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In February, I attended a one-off screening at Metrograph of the 1987 film “Making Mr. Right,” in which a young John Malkovich—in one of his first movie roles—stars both as a taciturn scientist named Jeff Peters and as Peters’s invention, a walking, talking android named Ulysses, who looks just like him. The film is a sci-fi screwball comedy involving robot-human romance. There’s a scene in which Laurie Metcalf, playing a lab secretary who is obsessed with Jeff, accidentally goes on an ill-fated mall date with Ulysses. The film, shot in Miami, has a zany sense of style. The leading lady, a publicity executive played by the downtown artist Ann Magnuson, wears a Rolodex on her wrist as a fashion accessory. Many other wacky things happen—I won’t spoil them for you here, because “Making Mr. Right,” a flop in its time, is worth watching. I had barely heard of it before this year, but I left the theatre believing that it is a stone-cold comedy classic.
The film’s director, the seventy-one-year-old Susan Seidelman, directed two of my other favorite films of the eighties—a time when the number of women helming feature films could be counted on one hand. Seidelman grew up in a Philadelphia suburb where, she told me recently, “everyone looked the same.” She attended film school at N.Y.U. and filled her movies with the kinds of fashionable and funky strivers with whom she hung out downtown. Her delightfully scrappy first feature, “Smithereens” (1982), centers on a twentysomething woman named Wren who runs around the Lower East Side punk scene trying to convince everyone that she should be famous. One of her love interests is played by the libertine punk rocker Richard Hell. Seidelman submitted the film to Cannes on a whim, and, to her surprise, it was selected as the first independent American film invited to compete for the Palme d’Or. Her follow-up, “Desperately Seeking Susan” (1985), starred a then little-known Madonna as a free-spirited grifter named Susan and Rosanna Arquette as a bored housewife named Roberta Glass who gets mixed up in Susan’s shady dealings. The movie had a sui-generis sensibility: rat-a-tat dialogue, flouncy (and trend-setting) eighties outfits, including Madonna’s soon-to-be-iconic stacked bangles and rosary necklaces, and a certain kind of feminine shamelessness that at the time was rarely seen on film. (Madonna airing out her armpits using a hand dryer in the Port Authority bathroom remains legendary.) The film cost Orion Pictures just five million dollars to make and grossed more than twenty-seven million dollars in the United States alone—a coup for a film that had two female stars, two female lead producers, a female writer, and a woman in the director’s chair. (Few studio movies today can even boast such a lineup.)
Then “Making Mr. Right” kicked off a series of ill-fated projects for Seidelman, including “Cookie” (1989), a little-seen gangster film that was co-written by Nora Ephron, and “She-Devil” (1989), a black comedy starring Roseanne Barr (as a resentful homemaker) and Meryl Streep (as aromance novelist who steals Barr’s husband). Seidelman went into, as she put it,“movie jail” for several years afterward, and found herself unable to get funding for ambitious projects. Her comeback, in the late nineties, came through the burgeoning medium of prestige-cable television. In 1997, she directed the pilot for “Sex and the City,” imbuing Carrie Bradshaw’s New York adventures with some of the signature Seidelmanian combo of daffiness and grit.
This month, Seidelman will publish a memoir, “Desperately Seeking Something,” which traces her own career path and describes the hurdles placed in front of female directors then and now. It’s a book “I wish I could have read when I was twenty-five,” she told me during a recent conversation. We spoke via Zoom because, after many decades living in a loft in SoHo, Seidelman has decamped to rural New Jersey. Our conversation has been condensed and edited.
It’s funny to be speaking to you while you are in New Jersey, because many of your most iconic movies are about escaping the suburbs for the big city, and you lived in New York City for so long.
Yeah, in my films, there was often a Jersey joke, because I had this impression of what New Jersey was like, based on travelling from Philadelphia to New York City on the New Jersey Turnpike, and going through Elizabeth, where it was really stinky.
You went to N.Y.U.’s film school in the seventies. What was your first New York apartment like?
