Sister Act

Paul Rudnick sold the idea in 1987 with Bette Midler in mind, but she turned it down fearing her fans would not accept her as a nun, and the part reached Whoopi Goldberg. Once production started, half a dozen writers reworked the script, Carrie Fisher and Nancy Meyers among them. Rudnick no longer recognised the result, pulled his name from the credits and replaced it with the pseudonym Joseph Howard. In Emile Ardolino’s film the comic engine is lyric substitution. The choir sings 1960s pop close to the original arrangements and sanctifies only the words: Mary Wells’s 1964 recording My Guy becomes My God, and the closing number I Will Follow Him was Peggy March’s 1963 chart topper, itself taken from Franck Pourcel’s 1961 instrumental Chariot. The voice in Sister Mary Robert’s solo is not Wendy Makkena but the singer Andrea Robinson. St Paul’s Catholic Church in Noe Valley, San Francisco stood in for the convent, and the storefronts opposite were redressed to look run down. The film took 139.6 million dollars in North America and 231.6 million worldwide. A good fit if you enjoy a joke that turns on one changed word while the arrangement stays honest. Not for viewers who came for the choir takeover and would rather skip the Harvey Keitel mob thread, which keeps returning.