Although Norton had said she was fired from the movie Tron (1982), she shared an Oscar nomination for her work on that film with Elois Jenssen. The Variety obit by Pat Saperstein highlights Norton's work in designing "Sissy Spacek’s iconic prom dress for Carrie:

“We had no money,” she recalled in a video interview about “Carrie.” She found many of the prom outfits in a store in the Valley that was going out of business, she said. But she had Carrie’s simple pale pink satin dress custom-made by a seamstress after changing the color from the original red in the book to create a more striking contrast with the blood that is splashed on Spacek.

“At the time, prom dresses and bridesmaid dresses and things were very fussy. They had all these ruffles and detail and I wanted to do….a bias cut dress and I wanted it to be really simple and look as if she could have made it herself,” she told Birth Movies Death. “It didn’t have a lot of ruffles or detail work. It’s sort of a classic 1930s bias cut dress. I wanted her to look different from everybody else but beautiful at the same time, and all the other girls, they looked like teenage girls wearing these sort of ruffly, fancy, gathered dresses.”

Other films included Joan Micklin Silver’s Chilly Scenes of Winter (1979), Airplane! (1980), Airplane II (1982), RoboCop 2 (again with Nancy Allen, in 1990), Cisco Pike (1971), and The Stunt Man (1980).

Pointer was mother to Amy Irving - and she was also Amy Irving's on-screen mother in Carrie (1976). This was the second time that Brian De Palma had cast a real-life mother-daughter duo in one of his films, having done so in Sisters (1972), with Mary Davenport playing mother to her real-life daughter Jennifer Salt. Earlier this month, in a Criterion "Closet Picks" video, Amy Irving pulled out a copy of David Lynch's Blue Velvet (1986), in which Priscilla appeared as Kyle MacLachlan's mother. "Mom's a hundred years old now," Amy says in the video, "and still going strong. And she and I do this kind of film sessions at her assisted living facility. And Blue Velvet was one of them."

Here's an excerpt from the Los Angeles Times obituary:

For 44 episodes of CBS’ series “Dallas,” Pointer played Rebecca Barnes Wentworth, Pamela and Cliff’s mother and the head of a rival oil family. In the 1976 movie “Carrie” she played Mrs. Snell, mother to Sue Snell, who was played by her daughter Amy.

She was just shy of her 101st birthday, according to a family statement obtained by The Times.

“Priscilla had a long acting career. She met her first husband Jules Irving in Europe just after WWII in an army production of ‘Brother Rat,’” the statement said. “They returned to the U.S. and formed the Actor’s Workshop in San Francisco. The company eventually took over the Vivian Beaumont Theater in NYC.”

Pointer, who was born in New York City on May 18, 1924, began her stage career in the city the 1940s. She was was married to Irving from 1947 until his death in 1979, moving out west with him after the war. They returned to New York City as the San Francisco troupe was winding down and Irving served as artistic director of Manhattan’s Lincoln Center from 1965 to 1972. The couple moved to Southern California after he retired, settling down in Santa Monica.

After her first husband died, Pointer married Robert Symonds. The two knew each other from San Francisco, and Symonds had moved to New York from California to work as Irving’s associate director at the Lincoln Center.

Symonds recalled meeting Pointer for the first time at the Actor’s Workshop in San Francisco, where she was “sitting at a desk typing a letter,” he told The Times in 1997. “I remember she was very, very pretty.”

Former Times staff writer Daryl H. Miller dubbed Pointer a “natural beauty.”

“Whether hunkered on the floor petting a dog or sitting pertly on a couch,” he wrote, “she is regal yet casual, arresting yet homespun.”

Amy Irving told The Times in 1997 that her mother and Symonds were “unbelievably well-suited” as a couple. “I know my mom and dad were deeply in love with each other, but Mom and Bob have so much in common,” she said. “There’s such harmony in their lives, a really nice balance. They spark each other.”

