'Desperately Seeking Susan' director Susan Seidelman reflects on her singular career

Susan Seidelman was seven weeks into directing her first studio picture when an electrician asked her to fetch him a bottle of water. In his defense, it was the dude’s first day on the job, and back in 1984 there weren’t a lot of movie directors who looked like Susan Seidelman. “I’m young, girlish and I don’t wear a reverse baseball cap or have a scruffy beard,” the filmmaker writes in “Desperately Seeking Something: A Memoir About Movies, Mothers, and Material Girls.” She begins the book with that anecdote as a way of reminding us how remarkable it was for this 4-foot-11-inch, self-described “Philly Girl” to make it to the top of a Hollywood ecosystem dominated by macho, optics-obsessed males.

Seidelman will be at the Brattle Theatre on Thursday, July 18, to sign copies of her memoir and talk about the ups and downs of her singular career before a 35mm screening of the film Seidelman was shooting when said electrician mistook her for a production assistant, the now-classic “Desperately Seeking Susan.” (By the way, she did wind up bringing that guy a bottle of water, just to see his reaction later when he learned who he’d been bossing around.)

It’s a breezy book broken up into short, punchy chapters that share the titles with some of Seidelman’s favorite songs, as if a filmmaker famous for her musical prowess couldn’t resist scoring her own story with jukebox hits. We follow young Susan from her childhood in the 1960s Philadelphia suburbs, when a young woman’s career options revolved around attracting a husband — to New York University’s graduate film program at the end of the ‘70s, located in an East Village that looked like a cross between an artists’ commune and a bombed-out dystopia.

New York City was bankrupt. Everyone who could afford to had fled to the suburbs, abandoning lower Manhattan to criminals and creative types. This was the landscape that spawned “Smithereens.” Seidelman’s 1982 debut captured a no wave scene of cramped, squatter apartment denizens living hand-to-mouth and hookup-to-hookup. Susan Berman stars as Wren, a moody refugee from the New Jersey suburbs determined to be famous despite a distinct absence of talent, or really any artistic interests at all. (These days Wren would probably be a hugely successful social media influencer. Watching the movie today, one can easily imagine her having a podcast.)

“Smithereens” was the first American independent film to screen in competition at the Cannes Film Festival. It’s an honor that almost didn’t happen, as Seidelman had tried to blow off a breakfast meeting with the fest’s programmer, offering the excuse, “I’m not a morning person.” Then she couldn’t afford the lab fees to obtain a 35mm print of the finished film. But a pair of seasoned industry reps who’d just launched writer-director John Sayles’ career happened to be sitting at the next table — they were morning people — and after overhearing the conversation offered to front her the cash. Only in New York, kids, only in New York.

Appearing on the July 1 episode of “The Brattle Film Podcast,” Seidelman said she was inspired by early Jack Nicholson performances like “Five Easy Pieces” and “The Last Detail,” explaining how “You never heard people say, ‘I like Jack Nicholson. He’s nice.’ You liked him because he was interesting.” During an era overrun with boringly well-behaved girlfriend roles, the women in Seidelman’s movies were allowed to be messy and flawed. That’s what made them interesting.

“Desperately Seeking Susan” is about two interestingly messy women who might as well stand in for the two sides of the director’s personality. Rosanna Arquette’s mousy, not-so-desperate New Jersey housewife is living the life that might have very well been the filmmaker’s if she hadn’t fled the suburbs and gone to film school. Married to a dull hot tub mogul, Arquette’s Roberta is a spiritual cousin to the main character in “And You Act Like One Too,” Seidelman’s enormously assured, Academy Award-nominated 1976 NYU short about an unfulfilled mother’s 30th birthday gone wrong. The filmmaker’s yearning for adventure is embodied by Susan, a wonderfully romanticized vagabond and chaos agent played by Madonna in her first and best movie role.

