Gems of the 1980's: Susan Seidelman Remembers DESPERATELY SEEKING SUSAN

(Filmmaker Susan Seidelman, above.)

by Jon Zelazny

In the early 80’s NYC cultural lull between Patti Smith’s retirement and Jay McInerney’s breakout, NYU film school graduate Susan Seidelman did the scrappy shoestring indie film thing, resulting in her acclaimed feature debut Smithereens (1982).

Best known for her hit sophomore effort, Desperately Seeking Susan (1985), Seidelman continues to direct movies and TV shows featuring female protagonists… including the pilot for “Sex and the City” and her Oscar nominated short film The Dutch Master (1994), about a shy dental technician who ventures “into” a museum painting for flights of erotic fantasy.

SUSAN SEIDELMAN: My husband Jonathan Brett—who co-wrote and produced The Dutch Master—and I had committed to living in Paris for a year because I was set to direct a feature for Polygram, a company that unfortunately went bankrupt. So we were kind of in a funk over there, and probably thinking about various ways of escaping our reality, when we went to the Louvre and saw this painting by Pieter de Hooch. A great thing about Dutch Master paintings is how they have rooms within rooms; there’s the main space, but there’s often a door suggesting something happening in the space beyond. We thought, wouldn’t it be interesting to go into that painting and through that door?

Your protagonist is a young woman, apprehensive about marriage, and yearning for experience outside her comfort zone. She’s similar to Rosanna Arquette’s unhappy housewife in Desperately Seeking Susan.

You’re right; both depict women seeking an escape from their rather mundane lives. Living a fantasy life is a theme I’ve always been interested in. I think of it in terms of Alice in Wonderland: in Susan, Madonna is kind of the White Rabbit, and this bored housewife decides to follow her down the rabbit hole… into a more exciting world where she gets to have an adventure.

As a young woman, did you have these kinds of fears about marriage?

It wasn’t so much a fear of marriage as much as a fear of living a boring existence. I grew up in suburban Philadelphia, which was a very nice place, and I certainly wasn’t miserable, but it was pretty homogeneous, and I sensed there was a more colorful world out there. And the way I got out was to go to NYU film school.

The Dutch Master was made for the European series “Erotic Tales,” and I admire how you skate close to, but never cross that line between eros and exploitation.

It probably depends on your own definition of erotic, but I never thought the film was just about people having sex, or showing nudity. But as a director, as a filmmaker—I’m kind of a voyeur. That’s part of the job. You get to look in and explore all different kinds of worlds that you don’t necessarily participate in. That’s really what movies are: we go to watch other people doing private things on the big screen. So the idea of a woman going into the world of a painting was erotic to me. For contrast, I wanted to make her “real” life as antiseptic and sterile as possible, which is why I made her a dental hygienist working in an office that was very cold and chrome, while the world inside the painting was lush, dark, and sensual. The colors, the set design, the costumes; everything was about creating a difference between her real life and fantasy life.

(The work of Pieter de Hooch, above.)

Another intriguing aspect is that while Mira Sorvino’s protagonist is not a mute, we never hear her speak. How did you come to that decision?

Since we portray her and her friends as these working class Brooklyn girls who take the train into Manhattan every day, I thought giving her a voice would make her too much like her friends. I wanted her to be kind of a romantic figure; a dreamy person, someone less based in reality. I don’t know if that was a good decision or not.

It’s very striking, partly because you don’t even notice it at first.

I was hoping you wouldn’t.

The thirty short films in the Erotic Tales series:
http://www.atlasfilm.com/product/late-night/erotic-tales-1.htm

Let’s backtrack to your post-NYU years, the late seventies. I read your recent article on the making of Smithereens; I guess there’s a new DVD edition?

Cinetic is distributing it on Video-on-Demand, and putting it out on iTunes and Amazon.com as well, so hopefully a new audience—one that probably wasn’t even born when it first came out—will get the chance to see it. What’s great is how the whole post-punk New York scene of that time seems to be of real interest to kids today.