The couple’s joint projects included the 1984 Blake Edwards film “Micki & Maude,” in which they played Ann Reinking’s parents, and the 1993 South Coast Repertory production of “Morning’s at Seven,” in which they played brother- and sister-in-law. “First Love” at the Odyssey Theater in 2003 and the 2000 production of Athol Fugard’s “Road to Mecca” at the Fountain Theatre in Hollywood were also twofer shows.

When Pointer and Symonds worked together on the 1997 production of “Fighting Over Beverly,” also at the Fountain, they rehearsed at home and carpooled across town to the theater, but their characters weren’t supposed to have seen each other in 50 years.

“That really requires acting,” Pointer told The Times, “because instead of having known him for 43 years, I have to pretend — and so does he — that we haven’t seen each other since we were 18.”

“The unflappable Pointer sails above the general mayhem with a ladylike aplomb that makes her subsequent emotional epiphany all the more moving,” The Times wrote about Pointer’s performance in that show.

The prologue spiritually anticipates Żuławski’s Possession - thanks to its disturbing, free-flowing wide-angle dollies - and is visually reminiscent of John D Hancock’s brilliant Let’s Scare Jessica To Death with its eerily idyllic soft light. Carrie (Sissy Spacek) gets her first period in the school shower and panics, unsure of what’s happening. Her classmates seize the moment for cruelty. Already within these first voyeuristic minutes, the supernatural surfaces, as does De Palma’s bravura visual eclecticism.

The remaining premise is dead simple. Penalised for the abuse, Carrie’s classmates scheme to get even with her via public humiliation. The story doesn’t keep us waiting for the main event long: the Prom with a capital-P. This sequence is to Carrie what the post-iceberg section is to Titanic; tragedy is foretold, but De Palma guides us to invest emotionally elsewhere, to keep rooting for Carrie. She makes a playful pact with the devil earlier, and so do we, surrendering to the director's choreography of spectatorship. One scene in particular is unforgettable: the camera swirls around Carrie and Tommy (William Katt), the popular boy who asked her to Prom, on the dance floor, not merely observing but pulling us into the rhythm, the dreaminess of it. It’s a pure, immersive moment that feels miraculous amid all the sweetly trashy sacrilege De Palma pioneers across the film.

The irreverent score, the gothic art direction, and Mario Tosi’s kaleidoscopic, slithering cinematography coalesce into something mesmeric. At one point, De Palma speeds up the footage and sound as Tommy and co. try on their Prom suits. It should come off as cheap and jarring. Instead, we’re so in sync with the film’s flow and confidence that we accept it without hesitation, and adore it for its audacity. This was one of those rare screenings at Warsaw's Timeless Film Festival with no guests, no Q&A, just a plain festival slot, that ended with a spontaneous ovation. That’s the enduring power of Carrie: a film so so alive with invention it stirs up astonishment, and love, decades on: the Prom Queen of the greatest decade in horror, still ruling.

The Palisades Fire roared through Pacific Palisades on Tuesday, and has burned more than 21,000 acres as of Friday afternoon.

Reports Tuesday night appeared to show Palisades Charter High School was engulfed in flames. A Los Angeles-based TV reporter and cameraman were fighting the fires as darkness fell. The cameraman, who went to Palisades High, said: "This is heartbreaking. This is my alma mater. The baseball field is totally gone, some of the buildings are gone."

Despite the carnage the Southern California fires have left in the surrounding community, there’s something the Pacific Palisades community can smile about — the home of the Dolphins is intact.

I went to the Palisades Charter campus on Friday afternoon to see what the status of the school was. What was left? What’s gone? How bad is it?

The answers: A lot. Not a lot. Not that bad — and that’s good.

The backside of the campus saw damage. A number of classrooms and some bungalow-type buildings burned down, but a majority of the campus is unscathed.

The football field and baseball field are fully intact. The front of the school, where a large grass quad sits, is as green as can be. The basketball gym is untouched. The aquatic center is in great shape.

"There’s no telling when students will be back on campus and in classrooms," Fattal writes. "It’s possible some athletic activity, like basketball and soccer practice can take place so those teams can play games, but the overall condition of the school is in good standing considering the apocalyptic images seen from this week’s wildfires in Los Angeles."

