There aren’t that many memoirs by directors: Frank Capra, Elia Kazan, William Friedkin, Peter Bogdanovich. Quentin Tarantino’s Cinema Speculation doesn’t quite qualify but certainly reads like one at times; Bogdanovich interviewed dozens of classic Hollywood directors, many compiled in books like Who the Devil Made It?, long since inexplicably out of print; Paul Schrader and Steven Soderbergh have written books on other filmmakers. Two came out this year that are revealed to be products of the pandemic, the case with so many books, albums, and scripts, a silver lining. One of these books was written by Ed Zwick, and the other Desperately Seeking Something by Susan Seidelman, out now in hardcover.
Born in 1952, Seidelman recounts a comfortable and, more importantly, happy middle-class family upbringing in Philadelphia. A familiar baby boomer story through film school, the late-1970s music scene in New York, and the genesis of her debut feature Smithereens. That’s a gem of a movie, a nervous yet ferocious portrait of a young woman in early-1980s Manhattan, when cabs wouldn’t go below 14th St. and there were no lights in Tribeca. Seidelman doesn’t mention star Susan Berman beyond the making of Smithereens, despite lauding her performance—but she showed up in Seidelman’s third film, 1987's Making Mr. Right, so one assumes no bad blood.
More confusing are the number of typos and mistakes, especially early on in the book. Seidelman mistakenly identifies Wes Craven as the director of 9 Lives of a Wet Pussy, not Abel Ferrara, who she mentions early in the chapter. There are a number of repetitive phrases a couple of pages after each other, something that doesn’t read intentional despite the book’s cut-up structure (it’s around 342 pages but very, very short chapters, all named after songs).
The most glaring mistake Seidelman makes is identifying Rudy Giuliani as the mayor of New York in the 1980s, citing his “recent election” around 1984; she confuses two periods of gentrification, one in the mid/late-1980s and the early-1990s, both times citing Giuliani. What may I ask does Seidelman have against the late Ed Koch? But it’s not really a knock on the book, just another example of the decimated publishing industry, unable to afford a single person to proofread, apparently.
Desperately Seeking Susan remains entertaining and refreshing even through the dreaded middle-years of journeymen directors like Zwick and Seidelman (I hope more filmmakers join in). Seidelman may have started out as an auteur, writing Smithereens, but she made four studio movies, and then worked largely in television. There were more movies, but she only wrote a few. She’s as much a journeyman as Zwick: taking projects and opportunities when she can, never having the world revolving around her finger at any one moment like Friedkin, Bogdanovich, or Kazan. These are the lives of working directors, and their anxieties and (potential) embarrassments never end—in fact the likelihood they’ll be embarrassed gets worse the older they get, as when Seidelman went from directing Meryl Streep to a chimpanzee in a Disney TV movie. But it all really worked out fine.
Seidelman ends the book twirling in her yard, smiling, her longtime partner Jonathan Brett nearby smoking a cigar in a hammock. She made it with precious few regrets. But maybe they’ve just been edited out.
—Follow Nicky Otis Smith on Twitter and Instagram: @nickyotissmith