Did you read that book Legs McNeil did? Please Kill Me. It’s an oral history of that scene, and it describes all kinds of people like Wren.

Smithereens follows the exploits of a near-destitute young hustler on the make. Wren first attempts to promote herself, and then decides to “manage” an apathetic local rock star, played by NYC punk icon Richard Hell.

I think Wren predates all these reality stars you see on the cover of People magazine these days; the ones who are “famous” although you’re not sure what it is they actually do. Wren thought if she put up posters of herself—even though she has no discernable talent—she could become famous… I guess she was right!

At the time you made it… it was really before the whole New York independent film scene began, right? There was no Spike Lee yet. No Jarmusch, no Bill Sherwood.

There were a few filmmakers working, like Amos Poe, and a guy named Eric Mitchell. John Sayles was just getting started on the east coast; I think he shot The Return of the Secaucus Seven (1980) in Hoboken. He was working in maybe the $60,000 budget range, while guys like Poe and Mitchell were making movies for under $10,000. They never got distribution, but they would show them at these independent screening rooms—small film collectives. By the end of the eighties, independent film was more organized, had much bigger budgets, and established distributors, like the early Miramax.

When we finished Smithereens in ‘82, there were very few indie film distributors. What they had was “art film” distributors: we got picked up by New Line Cinema. Bob Shaye was in New York at that time, distributing movies by Werner Herzog and Wim Wenders.

And that whole downtown scene wasn’t really on the wider cultural radar yet, was it? It was before Bright Lights, Big City and Tama Janowitz?

There was a very vibrant scene around CBGB’s and Max’s Kansas City, and it was starting to become well known; it was certainly talked about in London, for example. But it was really about music, not film… though there was some crossover, which is how I ended up working with Richard Hell, and Debbie Harry starred in an Amos Poe film called Unmade Beds (1976).

Were you an actual fan of that scene? Did you hang out at those clubs?

I did. I can’t say I was a fan of all the music, but I was interested in the culture, and I hung out at CBGB’s and Max’s Kansas City and the Mudd Club. What I think was interesting about that time is that New York was in the midst of a financial crisis, so there wasn’t a lot of money in the city… which was really good for filmmakers and musicians and painters and other creative people because they could afford to live here. Downtown was really cheap, so you had all this great street culture: bars and clubs and storefronts that were turned into very funky galleries and music spaces.

Unfortunately, these days, one of the problems with Manhattan is it’s too expensive for young artists to live in, so they’ve all moved. Ten years ago, they were all going to Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and now Williamsburg is too expensive.

How did you support yourself between NYU and Smithereens?

There were two things. I’d made a film at NYU that was nominated for the Student Academy Award, and that got me some grant money to make other short films. One grant was from AFI, and another was from the New York State Council of the Arts. Those were the days when grant money for the arts was still available. I also did office temp work. I was a secretary/receptionist. It was a choice between that or waitressing… and I was kind of klutzy.

Were there any young women who particularly inspired Wren?

There were. She was kind of a combination of a couple women I knew. The main woman she was based on died from a drug overdose. She was kind of a sad victim of those times.

I’m not surprised. Wren doesn’t strike me as someone with a brilliant future ahead of her.

I’ve shown the film to a lot of people, and some find her kind of appealing, and others think she’s obnoxious and totally unsympathetic, but there’s something about her resilience that I really like. Her tenacity. Another inspiration for her was the streetwalker Giulietta Masina played in The Nights of Cabiria (1957). That character was also kind of scrappy. She got knocked down, but had the kind of survival instinct to always pull herself back up… like a dog that keeps getting kicked away, but still follows.

But as far as making it as a rock ‘n roll manager, Wren is never going to be Sharon Osbourne. She doesn’t have the brains, or the connections.

It’s true. But I think with people who are tenacious, you always hope that if what they want doesn’t work out, they’ll be clever enough to find some other outlet for their passions. I also relate to Wren because she’s another girl from the suburbs who just wants to lead a more interesting life. Clearly, that theme is very resonant and personal for me. Thankfully, I’m not as self-destructive as Wren.

