If Brian De Palma wasn't exactly the belle of the ball that was mid-1970's Hollywood, it was not for lack of trying. By 1976, the 36-year old director had already made nine low-budget features, the best of which- Greetings, Sisters, Phantomof the Paradise- were feverish exercises in style, combining pitch-black humor, bravura camera work, and a Hitchcokian sadistic streak. But even at this younger wunderkind friends, Steven Spielberg and George Lucas, were being coronated as cinema's new master crowd-pleasers, De Palma seemed too dark, too perverse, to move much beyond cult stature.
Of all the authors to whom this ambitious filmmaker could hitch his star, a former English teacher from rural Maine with a single, uncelebrated pulp horror novel to his name hardly seemed the ideal candidate. But there was something about Stephen King's Carrie- a grisly, oddly touching anti-fairy tale about a teenage ugly duckling who wreaks telekinetic vengeance on her high school tormenters and religious-nut mother- that stoked De Palma's imagination. From its Judy Blume-meets-Lord of the Flies opening- in which Carrie White has her first period in a locker-room shower stall- to its climatic prom-night orgy of destruction, the story seemed tailor made for De Palma's particular brand of film-school tricks and kinky Freudian fixations.
Upon Carrie's release Halloween weekend, 1976, The New Yorker's Pauline Kael declared it 'a new trash archetype'= her way of saying "two thumbs way up." Other 70's movies may command greater reverence these days from the canon nannies, but in terms of sheer influence, Carrie holds up against anything that period of creative ferment produced. Among its achievements, the bloody high school fable launched the big screen careers of several soon-to-be household names, including 22-year old John Travolta and 23-year old Amy Irving; brought stardom at 26 to Sissy Spacek (who, along with Piper Laurie, earned an Oscar nomination for her performance); vaulted its director into the first rank of Hollywood auteurs; set off a boom in teen scarefests still felt today; and played matchmaker to two Hollywood couples. On a grimmer not, the film now seems to have anticipated the Columbine era a good two decades before it arrived.
This month, to ring in Carrie's 25th anniversary, MGM Home Entertainment is releasing a special-edition DVD. For our own tribute, we asked the cast and crew to slap on some name tages and hold a big, gossipy class reunion. Without the pig's blood and the fire and the mayhem.
Carrie: On
BRIAN DE PALMA: A writer friend of mine told me about this book Carrie, and I bought it in hardback. I immediately saw all kinds of possibilities. Nobody had really done this sort of gothic revenge story set in high school before.
PAUL HIRSCH: I think Brian felt that American Graffiti, for all its success, didn't represent what he remembered as high school. Carrie was much closer to that
DE PALMA: Most of the features I'd made up to that point were done independently. My first studio film, Get to Know Your Rabbit, had been a catastrophe at Warner Bros. I saw Carrie as my way of getting back into the system while still doing what I wanted to do cinematically.
HIRSCH: At that point, of Brian's pals, Steven [Spielberg] had done Jaws and George [Lucas] had done American Grafiti. Brian hoped to be as successful as they were. He didn't intend to be the guy living on the Lower East Side forever.
DE PALMA: Studios treated horror films like retarded stepchildren. They made money, but they weren't what anyone wanted to see on their tombstones. And the United Artists people were this sophisticated group of New Yorkers. They just hoped Carrie got done inexpensively and made a lot of money.
LAWRENCE D. COHEN: The budget was under $2 million, which was negligible even then. For many of us, this was our first movie, and we had a lot to prove.
DE PALMA: Carrie was happening at the same time George was casting Star Wars. We were both using lots of young people, so we went through a filtering process together. We saw every young actor in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and everywhere else. It was relentless.
P.J. SOLES: You waited your turn, and there were these two guys behind a desk, George on the left and Brian on the right. They didn't tell us anything. It was just like, "I hear one guy's doing a space movie and the other guys doing a horror movie." They'd basically look you up and down and decide right there whose pile you'd go in.
WILLIAM KATT: I read for Luke Skywalker. I don't even think I was told about Carrie.
DE PALMA: George was interested in Amy [Irving] for Princess Leia. I think that's the only case where we had similar desires castingwise.
