Susan Seidelman is an advocate for what she calls the messy struggle. The movie and TV director, whose “Desperately Seeking Susan” is the great feminist screwball comedy of the ’80s and is enshrined in the National Film Registry, has always relied on her gut to get herself where she wants to be. Which is not to say that Seidelman fell into her career by caprice or good fortune.
As a woman, she had little margin for error. Hard work was a given, but also a capacity for what she calls “aesthetic playfulness,” of finding your way toward something great. That approach has yielded an idiosyncratic career of bold exploration, both within and apart from the Hollywood system.
In 1982, Seidelman ushered in the indie film counter-revolution with her debut, “Smithereens,” then became one of the few female directors to consistently work in Hollywood. “I’m not goal-oriented, but I’m very determined,” Seidelman says from her home in upstate New York. Such was the approach to Seidelman’s first book, “Desperately Seeking Something: A Memoir About Movies, Mothers, and Material Girls,” out June 18.
The prospect of setting down the particulars of her public and private selves had been a notion in theory only, something to do much later in life. As it turned out, “later” was 2020, when the pandemic shut down Seidelman’s ability to work on projects and made it possible for her to write. The COVID-19 pandemic was a trial for her; two weeks into closures with her p.