Carrie/Trivia

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • Ability Over Appearance: Sissy Spacek was widely thought to be too pretty for the title role, the character in the book being described as chunky, mousy-haired and covered in pimples with Spacek being a tall thin redhead with clear skin. But Spacek's Oscar nomination speaks for itself. The character was then rewritten slightly, saying that she would be pretty if she made an effort to tidy herself up a bit.
  • Billing Displacement: John Travolta, who was then the star of Welcome Back, Kotter, got second billing on the posters behind Sissy Spacek, even though Billy was, at best, the seventh most important character. Home video releases continue this tradition now that Travolta is a Hollywood icon.
  • Creator Backlash: Before he finished writing, Stephen King threw the entire manuscript in the trash, disappointed with how it was turning out. His wife Tabitha read it, loved it, and pushed for him to continue writing. The rest is history. He still regards the book as one of his weaker efforts, without the polish of his later novels.
    • According to his own account, he had originally been challenged to write something with which women could identify. He wrote the shower scene, didn't like it and threw it out; his wife, who had trouble with her periods, rescued it. The shower scene was what amazed every woman at Doubleday. Harlan Ellison said:

“…that opening sequence in which the telekinetic, Carrie White, gets her first menstrual experience before the eyes of a covey of teenage shrikes, and more than the light bulb in the locker room exploded. Xeroxes of the manuscript were run off; they were disseminated widely in-house; women editors passed them on to female secretaries, who took them home and gave them to their friends. That first scene bit hard…It was Jungian archetype goosed with ten million volts of emotional power. It was the commonly-shared horrible memory of half the population, reinterpreted.”

    • (He also used the word "trope" in this essay, which you'll find in his book Harlan Ellison's Watching.)
  • Creator Preferred Adaptation: King believes that DePalma's film adaptation is a superior work to his novel.
  • Dawson Casting: Both the 1976 and 2002 versions employ this.
    • Carrie White: 26-year-old Spacek in the '76 version, 29-year-old Bettis in the '02 version.
    • Sue Snell: 23-year-old Irving in the '76 version, 22-year-old McClure in the '02 version.
    • Tommy Ross: 25-year-old Katt in the '76 version, 26-year-old Mehler in the '02 version.
    • Chris Hargensen: 26-year-old Allen in the '76 version, 20-year-old de Ravin in the '02 version.
    • Billy Nolan: 22-year-old Travolta in the '76 film.
  • Enforced Method Acting: Several cases.
    • Sue Snell's mother was played by Amy Irving's real life mother, Priscilla Pointer, which caused some real-life emotions to spill into the scene where she comforts Sue following her nightmare at the end of the film. If you listen carefully, she even slips up and calls Amy by her real name at one point.
    • During filming of the scene where Mrs. Collins is chewing out the girls in gym, Brian DePalma was standing behind Amy Irving just off screen and whispering horrible cruel and hurtful things into her ears in order to make Sue's look of misery and guilt on camera look genuine.
    • In the prom attack scene, they used an actual fire hose on P. J. Soles (who played Norma). Her screaming and collapsing onto a table and then passing out was real. She ruptured her ear drum doing that sequence.
  • Fake American:
    • The 2002 version, having been shot in Vancouver, was so jam-packed with Canadians-playing-Americans that it would be simpler to list the actors who weren't Canadian: the Americans Angela Bettis, Patricia Clarkson, Rena Sofer and David Keith, and the Australian Emilie de Ravin.
  • Hey, It's That Guy!/Retroactive Recognition:
  • Hey, It's That Voice!: Both the original movie and the TV remake were dubbed in Japan and both versions has very interesting casting choices, since many of the voice actors worked in many classics of the Mecha genre as protagonists:
  • Keep Circulating the Tapes: The original musical adaptation had an extremely short run and for the longest time was never heard from again. Miraculously, a small handful of bootleg recordings of the production were made and managed to survive long enough to be put onto the internet. It wasn't until the recent revival in 2012 that an official soundtrack recording was made available.
  • Method Acting:
    • In the 1976 version, Sissy Spacek deliberately isolated herself from her castmates during filming.
  • Playing Against Type: Emilie de Ravin is more known for playing heroic characters. Her turn as Alpha Bitch Chris in the '02 film was different for her.
  • Production Posse: Brian De Palma, John Travolta and Nancy Allen reunited five years later for the film Blow Out.
  • Real Life Relative:
    • Amy Irving and her mother Priscilla Pointer played Sue and her mother respectively.
    • The song that plays during Carrie and Tommy's dance at the prom is sung by Katie Irving, Amy's sister and Priscilla's other daughter.
  • Star-Making Role: The 1976 version was this for Sissy Spacek.
  • Stillborn Franchise: The 2002 version was a Pilot Movie for a series that was never made.
  • Technology Marches On: In the 2002 version a teenage girl using her cell phone to make a call in lieu of texting and mentions of e-mail being used as communication between two teenage girls horribly dates the movie that was at one time intended to be an update.
  • What Could Have Been:
    • The production of the original film experienced a literal example of Special Effect Failure, detailed in the special features on the DVD. The finale was supposed to involve Carrie calling down a meteor shower on her house, destroying it. Indeed, the interior scenes, showing the rocks coming through the ceiling, had already been shot. However, when they shot the exterior of the house burning down, the rig that was supposed to drop the stones malfunctioned. The production didn't have enough money left to redo the shot, so they simply filmed it sans meteors.
    • The original film was cast in a joint session with the casting of Star Wars, which creates some very interesting casting possibilities. John Travolta as Luke Skywalker? Nancy Allen or Sissy Spacek as Princess Leia? And the obvious one, Carrie Fisher as Carrie White? (Allegedly, that was the role that she was originally auditioning for before she was cast as Princess Leia.)
    • Bernard Herrmann was the first choice to score the film but died during production. Pino Donaggio replaced him.
  1. ↑ Ideas, people.
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