AMY IRVING: Even after Brian had cast me in Carrie, he coached me to play Princess Leia. He said, "That's going to be a much bigger film. It would be good for you." And actually, he was a big help, because Star Wars was a difficult audition. You had to talk about C-3Po and R2-D2, and there were these mouthfuls of exposition.
DE PALMA: I knew Sissy [Spacek] from Phantom of the Paradise. She was [art director] Jack [Fisk]'s girlfirend and had painted sets on Phantom. I knew she was a good actress from Badlands. But the studio didn't like the idea of Sissy in the part. They didn't even want me to test her.
SISSY SPACEK: I got offered a commercial for the same day as the screen test. I called Brian and said, "What should I do?"- figuring he'd say, "Don't do the commercial." And he said just the opposite. It infuriated me, and I thought, "Screw him, I'm going to get this part." Suddenly I felt like the underdog, which was very Carrie-esque. The day of the test, I pulled out an old dress my mother had made for me in seventh grade. I didn't wash my face or brush my teeth,, and I put Vaseline in my hair. When I went in, the hair and makeup people came running over to try to make me up, but I shoved them away and went into a corner. I had been so wounded by Brian and I just used that.
HIRSCH: As written by Stephen King, Carrie is this fat, ugly, disgusting kid. That served his purposes for the novel, but to look at somebody like that for an hour and a half wouldn't work. So I was very happy when Sissy was cast.
SPACEK: My parents though Carrie would ruin what career I had. But, you know, people weren't beating my door down. I wasn't considered the type at that time.
PIPER LAURIE: I hadn't done a film since The Hustler, 15 years before. I had retired, had a child, and become a sculptor. Suddenly I got a phone call from a woman, who had once been my agent, wanting to know if she could send me the script for Carrie. I read it, and I just didn't get it. But I talked to my husband [film critic Joe Morgenstern], and he said, "Well, when De Palma does a movie, he has a comedic approach." I thought, "Ah! This is a satire!" Suddenly I saw how it could work.
HARRIET B. HELBERG: Welcome Back Kotter had just come on, and there was some heat around John [Travolta]. He wasn't a phenomena yet, but his magnetism was always there. He was somebody Brian wanted from the get go.
IRVING: Brian never wanted us to forget he was the one who gave us our start. He had this chorus he made us memorize "There we were, groveling in the gutter and Brian put his armout to us and pulled us out." I've never forgotten that.
MARCIA NASATIR: The biggest problem with the script was the opening scene when Carrie menstruates. Everybody got crazy about that: "How will we show this? Can we even show it?"
COHEN: Like a lot of King's writing, that scene put its finger on an experience that makes people nervous. Brian knew exactly what he could do with music, editing, and direction to convey a sense of dreamy horror that pushed people's buttons.
DE PALMA: This was a lot of the girls' first movie, and they were very uptight about the shower sequence. I had to talk to each one. Fortunately, Sissy led the way.
SPACEK: That scene was torture. In my negotiation, on of the most important terms for me had been "no pubic hair." I remember being really nervous a few days before. I went up to Brian and said. "What's the shower scene about?" He paused and he said, "It's like getting hit by a Mack truck." And he was right.
NANCY ALLEN: I didn't know anything about cameras. I saw this lens closer to me, so I thought it was filming me from the waist up. I was shocked when I went into dailies and, whoo! There I was, head to toe! All of the girls were freaked otu. But it was shot beautifully. If you have to be filmed naked, it might as well be like that.
HIRSCH: My credit comes on just as Nancy bounds toward the camera, completely naked. People said to me, "How come your name wasn't on the picture?" I resolved I'd never be upstaged in quite that way again.
DONALD HEITZER: When they showed the dailies of the shower sequence, believe me, everybody came. They had done a shot of Sissy up her legs- he wanted to show the blood coming down her thigh. But I'm telling you, he made a study of her pussy. It was a couple of hundred feet of film. Oh, it was embarassing. In the dailies, there was just silence and suddenly you heard Sissy's voice: "Thanks, Brian."
