20 facts you might not know about 'Sister Act'

Back in 1987, an attempt to product Sister Act began. The first choice? Bette Midler. However, Midler did not think her fanbase wanted to see her play a nun, so she passed. Goldberg was approached, and she signed on.

Joseph Howard, the credited screenwriter of Sister Act, does not exist. The original script was written by Paul Rudnick. Then, it got rewritten by several screenwriters, including noted script doctor (and actor of some renown) Carrie Fisher. While Rudnick was still going to be the sole credited screenwriter, he felt the script no longer resembled the one he wrote. As such, he chose to be credited with a pseudonym.

Emile Ardolino has a couple of classics to his name in Dirty Dancing and Sister Act. Sadly, his career and life were cut short. In 1993, Ardolino died due to complications from AIDS. He was only 50.

One of the nuns in the choir is playing by Ellen Albertini Dow. You may know her better as the rapping granny from The Wedding Singer. In 1992, Dow was already a senior citizen, but she would live a lot longer. When Dow passed away in 2015, she was 101 years old.

The actress who plays the young version of Deloris in Sister Act is Isis Carmen Jones. Apparently, a few people thought she was the spitting image of a young Goldberg. In 1992, she also played a younger version of Whoopi’s character Guinan in Star Trek: The Next Generation.

Somehow, in 1992, Keitel found himself in two films that featured nuns in prominent roles. One of them is Sister Act, of course. The other is Bad Lieutenant. Let’s just say don’t schedule those two films together for a family double feature.

Hey, most of us can’t tell one order of nuns from another, so we aren’t getting out the knives for Sister Act. Still, different orders wear different habits. The nuns in Sister Act are identified as Carmelites, but their habits represent those worn by the Sisters of St. Joseph of the Third Order of St. Francis. Well, it is a lot easier just to say “Carmelite.”

The church used for the movie was St. Paul’s Catholic Church in the Noe Valley neighborhood of San Francisco. The neighborhood was upper middle class at the time, whereas the church in the film is supposed to be in a downtrodden neighborhood. As such, they had to dress down the neighborhood around the church to make the setting work.

In the original script, the action took place in Chicago. However, Goldberg had started her standup career in San Francisco and felt a kinship to the city. As such, the setting was changed once she was signed on.

When you have access to a nun’s habit, and you aren’t an actual nun, there are opportunities for pranks abound. Some of the women would go to casinos or bars dressed in their costume. Kathy Najimy and Wendy Makkena once ordered room service while still in their costumes, and they put an adult movie on the TV as a joke as well.

Deloris’ girl group is known as the Ronelles. Fans of girl groups of the ‘60s can probably surmise how that name was chosen. It’s a mashup of two iconic pop acts, the Ronettes and the Shirelles.

Part of the action in the film takes place in Reno, and the movie shot on location there. However, the post office stood in for a police station while filming. Why was that done? Evidently, the director Ardolino didn’t think the police station looked enough like, well, a police station.  

OK, we weren’t expecting total verisimilitude from a movie like Sister Act, but it is worth noting that the actions that drive the plot of the film wouldn’t happen in real life. The actual United States government does not put agents undercover or hide witnesses as members of the clergy, considering it not safe enough.

Part of the hook of Sister Act is classic pop songs are remade to be religious, as if Deloris is some sort of pious “Weird Al” Yankovic. The soundtrack ended up making it up to No. 40 on the album charts in the United States and went gold. Most of the case provided their own singing voices, save for the character of Sister Mary Robert, whose singing voice was provided by Andrea Robinson.

Sister Act made $231.6 million worldwide off of a budget of $31 million. It was the eighth-highest-grossing movie of 1992.The film was second in the domestic box office for four weeks straight as well, behind three different films that topped the charts.

Whoopi already had an Oscar for Ghost, but the Academy wasn’t interested in Sister Act. That being said, a few other awards bodies were into Whoopi’s work. She got nominations from the Golden Globes, the Kids’ Choice Awards, and the MTV Movie Awards. Goldberg didn’t win any of them, but the movie won for Favorite Comedy Motion Picture at the People’s Choice Awards.

For a movie about nuns, Sister Act drew a lot of ardor. In 1993, actress Donna Douglas (Ellie Mae from The Beverly Hillbillies) and her partner Curt Wilson filed a lawsuit against Disney, Whoopi, Midler, and others to the tune of $200 million saying that the movie was plagiarized off of an adaptation of the novel A Nun in the Closet they had worked on. They turned down a $1 million offer to settle, and then lost the case. Then, in 2011, a nun named Delois Blakely sued Disney saying that the movie was based on her 1987 autobiography The Harlem Street Nun. She took it to the New York Supreme Court, which dismissed her case with prejudice.

Sister Act got one of those quickie 1990s sequels in 1993 with Sister Act 2: Back in the Habit. The movie had a new director in Bill Duke, but much of the cast returned. It was less successful, but still successful, as it made $125 million worldwide off of a $38 million budget.

Sister Act features a lot of songs, so turning it into a stage musical certainly tracks. The musical went to London’s West End for a year-plus before opening on Broadway. The Sister Act musical debuted on Broadway on April 20, 2011, and closed in August 2012 after 561 performances.

In 2018, it was announced that two writers had been hired to pen Sister Act 3 for Disney+. After a quiet spell, Goldberg confirmed in 2020 that she has signed on for the movie as well. Tyler Perry is on board to produce, which should ensure the film eventually happens.