Witney Seibold, Slash Film

In Chu's film, future Wicked Witch Elphaba is an illegitimate child born with green skin and "Carrie"-like telekinetic powers, powers which she uses when the local brats make fun of her color. Elphaba will eventually grow up to be a stalwart and not terribly interesting young woman played by Cynthia Erivo. Erivo is an excellent singer and can certainly belt out the show's bigger numbers with a Broadway baby's aplomb, but her performance otherwise is frustratingly subdued. It's as if she's afraid to show any actual wickedness, anger, joy, or any other emotion beyond intense frustration and mild concern.

The same might be said of Ariana Grande (credited in the film as Ariana Grande-Butera for reasons you can read here), who plays Galinda (the future Glinda). Elphaba meets Galinda at Shiz University, presented as a Hogwarts-like school for witches and warlocks (despite it just being the college for all of Oz) where Elphaba's little sister Nessarose (Marissa Bode) has been accepted. Galinda is presented as a vapid, shallow valley-girl-type character, more concerned with fashion and popularity than skill or achievement. Grande, a professional pop star, can likewise hit the high notes, but rarely brings any kind of lifelike expressions to her Beverly-Hills-inflected performance.

Elphaba unwittingly performs a feat of telekinesis in front of Shiz University's headmistress, Madame Morrible (Michelle Yeoh), and the young witch is accepted on the spot, not even having applied. Elphaba and Galinda become roommates, and one might expect the two actresses to downshift into cattiness mode as they discover their mutual loathing for one another. Song lyrics assure the audience that loathing is indeed developing, but I see nothing of that on the lead actresses' faces or in their performances.

A lot happens before the main title appears, most importantly a recap of Elphaba’s birth. Attended to by her ursine nanny Dulcibear and a goat obstetrician, Elphaba’s entry into the world is greeted with shock. When her father, Governor Thropp (Andy Nyman), sees the baby’s pea green skin he shrieks, “Take it away!” In a clever moment right out of Carrie, Elphaba demonstrates her instinctual powers even as a newborn when surgical instruments go flying up to the ceiling.

Wicked’s greatest dramatic asset, even more so than Schwartz’s score, is Holzman’s brutally efficient book. In crafting the stage musical, which charts Elphaba’s rise from undergraduate outcast at Shiz University to the Most Wanted Witch in Oz, Holzman and Schwartz identified the exact amount of exposition, backstories, and comic asides that they needed to expand a fantasy world and communicate their characters, cutting every second of excess fluff. On stage, Elphaba finishes belting the roof-raising “The Wizard and I,” in which she dreams of becoming famous and being “de-greenified,” and then immediately steps a few feet stage left to launch into a rageful duet, “What Is This Feeling?,” with Glinda. There’s no transition, no perfunctory dialogue—the show just barrels shrewdly from essential moment to essential moment.

The film, conversely, takes its sweet time, adding longer scenes between every song, including lots of silly banter for Glinda’s reimagined entourage (Bowen Yang and Bronwyn James), even if there’s almost no changes to the plot. On screen, Wicked feels self-consciously elongated whenever it stretches beyond the musical’s exoskeleton, as if the idea of making a lengthy movie predated the plan for what to do with all the extra minutes. The scene in which Glinda reaches out to Elphaba by mirroring her awkward dance moves at a party can be a tearjerker on stage, but the slow-motion treatment here as the dance goes on and on drains it of emotional energy.

Wicked’s frequent patches of sluggishness are particularly frustrating because so much of the film—especially the songs—is glorious. As in In the Heights, Chu excels at timing shots to match the music precisely, treating Schwartz’s music with an invigorating reverence. When Glinda sings the line, “Of course, I’ll rise above it,” the melody leaps up on the word “rise” and the camera pans upward. Since Chu’s stylistic vigor is essentially playful, Wicked shimmers most distinctively in the comic set pieces, especially “What Is This Feeling?,” choreographed with giddily vicious energy. Much of the broader musical staging, like the ensemble’s dizzying leaps across a series of spinning clock faces in “Dancing Through Life,” is stunning.