We talked about the aesthetics of The Dutch Master, and Desperately Seeking Susan has a very purposeful visual design as well. Was your ability to exert that kind of control over Smithereens more limited?

Smithereens is actually pretty stylized. If you look at the first frame: you see the lower half of a woman standing in the subway holding a pair of black and white checkered sunglasses, and then see legs in a black and white checkered miniskirt walk up behind her, you know without any dialogue why the girl in the miniskirt needs to steal those checkered sunglasses. And that’s told through fashion, and style, and design. For me, those aspects are always important, especially when they help tell the story. That probably came out of the fact that when I was younger, I wanted to be a fashion designer. I think you can use the details of clothing to tell a lot about a character.

(Seidelman during the production of Desperately Seeking Susan, above.)

I noticed that watching Susan again this weekend. Being a guy, I generally don’t pay much attention to those kinds of details unless it’s some period epic where you’re supposed to ooh and ahh over the costumes. Before we get deeper into Susan, how did it first come together?

Well, my friends from film school and I never anticipated what would become of Smithereens after we finished it, but after it was accepted into the Cannes Film Festival, it got a commercial release from New Line, and suddenly I found myself with an agent. So I started to get scripts sent to me—the studios are kind of interested in who’s up and coming—but most of the scripts were really bad. A lot of them were female teen comedies, and just very silly. I was very aware that because there were so few women directors to begin with, if a woman got some attention for making an independent film and landed a Hollywood movie—and it didn’t succeed at the box office—you never heard from her again. (Guys seemed to get more chances.) I knew I’d better pick my first piece wisely, so I waited and waited, and one day my agent sent me this script called Desperately Seeking Susan… and being superstitious, the title certainly caught my eye.

Did they change it just to entice you?

No, that was the actual title; I assumed they were desperately seeking me! So I read it and found it really resonated with some of my own personal obsessions. I also liked that part of the story was set in the same East Village areas where Smithereens took place. That was a world I felt I knew… and I could certainly relate to the lead character’s suburban existence; had I not moved to New York that probably could have been the life I had. So while Susan would have a bigger budget, and be my first “studio” movie, it didn’t feel like it would be an overwhelming experience.

The script seems very reminiscent of all those great 1930’s “sparkling” Hollywood romantic comedies. Did it read that way on the page?

It did. It is kind of screwball, like those great movies with Carole Lombard, or the Preston Sturges comedies. Another one of my favorite films that it reminded me of was Jacques Rivette’s Celine and Julie Go Boating (1974), which has a similar kind of magical realism, and involves people changing places, and stage magic. I thought if I could pull off obvious story contrivances like amnesia—but do it in a clever way and with a bit of a wink—I could get the audience to go along with it instead of being turned off by those clichés.

Were you a student of early Hollywood comedy?

I’d say so. I really loved all those 1930s actresses because they were so feisty, colorful, and strong. By the 1950s female characters had become too domestic. Wives and mothers—along and the occasional “bad girl”—were the only options.

A lot of directors who excelled at that style—Capra, Lubitsch, Cukor, Mitchell Leisen—came from a theater background. Did you?

I didn’t. Another thing about a lot of those guys—or when you get to some later people, like Billy Wilder—they were transplanted Europeans, which I think gave them a slightly ironic look at American culture; they could put a twist on those story clichés, and that always appealed to me.

Two faults I often find with screwball comedies is they either amp up the character interplay to the point where everybody’s hysterical, or the characters are too cartoon-y. Susan avoids both of those traps; were you always consciously thinking about not letting things get too silly or too shrill?

If you can make the characters very real and recognizable; if the essence of the character is truthful in some way… I was hoping that would keep me from crossing that line. I didn’t want the characters to come across like corny stereotypes, or clichéd, or too broad. Screwball and romantic comedy definitely requires a light touch.

I think that’s why it holds up so well. The story and situations are absurd, but all the characters are very natural and likable... and nobody looks like they’re trying to outdo each other. Even Madonna. What she gives you—that punk side of her personality—is exactly what’s needed, and it’s just the right amount. I love some of her throwaway moments—drying her armpits with the blower in the ladies’ room—that’s more “rock star” than anything Richard Hell gave you!

