Susan Seidelman cemented her place in film history when she went from directing the independent film Smithereens to the cult classic Desperately Seeking Susan which helped launch Madonnas career. Since then Seidelman has had one of the most eclectic careers in Hollywood. From directing another cult classic Making Mr. Right to the pilot for Sex and the City all the way up to her return to feature films with Gaudi Afternoon.
But Seidelmans passion for film brought her to a project which she couldnt get made inside Hollywood, Boynton Beach Bereavement Club. So she took it upon herself and her team to produce the film and help find distribution. The film was well received by numerous film festivals and is now available on DVD.
Buy the DVD of Boynton Beach Bereavement Club
Daniel Robert Epstein: What was the inspiration for Boynton Beach Bereavement Club?
Susan Seidelman: My parents live in Boynton Beach and my mother always calls me with ideas that she thinks would make good movies. About two and a half years ago she told me an idea for a film about people in their 60s, either aging baby boomers or seniors, who find themselves back in the dating game again after many years of married life. The reason that she had this idea was because in the community where she lives there are plenty of people whose spouses had died or were divorced at a later age and she started to hear stories of older people who were back in the dating game again. The stories ran the gamut from funny to sad to sexy. I thought Wow, Ive worked on romantic comedies before but no one has really dealt with the fact that older people still date, are interested in romance and still are interested in sex. Hollywood hasnt really dealt with that.
DRE: Youre on the young end of the baby boomers, right?
SS: I am; but in most Hollywood romantic comedies, if youre over 35, youre old. Most romantic comedies are geared for either high school or 20-somethings. I directed the pilot for Sex and the City about ten years ago. Those women were about 35 to 40 at the time and that was considered old [laughs]. Back then networks werent interested in dealing with women past 30 and romance.
One of the other motivating things of the story was that my mothers best friend, who she has known since high school, passed away. Suddenly this best friends husband, who was around 70-ish, who had been married for 45 years to the same woman, suddenly found himself dating again. He started to tell my mother stories. So hes the inspiration for the character played by Len Cariou in the movie and his anecdotes were used as a basis for some of the stories in the film. When my mother told me this idea I said, Why dont I come down there and interview a lot of people and collect stories? So thats what I did and it became the basis for the screenplay.
DRE: Was this film done independently and then sold to Sony?
SS: Yeah it was. Originally I thought I would go the traditional route, which was show it to some established production companies and see if there was any interest in them putting up the money to make the film. But I kept getting the same feedback. People kept saying Thats an interesting subject matter but we dont think its going to make money because who wants to see a movie about old people and romance or old people and [laughs] dating. The established producers I went to initially said old people dont go to the movies.
DRE: What! Thats crazy; they go to the movies all the time.
SS: Thats exactly what I felt. I kept feeling in my gut Youre wrong; I dont care what you think the demographics say, I know what I know, which is that my parents go to the movies more than I do and I go to the movies more than my 14 year old son used to. Hes so busy online he doesnt go to the movies nearly as much as I do. Maybe older people dont to see The Grudge or The Ring but theyll go to movies if theres something they want to see. Theyre a little move selective.
After hearing enough producers or production companies telling me there was no audience or that they didnt feel it would make its money back I partnered up with my mother as a producer. Shes a bit of a dynamo and she certainly knows that South Florida audience. From there we hooked up with two women who were in their late 30s, early 40s who had come out of Wall Street and they were interested in getting involved in film. We decided to form a limited partnership and raise the money ourselves to produce the movie.
DRE: Had you done anything like that before?
SS: No, though back in film school I raised tiny amounts of money for projects. But for 20 years, I hadnt. I just worked on either studio movies or cable movies or whatever. So this was a first for me and weirdly enough, it took me back to my independent film roots. My first film Smithereens was independent and had a budget of $40,000. That was about the punk rock world and early 80s [laughs] so this was far from that. But in some ways the making of the movie and the way you try to get people excited was very similar.
DRE: Was it important for you to cast people who we dont see as much in the movies anymore, like Joe Bologna and Sally Kellerman?
SS: One of the things that also attracted me to this movie was the idea that the cast would all be in their 60s. There are so many great actors and specifically actresses, that once you hit a certain age, and usually that age is around early 40s, you become invisible. You start off playing leading ladies and then either you graduate to mother of the leading lady or at a certain age they want you to graduate to the grandmother of the leading lady. If you dont want to do that or you dont think that the parts are interesting enough, you disappear. I saw that there is a lot of great talent that was unused and if we could make a movie that had interesting parts where these characters were the leading characters, not someones dottering grandmother or a geriatric joke, but full, interesting, vibrant characters, we could pull together a really good cast of underutilized older actors.
