Brian De Palma helped rewrite the opening crawl of Star Wars
Before he was a thriller director, Brian De Palma was a physics student who built computers and won a science-fair prize for an analog machine solving differential equations. Years later, watching an early cut of his friend George Lucas's Star Wars, he offered to tighten its clumsy opening text crawl.
De Palma was born in Newark, New Jersey, on September 11, 1940, the youngest of three sons of an orthopaedic surgeon whose family came from Alberona in Apulia. Raised in Philadelphia and New Hampshire, he finished at the Quaker Friends' Central School. His relationship with his father was poor; as a teenager he secretly trailed him to document an affair, an episode he later gave to the young character in Dressed to Kill.
At Columbia University, Citizen Kane and Vertigo pulled him from physics towards cinema. After graduating in 1962 he joined the theatre programme at Sarah Lawrence, which had just begun admitting men, and earned an MA in 1964. An early short feature, The Wedding Party, shot in 1963, featured an unknown Robert De Niro, misspelled in the credits as Robert Denero. His documentary Dionysus in '69 used split screen to follow actors and audience at once, a device that became a signature. Greetings, again with De Niro, took a Silver Bear at Berlin.
He moved to Hollywood at 30, where a miserable experience with Tommy Smothers on Get to Know Your Rabbit was followed by smaller films including Obsession, a riff on Vertigo scored by Bernard Herrmann. Carrie, released in November 1976, was a modest, underfunded United Artists project adapted from a Stephen King novel that was not yet a bestseller. It became his first real hit and earned Oscar nominations for Sissy Spacek and Piper Laurie. Because its casting overlapped with Star Wars, several actors were considered for both films.
De Palma wanted to be an American Godard, and his work is full of homage: Hitchcock echoes run through several films, Blow Out reworks Antonioni's Blowup, and Scarface remakes the 1932 Howard Hawks film. Critics have attacked his violence and sexual content, but Roger Ebert and Pauline Kael championed him, and Carrie now sits in the National Film Registry.
Source: Brian De Palma
