De Palma offered Orion his Dressed to Kill project for him to direct while they waited. He agreed, if they could wait another year for him to finish his other commitments. De Palma sought Robert De Niro, who appeared in three of his early films, to replace Travolta. Meanwhile, Elliott receives phone calls from his patient, Bobbi, a pre-op transsexual with homicidal tendencies, and Elliott’s stolen razor.Īfter waffling for over a year, Travolta declined “Prince of the City” for seeming too ordinary. Witness to the murder is high-class prostitute Liz Blake, who describes the perpetrator as a blonde woman in sunglasses with a straight-edge razor. Kate later has a fling with a stranger but her guilt manifests in her deepest fears coming true, culminating in her murder. She explains and then makes a pass at her psychiatrist, Dr. In the finished script, sexually unsatisfied housewife Kate grows overwhelmed with vivid, violent erotic fantasies. De Palma chose a straight-razor for the murder weapons after reading an article that disfigurement was a woman’s greatest fear, while men feared castration, fitting in with the transsexual subtext due to the body shaving and organ removal necessary. Kate’s psychiatrist would be revealed as her killer, a schizophrenic whose murderous female side dominates when he’s aroused as a male. He wrote the screenplay quickly, keeping it short so he could explore lengthy, heavily storyboarded camera sequences. He wanted to hone his visual storytelling skills into a filmmaking style that transcends the content. These fueled his passion to thrill, chill, and terrify audiences through morally ambiguous characters, told through cinema techniques emphasizing style and structure over dialogue and exposition. A Jekyll and Hyde with male and female personas as the murderer in a movie could be a wonderful twist for Dressed to Kill.ĭressed to Kill was conceived as De Palma’s return to Hitchcockian suspense vehicles he’d explored with 1972’s Sisters and 1976’s Obsession. He found the notion of one body fought over as if by two different people eerie yet fascinating. As part of the course, he made the quirky comedy Home Movies, a low-budget effort reminiscent of his early experimental counterculture comedies.ĭe Palma also caught an episode of “The Phil Donahue Show” featuring Nancy Hunt, about her new book, “Mirror Image: The Odyssey of a Male-to-Female Transsexual”. As a script was being written by playwright David Rabe, De Palma took a temporary teaching gig for a screenwriting course at his alma mater, Sarah Lawrence College. Travolta expressed interest in a film adaptation of Robert Daley’s true crime book, “Prince of the City.” Orion paid $500,000 for the film rights, then secured De Palma, who directed Travolta in Carrie, to direct. In 1978, Orion Pictures was eager to develop a project for John Travolta. Variety should keep him, and the audience, from growing fatigued.Īs he worked out the details for Dressed to Kill, De Palma took another studio gig. He felt The Fury misfired because it strayed too closely with Carrie, which also featured telekinesis. De Palma saw Dressed to Kill as his return to the films he made before taking on complicated, big-budget studio efforts. After taking a studio assignment to direct 1978’s The Fury, De Palma repurposed his “Cruising” ideas to embark on a new screenplay about the danger of sex, Dressed to Kill. Ultimately, the studio gave up on De Palma and handed the project to William Friedkin, who started a fresh adaptation. In the stranger’s apartment building elevator, she’s stabbed to death by the killer. Kate later meets a stranger in a museum, and has a fling, discovering afterward that he has an STD. De Palma added a character not found in “Cruising”, a bored housewife named Kate, who experiences erotic fantasies of being forcefully taken by a stranger. Goodbar”, where a woman leads a double life to explore her sexual awakening. After the studio rejected this version, De Palma’s added another element, borrowing both from the formula of Psycho and from the 1975 novel, “Looking for Mr. De Palma changed the nature of the killer from a college student to a failed actor who films his murders with a video camera, an homage to Michael Powell’s 1960 film Peeping Tom. The seed for Dressed to Kill was planted in 1974 when filmmaker Brian De Palma adapted Gerald Walker’s 1970 novel, “Cruising”, about an undercover cop searching underground gay clubs for a serial killer.
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