The Material Girl never did figure out how to play an actual person — it’s why the only other movies she’s any good in are “Dick Tracy” and “Evita,” or when she played a deliberately Madonna-esque superstar in Abel Ferrara’s “Dangerous Game.” She’s so great in “Desperately Seeking Susan” because Susan is more of an idea than a character — the dream of romantic escape that pulls Arquette’s Roberta out of her sleepwalking suburban life and into a screwball mistaken identity comedy with a plot involving stolen Egyptian artifacts about which the movie couldn’t care one bit. Her career was just starting to take off, but Madonna was already in complete command of her physical presence. Watch her cock an armpit over a restroom’s electric hand dryer in a move that’s at once uncouth, rudely sexy and instantly iconic.

“Desperately Seeking Susan” is one of my favorite films of the ‘80s because Seidelman conjures such an air of casual enchantment. It’s a fairy tale of a New York City that’s all cool vintage shops, retro movie theaters and magic shows illuminated by the beautiful, brazenly artificial lighting of genius cinematographer Edward Lachman. The great Santo Loquasto worked as both production designer and costume designer, unifying the movie’s jangly bracelet aesthetic in both the clothes and the sets. I love how cluttered the immediate area surrounding Susan always instantly becomes. It’s like she brings her own mess wherever she goes. (I can also speak for many men of my generation in admitting that the famous Herb Ritts photo of Arquette and Madonna in matching costumes that became the movie’s poster may very well have jump-started puberty for this young critic.)

Seidelman’s career hit a rough patch following the success of “Susan.” Like a lot of memoirs — especially ones written during the COVID-19 pandemic — “Desperately Seeking Something” is a largely conciliatory affair, which might be a bit of a disappointment for those looking for dish about the outsized personalities she’s worked with over the years. (Seidelman’s even generous to a screenwriter she says gave her a case of crabs, going on to praise his script for “Making Mr. Right” in the same paragraph.) The notorious 1989 film “She-Devil” cast Meryl Streep in her first comedy opposite the ascendant Roseanne Barr, then just one PR cycle away from blowing it all up with her crotch-grabbing rendition of the national anthem.

Based on Fay Weldon’s “The Life and Loves of a She-Devil,” the movie is trying for a sort of stylized kitsch but Seidelman never quite nails the tone. There was such a whiff of misogyny to the film’s catty press coverage that it’s one of those movies you wish you could say was unfairly maligned. But it just doesn’t work at all, no matter how gamely Streep throws herself into the physical comedy. One of the book’s more amusing chapters finds Seidelman giving birth to her son Oscar while Siskel and Ebert were panning the film on her hospital room TV.

Male directors are allowed to fail all the time in Hollywood, but a full six years after “She-Devil,” the best job Seidelman could get was directing a television movie for Disney in which a chimpanzee becomes a network executive. It’s another development she’s surprisingly sanguine about in the memoir. Maybe because the small screen would soon bring her career redemption when Seidelman was hired to helm the pilot for a hot new HBO show about a New York newspaper columnist.

Given what a self-parodying, fashionista cartoon “Sex and the City” became in its later seasons — not to mention those unwatchable movies — it’s a little jarring to look back at Seidelman’s scrappy series premiere, in which Sarah Jessica Parker’s Carrie Bradshaw lives in a relatively modest walk-up apartment and dresses like someone with a job. Reuniting the filmmaker with Chris Noth, who had one line as a drag queen in “Smithereens,” the pilot’s a prickly piece of work, shot beautifully by “The Piano” and “Blackhat” cinematographer Stuart Dryburgh, with Seidelman’s usual nose for New York locations.

Even more characteristically, it’s about messy, interesting women who came to the big city to reinvent themselves, just like a certain, diminutive Philly Girl who was desperately seeking something.

"Desperately Seeking Something: A Memoir About Movies, Mothers and Material Girls" is now in bookstores. Susan Seidelman will be hosting a screening of “Desperately Seeking Susan” at the Brattle Theatre on Thursday, July 18.