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THE SISTERHOOD OF NIGHT Georgie Henley as Mary Warren The Chronicles of Narnia films trilogy (dir. Andrew Adamson & dir. Michael Apted) Perfect Sisters (dir. Stanley M. Brooks) Kara Hayward as Emily Parris Moonrise Kingdom (dir. Wes Anderson) Willa Cuthrell as Catherine Huang Dan in Real Life (dir. Peter Hedges) Whatever Works (dir. Woody Allen) Olivia De Jonge as Lavinia HALL Sundowning (dir. M. Night Shyamalan) Good Pretender (dir. Maziar Lahooti) Kal Penn as Gordy Gambhir The Harold & Kumar movies (dir. Danny Leiner) The Namesake (dir. Mira Nair) www.thesisterhoodofnight-movie.com THE SISTERHOOD OF NIGHT A CINE MOSAIC AND EVENSTAR FILMS PRODUCTION in association with GALATA FILMS AND K5 INTERNATIONAL DIRECTED BY............................................................................................................... Caryn Waechter SCREENPLAY BY....................................................................................................................Marilyn Fu PRODUCED BY..................................................................Lydia Dean Pilcher and Elizabeth Cuthrell EXECUTIVE PRODUCERS.................................David Urrutia, Steven Tuttleman and Taha Altayli BASED UPON THE SHORT STORY BY ………………….......………………....…….Steven Millhauser CAST...................................................................................Georgie Henley, Kara Hayward, Kal Penn, Laura Fraser, Willa Cuthrell, Olivia De Jonge #SYNOPSIS Based on the short story by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Steven Millhauser, The Sisterhood of Night is a story of friendship and loyalty set against the backdrop of a modern-day Salem witch trial. Shot on location in Kingston, NY, the film chronicles a group of girls who have slipped out of the world of social media into a mysterious world deep in the woods. The tale begins when Emily Parris exposes a secret society of teenage girls. Accusing them of committing sexually deviant acts, Emily’s allegations throw their small American town into the national media spotlight. The mystery deepens when each of the accused takes a vow of silence. What follows is a chronicle of three girls’ unique and provocative alternative to the loneliness of adolescence, revealing the tragedy and humor of teenage years changed forever by the Internet age. #THEBEGINNING Steven Millhauser’s short story The Sisterhood of Night was first published in Harper’s Magazine in 1994, and later in a collection called The Knife Thrower and Other Stories in 1998. Screenwriter Marilyn Fu’s first reading of the story coincided with a trip back to her hometown, which sparked the idea for the adaptation: “My mom called to tell me she was selling the house I’d grown up in. She wanted me to come home and clean out my closet. I ended up sifting through old yearbooks and photos, notes my best friend passed me in class, mix tapes, journals. All of the longing, frustration and excitement of my teen years came back to me in a very clear way. And I was the only Taiwanese-American kid in a very white high school, so I definitely felt like an outsider then." “Millhauser’s story, which I interpreted as a sort of investigation into the secret life of teen girls, became the perfect skeleton with which to include all these artifacts from my teen years, ‘evidence’ if you will, of what it means to be a teen girl and to be an outsider holding tight to the things that make you unique. People assume that the Taiwanese-American character I created in the script, Catherine Huang, is me, and they're right, but actually all of the girls are me and all of them are unique outsiders in their own ways.” Marilyn came to Caryn Waechter with an early draft of The Sisterhood of Night after being inspired by Caryn's visual storytelling in her Columbia University thesis film, God is Good. The original screenplay was thick with ideas, characters, and a rich world nostalgic for those high school days. Waechter explains her initial connection to the script: “When I read Marilyn’s first draft of Sisterhood, I immediately fell in love with the story’s mix of satire, nostalgia, darkness and this constant urge to push everything right up to the edge. It was trying to break all the rules and simultaneously it felt so familiar, like home. I was laughing in the beginning and crying by the end. Personally, I come alive at night, and I knew from the start that Marilyn and I could make fire with our combined strengths.” – Caryn Waechter In 2007, Marilyn Fu’s screenplay won the Tribeca Film Institute’s All Access Creative Promise Award. It was at this moment that Fu and Waechter approached producer Lydia Dean Pilcher. "I was a mentor at the Tribeca Film Festival," Pilcher said. "I had no intention of taking on any projects while I was there, but Marilyn and Caryn made a good pitch, and then handed me this mini copy