HIRSCH: George Lucas once told me he thought that locker-room scene was the key to Carrie's success. He said, "Most directors, if they're going to show frontal nudity, will save it for reel nine. But putting it [early] in the film, Brian puts the audience in a place where they feel like this is a director who might do anything."
DE PALMA: There hasn't been a menstruation scene since that I'm aware of.
SPACEK: Piper was so convincing in her religious fervor that it was easy to be afraid of her. She was a powerhouse. The scene where she dragged me into the closet, stuff like that got very physical.
LAURIE: After every take, I would scream with laughter at how terrible I was. I was having a ball.
COHEN: In the original script, Margaret stabs Carrie, then Carrie stops her heart. I was having dinner with Martin Scorsese one night at Musso and Frank's, and Brian came in. He said, "I've got a great way to do the Margaret White death scene: Carrie's going to crucify her with kitichen utensils." I thought he was completely certifiable. But what I liked about Brian was that his imagination was always right on the line between something extraordinarilly interesting and potentially risible.
ALLEN: This was the '70's. Everybody was flirting. We all kept very busy.
IRVING: There was a lot of competition: Who's going to get one of these two guys in the sack first? They ruled out William Katt for me because I had already dated him. So John was my hook. And man, I gave it a good shot.
SOLES: John wasn't really a dater at that time. I'd gone over to his house three times to study for the screen test with him, and I was there until one in the morning, and he never made any moves. I thought, "This is the first guy I've met who's so cute and so nonsexual." He was just very childlike. He like to skip around the back of the set holding hands.
IRVING: In the whole flirtation thing, John was aloof. He wasn't about to get down and play spin the bottle with us.
SOLES: Amy tried hard to fix me up with Billy. It was only maybe a year since they'd broken up, and I think he was still smitten with her. She was trying to repair his broken heart by fixing him up with somebody else.
KATT: God, yes, I carried a torch for Amy. How could you not? She was so gorgeous.
SOLES: Brian had a girlfriend, Leslie somebody- she was a writer, I think. She wasn't on the set much, and when she was, she always seemed unhappy. Now I can understand why: Here was Brian directing ally these beautifyul young girls plus Betty Buckley was his ex-girlfriend. Nancy liked Brian from the start and seemed driven to be in his life. And Amy also liked Brian. In fact, Amy liked him to the point where it's my understanding he called his friend Steven [Spielberg] and said, "Hey, why don't you take Amy out? - just so she'd leave him alone.
DE PALMA: I don't remember Amy having a crush on me. I just did a little matchmaking. I set up a date and it was kismet. They were gone. [Spielberg and Irving married in 1985 and divorced in 1989.]
IRVING: Brian had arranged that I'd go meet Steven to talk about Close Encounters of the Third Kind. But the part in Close Encounters was the mother of a 4-year old, and I looked about 12. Steven immediately said, "You're too young for this part." We talked for about an hour, and I left. Steven was a professional- he wasn't going to ask me out in a casting session. So then Brian organized a dinner with his then-girlfriend, Marty Scorsese and his then-wife, and Steven and me. Basically, there was a lot of casting going on: casting of films and of life.
SOLES: Actually, Steven asked everybody out. Me, Nancy- he tried with everybody. Finally Amy agreed to go out with him. He was very nice and smart, but we were looking for hunky guys. I think Brian invited Steven to the set to look at the cute girls just so he could watch the process.
ALLEN: Brian, John, and I had dinner one night while we were shooting the car crash scene. Afterward, John turned to me and said, "Brian likes you." I said, "What are talking about?" I mean, he wasn't flirting with me- or if he was, I missed it. But I certainly was attracted to him.
DE PALMA: Nancy had a boyfriend at the time, and I had a girfriend. But, you know, this wasn't the Victorian era. Did I think she was an attractive girl I might have a future with? Yes!
ALLEN: Brian's not the most accessible person when he's working. I think he likes planning movies more than shooting them; people just get in the way of his vision. After the shoot, Brian was in New York, editing, and he had told me, "Give me a call if you're in the city." So I called him and he asked me if I wanted to have dinner. He was like a completely different person: funny, sociable, a great conversationalist. I was like, I've never met this man before. [Allen and De Palma married in 1979 and divorced in 1984.].