Between Oz’s stark, bright colors, the sweeping shots of winged monkeys in flight, and soaring gestures toward the iconography of The Wizard of Oz, Alice Brooks’s cinematography can sometimes offer an exhilarating sensory overload. In the opening sequence, undergirded by newly percussive orchestrations, the camera captures an incandescent rainbow before flying over Dorothy and company making their way across the Yellow Brick Road. Wicked was, perhaps, the last great mega-musical, following in the footsteps of less nimble, more somber shows like Les Misérables and The Phantom of the Opera: Unlike those musicals’ lackluster stage-to-screen adaptations, the world rendered here actually feels huge and wild and full enough to encompass a reality worthy of the largesse suggested on stage.

For devotees looking to see Wicked explode on to the screen, then, Chu’s vision won’t disappoint. Neither will his commitment to ceding several minutes of the film to a series of Broadway cameos that go on for long enough that newcomers to the Wicked-verse may be completely lost. If the utterly campy sequence, which unsubtly pokes fun at a rumored behind-the-scenes feud from 2003, isn’t targeted at casual audiences, the filmmakers are, at least, unapologetic and self-aware in catering to the viewers primed to care the most.

Fortunately, neophyte audiences won’t require any extra knowledge to fully appreciate the freshness blooming from the central performances. Erivo blends her film experience and Broadway bona fides to offer an Elphaba that marries the smallest of gestures—a sweet, inward smile before she launches into her hopeful “The Wizard and I,” for example—with the stadium-sized bravado of her “Defying Gravity.” Though the screenplay’s additions flesh out her character superficially—Elphaba pedantically corrects Glinda’s grammar—Erivo offers a slightly snarky sweetness that makes the role feel unusually layered.

Erivo uniquely takes advantage of all the extra runtime to deepen her characterization, carefully exploring Elphaba’s self-loathing (she blames herself for her mother’s death and her sister’s disability) and the past hurt that fuels her burgeoning activist bent. And the presence of a Black actress in the role reinforces how much Wicked is a barely disguised allegory about skin color and the flammable potency of vilifying the Other for political gain. Erivo actually pushes back against the script’s emphasis on Elphaba’s Carrie-like powers that wreak havoc whenever her emotions get the better of her: She makes Elphaba’s overlooked wit and care and intelligence infinitely more interesting than her magical potential.

Aiding in this redefinition of the character, of course, is the actress’s voice. While Elphabas on Broadway have famously added flamboyant vocal riffs to “The Wizard and I” or “Defying Gravity,” they’ve been constrained by certain stylistic limitations about adapting the score. Erivo seems to have freer rein to shape the role around her own gifts. Especially in the tenderly wistful ballad “I’m Not That Girl,” she weaves liquid melismas into the melody, tendrils of Elphaba’s longing that will surely become a new gold standard for interpreting the song.

If Grande’s fluttery Glinda doesn’t equivalently redefine the role, it’s still an astutely funny, splendidly sung performance. Whenever Grande hits especially high soprano notes, Glinda’s on-screen posse breaks out into applause, perhaps a little meta wink at the naysayers who doubted whether Grande had the vocal chops to sing the role. She not only does, but she’s also refreshingly unafraid to make Glinda quite cruel at the start of the film. Most Wicked castings tend to tilt toward one protagonist or the other—it’s Elphaba’s story or it’s Glinda’s, depending on who’s in the roles—but the pairing here provides a lovely balance, with Holzman and Dana Fox’s extended script giving them both, at least, extra room to grow.