DRE: Could the characters in Smithereens have grown up to become the characters in Boynton Beach Bereavement Club?
SS: Weirdly enough, CBGB closed and I didnt go the closing night but my husband went. He saw Patti Smith get onstage and she is now this gray haired woman. He looked around the room and it was full of 50 and 60 year olds dressed in black leather and women who were still pretty outrageous. So the answer is yeah, the characters in Smithereens are technically old enough to be living in a retirement community in Boynton Beach.
DRE: [laughs] Thats terrifying and funny at the same time.
SS: Well think about it, look at The Rolling Stones. Theyre all in their mid-60s and Charlie Watts is probably 70-something. Its about time that somebody made a movie that redefined what being old is. I dont think the Rolling Stones have become neutered or asexual just because theyre in their 60s. When I started taking the script to people, especially younger producers, that was the first thing that came out of their mouth was Eww, sex and seniors. Gross! But I thought it was interesting.
DRE: I know you probably didnt have much to do with Sex in the City after you did your few episodes but I wasnt really happy with how the show ended.
SS: I didnt watch all the episodes. I did see the very last episode though.
DRE: I was a little annoyed that they had to have a man to move on with their life. It almost seemed against the idea of the show.
SS: What I liked about the show in the beginning was that it was breaking taboos and it was ballsy. The episodes that I was involved with and the ones that I saw were not about getting a boyfriend. Then again, I didnt follow through all the various changes that the characters went through.
DRE: How was working with the guys on Stella?
SS: Theyre funny. The two episodes I did were neat because it was like making a mini-movie. I liked that each episode was its own little story. They had this slightly absurdist, but cool Marx Brothers dumb cleverness to it. I know it didnt go beyond the first season. Maybe its such a specific sense of humor that some people get it and some people dont.
DRE: A few of your films are considered real classics. Films like Desperately Seeking Susan and Making Mr. Right are such strange and seemingly silly concepts that very easily could have ended up as bad films. How did you approach them?
SS: One of the things I liked about both of them is that I like to mix pop culture with archetypes or myths. In Desperately Seeking Susan we used amnesia which could be really stupid. But we found a way to turn it into something mythic like Alice in Wonderland where someone gets bumped on the head and becomes someone else. For men and certainly for women, theres always this thing where youre one person on the outside and maybe theres somebody else inside of you who wants to get out or you want a more exciting life. It was that idea of this bored housewife following this mysterious creature into another world and then using the device of the amnesia to allow you to be somebody else. It is trying to find a tone thats contemporary and that allows the audience to wink with you and enjoy the ride theyre going on. It was the same with Making Mr. Right. Falling in love with a robot is a metaphor, its Pygmalion. Thats the myth of that; its a role-reversal Pygmalion. Again, it could be really weird to fall in love with an android, but I hope that the underlying theme of what its about would tap into something bigger than just an android story.
DRE: At this point, you are certainly a veteran in the business, but a lot of your films in the past few years have not been as high profile as before. What is that a result of?
SS: When She-Devil came out and it didnt do as well as I hoped it would do, I also had a baby. In fact, the week She-Devil came out was the week I gave birth to my son. I had worked pretty steadily throughout the 1980s and I was burnt out so I took some time off to be a mom. Hollywood is like a merry-go-round but it keeps going faster and faster and if you step off you have to run a lot harder to jump back on because the industry keeps moving forward. I think one of the things that happened while I was off the merry-go-round is that the kind of movies that I made in the 80s, which were modest to medium budget character driven films, werent getting made. The median budget for those kinds of movies in the 80s was $10 to15 million. By the mid to late 90s the median budget was $50 million. The average big budget movie is $150 million. Movies were getting more and more expensive to make and character study movies were becoming less desired. So I started to direct things for cable like Showtime and HBO. They started to make the kinds of movies that used to be made by studios in those lower to mid budget ranges. That didnt only happen to me but to other women who were making character oriented stuff.
DRE: Are you working on anything now?
