How Led Zeppelin butchered a Brian De Palma movie
Led Zeppelin didn’t set out to ruin Brian De Palma’s career. They probably hadn’t even heard of the little-known director until an accidental crossover in one of his movies incited the band to take legal action. Their 1974 dispute led to one of De Palma’s most devastating cinematic setbacks, and believe it or not, it continues to this day.
It’s no secret that De Palma has courted controversy throughout his career. The Hitchcock devotee and founding member of the New Hollywood movement has always blurred classic glamour with his own artistic bent toward gore, exploitation, and voyeurism. This has earned him legions of passionate fans (Quentin Tarantino called him the greatest director of his generation) and a handful of powerful detractors (all the studios that have refused to finance his films).
But in 1974, the director had yet to win over mainstream audiences with Carrie or scandalise them with Dressed to Kill. He was just a scrappy filmmaker messing around with split screens and jump-cuts and offending a small group of cinema-goers with releases like the conjoined twin murder thriller Sisters and the grindhouse slasher comedy Murder a la Mod.
His 1974 film Phantom of the Paradise was an ambitious departure that had all the hallmarks of an auteur-driven calling card, but it was curtailed at the eleventh hour. It follows a young musician (William Finley) who sells his compositions to an underhanded music mogul named Swan (Paul Williams). When Swan tries to have him killed, the musician dons a silver birdlike mask and black cape to cover his injuries and begins haunting the theatre where Swan is rehearsing his stolen musical.
Drawing on Faust, The Picture of Dorian Gray, and The Phantom of the Opera, the film is also a rock musical of ecstatic proportions, an unhinged exercise in creative freedom that features splattering gore, Alice Cooper levels of on-stage theatrics, and costumes and sets that are so outlandish they make Flash Gordon look like Dogville.
In the original cut of the film, Swan’s record label, Swan Song Enterprises, is plastered everywhere, signifying how deeply the mogul has entrenched himself in popular culture. Unfortunately for De Palma, after Phantom was filmed and before it was released, Zeppelin manager Peter Grant founded Swan Song Records, the band’s ticket to greater creative freedom and financial control over their music. When he found out that De Palma’s movie featured a nearly identical name, he threatened to take the director and his film to court.
Unable to face the financial burden of a legal battle, De Palma was forced to cover or remove all references to Swan Song Enterprises. This included covering all the lettering and logos with shonky graphics that looked amateurish even in the days before CGI, and slicing out whole sections of dialogue.
Some have suggested that Grant, a former wrestler and bouncer known for invoking his previous lines of work whenever he believed that his musicians needed defending, was retaliating against De Palma for a particular scene in the movie that hit close to home. After the Phantom has begun to terrorise Swan’s theatre, he takes aim at the production’s glam-rock frontman, Beef (Gerrit Graham), lobbing a neon sign shaped like a lightning bolt while he’s on stage. It electrocutes and kills him.
The scene was a direct reference to the on-stage electrocution death of Stone the Crows guitarist and Grant protégé Les Harvey two years before, and whether or not this was the cause for the manager’s ire, he was willing to go to the mat to prevent De Palma from using the very generic phrase “swan song” anywhere in his film. It seems unlikely that he would have been so passionately opposed to the coincidence, considering that De Palma was not a very well-known director at the time and Phantom was not affiliated with a major studio.
It’s possible that the original cut of Phantom of the Paradise was just as messy and disjointed as the butchered version that made it to cinemas and would have bombed in exactly the same way, but fans of De Palma and anyone who sees all the potential leaping from the screen have been desperate to find out for themselves.
Unfortunately, although Led Zeppelin broke up decades ago and Grant died in 1995, the ‘Swan Song Cut’ is still under lock and key. De Palma and several of his most prominent fans, including Shaun of the Dead director Edgar Wright and American Psycho author Bret Easton Ellis, have written to the band’s various surviving entities, begging them to waive their copyright just for the film. 50 years after Phantom’s release, however, they refuse to budge, and the movie remains a niche obsession for a small group of die-hard fans.
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