"It initially started as a conversation that Amazon initiated, and they said, 'Hey, would you have any interest in Carrie?'" Flanagan told MovieWeb in a recent interview. "And I had to think about it, because my first instinct is always — why? It's been done perfectly by De Palma, it's then been done three other times after the fact. Why do it again?" He explained: "Carrie White is a story about high school violence and bullying, and that feels immediate and important today, unfortunately, even more kind of sharply relevant than I think it was when he wrote it. So there felt like a chance for some true modernization beyond just changing the time period, and to use it to talk about the issues that affect high school kids in America today. You know," elaborated Flanagan, "Carrie White walking through a metal detector is interesting to me. Carrie White with social media. The iconic scene in the locker room is very different when people have phones in their hands. So that was the first germ of an idea, like, there is room for this to actually have a lot to say that's very relevant. And I can't spoil the changes that we made in order to kind of find a story that felt like it needed to be told. But we made some pretty substantial changes."

Flanagan continued: ""When I brought it to Stephen King — because that's the other side of this, if Steve says no, he doesn't want to see it happen, we're not going to do it; I'm not about to do that in that relationship. And so when I mentioned it to him and said, 'What do you think about Carrie for TV?' He said, 'Well, why? Leave her alone . She's good, she's done. I'd rather we focus on other things.' But when I sent him kind of the layout of how I saw it could work, he really liked it," added Flanagan. "And he came back and said, 'Actually, yes, I think this is interesting, and I think this could be really relevant and could be really exciting.' And so that was when I said yeah, we should do this. I can't talk more about it, other than we're in the writers' room. We're having a great time, and I think we're going to tell a story that will be surprising and impactful, very relevant to our modern society and to issues in our country."

"My oldest son is 14 years old," explained Flanagan on a more personal note, "and I look at him as I'm working on this story, and think it's important for his generation. I think there'll be something in there that I hope will be useful to them in this world. But yeah, I'm really glad we're doing it. I'm having a blast." Flanagan concluded: "But it was a surprise to me as well that it emerged as a priority. Because my initial reaction was, why do it? Which, in fairness, I had the same reaction when we first talked about adapting The Turn of the Screw for [The Haunting of] Bly Manor . It's been done dozens of times, that thing is just worn out. Why? Why approach it? And we found an approach that made it feel like, yes, absolutely, this is a story worth telling. So, yeah, I think it's going to be very, very interesting for people, and I think it'll be surprising."

Fargeat has always gravitated towards a smorgasbord of different genres, including “action, Westerns, horror, body horror, sci-fi, fantasy”. The filmmaker tells me that she adored “everything that allowed me to go outside of reality and be in a world where the rules were different and were a great window to creative, often crazy imaginations. It goes from the first Star Wars trilogy to the movies from [David] Cronenberg, which had a big impact on me.” She also cites Paul Verhoeven’s RoboCop and the surrealism of David Lynch: “They all played specific roles at different ages of my life, building my imagination and my way of envisioning the world.”

Growing up in France, Fargeat recalls feeling “quite bored” and that everyday life was “inadequate”; the entertaining adventures and “sense of rebellion” in genre films provoked “strong emotions, whether it was fear, passion, thrill… I was feeling alive.” Dark comedy played a large role in her cinematic coming-of-age as well, particularly the silent satire of Charlie Chaplin. “It’s really two legs that I have with me,” she says. “The more genre, imaginative one, and the more satirical comedy—which is also something that creates strong emotions.”

In The Substance, satire converges with body-horror to metaphorically metamorphosize into its own beast. Fargeat lists Cronenberg’s The Fly as a definite inspiration for the literal metamorphosis featured in her film, as well as the enduring imagery of the blood tsunami pouring out of the elevator in The Shining, and, of course, the climactic prom scene from Carrie. (While the filmmaker admits that she hasn’t yet seen Society, it’s now on her watchlist since so many people have mentioned it after witnessing her penchant for grotesquely organic practical effects).

“All those movies, filmmakers have seen the work of other filmmakers who’ve digested what they’ve seen and what other filmmakers did,” Fargeat says. “I love the fact that there is some kind of common creativity somewhere that each one redigests in its own way, with its own world and its own theme. I truly believe that we are, in the end, the result of what we watch, what we read, what we’re exposed to, and all of this lives with us… We are growing ourselves, feeding ourselves from all those influences, whether they are conscious or unconscious.”