Trivia – Susan Seidelman: Her Films & Career

Today, female directors are thriving across film and television—but rewind to the late 1970s and early 1980s, and the landscape looked very different. Opportunities behind the camera were scarce… until a former fashion design student turned NYU film school rebel named Susan Seidelman burst onto the scene and began rewriting the rules.

From her groundbreaking indie debut Smithereens—the first American independent film ever selected for the Official Competition at the prestigious Cannes Film Festival—to later fan favorites like The Boynton Beach Club, a witty and heartfelt romantic comedy set in a Florida retirement community, Seidelman has spent more than four decades bringing fresh perspective, humor, and humanity to the screen. Her work helped open doors for generations of women filmmakers while proving that smart, character-driven storytelling never goes out of style.

In honor of my recent conversation with this legendary storyteller on Hollywood Obsessed Podcast Episodes 165 & 166, I thought it would be fun to celebrate her remarkable career with a trivia collection highlighting some of her most memorable films, television work, and trailblazing achievements.

After exploring the trivia, be sure to listen to my fascinating two-part interview with Susan herself—you’ll hear behind-the-scenes stories, career insights, and plenty of entertaining surprises along the way.

Enjoy!

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After attending Abington Senior High School, she studied fashion and art at Drexel University in Philadelphia.

While attending NYU, Susan’s student film And You Act Like One Too earned her a Student Academy Award nomination in 1976.

Desperately Seeking Susan is considered one of the 100 greatest films directed by women.

Before COVID, she worked part-time as a film professor, teaching directing and screenwriting at New York University Tisch School of the Arts, Columbia University, and The New School in New York City.

She is the partner of screenwriter and producer Jonathan Brett. They have a son, Oscar Brett.

Seidelman’s memoir “Desperately Seeking Something: A Memoir About Movies, Mothers, and Material Girls” was published by St Martin’s Press in 2024. It is a first-person story of her trailblazing four-decade career in film, which began when few women were directing movies.

Her mother, living in a Florida retirement community, urged her to make Boynton Beach Club (2005) and co-wrote the movie’s script with David Cramer.

Smithereens marked Susan Seidelman’s theatrical feature debut as a writer, producer, and director.

Seidelman’s crew on her first film, Smithereens, consisted of friends and people with whom she had worked at New York University film school while she was a student there.

Smithereens was filmed entirely on location in New York City. All of the film’s stars, apart from Richard Hell, were newcomers to the screen.

Production on the independent film Smithereens shut down for six months after actress Susan Berman had an accident on a fire escape while improvising a scene. Berman was improvising with one of her fellow actors in a scene in which her character was tossed onto and trapped on a fire escape, responding frantically to the situation. In the midst of acting and struggling with the other actor to be let back inside, Berman fell off the fire escape and broke her leg. Production shut down for six months, and the crew resumed shooting in early 1981. Filming took a total of about seven weeks.

Actor Chris Noth (Sex and the City) made his film debut in Smithereens, playing a male prostitute. He was about 27 years old. His performance is the last actor’s credit shown.

Smithereens became the first American independent film accepted into the Official Competition at the Cannes Film Festival. The film went on to win awards at major international festivals and is now preserved in the prestigious Criterion Collection.

Bruce Willis auditioned for the role of Madonna’s boyfriend in Desperately Seeking Susan, but the role was given to Robert Joy.

One of the iconic jackets worn by Madonna and Rosanna Arquette in Desperately Seeking Susan was sold at a Hollywood auction in November 2014 for approximately $225,000. One of the ornate Egyptian earrings worn in the film sold for $34,000.

The identical triplets dressed in matching outfits outside the publishing house where Madonna places a personal ad in Desperately Seeking Susan were not originally in the script. Director Susan Seidelman noticed them walking down the street while setting up the shot and wanted them in the scene because they captured the movie’s theme of doubling. These three brothers—Robert Shafran, David Kellman, and Eddy Galland—were separated at birth and received significant publicity when they finally met as adults. They were later the subjects of the documentary Three Identical Strangers.

During the first exterior shoots, people passing by weren’t paying attention to Madonna’s acting. By the time shooting finished nine weeks later, production had to hire security to keep fans off the set because “Like a Virgin” had been released and Madonna had become a star.

Major scenes take place in two famous landmarks of New York’s downtown art scene: Gary Glass tracks down Susan at Danceteria, the New Wave nightclub where Madonna first performed, and Dez works at the Bleecker Street Cinema, one of the most famous art-house theaters in New York City.

The magic club scenes in Desperately Seeking Susan were filmed at the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem, best known as the location of Malcolm X’s 1965 assassination. Giancarlo Esposito, who plays a street vendor in the film, later portrayed one of the assassins in Spike Lee’s biopic Malcolm X, which was also filmed at the same location.

