De Palma and the Movie Brats Body Double

Brian De Palma was one of the five core "Movie Brats" — the generation of American filmmakers who stormed Hollywood in the late 1960s and 1970s. The others were Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, and George Lucas. They shared scripts, gave each other notes, swapped profit participation points in each other's films, and competed for the same actors. In the 1970s, De Palma was considered the most technically gifted of the group. By the 1980s, he was the only one who hadn't broken through to sustained commercial dominance.

In the 1970s, the group called De Palma "the filmmaker"

Edgar Wright, writing for the Criterion Collection, captured the group's internal hierarchy:

"There's a reason that, back in the seventies, fellow movie brats Spielberg, Lucas, and Scorsese would defer to De Palma as 'the filmmaker.'" — Edgar Wright, Criterion Collection (2016) (criterion.com, paywalled)

This deference was rooted in De Palma's formal command — his understanding of how to construct sequences, how to use the camera to tell the story. Martin Scorsese said it directly:

"Brian is a great director. Nobody can interpret things visually like he does: telling a story through a lens." — Martin Scorsese, Projections 7 (1997) (book, not available online)

De Palma's own view of the generation was proud but unsentimental:

"What we did in our generation will never be duplicated." — Brian De Palma, Cultural Daily (2020)

De Palma introduced Scorsese to De Niro

De Palma's most consequential act of friendship within the group had nothing to do with filmmaking technique. He introduced Martin Scorsese to Robert De Niro at a Christmas dinner party in the early 1970s. De Niro had already appeared in three De Palma films — Greetings (1968), The Wedding Party (1969), and Hi, Mom! (1970) — before he ever worked with Scorsese. The introduction led to Mean Streets (1973), then Taxi Driver (1976), Raging Bull (1980), and Goodfellas (1990) — the most important actor-director partnership in American cinema. De Palma received a special thanks credit on Mean Streets.

De Palma also reportedly gave Scorsese the Taxi Driver screenplay, written by Paul Schrader. The chain of influence — De Palma to Scorsese to De Niro to Schrader — runs through several of the most important American films of the 1970s.

De Palma rewrote the Star Wars opening crawl

De Palma and George Lucas held joint casting sessions in 1976 — De Palma casting Carrie, Lucas casting Star Wars. At an early screening of the Star Wars rough cut in 1977, De Palma was characteristically blunt about what didn't work:

"The movie starts in chapter four in a world nobody knows anything about with all these funny names for people... I suggested George set it up like the crawls in the Flash Gordon movies. George had that idea, but it was all gobbledygook basically, so Jay Cocks and I went over the crawl and basically rewrote it so it made some sense." — Brian De Palma, Collider (2016)

Lucas's original crawl ran six paragraphs. De Palma and film critic Jay Cocks rewrote it into the iconic three-paragraph version that audiences know. De Palma also famously mocked The Force at the screening:

"'The Force', I would say, and I kept repeating it. 'It doesn't seem like a great name for this kind of spiritual guidance, The Force'... obviously I was terribly wrong about that." — Brian De Palma, IndieWire (2016)

Steven Spielberg, who was also present, captured De Palma's personality: "If you know Brian, that's the way he is. He does that to everybody; he's very caustic."

Pauline Kael was the critical glue that held De Palma's reputation together

Kael championed De Palma more aggressively than she championed any of his peers. Her review of Carrie (1976) established the terms:

"De Palma has mastered a teasing style — a perverse mixture of comedy and horror and tension, like that of Hitchcock or Polanski, but with a lulling sensuousness." — Pauline Kael, The New Yorker (1976)

By The Fury (1978), Kael was making extraordinary claims:

"No Hitchcock thriller was ever so intense, went so far, or had so many 'classic' sequences." — Pauline Kael, The New Yorker (1978) (not available online)

And by Blow Out (1981), she placed De Palma alongside Coppola:

"Each time a new film of his opens, everything he has done before seems to have been preparation for it." — Pauline Kael, The New Yorker (1981)

The Kael-De Palma relationship was so intense that Michael Sragow compared it to the great critic-artist pairings: "As critic and creator, Kael and De Palma became as strongly linked as Edmund Wilson and F. Scott Fitzgerald, or Malcolm Cowley and William Faulkner." But Kael's advocacy came at a cost — "Praise of Brian De Palma was one of the things she got rapped for the most." When Kael reviewed Body Double (1984) with disappointment, it stung De Palma precisely because she had been his most important defender.

De Palma never became the establishment

The other Movie Brats all found a way into the Hollywood establishment. Spielberg and Lucas built empires. Scorsese became the prestige conscience of American cinema. Coppola founded American Zoetrope and became an institution. De Palma remained the provocateur who couldn't — or wouldn't — play the game.

"I'm not like my peers that went to Hollywood in the 70s... They became the establishment, but I'm not liked in certain quarters of the industry because I've always tried to do things on my own terms. I see myself as an outsider." — Brian De Palma, The Skinny (2013)

The French critics at Cahiers du Cinema valued him differently. They voted De Palma's Carlito's Way (1993) the best film of the entire 1990s — an assessment that would have been unthinkable in the American critical establishment, which spent the decade debating whether De Palma was a serious filmmaker at all.

Laurent Bouzereau, in The De Palma Decade (2024), captured the paradox: "Among a crop of fresh filmmakers including Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, Martin Scorsese, and Francis Ford Coppola revolutionizing Hollywood in the '70s, Brian De Palma — a director from Philadelphia with a few social satires under his belt — charted a cinematic path unlike any of his peers. At times he was unfairly dismissed as a Hitchcock copycat; other times he was misunderstood for his peculiar mix of sexuality, humor, and violence. But, over the course of ten years, he created a new cinematic language." (hachette)