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| Susan Seidelman on the Sex And The City pilot she directed: “The opening line of the script is “Once upon a time …” The opening starts off as a happy fairy tale and then it gets dark.” |
In the first instalment with Susan Seidelman on her memoir, Desperately Seeking Something (St. Martin’s Press), we were joined by music producer and 99 Records founder Ed Bahlman, who over 40 years ago worked with Susan during the late stages of the editing process for her début feature film Smithereens (which had its world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in 1982), starring Susan Berman opposite Richard Hell and Brad Rijn.
In the second instalment Susan Seidelman discusses Dianne Wiest, Emily Lloyd, and Brenda Vaccaro in Cookie, her Sex And The City pilot (with Cynthia Nixon, Kim Cattrall, Kristin Davis, and Sarah Jessica Parker), friendship and fashion, fairy tales and their dark side, Lina Wertmüller, the passing of Mark Blum (from Desperately Seeking Susan with Madonna, Rosanna Arquette, and Aidan Quinn), and the lack of female role models in the past.
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| Dino (Peter Falk) with Lenore (Dianne Wiest) and Cookie (Emily Lloyd) in Cookie |
Susan kicks off her fall book tour tonight with a screening of Desperately Seeking Susan, followed by a conversation with Mark Erder at the Haystack Book Talks, Norfolk Library, Norfolk, Connecticut. She will also be in Barrington, Massachusetts with Rachel Same at the Triplex Cinema on the 20th; Mystic, Connecticut with Maria Giese at the Mystic Film Festival, La Grua Center on the 21st, and Winston-Salem, North Carolina with Michal R Miller at the University of North Carolina on the 27th.
From the New Jersey countryside, Susan Seidelman joined us on Zoom for in-depth conversation on her memoir and impressive career as a filmmaker.
Anne-Katrin Titze: The two performances by actresses in your films I probably love the most, are by Dianne Wiest and Emily Lloyd in Cookie.
Susan Seidelman: Oh thank you! No one talks about Cookie that much! I had fun making that movie and particularly I liked the female characters. I liked Brenda Vaccaro, she’s so bold in that. And Dianne Wiest is great; she’s great in everything. But Emily Lloyd was also really good and then just kind of disappeared after a few years.
AKT: Both of them have great slapstick moments. They are so funny and so charming.
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| Cynthia Nixon, Kim Cattrall, Kristin Davis and Sarah Jessica Parker in the Sex And The City pilot |
SS: Oh thank you! You know, it’s funny, that movie ended up … Sometimes you make something and then there’s circumstances totally beyond your control. Like a studio gets bought by another studio and your film is suddenly an orphan at that studio and it sits on a shelf for two years. With Cookie, a lot of other mafia movies came out, but this one had been made before some of those other ones. By the time Warners released it it didn’t feel quite so fresh anymore.
AKT: It’s ready for rediscovery!
SS: I hope it will be!
AKT: There are scenes in it shot in Dumbo, where we met for your book launch [at POWERHOUSE Arena], right? The area looked very different then!
SS: Yeah, back then it was totally deserted. It was just big factory buildings and there was nowhere even to get coffee at the time. Now it’s amazing. But New York is always changing, that’s what I like about New York. Like the characters in some of my films, New York is always reinventing itself.
AKT: In Cookie, the wife of Peter Falk is called Bunny and reading your book, I saw that there was a Bunny in your life, who had poodles and a Tippi Hedren hairdo. Is there a connection?
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| Roberta (Rosanna Arquette) with her husband Gary (Mark Blum) in Desperately Seeking Susan |
SS: No, but Bunny is a great name. It’s obviously a nickname, but there’s something so female and bold about it. All the Bunnies that I’ve ever met in my life, they’re not like little bunny rabbits, they’re usually ballsy, bold women.
AKT: You directed the pilot for Sex And The City and set this phenomenon in motion. Did you have an inkling how far this series would go?
SS: I did not! But I knew that sometimes you just have to trust your instincts. I felt the same way as with Desperately Seeking Susan when I read the pilot script for Sex And The City. Because I love fairy tales, you know. Alice In Wonderland and other fairy tales and myths, it’s all interesting.
AKT: By the way, why I could not meet with you earlier today is because I am right now lecturing a summer course on fairy tales at Hunter College.
SS: I would love to be in your class! I’m sure I would learn a lot. The opening line of the script is “Once upon a time …” The opening starts off as a happy fairy tale and then it gets dark. The first two minutes of the pilot - that’s exactly what it is, a fairy tale that becomes a dark fairy tale by the end.
AKT: As most of them have that dark aspect. I also see the series as a kind of wish-fulfillment about women’s friendship. Everybody wants that, I think, that there is such a strong bond between very different women, which is rare.
SS: In the past many films made by men, they always had women as being rivals. There is the dark woman and then the good woman and they seem to be opposites and enemies in a way. It was wonderful to make a pilot where the women were very different but they shared that sense of friendship. Friends could be family. That’s the strength of Sex And The City. Some people think it’s the fashion or the sex. I don’t. I think it’s the friendship.
AKT: I agree. The friendship is the main thing. Plus the fashion. The shoes.
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| 99 Records Devious Woman by Singers and Players from War Of Words (99-002LP) placed by Ed Bahlman is heard in this scene with Paul (Brad Rijn) in Smithereens |
SS: Yeah, although I’m sure that show is responsible for many twisted heels. You know, I lived in SoHo for many years and you can’t walk in Manolo Blahniks on Crosby Street!
AKT: No, you can’t! Maybe tip-toe a few steps and that’s it. The first article I wrote during COVID, was about the death of a CUNY colleague, Mark Blum [who starred in Desperately Seeking Susan].
SS: I think he was one of the first “celebrity,” or known, Covid victims.
AKT: Terrence McNally and Mark.
SS: I think that was also in part the motivation to want to write this book because during Covid I had a lot of time to take notes but I was also suddenly aware of my own mortality. I was soon to be turning 70 and that’s a game changer.
And then Mark died and I realised it was time to get this stuff out. After 40 years of reading people writing about my films and telling me how they interpreted my films, I felt like I needed to talk from the inside looking out and to maybe tell the story of why I chose to tell those stories or make those kinds of female characters.
AKT: It’s a powerful book! Thank you!
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| On June 24, Susan Seidelman and Ed Bahlman remembered James Chance, who died on June 18. 2024, seen here (in the centre) dancing with himself in 1977. Photo: Ed Bahlman |
SS: You know, it’s so weird when you’re writing something, there’s stuff in the book that I never told my son about. He’s now 34. I thought, how is he going to interpret this? But also you never know if your story would be of interest to other people, other women in particular. Of my age but also the younger generation, because besides Lina Wertmüller, I talk about it in the book - I really didn’t have too many female role models when I was in film school in the Seventies. I’d heard of a couple of women film directors.
AKT: Dorothy Arzner.
SS: Yes, part of my motivation was to write a book that maybe this generation of women might relate to. Or at least to say, here are the ups, here are the downs, no holds barred, this life is about all of this roller coaster
Read what Susan Seidelman had to say on the significant support of Ed Bahlman with the music for Smithereens, the influence of Jacques Rivette’s Celine And Julie Go Boating, her love of Billy Wilder films, Adele Bertei, the passing of James Chance and more.