My first apartment was on East Ninth Street, in an elevator building, which was upscale for the East Village. But it was a tiny, maybe a four-hundred-square-foot, L-shaped studio apartment with a kitchen nook. It faced an alley, where I could look into another person’s apartment about ten feet away. What was fascinating about New York was I could literally listen in on all the conversations of my neighbors. I didn’t even have to put my ear to the wall. I could just hear it.The guy I rented the apartment from was a former child star. He was in a show called “Our Gang,” which became “The Little Rascals.” But the apartment was depressing. It had just a cot and a few folding chairs. It made me see that New York is full of all these interesting people, either on their way up or on their way down.
You were a young woman living in the East Village by yourself at a pretty rough time for the city. Did you ever feel afraid?
No, never. I think that that was partly naïveté. The only time I was a little scared was when the Son of Sam hit the headlines, because I had long, dark hair then, and I fit the description of his victims. But I would go from the Upper West Side to Times Square to Astor Place at three in the morning and think nothing of it. I feel that my innocence was an asset, about a lot of things. For example, my not knowing how bad the odds were that I would ever become a working female film director. If I had known what the statistics were, it would’ve been disheartening, but I didn’t think about it. It was the same when I went out to shoot “Smithereens”—I’m jumping ahead now. But I didn’t know how dangerous it was to be running around Times Square at night when it was really seedy, with a bunch of kids and a bunch of camera equipment that easily could have been stolen. But that was part of the fun.
In film school, were your professors encouraging? Did they give you a sense that you could be a working woman director?
I had no female role models. I didn’t know any female American directors. The only one I had even heard of was Elaine May, because I had seen “The Heartbreak Kid” and loved it. And in my class of thirty-five, there were five women. All of the crafts classes—camera, directing—were taught by men.
What gave you the idea to make a full-length feature?
I kept talking about wanting to make a feature film after I left N.Y.U., but I needed a little kick to give me the confidence. What happened was, around the time I was twenty-eight, I fell in love with a man who was a professor. My friends were all getting married at the time, though they would all be divorced in ten years. I guess I felt like, Oh, it’s time to do that. Then my engagement exploded. Also around that time, my grandmother passed away. In her will, she had left me some money that was to go toward my wedding. I took that money and used it to jump-start my film. I had the kick in the butt I needed to say, “I’ll show you. I’m going to be a film director.”
You end several chapters of your book with a vow to prove everybody wrong.
Being a girl and growing up in the pre-feminist sixties, I got a lot of cheek pinches and pats on the head. But I never felt like that sweet little girl. I always felt like there was some other kind of person living inside. I always had this feeling, like, I’ll show you that I am different than how you see me.
You never really became a full-on punk, though you were certainly hanging around those scenes in the East Village and Lower East Side, and you captured them so well in your first film.
N.Y.U.’s film school back then was on East Seventh Street and Second Avenue, and you couldn’t have gotten more ground zero for punk culture. I wasn’t a punk, exactly, but I was rebellious. I was an instigator of bad behavior at times, but not in a full-on, Nancy Spungen kind of way. You know, Nancy—one half of Sid and Nancy—she was from my home town. I had some self-destructive behaviors, but I was not a self-destructive person. Still, there was a little angry thing in there that I responded to, a little cynical thing that appealed to my ironic sensibility more than the rainbows and unicorns of the hippie period.
Did you feel you were part of any kind of New York filmmaking school at the time?
Not necessarily a film school, though I felt like part of a downtown New York community. Scorsese was already established, along with Sidney Lumet and Mike Nichols. I knew who the New York filmmakers were. But there was this other, indie thing going on in the late seventies, and those were more my people. Jim Jarmusch, Bette Gordon, Lizzie Borden, Scott B. and Beth B. I would see them at parties, and there was a certain amount of sharing information, such as “Do you know a good D.P. who will work for free, or for a little bit of money?” or “Do you know where I can get cheap film stock?” There was a great place, owned by a guy named Rafiq, where you could buy short ends of film. If a well-known film director was making a movie, his leftover film stock would somehow end up with Rafiq in this loft near the Strand Book Store. You had to walk up twenty incredibly steep, rickety stairs. Walking up was scary, but walking down carrying film stock was scarier. That became the hangout for a lot of downtown filmmakers at the time.
How did “Smithereens,” your first feature, get made?
I always had a notebook with me, or if I didn’t have paper I was writing on my hands with a Magic Marker. So I had pages and pages of notes about things I’d seen, on the subway, or in the city, and I’d shuffle them around to try to make a story. The story coming together revolved around this character I called Wren, who was a bit more self-destructive than I am. But I related to her. She came from New Jersey, I came from Philadelphia, but it was coming from a place where things were not happening, and looking across at Manhattan and saying, “That’s where I want to be. That’s where the cool people are.”
