Desperately seeking Susan — Seidelman, that is
Film director, onetime nice Jewish girl, writes memoir about her life in the movies
Susan Seidelman’s parents said she had ants in her pants. Her grandmother claimed it was shpilkes. Whatever you called it, though, even at a young age, there was a restlessness about her.
Ms. Seidelman mined that tension on the way to becoming a talented and groundbreaking movie director. Her first, a film school project, was nominated for a Student Academy Award. Her second, “Smithereens,” in 1982, was the first American independent film accepted into the main competition at Cannes. And her third, “Desperately Seeking Susan,” in 1985, became a star vehicle for Madonna, Rosanna Arquette, and Aidan Quinn, and proved both a critical and a financial success.
Now Ms. Seidelman, 71, has published “Desperately Seeking Something: A Memoir About Movies, Mothers and Material Girls.” So, logically, my first question, in a Zoom interview from her home in Stockton, in Hunterdon County, was what was she so desperately seeking.
“I was desperately seeking to become the most authentic version of myself,” she said. Asked who that person is, she responded:
“I don’t know. I think there were certain expectations from the time and place where I grew up about who I might become as I grew older. I didn’t fit into the typical good girl box. I was brought up to be a good Jewish girl, but I also had a rebellious streak that my family didn’t quite understand.”
Ms. Seidelman grew up in a suburb of Philadelphia. “I didn’t come from a religious family, but I came from a family that had a very strong sense of Jewish identity,” she said. “We celebrated the holidays, and I was confirmed. Back then, it was very unusual for a girl to have a bat mitzvah — though my younger sister had one.”
Still, Susan was something of a rebel. “I found different ways of trying to find my voice. One of them was deciding to move to New York, live a creative life, and go to film school. I think most of my girlfriends from the neighborhood and high school went a more traditional route, getting married by 25. Certainly, none of them became film directors, at a time where there weren’t any women doing that.”
The only American role model Ms. Seidelman had was Elaine May, who helmed “The Heartbreak Kid.” But to be fair, it wasn’t that she even considered being a director when she was growing up. In fact, it was almost an accident that it became her career choice.
But Ms. Seidelman disagrees with the idea that it might have been accidental. She contends that “it was fate. Life takes you down different paths, and sometimes you’re lucky enough to stumble down the right one.”
Ms. Seidelman was enrolled as an unhappy fashion major at the Drexel Institute. So she transferred to a humanities program and found that she needed an easy four credits. So she enrolled in a film appreciation course. As she wrote in her memoir, she could have taken a music appreciation class or an introduction to psychology. But she ended up in film appreciation. “I had no idea this would change my life,” she said.
She enrolled in the nascent graduate film program at NYU, one of only five women in a class of 35. Her student film was about a frustrated New Jersey housewife who stumbles into an affair on her 30th birthday. Ms. Seidelman described her as a woman “who feels restless, unappreciated and is desperately seeking something — a recurring theme in the films I would go on to make.”
It seems like an awfully mature storyline for a 23-year-old, but Ms. Seidelman says she knew the subject well. “I could have been that woman. I’m not saying that I would have had an affair. I’m just saying that that woman’s life could have been mine. I understood who that woman was. I understood her restlessness.”
The student Oscar nod brought her to Los Angeles, and the attention of some studio execs, but little else. “I could have gotten a job as a script reader or an assistant to the assistant to the assistant,” she said. “But I was impatient.
“I saw guys a little older than me — maybe a decade older — Scorsese, Spielberg, Coppola, all those guys were making low-budget movies. And I knew that’s what I wanted to do. I didn’t want to read scripts, and that wasn’t going to happen to me out there.”
So she returned to the Big Apple. In 1982, with the help of former classmates and guerrilla tactics — filming late at night and without the required permits — she created “Smithereens,” the film awarded a prestigious place at Cannes.
This, too, was about a restless young woman from the suburbs of New Jersey who comes to New York to try to join a punk band.
Three years later, she cowrote and directed the film most associated with her, “Desperately Seeking Susan,” about a bored New Jersey housewife and a bohemian drifter. The film cemented her reputation as a director to be reckoned with.
There followed a series of films, none as successful as “Suddenly,” but always interesting. One of my favorites was “Cookie,” a father-daughter Mafia comedy, released in 1989, cowritten by Nora Ephron. She followed that with “She-Devil,” also in 1989, based on Faye Weldon’s novel, which offered the first comedic role to Meryl Streep and the first movie role — period — to Roseanne Barr.
Ms. Seidelman won an adult Academy Award nomination in 1993 for “The Dutch Master,” a short she cowrote and coproduced with her partner Jonathan Brett as part of a series called “Tales of Erotica.”
She was similarly successful in television, where she was twice nominated for Emmys. She directed the pilot and first few episodes of “Sex and the City,” setting the template for the run of the show.
Clearly, there are a lot of projects to choose from, but my favorite actually was the brainchild of Susan’s mom, Florence.
“She and my dad were friends with one of her best friends from high school and her husband,” Ms. Seidelman said. “When my mom’s best friend passed away, her husband was a widower who suddenly found women in his community circling around him. He started to tell my mom about the experiences he was going through as a single guy being approached by women for friendship and romance.
“She used to call me from time to time with ideas she thought would make good films. When she suggested people of a certain age who find themselves back in the dating game, it struck me as a really good idea that hadn’t been explored much in mainstream Hollywood movies.
“She wanted to take a stab at writing the script. So she went out and bought a copy of ‘Screenwriting for Dummies.’ She didn’t talk about it for a few months, and one day I got a packet in the mail containing her draft of the script. It was really rough and structurally a mess, so I asked her if she would mind if I rewrote it. ‘Boynton Beach Club’ was the result.”
There were hits and misses, but overall, it seems as though her career was effortless. So I asked a question I was asked when I told someone I was going to interview her: Whatever happened to Susan Seidelman?
“Well,” she replied, “for a while she was in the public eye, and then for a while she disappeared. Now she’s written a book about what happened to her along the way.”
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