It can be cliché to call someone a pioneer, but for American film director, writer, and producer Susan Seidelman, it’s true. In her memoir, Desperately Seeking Something: A Memoir About Movies, Mothers, and Material Girls, she talks about some remarkable firsts, like coming up in the 70s when schools barely had film departments, let alone female professors on the faculty or anyone other than male directors in the curriculum. The only work from a woman director she saw were the films of Italian filmmaker Lina Wertmuller, and that was in cinemas.
The movie Seidelman made while a graduate student at NYU earned her a Student Academy Award Nomination (and a chance to meet Jack Nicholson). Her feature debut, Smithereens, was the first U.S. independent movie to compete for the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 1982. She put Madonna in her first film, generating arguably the pop icon’s best, most natural performance in Desperately Seeking Susan. Also on the long list of incredible career moments was directing the pilot of the seminal Sex And The City.
Named for actress Susan Hayward, Seidelman spent a happy childhood and adolescence fantasizing about what could be found beyond her comfortable, Jewish family in the Philadelphia suburbs. A nasty elementary school teacher who left a lasting impression by putting her in remedial reading, and some teenage heartache, led to her “I’ll show you” attitude.
That propelled her out of Philadelphia to New York, where she got into film school without truly knowing what she was doing because there weren’t any role models to guide her. It also kept her going during the two years it took to make Smithereens, which she and her crew, who worked for free, shot guerilla-style on the streets and subways of New York without permits. The stops and starts were due to finances but also when lead Susan Berman fell 15 feet from a fire escape and was sidelined with a cast for four months. And later, after the big budget She-Devil did poorly in theatres (Seidelman’s third misfire in a row), that fire helped her come back after the studio executives sent her to “movie jail.”
Seidelman’s memoir would have been better served by jumping past the less compelling minutia of her origins sooner, because much like Seidelman herself, the book’s magical moments happen when she finally is living as her full self in New York. It’s rich in delightful, vivid stories, like how she found aspiring screenwriter Ron Nyswaner (Philadelphia, Fellow Travelers) by cold calling Columbia’s screenwriting department, and he introduced her to Jonathan Demme. Or that her journey to Cannes was as a result of the handwritten postcard she mailed o the organizers requesting an application, and not only being selected, but the utterly broke Seidelman got the $25,000 she needed for the movie to be screened at the fest when a pair of distribution agents overhead her talking about Cannes over breakfast. Another wild detail is that the identically dressed triplets who smile at Madonna in Desperately Seeking Susan (who the crew just came upon randomly while filming in Manhattan), were the subject of their own astonishing documentary, Three Identical Strangers, 25 years later.
Desperately Seeking Something winningly captures a downtown New York that is sadly a relic, the exhausting and fascinating machinations of getting a script onto the screen, and Seidelman’s distinctive sensibility as a filmmaker, providing a window into the fierce will, inventiveness and chutzpah required to be a female artist, one whose work won’t lapse into near-obscurity like other women who came before.
