It’s an outrageous, ridiculous, full color campy rock musical from the early ’70s, a cartoonish, garish, uber-weird comedy-rock-opera-horror story that flopped on release but has since gone on to achieve cult film status. 50 years later, it often shows at late-night screenings for enthusiastic fans to watch live actors play out scenes from what’s on screen.
And it’s not the one you’re thinking of.
Phantom of the Paradise came out in 1974, a year before The Rocky Horror Picture Show. And while there’s a lot similar between the two, a lot more is different. Rocky Horror takes glee in having no real plot whatsoever, while Phantom is stuffed to the rafters with plots, including a mashup of the plots of The Phantom of the Opera, the Faust Legend, The Count of Monte Cristo and The Picture of Dorian Gray, all staged in Technicolor Glam Rock and nascent Goth.
And in place of, say, Tim Curry as our sweet transvestite “villain,” Phantom features short and slightly cherubic character actor Paul Williams, also the film’s composer and best remembered for the kid gangster musical Bugsy Malone, The Muppet Movie, and the Carpenter hits “We’ve Only Just Begun” and “Rainy Days and Mondays.” (Here he plays a diabolic record producer–and yes, he’s really creepy in the role.)
Weren’t the 1970s weird?
It gets weirder. Phantom was written and directed by Brian De Palma, who would go on to blossom as the director of the landmark supernatural thriller Carrie, as well as superb thrillers like Dressed to Kill and Blow Out before climbing to true blockbuster status with the first of the Tom Cruise Mission Impossible movies. And in this film, he swings BIG, with crazed camera angles, extreme (if cartoonish) violence, and about as much flesh as he thought he could get away with for a PG listing. It’s like nothing else he ever made, partly because it was a colossal box office disaster, paving the way for Rocky Horror to also flop hard.
De Palma obviously recovered, but Phantom faded into obscurity — or at least the late night film circuit.
That’s where I saw it, about a decade after it’d come out, at a midnight screening in my hometown. I was in the somewhat easily shocked early years of adolescence when sex and violence caused less excitement than unfamiliar and unwelcome squirming. I remember the hammering edits and tempo, the craziness being shoved at me, the psychedelic color schemes of the musical numbers, the Grand Guignol pleasure De Palma took with violence and forcing us to see, and the operatic scale of the whole thing, with that awful scarred hero-villain, his teeth metal and his eyes mad, screaming into the night as he watches the seduction of the woman he loved.
I kind of hated it. But I am glad I saw it.
If all of this is getting your midnight cult classics motor revving, there might not ever be a better time to see The Phantom of the Paradise than on November 8th at the Capitol Theatre, where for its 50th anniversary it will be accompanied with a live band and an actor-adjacent performance on the stage–similar to what you would see at a Rocky Horror evening.
The producing company’s got pedigree, as it’s led by Amy Shepherd, whose father had a small role in the original film and was an actor in a half-dozen well-known films of the 1970s, including Death Race 2000 and De Laurentis’s King Kong, where he spent time in the gorilla suit. She’ll be leading the live performance with a cast that includes Bruce Hassle, Heather Matthews, Mandy Ryle, Denim Protege and Xander Layden, and a band that includes Andy Garness, David Broyles and Rick Jarvela and Craig Foster.
WHAT:
Phantom of the Paradise
WHEN:
Friday, November 8, 6 p.m. doors, 7 p.m. show
WHERE:
Presented by the Olympia Film Society at 206 5th Avenue SE; Olympia, WA 98501
HOW MUCH:
$20 general admission, $15 OFS members
LEARN MORE:
https://olympiafilmsociety.org/