I knew I wanted her to have a love story, but not necessarily a traditional one, and there would be disappointment in it. I had just gone through a disappointing love story myself. And I knew that she was somebody restless. Because I was restless. I was always interested in what the next thing was going to be.
What I find striking about Wren is that she is a proto-influencer, decades before that concept existed. She wasn’t necessarily good at anything, but she was putting up flyers announcing herself as famous all over the Lower East Side.
We all feel that way, right? We want to say, “I am here, I exist. I have something I want to say. I might not know exactly how I want to say it yet, but I’ll figure that out.”
Wren strikes me as a person who knows that she’s more special than the average person and is destined for greatness. But that’s all she seems to know. She doesn’t have too many practical skills.
A lot of that came out of the downtown punk scene, where I would go see some of these bands, and they weren’t good musicians. A lot of the songs sucked. I mean, there were some great people, like Talking Heads and Blondie, but a lot of it was people going, “I’m going to be in a band—it doesn’t matter whether I can play an instrument.” I can trace that line to Wren.
Can we talk about Wren’s fashion sense? Your films are so stylized, and so beautifully production-designed and costume-designed. You majored in fashion in college, and your fashion education must have played a part in your filmmaking.
I think you can say a lot with fashion that you don’t have to say with words. In the opening image of “Smithereens,” the fashion is telling you the story. You don’t even see the character. You see a vinyl black-and-white houndstooth miniskirt and ripped fish-net stockings enter a frame on a subway platform. Then you see a woman passenger—you don’t even really pay attention to her, but you see she’s carrying black-and-white checkered sunglasses, and you know that the person in that black-and-white miniskirt is going to have to somehow get those black-and-white sunglasses. The fashion tells you everything you need to know about what is going to happen.
“Smithereens” had a dramatic journey. You had to pause production almost as soon as you started, after the lead actress had an accident.
I didn’t have all the money together, but I figured that, if I just started filming, somehow it would come together. But on the fifth day of filming, we were doing a rehearsal in a loft in Tribeca for a scene where Wren’s love interest wants to get rid of her, so he pushes her out of a window onto his fire escape. Susan Berman, who played Wren, was out on the fire escape, and she thought it would be funny to try to run toward an open window at the other end of the loft, not knowing that the fire escape ended. I’m inside the loft, watching this rehearsal, and it’s like a Road Runner cartoon. I see her running along the fire escape and then just dropping, like off the edge of a cliff. Luckily, she landed on the landing below, but it was still a twenty-foot drop. She broke her leg; there was an ambulance, the whole thing.
Long story short, she was in a cast for three or four months. And I’m freaking out, because I’ve spent half of the money, and we’re only on day five. No one’s getting paid. I don’t know whether I can hold the crew together. I don’t know whether Susan will want to come back. I didn’t know I needed film permits to work, so I didn’t have a film permit. But I did have insurance, which paid for her claim. That’s something I learned in film school. Always get insurance.
How did you end up getting the film into Cannes?
Honestly, I just applied to the only film festival I really knew about. Sundance wasn’t Sundance at the time. There was no Tribeca Film Festival. I literally just sent Cannes an inquiry postcard, and then I forgot about it. A couple of weeks later, I got a phone call saying, “I’m a representative of the Cannes Film Festival. If you want to show your film, bring it to a screening room on West Forty-fifth.”
There was a film lab we all used then called DuArt. The guy who ran it, Irwin Young, was incredibly supportive of up-and-coming young directors. He processed my footage for “Smithereens,” but I did not know how I was going to pay to get it out of the lab. I explained to Irwin that Cannes wanted to see my film. Usually the person who’s in charge will not let you take your film out unless you’ve paid your bill. But Irwin was kind, and said, “O.K., we’ll let you take the print. You just have to bring it back.”
How much would the lab bill have been then?