SS: Since I am a producer and director of Boynton Beach Club it took another year of being involved in the distribution. So its only been in the last three months that Ive totally finished with the film. But now I can look at other projects. One of the things that Im doing is Ive optioned a book I like, so Im working with a co-writer to turn that into a screenplay.
by Daniel Robert Epstein
SG Username: AndersWolleck
But Seidelmans passion for film brought her to a project which she couldnt get made inside Hollywood, Boynton Beach Bereavement Club. So she took it upon herself and her team to produce the film and help find distribution. The film was well received by numerous film festivals and is now available on DVD.
Buy the DVD of Boynton Beach Bereavement Club
Daniel Robert Epstein: What was the inspiration for Boynton Beach Bereavement Club?
Susan Seidelman: My parents live in Boynton Beach and my mother always calls me with ideas that she thinks would make good movies. About two and a half years ago she told me an idea for a film about people in their 60s, either aging baby boomers or seniors, who find themselves back in the dating game again after many years of married life. The reason that she had this idea was because in the community where she lives there are plenty of people whose spouses had died or were divorced at a later age and she started to hear stories of older people who were back in the dating game again. The stories ran the gamut from funny to sad to sexy. I thought Wow, Ive worked on romantic comedies before but no one has really dealt with the fact that older people still date, are interested in romance and still are interested in sex. Hollywood hasnt really dealt with that.
DRE: Youre on the young end of the baby boomers, right?
SS: I am; but in most Hollywood romantic comedies, if youre over 35, youre old. Most romantic comedies are geared for either high school or 20-somethings. I directed the pilot for Sex and the City about ten years ago. Those women were about 35 to 40 at the time and that was considered old [laughs]. Back then networks werent interested in dealing with women past 30 and romance.
One of the other motivating things of the story was that my mothers best friend, who she has known since high school, passed away. Suddenly this best friends husband, who was around 70-ish, who had been married for 45 years to the same woman, suddenly found himself dating again. He started to tell my mother stories. So hes the inspiration for the character played by Len Cariou in the movie and his anecdotes were used as a basis for some of the stories in the film. When my mother told me this idea I said, Why dont I come down there and interview a lot of people and collect stories? So thats what I did and it became the basis for the screenplay.
DRE: Was this film done independently and then sold to Sony?
SS: Yeah it was. Originally I thought I would go the traditional route, which was show it to some established production companies and see if there was any interest in them putting up the money to make the film. But I kept getting the same feedback. People kept saying Thats an interesting subject matter but we dont think its going to make money because who wants to see a movie about old people and romance or old people and [laughs] dating. The established producers I went to initially said old people dont go to the movies.
DRE: What! Thats crazy; they go to the movies all the time.
SS: Thats exactly what I felt. I kept feeling in my gut Youre wrong; I dont care what you think the demographics say, I know what I know, which is that my parents go to the movies more than I do and I go to the movies more than my 14 year old son used to. Hes so busy online he doesnt go to the movies nearly as much as I do. Maybe older people dont to see The Grudge or The Ring but theyll go to movies if theres something they want to see. Theyre a little move selective.
After hearing enough producers or production companies telling me there was no audience or that they didnt feel it would make its money back I partnered up with my mother as a producer. Shes a bit of a dynamo and she certainly knows that South Florida audience. From there we hooked up with two women who were in their late 30s, early 40s who had come out of Wall Street and they were interested in getting involved in film. We decided to form a limited partnership and raise the money ourselves to produce the movie.
DRE: Had you done anything like that before?
SS: No, though back in film school I raised tiny amounts of money for projects. But for 20 years, I hadnt. I just worked on either studio movies or cable movies or whatever. So this was a first for me and weirdly enough, it took me back to my independent film roots. My first film Smithereens was independent and had a budget of $40,000. That was about the punk rock world and early 80s [laughs] so this was far from that. But in some ways the making of the movie and the way you try to get people excited was very similar.
DRE: Was it important for you to cast people who we dont see as much in the movies anymore, like Joe Bologna and Sally Kellerman?
SS: One of the things that also attracted me to this movie was the idea that the cast would all be in their 60s. There are so many great actors and specifically actresses, that once you hit a certain age, and usually that age is around early 40s, you become invisible. You start off playing leading ladies and then either you graduate to mother of the leading lady or at a certain age they want you to graduate to the grandmother of the leading lady. If you dont want to do that or you dont think that the parts are interesting enough, you disappear. I saw that there is a lot of great talent that was unused and if we could make a movie that had interesting parts where these characters were the leading characters, not someones dottering grandmother or a geriatric joke, but full, interesting, vibrant characters, we could pull together a really good cast of underutilized older actors.
DRE: Could the characters in Smithereens have grown up to become the characters in Boynton Beach Bereavement Club?
