SET PICS FROM 'SISTERS'


Goregirl's Dungeon yesterday posted several production stills from the set of Brian De Palma's Sisters, including the one above, of De Palma and Margot Kidder.

VIDEO: MAITLAND MCDONAGH ON 'SISTERS'
ARROW'S DVD/BLU WILL HAVE NEW INTVS WITH JENNIFER SALT, PAUL HIRSCH, LOUISA ROSE, JEFFREY HAYES
Bloody Disgusting has an exclusive video of Maitland McDonagh talking about Brian De Palma's Sisters, which will (maybe?) be part of the extras on Arrow Video's upcoming Blu-Ray/DVD edition of the film. McDonagh wrote an essay about De Palma's Dressed To Kill for Arrow's Blu-Ray edition of that film, released last year. There are a couple of curious discrepancies here, though: for one, while the video shows that Sisters will be released April 14, the Arrow website shows the release date as April 28; the other odd thing is that the Bloody Disgusting headline calls the Maitland McDonagh video an "outtake," although the article by MrDisgusting never uses that word once.

In any case, don't get excited-- there does not appear to be any promise that the upcoming release will include outtakes from the film itself. Whether or not the Maitland McDonagh interview is itself an outtake remains to be seen, as she is not listed in the list of extras included in the Bloody Disgusting article, but MrDisgusting does call the video "one of the extras." Here are the extras that are listed:

- Brand new High Definition digital transfer
- High Definition Blu-ray (1080p) and Standard Definition DVD presentation
- Original Mono audio (uncompressed PCM on the Blu-ray)
- What the Devil Hath Joined Together: Brian De Palma’s Sisters – A visual essay by author Justin Humphreys (47 mins)
- All new interviews with co-writer Louisa Rose, actress Jennifer Salt, editor Paul Hirsch and production manager Jeffrey Hayes
- The De Palma Digest – a film-by-film guide to the director’s career by critic Mike Sutton
- Archive audio interview with star William Finley (excerpt)
- Gallery of Sisters promotional material from around the world
- Theatrical trailer
- Reversible sleeve featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Graham Humphreys
- Collector’s booklet featuring new writing on the film by author Kier-La Janisse (House of Psychotic Women), Brian De Palma’s original 1973 Village Voice essay on working with composer Bernard Herrmann as well as a contemporary interview with De Palma on making Sisters, and the 1966 Life magazine article that inspired the film, illustrated with original archive stills

Incidentally, in the video at Bloody Disgusting, McDonagh mentions William Castle's Homicidal, contrasting that film's lack of critical attention to the type of attention De Palma's Sisters received upon its release. De Palma listed Homicidal as one of his "Guilty Pleasures" in an article for Film Comment back in the 1980s.

ARROW'S 'SISTERS' BLU-RAY APRIL 14
MORE DETAILS TO BE ANNOUNCED CLOSER TO RELEASE DATE


According to Twitch, Arrow Video announced its "Q2 line-up" today, and it includes a release date for its Blu-ray edition of Brian De Palma's Sisters, which will be released April 14th. Along with a high-definition digital transfer of the film, the edition will have "newly created exclusive content- Reversible sleeve featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Graham Humphreys- Collector’s booklet featuring new writing on the film, archive content and more!- More to be announced closer to the release date." Arrow's Blu-ray of Phantom Of The Paradise is officially released Monday (February 24th).

'SISTERS' IS A 'FURIOUS WASP'S NEST OF A WORK'
"IS IT OKAY TO WATCH THIS?"
Brian De Palma's Sisters screened in Chicago last night as part of Doc Films' De Palma Retrospective, running Wednesdays through March at the University of Chicago. Cine-File included the screenings (it was shown twice) in the "Crucial Viewing" portion of its weekly guide to alternative cinema. Contributor Kian Bergstrom wrote very enthusiastically about the film:

"After a decade in training," Bergstrom begins, "making movies that are variously interesting (GREETINGS, THE RESPONSIVE EYE), fascinating (HI, MOM!, MURDER A LA MOD), or catastrophic (GET TO KNOW YOUR RABBIT), De Palma burst into artistic maturity with this astonishingly accomplished and subtle masterpiece. It marks the moment De Palma went from being the geekiest of the American New Wave brats to simply the greatest American filmmaker working, a title he's maintained with an almost unbroken string of subsequent wonders. Like many of De Palma's films, SISTERS is antagonistic towards its audience, barraging us with images of brutality, damaged bodies, damaged people, pushing us uncomfortably interrogating us at all times to defend our continual decision to keep watching. It is as though every segment were structured around a question, asked of the audience, as to whether the upcoming visual offense would finally prove to be too much for us to justify. Is it OK to watch this? would be film's ideal motto, with the emphasis on the question mark. At its heart are the Blanchion twins (in a disarming and mesmerizing performance by Margot Kidder), conjoined at birth but surgically cloven from one another as young women. A young model in New York, Danielle picks up a fellow game show contestant, only to find her erotic trajectory frustrated by her astonishingly creepy ex-husband, Emil. Eluding Emil, the amorous couple finds their way into bed together with the casual revelation that the next day will be Danielle's birthday. But that birthday brings with it not joy but murder as Dominique, the evil twin of sweet-natured Danielle takes control of the narrative. As always with De Palma, though, there's much more at play than there seems. Quick as a knife-strike, he introduces the real main character, Jennifer Salt's Grace Collier, a combative investigative journalist whose apartment overlooks the twins' abode. Desperate to discover who her strange neighbors really are, and what they really did with the body she saw killed there, Grace and a private detective pry into the history of the Blanchions, only to discover that peering to closely into their lives threatens indeed their own very existences. SISTERS moves rapidly through a succession of set-pieces, each extraordinary in stylization, exacting in execution, and monstrous in implication: invasions of privacy, hypnotism, madness, and horrifying errors of judgment. This is a film troubled by doubles, by two detectives, by two policemen, by twins, and also by duplication: the duplication of a person when death strikes, the duplication of an image by the television screen, the duplication of cells within a woman's womb, the duplication of space by the split screen. Many critics of De Palma see him as working in hermetic structures, narratives so precise and specifically and idiosyncratically realized that his films are comprehensible only when we understand them to be entries in grand artistic conversations with his inspirations (Hitchcock, Hawks, Lang, Welles). They miss so much: the nausea the film expresses towards the casual misogyny and power of the mysterious Emil; the fragility of the social world, as easily ripped to shreds as a Grace's thin shirt; the arbitrariness of the normal, broken and shattered by the slightest action. SISTERS is no insular work, pillaging all its best ideas from Hollywood's graying masters, but a living, beating, furious wasp's nest of a work, stable at a distance, but ready to explode with the slightest touch."

'SISTERS' AT AFI SILVER THEATRE NEXT WEEK
SUNDAY & WEDNESDAY AS PART OF "HORROR '73" SERIES IN MARYLAND
Brian De Palma's Sisters, which had a remake of its own a few years ago, is included in AFI Silver Theatre's film series, "Horror '73: An Annus Horribilis at 40." A 35mm print of Sisters will be screened this Sunday (October 27) at 9pm, and also on Wednesday (October 30) at 9:15pm. The AFI Silver website explains that 1973 was "a landmark year for horror cinema," noting films such as The Exorcist, Don't Look Now, and The Wicker Man, the latter of which is included in the series in a newly-restored version. The website further states that "Horror '73 offers fans of the genre an opportunity to see nearly 20 of these innovative and diverse experiments in screen terror in their proper setting—a dark theater—with many titles screened from rare archival prints."

EDITOR RECALLS SEEING 'SISTERS' WITH MALICK
"NEITHER OF US HAVE BEEN AS FRIGHTENED AS WE WERE BY THAT MOVIE"


The Playlist's Diana Drumm posted an interview today with Billy Weber, who has worked as editor on several of Terrence Malick's films. Drumm caught up with Weber at this years TCM Classic Film Festival. In the following passage, Weber recalls attending an early Los Angeles film festival called FilmX to catch a midnight screening of Brian De Palma's Sisters:

"A screening of Brian DePalma’s Sisters helped cement the friendship between Weber and Malick
'I was hired by someone named Bob Estren, who was the original, first editor on Badlands, who hired me to be his assistant... Before they started shooting, I had to go pick up a check from him to go get the editorial equipment to rent and so I went to the house he was staying in at the time and that’s how I met Terry,' Weber said. 'Then he went off to shoot the movie and I didn’t see him again until he came back and then we almost immediately became close friends, just have been close friends ever since.'

'While we were working on Badlands, we came to Grauman’s Chinese, to the theater we screened in today, to a midnight screening of FilmX, which was an early L.A. film festival, to see Sisters which Ed Pressman (producer on Badlands) had produced, Brian De Palma had directed. The two of us came together to see it. To this day, neither of us have been as frightened as we were by that movie. It was so scary, so good… We talked about this a year ago, we’ve been friends ever since.'”

'SISTERS' PLAYS HERRMANN SERIES IN CAMBRIDGE
PART OF DOUBLE FEATURE WITH 'TWISTED NERVE' THIS TUESDAY
This Tuesday, August 23, the Brattle Theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts, will pair up Brian De Palma's Sisters with Roy Boulting's Twisted Nerve for a double feature as part of its series, "Music for Movies: Bernard Herrmann Centennial," which began in early July and concludes August 30th. Herrmann's eerie whistled theme from Twisted Nerve was used by Quentin Tarantino in a De Palma-esque sequence of Kill Bill Vol. 1.
(Thanks to Jim!)