ALLEN: John and I used to drive to the set and my first glimpse of his stardom came when he picked me up in his new convertible Mercedes. I remember him looking through the instruction manual because he couldn't figure out how to take the top off. But he seemed very comfortable with stardom. I don't think he missed a beatl
KATT: My most vivid memory of John is him teaching a few of us a soft shoe on a couple of plywood planks.
ALLEN: John only mentioned Scientology to me once. We were hanging out and he said, "Do you want to try something?" And we did this thing where we put our palms together and stared into each other's eyes. It was intense. But he didn't promote Scientology or anything.
SPACEK: By the end of the shoot, John had become a huge star. Anytime we were filming outdoors with him, we had to get police to control the mob. I remember shooting the scene where his car flips over and explodes. It was a dangerous stunt, and th ey were having a hard time keeping the crowd back. So John got on a bullhorn and made the most heartfelt speech, asking the crowd to calm down. They all listened intently, and we thought, "Thank God, now we can do this stunt." But the minute he put the bullhorn down, they all started screaming and breaking throught the barricade again.
DE PALMA: The prom sequence took months to work out. I remember note cards in my apartment going across many walls with every shot, every setup.
HEITZER: Brian walked us through this tracking shot he wanted to do: "We'll start here on Tommy and Carrie at their table, then I want to tilt up and see P.J. collecting ballots, and then we'll duck down under the steps and see Travolta and Nancy hiding, then along the side of the stage to Amy, then up the rope, over the bucket, then down..." It took 27 takes to get it right. But that was some kind of shot.
SOLES: Brian was still making up his mind who was going to get killed and how. Betty was kind of nervous. She was saying, "I wonder how Brian's going to kill me because our relationship ended badly."work out.
BETTY BUCKLEY: For heaven's sake, that's ridiculous. No, I was just afraid I was going to get smushed by the basketball backboard in my death scene. His direction to me was, "Squirm like a bug on a pin and then die." I thought, "You can just see what Brian was like as a little boy right there." Every time one of us got killed, we'd all watch, and then we'd go out and celebrate that we hadn't actually died.
ALLEN: Once the mayhem started, it was very intense. People got thrown around a lot. The whole mood shifted.
HEITZER: Brian can get a little bit...I don't want to say sadistic But in the prom scene, he had all the older actors and extras in one corner of the stage, and my dad was one of them. I said, "Hey, don't use the fire hose on the older people." He was like, fuck 'em. And, man, he wailed on them.
SOLES: Brian had decided I was going to get killed by the hose. He said he wanted the water to bat my head around so it looked like it had broken my neck. That water came out full force. It went into my ear and ruptured my eardrum, and I fell down. The grips picked me up and carried me to my dressing room. I wanted Brian to come and say, "Are you all right?" But he didin't. He had a movie to make.
DE PALMA: The studio people were very squeamish. In the prom scene, when Carrie gets doused, they were saying, "Couldn't we have something besides blood? I said, "What? Yellow paint? It doesn't exactly have the same effect."
SPACEK: The blood was a mixture of Karo syrup with food coloring. I had to keeep it on for days. My arms would stick to my sides, and if I sat in a chair, I'd stick to it. They had someone following me around with a spritzer bottle so I could get loose from things.
DE PALMA: Sissy had that syrup all over her and was basically baking because she was walking so close to the flames. She smelled like some kind of gummy candy left on a radiator for days.
COHEN: There was probably 20 endings along the way. In the original scrip, Carrie dies in Sue's arms. There was also an ending with Sue in an asylum. Brian felt we needed something audacious to shock the audience.
HIRSCH: Brian and I went to see Deliverance. That movie ends with a hand coming out of the river with a gun in it. Brian turned to me and said, "That's a great idea, but I could do it so much better."
IRVING: On paper, Brian's ending didn't look that great: Sue walks up to Carrie's grave, then a hand reaches out. I thought, "I get the last scene in the movie and it's a turkey." Brian said, "I want everything to look weird, because it's a dream sequence. So you're going to walk backwards and then I'll play it forward so the birds are flying backwards." I'm like, "Oookay."
