The de Palma Decade: Redefining Cinema with Doubles, Voyeurs, and Psychic Teens

Journey with award-winning filmmaker and author Laurent Bouzereau through acclaimed director Brian De Palma’s renowned--and controversial--horror and thriller films that redefined cinema in the 1970s and early 80s with interviews conducted over three decades and fresh takes.

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, melding his signature themes with specific filmmaking techniques that are now synonymous with his name.

Acclaimed filmmaker Laurent Bouzereau explores the seven films that came to define the De Palma decade: Sisters, Phantom of the Paradise, Obsession, Carrie, The Fury, Dressed to Kill, and Blow Out. Combining film analysis, detailed production histories, and interviews with De Palma himself, his casts, and collaborators, Bouzereau presents the definitive record on this unrivaled period of cinematic creativity and the emergence of an auteur who would continue to influence filmmaking in the decades that followed.

Laurent Bouzereau is an award-winning filmmaker and best-selling author. His credits include the HBO feature documentaries Mama’s Boy, based on the best-selling memoir by Dustin Lance Black, and Natalie Wood: What Remains Behind, and the acclaimed Netflix series Five Came Back (with an Emmy winning narration by Meryl Streep), executive produced by Steven Spielberg. Bouzereau has produced and directed numorous benchmark behind-the-scenes documentaries, and is the author of several books on cinema, including The De Palma Decade, Steven Spielberg: The First Ten Years, The Art of Bond, and Hitchcock: Piece by Piece. Laurent and his husband Markus Keith run Nedland Media, a production company based in Los Angeles. Together, they develop and produce both scripted and non-scripted projects, as well as brand marketing for all the major studios.