Probably about nine thousand dollars, and I didn’t have it. I had tapped every friend, family member. I had borrowed up the wazoo to make the movie. I remember schlepping the cannister on the subway to the screening room and dropping it off, not knowing what would happen. About three days later, I got a phone call from a guy with a French accent, saying, “I saw your film. I think it’s interesting. I’d like to meet you for breakfast.” I met him at one of those French hotels in midtown. He said to me, “I like your film. I’d like to put it in the festival, but you have to understand what this means. Your film is in 16-mm. It needs to be blown up to 35-mm. You need to get a publicist; you need to have French subtitles; you need to make posters; and you need a sales rep.” I had none of those things. The cost of blowing up the film to 35-mm. was probably about twenty thousand dollars. As he’s having this conversation with me, I’m thinking, Oh, my God, I can’t believe this opportunity is slipping through my fingers.
Then, at that very moment, this British man and a woman sitting at the table next to us turned to me and said, “I’m sorry to interfere, but we happen to be sales agents. If you let us represent you, we will front you the money for all those things.”
Wow. And from Cannes you got distribution?
Yes, New Line Cinema. Cannes was where it hit me that I was a professional now, a real filmmaker. I got an agent, and I started to get attention from the studios. They flew me to L.A. I started doing the dog-and-pony show. I got sent a bunch of scripts, and, to be quite honest, most of them were not right for me. They were sucky. I knew I had to be smart. I decided to wait until I could find the right thing. I knew women who had done one beautiful independent film, and then made a Hollywood movie with a heavy-handed male producer second-guessing them or watching over their shoulder, and then they disappeared. I didn’t want to disappear.
About a year later, I got the script for “Desperately Seeking Susan.”
One thing I think people don’t know was that Rosanna Arquette was actually more famous than Madonna when you started making that movie. She got paid three times the amount Madonna did. You cast Madonna even before her first album came out.
The part that interests me is the discovery—or trying to figure out how to take somebody that you think is interesting in one way, and then use them in a way they haven’t been seen before. Like with Richard Hell, a punk rocker, to see him as a sexy movie star; or Madonna as an actress; or putting Meryl Streep in a comedy.
Did you have to persuade any studio executives to let you hire Madonna?
Oh, all of them! They didn’t really know who she was. But I knew her, because I went to Danceteria, and I went to Area. I went to those clubs, and not just to dance. At that time, all the art sort of melded together—performance art, graffiti art, dance. I had been invited to Keith Haring’s birthday party at the Paradise Garage, and Madonna performed there. Also, I had moved to a loft in SoHo, on Thompson, after “Smithereens” came out, and she lived right down the street from me. While we were making “Desperately Seeking Susan,” she would just come over.
I think people wonder how much of the style in the movie was self-generated from Madonna. She looks so amazing in the film.
Some of it was self-generated. But I worked with a great collaborator, Santo Loquasto, who had worked on some of Woody Allen’s movies as a costume designer and then as a production designer. He was smart enough to recognize, like I did, that, if you’re going to work with Madonna, you want to bring what’s great about her into the film. You don’t want to have her in a costume. So he went to her apartment and looked through her clothes. You can see he pulled things from her own closet, because, when she’s sitting outside of the Magic Club, she’s wearing this bright-orange cutoff sweatshirt that says “MC”—her initials.
I think my favorite shot is when she’s eating cheese puffs with the lace gloves on. It’s genius. No cheese dust on your hands!
That was actually the very first shot that we shot in the movie, her walking down St. Mark’s Place.
One thing you discuss in your book is that there was a sense of tension on the set, because Madonna was getting more famous, and people started to care about the fact that she was in the movie, and Rosanna worried she might be overlooked.
Yeah. Our film was now being referred to as the “Madonna movie,” and that had to have impacted the balance of the vibe on the set. I’ll take responsibility also. Rosanna was the more experienced actor. She had been used to acting in movies with professional actors and an experienced director. She was just coming off a Scorsese set. I was not an experienced director. I had made student films. In “Smithereens,” my relationship with those actors was very straightforward—there was no politesse. We were all in the trenches together. I’m the kind of person—sometimes what’s in my mind comes out my mouth. And I didn’t understand the dynamic of how you need to massage the actors you’re working with to get the kind of performances you want. So some of that tension was my not knowing the language, not having learned it yet.
I want to talk about your third film, “Making Mr. Right,” because I was at the screening at Metrograph a few months ago to see it for the first time, and I laughed so much. That movie is so fucking funny. But it was your first real flop.