of the script, it fit perfectly into my purse, so I couldn't resist!" Pilcher read it and loved it, but felt that the story should be updated to be culturally relevant. "The Steven Millhauser story is set in the late 1990’s, but kids today live in an Internet age where social media dictates new rules. What will this all mean when we’ve accumulated enough history to look back? It’s fertile ground for gossip, rumors spread at lightning speed, and the consequences of living in public can be devastatingly severe — all of which fit the story perfectly." -Lydia Dean Pilcher Lydia Pilcher and Elizabeth Cuthrell had previously worked together on the critically acclaimed film “Jesus' Son,” with director Alison Maclean (Lions Gate Films). Lydia knew Elizabeth would be drawn to the Sisterhood script with its warm emotional heart and cool edgy style. And as mothers of teen daughters, they were living the adolescent angst of the story. Pilcher and Cuthrell embarked on a three-year creative process with Waechter and Fu that shifted and reshaped the script. The themes explored in the story took on a larger perspective by expanding the landscape to include the digital world and the media. "Stories of teenage power and intimidation on the Internet continue to both inspire and terrify us. The internet is a social gathering place where girls can connect and share creatively across the world, but it can also be a place for social tension, where bullying can happen in a crueler and deeper way than ever before, driving teens into sexual shame and even suicide." -Elizabeth Cuthrell Crucially, this direction transposed the Salem witch trials framework in Millhauser’s story into the world of Facebook and Twitter. This added another layer of relevancy to a classic tale. Fu gave each of the Sisterhood girls her own secret life – Mary Warren has a boyfriend that no one knows about, Catherine Huang is afraid her mother is going to die, and Lavinia Hall thinks she’ll never be kissed. There are the secrets the girls keep from each other, and the ones they keep from everyone else. “We live in a world where our lives are so public. Everything is posted, tweeted, or instagrammed the moment it happens. But the Sisterhood girls are all off-line. They want to keep their inner lives to themselves and the consequences are both revelatory and tragic.” - Marilyn Fu Emily Parris is the gossip girl who witnesses the girls in the woods and accuses them of sexually deviant activities. In contrast, she is hyper-connected in social media, but disconnected from herself. As the 2 www.TheSisterhoodofNight-movie.com investigation turns ugly and more victims come forward, Emily's blog takes an unexpected dramatic turn when suddenly a whole other circle of girls scattered across the country emerges with personal stories of sexual molestation. “I wanted to push the hysteria of the Salem witch trial story beyond the small town where they live,” Fu says. “Emily mobilizes these girls through social media, and just as we see with Mary, Catherine and Lavinia, there are both positive and negative consequences. Nothing is black or white. The beauty and power of the Internet is that it lets us pass information and connects us to each other. But what information is being passed—what is the message? And at what point does the ability to connect so easily make us disconnect?” It was in post-production that the filmmakers made the decision to narrate the movie from a girl’s point of view versus the adult point of view in Millhauser's story. “This lets viewers into the girls' inner circle, while the adult voice is still expressed through the new character of Gordy Gambhir. The adult telling Millhauser’s story is a voice of reason who tries to understand the girls," Fu says. "Then there's another adult, one of the girl's dads, who plays prominently into the climax. Gordy is the amalgamation of both those elements. I made him a guidance counselor because I remember mine as being very kind. Plus, this would tie his character to the world of the high school." Over the course of many drafts, the themes surrounding friendship, secrecy and technology became cohesive in the script. Only in the climax is it finally revealed what the Sisterhood girls do in the woods. Millhauser created a mystery with a haunting, lyrical climax that is all the more impactful because of its subtlety. However, the filmmakers felt that to sustain the length of a feature film and satisfy an audience, the climax would need to be embellished into something more visually tangible on screen. Fu says, “I won’t give away the end by explaining our choices, but essentially I used the rules of the Sisterhood that Millhauser set up in the short story and tried to come up with the antithesis of what we’d expect a teen girl to do today if she was in pain or needed a friend or felt completely alone.

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