"Phantom Of The Paradise" (1974)

Starring: Paul Williams, William Finley, Jessica Harper, George Memmoli, Gerrit Graham.

First, the lowdown: It’s what Webber’s Phantom of the Opera would’ve looked like if done immediately after Starlight Express.

Frank Zappa once posited that if the world is going to come to an end, it wouldn’t be by plague, pestilence, war or natural disaster, but by all of humanity being crushed under an ever-growing wave of nostalgia. This exercise in sequins and eyeliner was the brainchild of Brian De Palma. Yes, the same man who brought Scarface and Dressed to Kill to the screen created this. Paul Williams plays Swan, the head of Death Records, a cornerstone of the recording industry (you heard it right folks, the midget with a pageboy haircut plays a David Geffin/Brian Epstein hybrid while sporting the Herve Villechaize collection). Swan’s current figurehead for his label is the appropriately named band The Juicy Fruits who are spearheading the 1950s nostalgia movement (but in reality look like Sha-Na-Na). After the Juicy Fruits give a saccharine laden do-wop number at Swan’s club, bookish songwriter Winslow Leach (who looks a little TOO much like Randy Newman) gives a solo piano performance to a barely responsive crowd. (The scene is pretty painful in that it points out why many songwriters don’t sing.) Turns out that it’s a passage from a rock operetta to the story of Faust (how original!) that Winslow has created. Knowing a “next big thing” when he sees it, Swan sends out right-hand lackey Philbin to dupe Winslow out of it.

Winslow, too naïve to hire at least 1000 lbs of lawyer before getting into any kind of entertainment deal, willingly gives the score over. After a few months of getting his phone calls ignored and being forcibly ejected from Swan’s office and home (the “Swanage”; hey, at least it’s not “Schwannstein”), Winslow finally gets framed for drug trafficking and put in the big house. Months of prison rapes and experimental dental surgery take their toll and Winslow goes berserk and escapes the hoosegow. His first outlet for his anger is the press house for Death Records. A few minutes into going “Winslow SMASH!” on everything, the cops arrive, Winslow panics, and he gets his noggin caught in a record press. Ouch. Our deluded sap managed to elude capture however, and slink his way to The Paradise, a new theatre of Swan’s design where he dresses up as an Elton-John-meets-Marilyn-Manson caricature. The opening number to said theatre is going to be based off of Winslow’s music with The Juicy Fruits singing it.

Enraged beyond all comprehension, our newly christened Phantom plants a bomb on the stage, which only seems to succeed in scaring the bodily waste out of people. Swan, on the other hand, being the intelligent dwarf he is, catches up with our erstwhile Phantom and promises that he will willingly buy the music and use it as written, if he lays off the killing thing. The Phantom relents, gets a synthesized voice box, and finishes the score while subsiding on a diet consisting entirely of uppers. Meanwhile, Swan has been auditioning talent, but instead of putting the underspoken siren Phoenix (who Winslow has a hankerin’ for), he puts in a reject from T-Rex with Peter Frampton’s stage presence: Beef.

Fed up with everyone, the Phantom inadvertently provides a climax to the Paradise’s opening (during a number that’s supposed to come off as Alice Cooper with KISS trimmings, but in reality reminds one of the Rocky Horror Picture Show) by killing the appropriately named Beef with a light fixture, which puts Phoenix into the limelight. And the rest I leave up to you guys; I’m still compulsively washing myself after seeing Paul Williams get it on.

Line of the movie: “I loathe perfection, unless it is in myself.” Paul Williams - EWWW!

Three stars. Have a nice day.