I was so happy with the response to that screening, because, when a movie is a flop, people tend to not want to talk about it. I loved making “Making Mr. Right,” but people seem to not want to bring up the fact that it was a flop at the box-office or hurt my feelings. It was in theatres for such a short amount of time, and then it was never really pushed on DVD. So Metrograph was the first time I had seen it with an audience up on a big screen in thirty years. And I laughed! I always thought maybe people didn’t get the style. It’s an A.I. romantic comedy.
Which is certainly newly relevant! Despite the film flopping, you got to fail upward a little bit, and make another movie, the gangster film “Cookie,” co-written by Nora Ephron. Was there any feeling you had, when working with Nora as a writer, that she would be a director one day? Did she ever talk to you about wanting to do what you did?
She didn’t talk to me about wanting to do it, but there was no doubt in my mind that she could do it, because she had all the qualities that a director needs. She had confidence. She had a vision. She had the ability to multitask. A director needs to know how to do ten things at once. When I would go to her house for script meetings, she would be cooking food, dealing with her kids, and talking about the script at the same time. I knew that I also wanted to eventually be a mom, but I also wanted to be a film director, and I didn’t quite know how you could be good at both at the same time. I had no role models. Looking at Nora—she wasn’t a director yet, but she was a professional woman, mom, and working New Yorker.
You were pregnant on the set of your next film, “She-Devil,” starring Roseanne Barr and Meryl Streep. But you didn’t know that you were pregnant.
I was five months pregnant, and I did not know! When you make a movie, it’s like being on a roller-coaster ride. You don’t have time to wash your hair. During preproduction on “She-Devil,” I knew something was wrong. I went to the doctor, had a pregnancy test. He said, “No, you’re not pregnant. It’s probably hormonal because you are in a crazy job. You’re under pressure.”
Looking back on it now, I do see some signs that I totally ignored. I did gag a couple of times when I brushed my teeth. And I was gaining weight, but I thought, O.K., I’m eating too much craft services. When the shoot ended, a woman came up to me and said, “Oh, congratulations!” I thought she was congratulating me on a movie. And she said, “No, are you pregnant?” And I said, “No, I’m just fat.” One night though, I was lying in bed and I thought I had internal blockage or some sort of stomach cancer. I knew something was seriously wrong. I went to the doctor, and he took one look at me and said, “You’re going into your fifth month.” I kept thinking, I’m not dumb—how could I have been so out of touch? I do believe that fate pushes you this way or that. I wanted to be a mom, but I don’t know how I would’ve responded if I had found that out in the beginning, right as I was going to shoot the movie. Would I have said, “I’m going to work with the biggest TV star in the world, and the biggest actress in the world, and I don’t want to direct a movie going through morning sickness and maybe feeling miserable and standing on my feet all day?” I’m glad I didn’t have to make that decision.
I think “She-Devil” is hilarious, but the critics were not so hot on it, and it did not set the box-office aflame.
I knew I was in movie jail after “She-Devil.” It didn’t do bad—it just didn’t live up to expectations.
What does it mean to be in “movie jail”?
Well, it can happen after one movie. With guys, it usually happens after a few movies. [Laughs.] You just stop getting the good projects, and you don’t get the head of the studio returning your call. You can feel it. In New York, you don’t feel it as much, but in L.A.—I’ve been to L.A. after a hit, and you feel like you’re the queen. I’ve been there after a flop, and you kind of want to hide under a rock.
With “She-Devil,” a couple of things happened. The studio was really gung ho about the film—top movie star, top TV star. They wanted to put it out on the same weekend as “The War of the Roses,” which was also a revenge movie, but it had a male star. Its cast, Michael Douglas, Kathleen Turner, and Danny DeVito, had already been in movies together that had been hits. “She-Devil” was a domestic comedy with two women, so you’re not going to get the guys rushing out to see it. The casting of our film was not a Hollywood given. It was more like a Hollywood curiosity. So my partner, Jonathan, who I produced the movie with, had gone to the studio and said, “Shouldn’t we check into not putting the movie out on the same day as ‘War of the Roses’?” But Hollywood—it’s like a machine. Once they get the trailers out saying “Coming December 18th” and they book three thousand screens, it’s very hard to change dates. I do think that that film did very well in ancillary markets, on DVD and TV, but it would’ve done better if it wasn’t on that weekend.
