Susan Seidelman made Hollywood history, thanks to her Philly spunk

In 1985, Susan Seidelman directed the romantic comedy Desperately Seeking Susan, about a bored suburban housewife, played by Rosanna Arquette, mistaken for an edgy rocker named Susan, portrayed by Madonna. At the time, the Material Girl wasn’t a household name and women working behind movie cameras were an anomaly.

“There were hardly any women directing Hollywood films,” Seidelman, 72, reminisced in a video interview from her Lambertville living room. Her trademark black hair is now ash blond and falls softly past her shoulders. Seidelman’s voice is raspy, her vibe is funky, and she sits squarely in her agency, giving full credit to her Philly spunk that back in the day helped her become a female force in the male-driven movie industry.

“From the beginning, I thought: ‘If I’m gonna make movies, I don’t want to try to imitate guys. I wanted to tell stories through my lens.’ That became my mission.”

In the dozens of movies and television shows Seidelman has directed — including the pilot episode of HBO’s Sex and the City — the leading ladies were a lot like her, young women who grew up in cookie cutter cul-de-sacs and moved to New York to escape their parents’ prying eyes and paralyzing judgment. Seidelman was born in Northeast Philly, grew up in the Huntingdon Valley suburbs, and moved to New York in 1973 to attend NYU film school as she searched for good times, bright lights, and a sense of self.

First, there was Wren (Susan Berman), the Jersey teenager who runs away to join a New York punk band in Smithereens, followed by Desperately Seeking Susan’s Roberta (Arquette). In the 1989 film She-Devil, Ruth (Roseanne Barr) is a spurned housewife who takes revenge on romance writer Mary (Meryl Streep) after Mary steals her husband.

Her cinematic work helped set the prototype for the suburban girl who blossoms into a bold, independent, vulnerable woman. It also opened doors for female directors who would come after her, from Sofia Coppola to Ava DuVernay.

“There is an element of magic, transformation, and reinvention in all of my movies,” Seidelman said. “It’s my hope that I empowered other women through the course of their life’s journey in my work.”

Seidelman reflects on her nearly half century in film in Desperately Seeking Something: A Memoir about Movies, Mothers, and Material Girls released by St. Martin’s Press in late June. While Madonna, Cyndi Lauper, Pat Benatar, and Klymaxx were writing the music about rebellious women who came of age in the era of sex, drugs, and rock and roll, Seidelman put their dreams on screen.

In her memoir, she walks us through Philly of the early 1960s when Jerry Blavat’s The Discophonic Scene started dance crazes and good girls went to Strawbridge’s for panty hose and miniskirts to wear on afternoon dates at the Willow Grove Park carousel.

“If you grew up in Philadelphia, you knew how to dance,” Seidelman said, moving her shoulders to the music in her head as she smiled on camera. Her father moved the family to a development in Huntingdon Valley in 1965 when his hardware business took off, “a homogenous world inhabited mostly by people who wanted to live among, ‘people like us,’” Seidelman wrote. “It provided a safety net that could also feel like a noose.”

Seidelman described herself as an “artsy kid who wanted to color outside the lines.” She was a troublemaker who went to wild parties. Her father didn’t approve of her life choices. “There were good girls and bad girls and very little in between,” Seidelman said. “When my father called me a slut, he was basically saying you are a bad girl and we need to fix you, you need to fix yourself.”

Still, she believed in her self-worth and enrolled in Drexel University in 1969 to major in fashion. She took one film class, and dedicated the rest of her life to the art of filmmaking. In 1973 she started film school at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, and produced a short film that was nominated for a Student Academy Award.

Desperately Seeking Something began as notes on Seidelman’s smartphone, reflections of a woman on the cusp of 70 trying to survive the pandemic. “I was approaching this game-changing age and I felt like I was living in a sci-fi movie,” Seidelman said.

The fast-moving chapters named after Top 40 songs from the 20th century read like scenes knitted together. She matter-of-factly shares details of Madonna and Arquette’s rocky on-set relationship, tells about how her ambition was shaped by a terrible breakup, and how she survived her own “Me-Too moment.” She weaves in her perspective and marvels how technology — whether it’s social media or Vimeo — would have made her life look different.

Seidelman writes with pride about opening doors for female directors, yet she laments being at the mercy of male reviewers who objected to her point of view. She points to a review of the 1987 film Making Mr. Right, starring Ann Magnuson and John Malkovich. Critics panned the film because, Seidelman wrote, “they objected to the idea of a woman abandoning human men to find satisfaction with a programmable sexbot.”

Such is the plight of the female trailblazer who must crawl so the woman behind her can fly. Seidelman’s parting words: “When you are feeling down on yourself, take your powerlessness and turn it into power. Kick some butt and prove that you can do it.”