“They became the establishment”: is Brian De Palma the last holdout of ‘New Hollywood’?
During the late 1960s and early ‘70s, a new crop of hungry young filmmakers smashed their way into Hollywood. They were the first cohort of directors to have received university degrees in filmmaking and were experts on the stylistic hallmarks of earlier directors like Alfred Hitchcock, John Ford, the German Expressionists, and the auteurs behind the French New Wave. The most successful members of the New Hollywood movement went on to become some of the most respected filmmakers of all time, including Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas, Martin Scorsese, and Steven Spielberg.
Early in the movement, Brian De Palma was an undisputed member of this newly dubbed Brat Pack, creating lurid thrillers that demanded respect for their sheer intensity. Movies like Carrie, The Fury, and Dressed to Kill established him as a brash newcomer with a distinctive vision – a style that fell somewhere between Hitchcock and Dario Argento turned up to 11. From the beginning, however, De Palma’s filmography has been uneven, to put it mildly. He’s been nominated for six Razzies, the awards ceremony that honours the year’s worst contributions to cinema, but he’s also created some of the most distinctive and beloved movies of the past five decades, including Carrie, Body Double, and Scarface (the latter of which, incidentally, earned him a Razzie nomination for ‘Worst Director’).
While other members of the Brat Pack flourished through the late ‘90s and beyond, De Palma’s continued to cycle through phases of unexpected successes and abject failures. There were the high points of crowd-pleasing box office hits like The Untouchables and the first Mission: Impossible movie, and the duds, like Mission to Mars, the star-studded catastrophe that was Bonfire of the Vanities, and a 2019 direct-to-video thriller called Domino. Through it all, De Palma has maintained that these wild swings in quality are proof of his purity as a filmmaker. In fact, according to him, he may be the last true member of the New Hollywood movement.
Speaking to The Skinny during the 2013 press tour of his film Passion, the director said, “I’ve always been controversial. 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.”
It’s a provocative statement befitting a director known for his cinematic provocations, but is it accurate? Just because Scorsese, Coppola, Lucas, and Spielberg have reached the height of the Hollywood pyramid doesn’t mean that they had to sell out to get there. On the contrary, the extreme differences between each of them is evidence that they have, in fact, forged their own paths. Lucas and Scorsese took wildly diverging trajectories when Lucas opted for special effects and tentpole franchises while Scorsese stuck to sweeping, character-driven dramas for critics to fawn over. Spielberg found his niche churning out nail-biting blockbusters that pull at your heartstrings, while Coppola has taken an approach more akin to “one for them, one for me” to keep his finances mostly in the black. As a result, his filmography is almost as erratic as De Palma’s, but its highs are even higher, and its lows never fail to be spectacular in their magnitude.
When De Palma calls out his fellow Brat Pack members for becoming the establishment, he’s missing the elephant in the room. They didn’t become the establishment by joining the pre-existing regime; they became the establishment by reshaping nearly every inch of it. In contrast, De Palma has always seemed to be more focused on the past. Rather than trailblazing a new genre or a new financial structure of Hollywood, he has stuck to his roots as a passionate film enthusiast, repurposing the tropes of his cinematic idols into films that, at their best, beguile and galvanise other passionate film enthusiasts. It’s no surprise that Quentin Tarantino is De Palma’s most vocal defender. Despite being an auteur in his own right, Tarantino’s sensibilities were shaped by his appreciation for genre filmmakers who were, in turn, influenced by previous generations of filmmakers, such as Sergio Leone’s repurposing of Akira Kurosawa’s samurai pictures or Jean-Luc Godard’s reverence for Hitchcock.
De Palma deserves plenty of credit for creating some of the most stylish, full-throttle thrillers of the past half century, but saying that he’s the last holdout of New Hollywood is simply inaccurate. If anything, he’s the only member of the Brat Pack whose unique style has not become a ubiquitous part of the Hollywood playbook.
