‘Desperately Seeking Susan’ director Susan Seidelman recalls a life in film

Her recollections are the catalyst for 'Desperately Seeking Something: A Memoir About Movies, Mothers, and Material Girls,' Seidelman’s new memoir.

Susan Seidelman was a city person — something that’s evident if you’ve seen her films like “Desperately Seeking Susan” or “She-Devil.”

But after 43 years of living in New York, Seidelman moved to rural New Jersey and was adjusting to country life when the pandemic hit. With plenty of time on her hands, she started jotting down memories on her cell phone’s Notes app. 

“Then I realized that I had 50, 60 pages of notes,” Seidelman says on a recent video call. 

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Those recollections – as well as her 70th birthday – were the catalyst for “Desperately Seeking Something: A Memoir About Movies, Mothers, and Material Girls,” Seidelman’s new memoir. “I think you have to be old enough to have a perspective on your life and also feel like you’ve lived enough of your life to have something to say about it in a slightly distanced way,” says Seidelman of writing a memoir.

“I can talk about my childhood and even all the films that I made in the ‘80s, which are now 35 to 40 years ago, with some distance,” she adds, “without all the emotional stuff that you feel when you’re in the moment and reading reviews, good or bad, so that’s what motivated me.”

Raised in Pennsylvania, Seidelman headed to New York for film school in the 1970s and began her career when there were relatively few women in the director’s chair. Her debut, “Smithereens,” was released in 1982 and was the first U.S. indie film to compete at Cannes for the Palme d’Or. But it was her second movie, “Desperately Seeking Susan,” the screwball comedy starring Rosanna Arquette and Madonna in a case of mistaken identity, that would become iconic. More films followed, some better received than others, as did TV projects, including the pilot for “Sex and the City.”

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“Desperately Seeking Something” is as much about the world that influenced Seidelman as it is about her movies. Particularly, it’s about how her adopted hometown of New York changed in the decades that she lived there.

“I never know if I romanticize certain time periods, like the late ‘70s and ‘80s, because I was young or they really were a great time period. It’s hard to know,” she says. “But there was something that was very exciting about the grittiness and grunginess.”

She recalls the way in which “Smithereens” was filmed. “I didn’t know that you needed to have film permits, so we just ran around the city shooting wherever we wanted. We never really asked permission,” Seidelman says. “There was something kind of exciting in that funky outlaw spirit.”

In the film, which was ahead of its time, the protagonist, Wren, excels at self-promotion despite not doing much of anything. She plasters photocopies of her face around town in a way that’s not too different from blasting selfie after selfie on Instagram today.

“It’s a way of saying I’m here, I exist, I want to be recognized, which is exactly what everyone is into these days,” she explains in our interview. “Maybe that’s a universal theme. We all want to tell people that we exist.”

Meanwhile, the enigmatic, titular character of “Desperately Seeking Susan” was played by Madonna when the singer was on cusp of super stardom.

“As I say in the book, when we started filming, the first day we were filming was on St. Mark’s Place, which was probably the heart of the East Village, St. Mark’s and 2nd Avenue. No one really paid attention to her. We just filmed,” Seidelman recalls. “Maybe a few people might have known who she was because she did have, from her first album, some stuff on MTV, but it wasn’t mass popular.”

She adds, “It was fascinating to watch over the course of the nine weeks that we were filming, to witness on a daily basis how her career skyrocketed. Again, I think that was because, by the end of the shoot, it was right before ‘Like a Virgin’ album hit and that changed everything.”

At the end of the 1980s, Seidelman directed “She-Devil,” starring Roseanne Barr as a jilted housewife seeking revenge against her ex-husband (Ed Begley, Jr.) for his affair with a romance novelist, played by Meryl Streep. It’s a stylized movie, with the world of Streep’s character adorned in shades of pink.

“Some people didn’t like the pinkness of it,” Seidelman says of reactions at the time of its release. “I was definitely making a statement about our obsession with beauty and culture and celebrity and just the way women and housewives are taken for granted.” 

Today’s viewers, though, might be more inclined to understand the film’s exaggerated femininity. “Certainly after ‘Barbie,’ maybe,” says Seidelman. “One of the few movies even pinker than ‘She-Devil.’”

Seidelman surmises that streaming has helped bring new generations of viewers to her films. “If you’re curious about something, you Google it and find out that it’s streaming on Criterion or Hulu or whatever it is and you get to watch it,” she says, “which has been amazing, especially for indie films and those low-budget films that came and went in a flash.”

Still, she adds, there’s something to be said for the experience of going to see movies in theaters, like she did so often in the heyday of low-priced repertory cinemas.

“I kind of miss that, that people don’t have that communal experience,” she says. “There’s a vibe you get when you’re sitting in a movie theater with other people and you’re seeing it up on a big screen and you’re not looking at your cell phone and texting at the same time, that I think a lot of people miss out on these days.”