SS: Weirdly enough, CBGB closed and I didnt go the closing night but my husband went. He saw Patti Smith get onstage and she is now this gray haired woman. He looked around the room and it was full of 50 and 60 year olds dressed in black leather and women who were still pretty outrageous. So the answer is yeah, the characters in Smithereens are technically old enough to be living in a retirement community in Boynton Beach.
DRE: [laughs] Thats terrifying and funny at the same time.
SS: Well think about it, look at The Rolling Stones. Theyre all in their mid-60s and Charlie Watts is probably 70-something. Its about time that somebody made a movie that redefined what being old is. I dont think the Rolling Stones have become neutered or asexual just because theyre in their 60s. When I started taking the script to people, especially younger producers, that was the first thing that came out of their mouth was Eww, sex and seniors. Gross! But I thought it was interesting.
DRE: I know you probably didnt have much to do with Sex in the City after you did your few episodes but I wasnt really happy with how the show ended.
SS: I didnt watch all the episodes. I did see the very last episode though.
DRE: I was a little annoyed that they had to have a man to move on with their life. It almost seemed against the idea of the show.
SS: What I liked about the show in the beginning was that it was breaking taboos and it was ballsy. The episodes that I was involved with and the ones that I saw were not about getting a boyfriend. Then again, I didnt follow through all the various changes that the characters went through.
DRE: How was working with the guys on Stella?
SS: Theyre funny. The two episodes I did were neat because it was like making a mini-movie. I liked that each episode was its own little story. They had this slightly absurdist, but cool Marx Brothers dumb cleverness to it. I know it didnt go beyond the first season. Maybe its such a specific sense of humor that some people get it and some people dont.
DRE: A few of your films are considered real classics. Films like Desperately Seeking Susan and Making Mr. Right are such strange and seemingly silly concepts that very easily could have ended up as bad films. How did you approach them?
SS: One of the things I liked about both of them is that I like to mix pop culture with archetypes or myths. In Desperately Seeking Susan we used amnesia which could be really stupid. But we found a way to turn it into something mythic like Alice in Wonderland where someone gets bumped on the head and becomes someone else. For men and certainly for women, theres always this thing where youre one person on the outside and maybe theres somebody else inside of you who wants to get out or you want a more exciting life. It was that idea of this bored housewife following this mysterious creature into another world and then using the device of the amnesia to allow you to be somebody else. It is trying to find a tone thats contemporary and that allows the audience to wink with you and enjoy the ride theyre going on. It was the same with Making Mr. Right. Falling in love with a robot is a metaphor, its Pygmalion. Thats the myth of that; its a role-reversal Pygmalion. Again, it could be really weird to fall in love with an android, but I hope that the underlying theme of what its about would tap into something bigger than just an android story.
DRE: At this point, you are certainly a veteran in the business, but a lot of your films in the past few years have not been as high profile as before. What is that a result of?
SS: When She-Devil came out and it didnt do as well as I hoped it would do, I also had a baby. In fact, the week She-Devil came out was the week I gave birth to my son. I had worked pretty steadily throughout the 1980s and I was burnt out so I took some time off to be a mom. Hollywood is like a merry-go-round but it keeps going faster and faster and if you step off you have to run a lot harder to jump back on because the industry keeps moving forward. I think one of the things that happened while I was off the merry-go-round is that the kind of movies that I made in the 80s, which were modest to medium budget character driven films, werent getting made. The median budget for those kinds of movies in the 80s was $10 to15 million. By the mid to late 90s the median budget was $50 million. The average big budget movie is $150 million. Movies were getting more and more expensive to make and character study movies were becoming less desired. So I started to direct things for cable like Showtime and HBO. They started to make the kinds of movies that used to be made by studios in those lower to mid budget ranges. That didnt only happen to me but to other women who were making character oriented stuff.
DRE: Are you working on anything now?
SS: Since I am a producer and director of Boynton Beach Club it took another year of being involved in the distribution. So its only been in the last three months that Ive totally finished with the film. But now I can look at other projects. One of the things that Im doing is Ive optioned a book I like, so Im working with a co-writer to turn that into a screenplay.
by Daniel Robert Epstein
SG Username: AndersWolleck
VIEW 3 of 3 COMMENTS
Cineman said:
She does good work and it's cool to hear what she's been up to. Good interview choice, folks. Thanks!
can u believe that there are like no posts here? feminist icon? HELLO?!?!?!?!