Susan Seidelman gave birth with the help of doulas named Siskel and Ebert. The director, best known for loving portrayals of gritty 1980s Manhattan, was in the final stages of a 28-hour labor when the film critics appeared on the hospital TV. They were discussing Seidelman’s newest film, the revenge comedy “She-Devil,” allowing her the unique discomfort of getting panned while an obstetrician prodded her cervix.
Ebert was kind to the movie; Siskel hated it. So when her doctor told her to push, she did so with a scream:
“Screw you, Siskel! Roger, this one’s for you!”
Seidelman recounts this scene in her memoir, “Desperately Seeking Something,” a breezy look at a career in which her mission, she says, has been to tell women’s stories through a female lens. Relentlessly cheerful and packed with the anecdotes and observations of four decades in and around Hollywood, her story is a testament to the good humor and adaptability demanded of women who dare to make a place for themselves in the movies.
Raised in the Philadelphia suburbs, Seidelman went to film school in New York in the mid-1970s, when directing movies seemed to require a beard, a baseball cap and a bad attitude. Seidelman did her part to change that with “Smithereens,” a 1982 Lower East Side coming-of-age story that has the D.I.Y. aesthetic of a punk zine. She financed it with $12,000 inherited from her grandmother, part of which went to giving the leading man Richard Hell a “badly needed” teeth cleaning, and spent years shooting the movie in the grimmest alleys, lofts and clubs that Manhattan had to offer.
“We were filming in no man’s land,” she writes, “late at night, without protection or security. We were young and reckless and naïve. Creativity was the invisibility cloak that protected us.”
The film became the first low-budget American indie asked to compete for the Cannes Palme d’Or prize and earned Seidelman an invitation to Hollywood, where she cast a singer named Madonna in the madcap New York comedy “Desperately Seeking Susan.” On the first day of shooting, Madonna was able to film on the streets of Manhattan without attracting attention. By the time they wrapped, she was one of the most famous performers on earth: rolling across the stage at the MTV Video Music Awards, smoldering on the cover of Rolling Stone and unable to appear in public without a bodyguard.
Her sudden stardom helped make “Susan” a hit, setting Seidelman up for what seemed like a long and happy career directing Hollywood comedies. But bad luck and bad marketing doomed her next three pictures, including the truly delightful “Making Mr. Right,” which makes better use of John Malkovich’s uncanny charm than almost anything else he’s ever done. “She-Devil” was the last big-budget feature she’d ever make.
Seidelman tells this story without bitterness. She never stopped doing interesting work, from the pilot of “Sex & the City,” for which she created the “gritty and magical” aesthetic that defined the show’s first seasons, to “Musical Chairs,” a TV movie about wheelchair ballroom dancing that gave Laverne Cox her first film role. For the most part, her book skips over anything painful, preferring to focus on the magical side of a life in films. For a director who’s never been afraid of a Hollywood ending, this feels like truth.
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