DE PALMA: Sissy insisted on being buried in that scene. I said we could get the stunt lady to do it. She said, "No, it's my character in the grave." Actually, Jack [Fisk] was the one who buried her.
SPACEK: Being buried wasn't so bad. But then they piled all these rocks on top, so my arm had to come up through them. I couldn't see anything. Brian would just yell, "Grab!" My arm was getting wrecked. But I do my own hand work.
HIRSCH: Whenever we screened Carrie, when that hand came out, you could see evry seat in the theater rock backward. George Lucas thought the ending was brilliant. He said, "The people standing in line for the 10 o'clock show hear this shriek, and 20 seconds later the doors open and everyone comes out. So you go into the theater thinking, 'What the hell was that?'
NATAHA: [UA chairman]Arthur Krim watched a screening of the movie and said. "I don't get it." But his teenage daughter just loved it."
COHEN: Brian invited a number of his peers to a screening. I remember Spielberg was making projections of how many millions it was going to make. And he was damn close.
DE PALMA: I was very unahppy with the way the studio sold Carrie. They dumped it in Halloween and treated it like a B picture- just grab the money and that's it. I'd wave my reviews at them, saying "This is an important movie." And it fell on deaf ears. When the picture did so well, they were startled.
MIKE MEDAVOY: I don't think anybody was expecting what happened. So in retrospect, we didn't do as well on Carrie as we could have or should have. But it still made $20 million domestically. And it launched Brian's careet.
COHEN: The book hit the best-seller list because of the movie. It was one of those moments of synergy: a movie selling a book that also sells the movie. We now take that sort of thing for granted, but it never happened then to quite this degree.
HIRSCH: Around the time we were finishing Carrie in L.A., Brian invited me to a dinner that [agent] Sue Mengers had with him, Steven, and Marty. And I remember just thinking, "This is the new Hollywood, right her at this table."
DE PALMA: Carrie was a big success for everybody. It was the beginning of Stephen King, who's now the Edgar Allan Poe of our generation. It launched me into my next round in the Hollywood system, and I was now a respected guy in the club again. But, you know, the gods decide whether these things live ten years or a hundred. I have little control over that.

The article is accompanied by a full page color photo of Sissy Spacek in a black evening gown, standing on some wooden bleachers.- "I had this idea that Carrie was like all teenagers who feel used and abused. All she wanted was to be a regular person."; small black and white photo of Brian De Palma talking to William Katt and Sissy Spacek on the set of Carrie- William Katt (left), Brian De Pama, and Sissy Spacek discuss the prom sequence. "Oh, it was wonderful," Spacek says. "That's what every southern girl is born and bred to do: be a prom queen."; another small b&w photo of Brian talking to Piper Laurie who is doing the crucifixion scene in Carrie- Right, a crucified Piper Laurie with technicians. "Brian would come up with these things overnight," she says of her death scene. "I guess he didn't sleep at all. When I got stabbed with all those knives, I roared with laughter."; Two small b&w photos- John Travolta (left) and Nancy Allen. "At one point it was reported that John and I were dating," Allen says. "We weren't. But I figured if they had to say you dating someone it might as well be him. He was very sweet." Amy Irving (right) shoots the graveside ending. "I remember walking over teh stones and hearing Sissy's oice saying you're walking over me, Brian," De Palma says, "She was in a box underneath."
THE PLAYERS
NANCY ALLEN: Chris Hargenson
BETTY BUCKLEY: Miss Collins
LAWRENCE D. COHEN: Screenwriter
BRIAN DE PALMA: Director
DONALD HEITZER: First assistant director
HARRIET B. HELBERG: Casting director
PAUL HIRSCH: Editor
AMY IRVING: Sue Snell
WILLIAM KATT: Tommy Ross
PIPER LAURIE: Margaret White
MIKE MEDAVOY: Senior vice-president of production, United-Artists
MARCIA NASTASTIR: Vice president of production, United Artists
P. J. SOLES: Norma
SISSY SPACEK: Carrie White