Madonna’s music video “Into the Groove” was created from clips from Desperately Seeking Susan, with the lyrics often matching the images. Doug Dowdle of Parallax Productions, a company that pioneered movie tie-in music videos during the 1980s, created the video using edited footage from the film.

Rosanna Arquette won Best Actress in a Supporting Role at the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) Awards for Desperately Seeking Susan and received a Golden Globe nomination for Best Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role in a Motion Picture — Comedy or Musical.

Desperately Seeking Susan represented Susan Seidelman’s first experience working with a professional union crew and studio backing.

Her film Desperately Seeking Susan (1985) has been selected for the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically” significant.

Desperately Seeking Susan was both a critical and commercial hit, premiering at Cannes, earning a César Award nomination for Best Foreign Film, and later being named among the BBC’s top 100 films of all time.

The lead actors of the comedy Making Mr. Right (1987)—John Malkovich, Glenne Headly, and Laurie Metcalf—had been acting together since the late 1970s as members of Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre Company.

Lead cast members Glenne Headly and John Malkovich, who appeared in Making Mr. Right, were married from 1982 to 1988.

Making Mr. Right director Susan Seidelman worked with the film’s two screenwriters, Floyd Byars and Laurie Frank, on several drafts of the script to shift the focus away from a Frankenstein-type story toward a Pygmalion-style theme.

The car explosion scene in Cookie (1989) was filmed on Renfrew Avenue in Elmont, New York, adjacent to Elmont Junior High School. Curious students lined the area and were held back by crew and security as Brenda Vaccaro signed autographs.

According to a contemporary article in People magazine, the star of Cookie, English actress Emily Lloyd, lived with an Italian-American family in Brooklyn for two weeks to help her develop her accent.

She-Devil (1989) was the theatrical feature film debut of actress-comedienne Roseanne Barr.

Before appearing in She-Devil, actress Meryl Streep was questioned about whether she could successfully perform comedy.

Teresa, the main character in the short film The Dutch Master, played by Mira Sorvino, does not have a single line of dialogue.

The Dutch Master received an Academy Award nomination for Best Live Action Short Film.

Susan directed the pilot and two additional Season 1 episodes (“The Power of Female Sex” and “The Baby Shower”) of the HBO original series Sex and the City (1998).

The early episodes of Sex and the City featured characters looking directly into the camera lens and commenting on the events in the story, an idea introduced by Susan Seidelman. This element was dropped toward the end of Season 2.

Carrie’s apartment is different in the Sex and the City pilot than in the rest of the series.

The romantic comedy Boynton Beach Club, directed by Susan Seidelman, was produced by Seidelman and her mother, Florence Seidelman. The film is based on the experiences of Florence and her widowed friend David Cramer at an adult community in Boynton Beach, Florida.

Boynton Beach Club (2005) stars Dyan Cannon and Michael Nouri, who dated in real life in the early 1980s.

Joseph Bologna and Renée Taylor, who both starred in Boynton Beach Club, were married in real life.

Seidelman’s 2011 film Musical Chairs—a Manhattan-set love story centered on wheelchair ballroom dancing—was nominated for an Astaire Award for Best Feature Film and for the 2013 GLAAD Media Award for Outstanding Film, Limited Release.

There was some controversy over the casting of able-bodied actors in the lead roles of Musical Chairs. Seidelman and producers hired disabled performers and dancers in supporting roles, including Auti Angel, a professional wheelchair dancer and star of the reality TV show Push Girls.

Musical Chairs featured then up-and-coming transgender actress Laverne Cox (Orange Is the New Black). Cox has said that playing Chantelle, a disabled Black transgender woman, in a feature film was a career milestone.

For the film The Hot Flashes (2013), Seidelman hired a basketball consultant to train the actresses—including Brooke Shields and Daryl Hannah—and teach them plays. The cast bonded during basketball camp.

Before appearing in The Hot Flashes as husband and wife, Eric Roberts and Brooke Shields played brother and sister in the film King of the Gypsies (1978).

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Some facts in this post were sourced from IMDb and Wikipedia—because even the most devoted film and TV fans occasionally need to double-check the trivia vault to keep our memories in perfect condition. 

If you’d like to dive even deeper into Susan’s remarkable films and fascinating career, be sure to listen to my two-part Hollywood Obsessed Podcast interview (Episodes 165 & 166) with trailblazing director Susan Seidelman. The conversation is filled with nostalgia, entertaining behind-the-scenes stories, and wonderful personal memories from one of Hollywood’s most original voices. It’s warm, candid, and packed with insights that film lovers won’t want to miss.

Listen now:

Episode 165 – HERE

Episode 166 – HERE