Sisters was also known as Blood Sisters in some selected film markets.

Brian DePalma's wicked sense of humor emerges at strange points during Sisters. Note the scene where the two game show contestants - Danielle and Phillip - receive door prizes for their participation. Danielle gets a set of steak knives (which she will soon use!) and Phillip receives dinner for two at Manhattan's Famous Jungle Room (a possible dig at game show producers awarding gifts based on cultural stereotypes).

Sisters is also one of the few films of its era to feature an interracial romance and kissing scene which may have received more attention if it was a bigger commercial release with well-known stars. Even The Mighty Quinn (1989), which was made almost twenty years later, and starred Denzel Washington and Mimi Rogers didn't allow audiences to see a kissing scene between Washington and Rogers (it was cut after preview audiences reacted negatively).

Brian De Palma began making films as a student, first at Columbia, and later at Sarah Lawrence College. His 1962 short, "Woton's Wake", won him several awards and featured William Finley in the role of Woton. Finley would continue to work as an actor for De Palma in Murder a la Mod (1968), The Wedding Party (1969), Dionysus in '69 (1970), Sisters, Phantom of the Paradise (1974), The Fury (1978), Dressed to Kill (1980) and The Black Dahlia (2006).

De Palma's first feature film, The Wedding Party (produced in 1966 but not released until 1969) is best remembered as the feature film debuts of Robert De Niro and Jill Clayburgh. De Niro would also star in De Palma's Greetings (1968) and Hi, Mom! (1970).

After completing The Fury in 1977, De Palma took a break from Hollywood production and taught filmmaking at Sarah Lawrence College for the 1977-78 session. The end result of his time there was Home Movies (1980), a low-budget comedy made with the assistance of Sarah Lawrence film students.

Actress Jennifer Salt, who plays Grace in Sisters, was a friend of De Palma's during his early years in New York and has appeared in three other films by him: Murder a la Mod, The Wedding Party and Hi, Mom!. She is the daughter of screenwriter Waldo Salt (Midnight Cowboy [1969], Serpico [1973], Coming Home [1978]) and actress Mary Davenport (This Gun for Hire [1942], Home Movies, Dressed to Kill). For Sisters, De Palma cast Davenport to play her own daughter's mother in the film.

Margot Kidder was a Canadian actress who got her first big film break in Hollywood in the 1969 Norman Jewison film, Gaily, Gaily. She also made a strong impression opposite Gene Wilder in one of his earliest movies, Quackser Fortune Has a Cousin in the Bronx (1970).

After Sisters, Kidder would go on to star in three more films in the horror genre - The Reincarnation of Peter Proud (1975), The Amityville Horror (1979), a huge box-office hit, and Black Christmas (1974) which enjoys a huge cult following and is slated to be remade.

Margot Kidder and Jennifer Salt were roommates in Southern California in the early 1970s while they were struggling performers. They held parties for their friends and neighbors who included Paul Schrader, Blythe Danner, Bruce Paltrow and Brian De Palma. One year at Christmas, Kidder and Salt opened a box under their Christmas tree and it contained the script to Sisters; it was De Palma's gift to them after a long period of no work for either actress. It was also De Palma's gift to himself. He hadn't worked since his unhappy experience with Warner Brothers over Get to Know Your Rabbit [1972], which sat on a shelf for six months and was then dumped into secondary cinemas without any fanfare or publicity.

Margot Kidder's career and life took a nosedive in 1990 when she was injured in a serious car wreck and couldn't work for two years. As a result, she went bankrupt. By 1996, she had become extremely depressed and became convinced her first husband was out to kill her. She fled her home, made herself unrecognizable by hacking most of her hair off and pulling out some teeth, and began a homeless existence for a while. Her desperate and confused condition became a media news story when she was found shivering under a family's porch near the studio lot where Superman (1978) was filmed. Margot credits police intervention with helping her to get her life back on track since then. She had another car wreck in 2002 but had a complete recovery. The actress stated that "the truth about those car smashes is - stone cold sober - I'm simply the worst driver on the planet."

According to Peter Biskind in Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, Kidder began an affair with De Palma while they were both living in Los Angeles in the early seventies. "Margot started seeing De Palma. They were passionately in heat, making it anywhere and everywhere, once in a closet at [Jonathan] Taplin's house, during a party. At the time, Bobby Fischer was challenging Boris Spassky, and a chess craze had swept up the beach. Brian taught Margie how to play, upset the board onto her lap when she made a dumb move. She played and played until the day she beat him, then lost interest."

Sisters is noteworthy as an early film venture from Edward R. Pressman, one of Hollywood's most distinguished and ambitious producers to emerge in the seventies. In addition to working with de Palma again on Phantom of the Paradise [1974], he also was a driving force behind such varied and offbeat films as Terrence Malick's Badlands [1973], Wolfgang Petersen's Das Boot [1981], David Byrne's True Stories [1986], Oliver Stone's Wall Street [1987], Abel Ferrara's Bad Lieutenant [1992], and many more.

Pressman's money came from his family's toy business and Sisters was his fourth feature as a producer (and his first with De Palma). Prior to this, he had produced Out of It [1969], The Revolutionary [1970] - both of which starred Jon Voight - and Dealing: Or the Berkeley-to-Boston Forty-Brick Lost-Bag Blues [1972]. He is profiled in the book Easy Riders, Raging Bulls as being "short and socially maladroit." Stories about his faux pas abounded. One night, at a party, he was holding a glass of scotch in his hand when actor John Lithgow asked him the time. He instantly turned his wrist, dumping the scotch into his lap. It was easy not to take Ed seriously, and most people didn't. Says [Jennifer] Salt, "Ed was totally spaced out, it appeared he had no idea what he was doing. We all felt the boys brought him along for the ride because he was a rich boy and his mother would bail them out of any trouble that they got into, so they played movies." Brian used to call him "Sparky" behind his back. Pressman was extremely tight with money, and when Brian had to sue him for dollars owed on Sisters, he stopped calling him "Sparky," and started referring to him as "the weasel."

Sources:
The Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film
Brian DePalma: Interviews, ed. by Laurence C. Knapp
Easy Riders, Raging Bulls by Peter Biskind
Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan..and Beyond by Robin Wood
www.briandepalma.net
filmforce.ign.com
film.guardian.co.uk
www.geraldpeary.com/interviews
Cinefantastique Magazine

Compiled by Jeff Stafford