/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/25639241/MPY_108_18923_R.jpg "Disney Plus has grown big enough to need a top 10 list")
Williams likens his creative process on Phantom to that on another job—one that similarly ended in a box office flop that has, in the years since, been rightfully reappraised. “It’s a bit like Ishtar as a writing assignment,” he says. “I approached Ishtar as an actor.” Both films depict the highs and lows of being an artiste with a certain amount of tongue-in-cheek facetiousness, but they were, first and foremost, “a chance to tell a story,” he explains. “It can be funny, it can be a parody, but if it’s not the truth, it’s not an accurate reflection of the character.” In that sense, Williams’ first career as an actor gave him a leg up on the edgier recording artists of the era. But how did the out-of-work actor, now songwriter, wind up taking a part in the picture for which he was hired to write songs about writing songs?
De Palma first asked Williams, possibly as a joke, to play the downtrodden composer Winslow. With the help of a leather bodysuit, Winslow transforms into the Phantom after his body and soul are destroyed, respectively, by a record press and a record exec. Feeling ill-suited to the imposing role, Williams declined. De Palma went with his old college chum William Finley, who’d already featured in five of the director’s films (he’d go on to appear in another three, plus a handful of Tobe Hooper titles, post-Phantom).
“What Bill Finley did with one eye!” says Williams, noting the strength of his co-star’s performance behind that metallic owl mask. “He’s like a tsunami of naivety, and at the same time, he’s capable of being terrifying. That’s just not me,” he explains. “But Swan, that evil little prick…” Williams and De Palma were at work in the recording studio when the director said, “You know, this Phil Spector-ish thing happens to you when you’re concentrating. How about Swan?” Williams immediately agreed. It was good news for Mommy Longlegs, who writes, “nothing cheers me up like watching Paul Williams absolutely decimate an innocent man’s life”.
Not much of a horror connoisseur himself, Williams describes how, while making Phantom, he and De Palma seemed to trade passions for each other’s craft. “If I was saying, ‘And then the Phantom’s crawling over, and you’re hearing da-da-daaa’”—he sings a mournful melody, —“‘there won’t be a dry eye in the house!,’ he loved it. And then when he’s talking about the scene with the face in the record press, I’m going, ‘You have to get a really close shot of the face!’”
De Palma’s films are chronically accused of prioritizing style over substance. Any former or current teen girl or gay who’s seen Carrie will tell you that’s untrue. But the director does tend to leave his stylistic fingerprints on the lights, camera and action. He has a few signature moves—the point-of-view shot, the split diopter—and his films boast intricately choreographed set pieces, like the heist on wires in Mission: Impossible, and the cat-and-mouse museum encounter in Dressed to Kill. Phantom is no exception. In fact, it takes this desire to put on a show for viewers quite literally: satirizing the depths to which corporate suits will stoop in order to make a buck, and how rabidly fans lap that up.