Well, some of that I can take credit for, and some of it was just being able to catch Madonna-isms on film. We cast her hoping her persona would lend itself to the story, and that wasn’t necessarily an easy thing to do. A lot of rock stars have tried to be on film, but for whatever reason, the film can end up actually diminishing their power.

(Madonna makes innovative use of the hand dryer in Desperately Seeking Susan, above.)

Susan is one of the only roles I can think of that lets Madonna be who she is without demanding more than she’s capable of. Another amazing thing about the cast is the number of recognizable actors in small roles: Steven Wright, Anne Magnuson, Giancarlo Esposito, John Turturro, Richard Edson, Laurie Metcalf, Michael Badalucco; it’s like a Who’s Who of indie film.

I don’t want to say it was just luck and timing, but there was certainly a number of great actors who were just sort of coming up the ranks at that time, and I was fortunate enough to get them. For many of them, it was their first film… and being that it was my first studio film, I think we all just wanted to do the absolute best we could.

It reminded me of an essay I read on Albert Brooks, which noted that in most movies, every effort goes into making the star shine at every moment, while Brooks will often give a bit player a real zinger, or somehow allow them to make an impression… and Susan has that quality in spades. What inspired your instinct for that?

It goes back to that Alice in Wonderland metaphor. I wanted Roberta to constantly be encountering all these vivid characters, so in every scene, I wanted the people opposite her to give her something to react to, or play against, or be amazed by.

Some of that wasn’t even scripted. That taxi driver who takes Madonna to the pier: his name was Rockets Redglare; he was this fairly well known downtown character, and we just let him say whatever he wanted. One take he said this, the next he said that…

The one you used is hilarious, his riff on sushi. You even have great extras… like the scene where Madonna walks past those three grinning male triplets.

Those guys weren’t even cast. We were just getting a shot of Madonna going into the newspaper office… and I saw those triplets walking down the street. We said, “Hey, you wanna be in this movie?” You know, even though it was a studio picture, it still had this kind of funky atmosphere.

Let’s talk a bit about the lighting, costumes, and sets. Every element of the visual design looks like a lot of thought went into it.

One of the great things was that I got to work with Santo Loquasto. I think prior to Susan, he’d just done the costumes for some Woody Allen movies, and a lot of theater, but this was either his first or second movie as both costume designer and production designer… which is fairly unusual, that one person handles both departments. But it allowed him to really coordinate all those elements, and create a complete world. So Roberta—when she’s a housewife—her outfits have a lot of cream, and beige, and pastels… and that’s how her house is decorated too. Very neutral colors.

Which was the time period, right? The "Miami Vice" look. Then in the New York scenes, you contrast that with very solid primary colors.

Exactly. We wanted New York to be very crisp and vivid. A lot of credit goes to the director of photography, Ed Lachman. To get that fairy tale/magical—but still gritty look for those nighttime street scenes, he used a lot of colored gels on the lights—like fluorescent green or purple—and this was before that look became a staple of music videos.

It was Ed’s first real studio movie as well. And the producers, Sarah Pillsbury and Midge Sanford, had never produced a movie before… so a lot of us were pretty fresh. No one was jaded, or saying, “This is the way it’s supposed to be done.” We were all sort of figuring it out at the same time.

I asked Walter Hill if he ever wanted to do a chick movie, so I’ll close here with the reverse: have you ever thought of doing a guy movie?

Oh… I prefer making films about characters I think I have a unique point of view about. And because there are so few women directors working, even today, that’s an area where I feel like I still have a lot to say. I’m afraid if ever did a real “guy” movie, there’d be no way I could compete, or have something more interesting to say, that Martin Scorsese, Quentin Tarantino—or any of those great male directors—couldn’t say better.

I did do one movie with a male lead—Making Mr. Right (1987). It starred John Malkovich, but he was playing an android. I’m not sure if that counts?
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This article originally appeared at EightMillionStories.com on October 23, 2009