By Russell Crawford for
Phantompalooza THE MAJESTIC ON $10 A
DAY Most of the time we would just sit around watching/toking...occasionally they would have us get on the stage, stand there, while they looked through light meters and adjusted the lights. It wasn't work at all! It was fun! I was in the upper balcony when they blew the car up. From what I remember the explosion caught something like a curtain on fire and they used extinguishers. They had big fluorescent Swan Song signs hanging on both sides of the auditorium. A few months later when Bad Company's 1st album came out on Swan Song records, I thought that somehow Phantom got ripped off! ZEN AND THE ART OF
LADDER HOLDING "I GIVE
YOU...BEEF" In the film, where Swan is auditioning singers/groups, the C&W cowboy is none other than former Paul Revere & the Raiders bass player Keith Allison, using the same guitar that he used in the mid sixties on the television show Where the Action Is. Paul Williams was always wearing these fancy threads with a kind of flat pancake hat with a duckbill, maybe a golf or driving hat. Oh yeah, and the platforms. He actually looked like rock royalty when not in costume! THE SWANAGE I didn't get to see the film for the 2nd time until 1988 when it was put out on video. My only regret: not getting autographs!! I had no idea who Paul Williams was! Or that DePalma would become a very famous director. I saw at the end credits that Sissy Spacek was there as a set dresser. THE MAJESTIC
PHANTOMPALOOZA I read all the messages everybody left on your site, and came to the conclusion that there must be a lot of really hip folks in Canada--home of Shania, Rush, 1970 Festival Express, Burton Cummings and the Guess Who, BTO & PHANTOMPALOOZA!!! Hats off to you and Best of Luck. Russell Crawford / Dallas, TX |
I was 17 in December 1973 and my experience with Phantom of the Paradise
was a gas!! I was there during some of the filming in Dallas, but I missed the
wedding scene/party and the concert scene. At my job I was making $2 an hour as a janitor
at a mall, so I wasn't there for every day of filming. They were paying $10 a day for
stage hands, and a few of us janitors wound up there. 
I am the one on the ladder behind Beef's band during the Dry Up Tubbo
scene. I was put up there to look like I was checking the lights. I honestly thought the
actors were having an argument rather than following the script. You probably noticed
Beef's snakeskin outfit with the buckle, a baby rattlesnake encased in plexiglas, but did
you notice the baby crocodile heads that are where the buttons are supposed to be? On his
pants he had this snake that was sewn in going up his leg.
The Swanage is the
old Dallas County Courthouse built in 1890. It is called Old Red and sits across the
street from Dealey Plaza, the site of the Kennedy Assasination and the "birthplace of
Dallas" where the first settler/ founder built the first cabin. It is also across the
street from the old county jail where Jack Ruby was kept and even David Crosby who was
busted here in '85. Old Red actually has gargoyles on the top. Kind of a
snake/dragon with wings and erect phallus. Whenever a tourist asks where the assassination
site is, I always direct them to Dracula's Castle.
Have read the
Majestic is haunted, ie., the switchboard coming on in the middle of the night lighting up
& freaking the security guard, the smell of food cooking when nobody is there. Harry
Houdini played there in the 1920's. Mae West, Duke Ellington, Amos & Andy. We saw King
Crimson, the Mahavishnu Orchestra and Procol Harum there the same year as Phantom.
Received my first traffic ticket right out in front of the theater when they were filming!
For more information on the Majestic Theatre visit their website: 
