Some still remember 1985’s Desperately Seeking Susan as a Madonna vehicle, but the movie’s actual heroine is New Jersey housewife Roberta Glass, played by Rosanna Arquette. Roberta is the movie’s yearning dreamer, living vicariously through personal ads she follows in the newspaper. Some guy keeps posting a three-line S.O.S. to his sort-of girlfriend (Madonna), and finally Roberta hops a bus to New York just to watch their next meetup in person.
Amnesia and an identity swap follow, true to the 80s notion of “downtown” as an Alice in Wonderland adventure (see also Scorsese’s After Hours). But for director Susan Seidelman, the city’s energy really was a tonic. In her new memoir, Desperately Seeking Something: A Memoir About Movies, Mothers, and Material Girls, she tracks her rise from Philly-born firecracker to Hollywood filmmaker, at a time when full-fledged heroines were not exactly a high priority in boys’-club studios.
Desperately Seeking Susan captures two sides of Seidelman’s experience. Roberta evokes her parents’ friends, raising kids in a working-class Jewish neighborhood; her mom married at 18, only going back to school years later. Madonna’s streetwise charmer is another story, suggesting the artistic freedom Seidelman could start embracing at N.Y.U.’s film school.
The director jokes that her five-foot height set her apart from your average Hollywood director, but she told stories that the movies sorely needed—about women like Roberta and Susan, or punk-rock wannabe Wren in Smithereens (1982), or Roseanne’s burn-it-all-down jilted wife in She-Devil (1989).
In Seidelman’s grounded telling, her non-movie life wasn’t so out of the ordinary. Blessed with a cheerful family, Seidelman filled her diaries with movie memories, spent summers at the Jersey Shore, and twirled on a local show called Super Lou’s TV Dance Party.
She kept seeking out adventure—Eurail, Israel, Istanbul—and that included her film education, learning about European art-house cinema from a 27-year-old college teacher with whom she had an affair. Drawing influences from New Hollywood directors of the 1970s and brash Italian auteur Lina Wertmüller, she binged at the Carnegie Hall Cinema on 57th Street.
Seidelman had an early success with an Academy-nominated student film, and an inheritance from her grandmother let her tackle Smithereens, her debut feature. In it, Off Off Broadway discovery Susan Berman stars as an East Village striver, backed by a Feelies-led soundtrack (suggested by Jonathan Demme).
Colorfully populated with the likes of Richard Hell, Cookie Mueller, and Amos Poe, with graffiti by Lee Quiñones, Smithereens went all the way to Cannes. But Seidelman keeps bringing her life back to earth, noting how she bounced back after a two-timing ex. (“I’ll show you” recurs as her spunky mantra.)
Offers for teen comedies followed, but Seidelman went for Desperately Seeking Susan, liking the idea of two female leads and teaming up with two women to produce. She bonded with screenwriter Leora Barish over Jacques Rivette’s 1974 French film Celine and Julie Go Boating.
You feel Seidelman’s affection for almost everyone on-screen—John Turturro as a magic-club impresario, or Roberta’s square hot-tub-salesman husband (the late Mark Blum). Madonna, too, even after her stardom grew during filming as Like a Virgin loomed, requiring extra security. (Seidelman says her fee, pre-fame bump, was one-third of Arquette’s.)
Desperately Seeking Susan is a pop fantasia of downtown—and flat-out lovely: city haunts pop with exquisite colors and textures thanks to the cinematography of Ed Lachman, and the costume and production design by Santo Loquasto (Madonna’s golden-pyramid jacket! The calavera hatbox!). Frequent revivals suggest it’s Seidelman’s most beloved movie, but fans might also like to know that she directed the first episodes of Sex and the City, too, during a 1990s move into TV.
Seidelman kept on working; bringing her life full circle, she later made a movie about a retirement community from a screenplay by her mom. (Her husband, Jonathan Brett, was also in the biz, producing a Dylan Thomas film starring the then married Gary Oldman and Uma Thurman, whose premature shutdown still seems to rankle Seidelman.) She started teaching more in 2013, the last year she made a feature-length movie (Hot Flashes), and felt the times shifting: “Pop culture was becoming unrecognizable,” she writes.
Throughout the book, Seidelman is refreshingly open and humble about the challenges of balancing work and family. Maybe nothing captures the sometime absurdity of simply trying to live her life as a working woman in Hollywood better than one tableau: giving birth while a hospital TV blared Siskel and Ebert debating the merits of She-Devil.
Nicolas Rapold is a New York–based writer and the former editor at Film Comment magazine