ARONOFSKY'S BLACK SWAN OPENS VENICE
VARIETY REVIEW: "SUPERFICIAL ECHOES OF SISTERS & FEMME FATALE"
Darren Aronofsky's Black Swan opens the Venice Film Festival tonight, but a critics preview this morning has created a buzz. Variety's Peter DeBruge is quite taken with the film, calling it "a wicked, sexy and ultimately devastating study of a young dancer's all-consuming ambition" that he feels resembles something closer to Aronofsky's Pi than to Powell & Pressburger's The Red Shoes (the latter being the one most reviews are comparing Black Swan with, along with Aronofsky's The Wrestler). DeBruge also compares the lure of the film to the cinema of Brian De Palma, but finds it closer in execution to David Cronenberg and Roman Polanski:

Already the film has acquired a certain lesbian allure, courtesy of a trailer that somewhat unfairly teases a scandalous [Natalie] Portman-[Mila] Kunis love scene. This footage will no doubt help to entice ballet-averse auds, though "Black Swan" is anything but a Brian De Palma-style erotic escapade (superficial echoes of "Sisters" and "Femme Fatale" notwithstanding).

Aronofsky seems to be operating more in the vein of early Roman Polanski or David Cronenberg at his most operatic. Though the director never immerses us as deeply inside Portman's head as he did Mickey Rourke's in "The Wrestler," the latter third of "Black Swan" depicts a highly subjective view of events that calls to mind the psychological disintegration of both "Repulsion" and "Rosemary's Baby."

MUBI is running a roundup of the reviews as they are posted.

JENNIFER SALT, BIG-TIME SCREENWRITER
EAT, PRAY, LOVE ADAPTED FROM ELIZABETH GILBERT MEMOIR
Jennifer Salt is the co-screenwriter on the film adaptation of Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat, Pray, Love, which opens in theaters today. Salt wrote the screenplay with the film's director, Ryan Murphy, the creator of the TV series Nip/Tuck and Glee. Salt was a regular writer and co-producer for Nip/Tuck.

Salt, of course, is a staple of the early films of Brian De Palma, having appeared in his first feature length project, The Wedding Party, in 1963 (released in 1969), which was made while both attended Sarah Lawrence College (according to Brooks Barnes at the New York Times, De Palma and Salt briefly dated during this time). In 1964, De Palma made a short film about her called Jennifer, and Salt subsequently appeared in De Palma's Murder a la Mod, Hi, Mom!, and Sisters, the latter having been imagined by De Palma specifically with her and Margot Kidder in mind to play the leads. She also appeared in a film written by her late father, Waldo Salt, 1969's Midnight Cowboy, which costarred her then-boyfriend Jon Voight (Salt would appear in one more film with Voight, Paul Williams' The Revolutionary, released the same year as the similarly-themed Hi, Mom!). Salt told Backstage's Jenelle Riley that her father had originally thought of a small role for her in Midnight Cowboy, but that role became bigger when she met with director John Schlesinger. Barnes' New York Times article, which features quotes from De Palma, briefly discusses this early part of Salt's career:

The early 1970s found [Salt] living (and partying) in Malibu, Calif., with Margot Kidder, who would go on to play Lois Lane in three “Superman” films. Drawn by Ms. Salt’s cooking and both women’s tendency to sunbathe topless were some dudes: Martin Scorsese, Brian De Palma, Steven Spielberg. (“To see those pale city boys running around on the beach with no clothes on was so charming,” Ms. Salt recalled. Said Mr. De Palma, “She cooked so well she could get us to do almost anything.”)

Salt went into television, acting for a long time on the TV series Soap before becoming disillusioned with it all, and eventually realizing that she never really wanted to be an actress after all. Here is how she told it to Riley at Backstage:

"I was doing nice guest shots on TV, but it just wasn't happening in a creative and fulfilling way," she says. "The roles I was up for—mostly mom roles—were dreary. And my enthusiasm for working on them and for auditions was very low." She had an epiphany. "Over the course of your life, you realize more and more who you are and how you want to spend your time," she reflects. "And it became clearer and clearer that I was very unhappy as an actress and didn't feel comfortable in my own skin. When I was younger I thought it was because I wasn't successful enough. But as I got older I realized it had more to do with the fact that I just didn't love it."

The two interview articles linked to above are great, and for another really great interview in which Salt discusses working with De Palma in depth, check out Cult Film Freak. The undated interview appears to be from around the late 2000's (maybe even 2009). When asked which of the directors she worked with provided the most freedom for an actor, Salt replies:

Without a doubt, Brian De Palma. Back in the late 60's and early 70's there was much more freedom in filmmaking. Brian was always experimenting with new ideas and wanted equal input from everyone. He was willing to hear and try nearly anything you could think of that might help. But I also worked on more than one film with him, so we trusted each other very much and over time we created a formula that worked between us. There was chemistry there by the time production began on Sisters. John [Schlesinger] was also equally open to ideas and he was focused on getting naturalness out of the performances of his actors. But during the duration of the shooting of Midnight Cowboy John was also battling some personal issues that often hampered the flow of the film's progress. Some of the best directors I have ever had the chance to work with were those in television. Many of them are now making theatrical films. There was at least back then much more room for improvisation in television than there is now.

When asked which of her roles she likes best, Salt replied:

I loved playing “Judy Bishop” [in Brian De Palma’s Hi Mom!]. Of course who wouldn't want to work with Bobby De Niro? Naturally back then he was pretty much an unknown, but I still can't believe I shared the screen at one time with him. Of course I still say “Grace Collier” [Sisters] is up there at the top of my short list as well.