously planned with moments of incredible comic improvisation; cruelly manipulative with emotions that run deep; a horror movie spiked with jokes. Brian De Palma said the most frightening thing in the world is a nightmare, more than life itself. Carrie was proof.
It was an instant hit, grossing close to $34 million domestically and earning Oscar nominations for Sissy Spacek and Piper Laurie, who played her mother. Pauline Kael, who had championed De Palma’s work, praised its unusual mixture of heart and adolescent eroticism. “No one else has ever caught the thrill that teenagers get from a dirty joke and sustained it for a whole picture,” she wrote. Others saw its operatic style as camp, including The New York Times’s Richard Eder, who called the movie “overwrought” and “inappropriately touching.”
While the prom and its aftermath became iconic, the movie was too eccentric and leering to become a blockbuster like Jaws. The hero of that movie is an ordinary guy struggling to protect his town. Carrie is much stranger, an alluring beauty, pitiful victim, and horrifying monster. Spielberg played to the middle, while De Palma took the perspective of the outsider, but without becoming cool or disengaged. Carrie moved audiences even when it insulted them. De Palma had arrived. He now had clout, control, and what he wanted in the first place: the affections of a really beautiful actress.
NANCY ALLEN was as sunny and friendly as De Palma was intense and remote. She had the blond, effortlessly stunning look and wide smile of a California girl, but she was raised in New York, by a policeman, and was savvier than she looked. As one of the last actors cast in Carrie, she had less experience than seasoned performers like Betty Buckley and Piper Laurie, or even her young scene partner John Travolta. De Palma was looking for unknowns, and he shared casting calls with George Lucas, who was looking for actors for Star Wars. Very conscious of her luck in getting the part, Allen kept a low profile on the set. She said little. Closely watching De Palma, she noticed how isolated he seemed, eating sunflower seeds by himself going over a shot in his head.
“He was the first person I ever met who liked being alone,” she says. The thought that he was interested in her romantically never entered her mind until John Travolta mentioned it to her. She still didn’t believe it, in part because of one hostile exchange. At a pause in shooting, De Palma and several actors were sitting around a table. Allen remained quiet. He started asking her questions, and she found some off-puttingly aggressive. The break over, she started working on the scene with P. J. Soles on top of a ladder but found her concentration lost. De Palma called a break and took her aside, and she told him what she thought of his interrogation. “You are a mind-fucker,” she said.
De Palma had always had a wry, ironic sense of humor, but with success, he became slightly more guarded, his gregariousness saved for certain people. He didn’t talk about his parents and the affair to just anyone. And in his personal life, he seemed to many like a mysterious, reticent figure. He dated Allen