Great Barrington — Susan Seidelman, director of the 1985 movie “Desperately Seeking Susan,” will discuss the film and her new book in an event at The Triplex on Friday, September 20, at 6:30 p.m.
Following a showing of the movie starring Madonna and Rosanna Arquette, Seidelman will talk about “Desperately Seeking Something: A Memoir About Movies, Mothers, and Material Girls.” The memoir chronicles Seidelman’s life, from growing up in the 1960s to enrolling in New York University’s Graduate Film School and moving to the Lower East Side of New York City in the 1970s and 1980s.
“The book is kind of a journey,” Seidelman told The Berkshire Edge. “I think that, throughout my life, I’ve been seeking different things. What I am seeking has changed throughout the years. I think for a lot of people, as we age and as we go through different experiences, we seek different things. Now that I’m over 70, I’m trying to figure out how to age but still be me, even though I’m older.”
In 1976, Seidelman was nominated for a Student Academy Award for the short film “And You Act Like One Too,” the first film she ever made.
“It was the 1970s, and I read about all these young men at the time, the Spielbergs, De Palmas, and the Scorseses, and how doors were opening for them in Hollywood,” Seidelman said. “I thought, ‘Oh, maybe if I go out there and knock on some doors, I’ll get to make some low-budget Roger Corman-produced movie.’ I realized that it wasn’t going to happen because it was a different world for me. There weren’t any women directors in the mid-’70s. So I realized, after knocking on lots of doors and getting lots of rejections, that I was going to have to make things happen for myself.”
Indeed, Seidelman’s film career took off when she produced and directed her first film “Smithereens,” released in 1982. The drama is about a narcissistic young runaway from New Jersey who comes to New York City to join the punk subculture. The movie, which was co-written by future-Oscar-nominated screenwriter Ron Nyswaner, was the first American independent film that competed for the Palme d’Or at the 1982 Cannes Film Festival.
“When the film got invited to Cannes, I didn’t feel like a trailblazer,” Seidelman said. “I think that, at the time, I was just in shock that this little movie that we made for no money with unknown people ended up at the first film festival I applied to. It was kind of shocking, and because I was naive, I didn’t know how much it would change my life. I was still so new to the film business that I didn’t even think of it as a business. I wasn’t thinking that this movie would be the first step in a long career. I just thought that this is a movie I want to make, and I was making it with friends from film school.”
After the success of “Smithereens,” Seidelman said that she started to get calls from agents submitting scripts to her. “But none of these scripts were the kinds of movies I wanted to make,” Seidelman said. “The scripts may have had female protagonists, but they were either prom queens, bitchy cheerleaders, or babysitters locked in spooky houses. Those weren’t the kinds of movies I wanted to make.”
Seidelman was sent script after script until she received the script for a movie titled “Desperately Seeking Susan.” “It was just the right script for me,” Seidelman said. “It had a theme that I related to personally. These two female protagonists [Roberta Glass played by Arquette and Susan Thomas played by Madonna] was a part of me, one was who I could have been, and the other was who I wanted to be in some variation.”
Seidelman said that she waited for a movie to come along with two strong female characters because she “wanted to make movies that had female characters that were just as interesting as those [male characters] that were just as flawed.” “I didn’t care about the female characters being nice characters because I wanted them to be interesting and compelling characters,” Seidelman said. “No one would say, ‘Oh, Jack Nicholson was such a nice character in “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” or “Carnal Knowledge.”‘ I came of age in the 1970s, and a lot of my thinking was informed by the second wave of feminism. There were a lot of things in the news and in books about women breaking out of the boxes they had traditionally been put into. The 1970s was the era of male outsiders, male antiheroes, and male buddy-buddy movies. Why couldn’t female characters be as interesting as their male counterparts?”
Seidelman said that the success of “Desperately Seeking Susan” opened the door for not only strong female characters in movies but also for more female directors in the movie business. “When I was in film school, the only female American director was Elaine May,” Seidelman said. “I knew of some of the European female directors like Agnès Varda and Lina Wertmüller. But suddenly [after “Desperately Seeking Susan,”] there was Amy Heckerling, Martha Coolidge, and, of course, Barbara Streisand. Then, years later, you had Nora Ephron and Penny Marshall. But it wasn’t until the ’90s, the rise of independent cinema, when suddenly it wasn’t just about the studios hiring women. Miramax, for better or worse about Harvey Weinstein, he did open the door to independent filmmaking and made independent filmmaking into a commercial industry.”
Seidelman said strong female protagonists, along with the multiple complex facets of New York City, are major parts of her films. “I consider New York City one of the co-stars of several of the films I made,” Seidelman said. “I did the pilot for ‘Sex in the City,’ and I think the city was really important in that show as well. Starting with ‘Smithereens’ [shot back in the early 1980s,] the city was so colorful in a gritty, funky, and falling dilapidated way. But it provided great art direction with all of those crumbling and gritty alleyways. You couldn’t reproduce that authentically on a Hollywood film set. You just put people out in an alleyway or a rubble-strewn lot in the East Village, and you had a great backdrop that you didn’t have to pay for. When you are working with a limited budget, you have to use what you have and turn it into something cinematic.”
Seidelman said she hopes readers will be able to relate to her memoir. “I don’t think I’m so exceptional that I had some experience that others can’t relate to,” Seidelman said. “Something was interesting about growing up in the innocent 1950s and 1960s, but seeing the world change in the 1970s. Then going into the 1980s, where everything changed again, and people started to get into Reaganomics and materialism. In the 1990s and early 2000s, there was terrorism, the dot-com bust, and the stock market implosion.”
Seidelman went on to direct many movies and television shows over the ensuing decades after “Desperately Seeking Susan,” including “Making Mr. Right,” “She-Devil,” four episodes of “Sex and the City,” and others.
“There’s been so many cultural changes, and I kind of use my movies and my changing way of making movies and subject matters as a way to talk about the changes that we were going through in America and New York,” Seidelman said. “I’m hoping that people will relate to my book to see the ways the world has changed, even if they haven’t seen my movies.”
To purchase tickets for the event, visit The Triplex’s website.