And also, literally the week the movie came out, that week was when I had a baby. So suddenly I’m a mom, and my world is changing drastically.
Weren’t you in labor while Siskel and Ebert were reviewing the movie, and they showed up on the TV in your delivery room?
Yes! The doctor’s hand was up my vagina telling me to push, and there were Siskel and Ebert. Every couple of seconds, I was having labor pains—and half of me is still that director, watching to see what those critics were saying.
Did you take a step back when your son was born just to sort of be a mom for a little while, or was it because of the “She-Devil” reception, or was it a little bit of both?
I was exhausted. I had done “Making Mr. Right,” “Cookie,” and “She-Devil,” one right after the other. Directing is physically hard work. I am not sure I had the desire or wherewithal to make that next movie unless it was really a movie I really wanted to make. I was happy to take a back seat for a while, especially when I had an infant, because the kinds of movies I wanted to make were the kinds that I really wanted to fight for.
In 1997, you directed the pilot of “Sex and the City.” For me, the show exists in the same world as the first few movies you made—a scrappy girl wandering around New York. She has her own sense of style; she has her own sense of adventure. She’s the main character in her own movie. It feels so you.
It was the New York that I knew in the moment. That’s what I was trying to get at. Even the end scene of the pilot, where she’s in the freeze-frame—she’s alone in the middle of the street. It’s raining and she looks confused. Take a look at the end frame of “Smithereens,” and compare. It’s not that different. Recently, a friend of a friend pointed out that, ironically, Wren and Carrie in that freeze-frame are wearing similar clothing. They’re both wearing animal-print tops.
I want to talk a little bit about the state of the industry. There are more women directors now, though not as many as you would think. Still, Greta Gerwig is breaking box-office records. Does it feel more promising than when you were coming up?
I have mixed feelings. I love movies. When I lived in New York, I lived near the Angelika and Film Forum, and, at three o’clock in the afternoon, if I wasn’t doing anything, I would see a movie. But culture has shifted. I don’t think movies have the same cultural clout that they used to have, and that saddens me a little bit. But maybe people would’ve said that about vaudeville if it was the turn of the century. I just remember, if a Jim Jarmusch or David Lynch movie came out, that weekend everyone who was culturally plugged in would rush out to see it. Or like with “Lost in Translation,” I think I was there for the first screening the morning it opened, because I had to see it.
I don’t know if people feel that way about movies anymore. Maybe younger people do—I don’t know. Sometimes I don’t know whether it’s my age that influences how I see the world, or whether it’s that the world has really changed. I think it’s probably both. I think that the movies, the studios are all run by corporations. For whatever you might’ve thought about Samuel Goldwyn or Louis B. Mayer or whoever those guys were—they liked movies. They were sharks, they were crude, but I got the sense they genuinely loved films. And I don’t know whether the people who are running Comcast right now care about movies. On the positive side, I mean, look, I’m a fan of Greta Gerwig’s movies. I ran out to see “Barbie” because I was interested to see a movie that could appeal to both the Barbie lovers and the Barbie haters, and a movie that might even be pinker than “She-Devil” was. And I enjoyed it, you know, for the Barbie movie it was. There aren’t that many women who have made billion-dollar blockbusters, so go girl.
You teach directing now. Do you think young people these days have that same kind of adventurous spirit that you did, where they’re willing to just go out and make an independent feature?
I get a lot of e-mails or social-media messages from people who are doing that. I think the problem is getting their films out into the world. We’re so spread out with all the streaming channels. There’s so much going on that you can’t really focus on certain things. So I think that films get lost in the shuffle. And maybe also people’s attention spans are shorter. Maybe somebody’s doing with their cell phone right now what I was trying to do with Wren, and they’re sticking on YouTube or TikTok.
But one of the things I did want to say was that on the positive side, that, during my last year teaching at N.Y.U., I had more women than men in my class as directors, and also women who wanted to be D.P.s. You couldn’t find a woman D.P. back in the eighties! There were a few who wanted to do it, but they were real mavericks, because you couldn’t get into the union as a woman. [With the memoir] I was really just writing a book I wish I could have read when I was twenty-five and starting out. I wanted to read a book about the ups and downs, from a woman film director, and there wasn’t one. I wish Elaine May had written a book back then. ♦
Sourse: newyorker.com
