Once more into the groove - Desperately Seeking Susan turns 25


Rosanna Arquette and Madonna during the shooting of the movie, 1984

Empty out your vintage shopping bags from Love Saves the Day, unroll your fishnet stockings and dust off that pyramid jacket you claim belonged to Jimi Hendrix, because “Desperately Seeking Susan” is a quarter-century old. This 1985 comedy-drama, which starred Rosanna Arquette as a New Jersey housewife masquerading as a bohemian Manhattanite – and, by the way, provided Madonna with her first lead role in a movie – was for a generation of viewers an introduction to New York’s downtown counterculture and its motley fashion sensibility. Now the film plays like a cinematic time capsule, filled with endearingly grimy places, authentic and imagined, and distinctive personalities that have vanished from the city.

To celebrate the 25th anniversary, the Film Society of Lincoln Center is hosting a screening of the film at the Walter Reade Theater on Thursday evening that will be attended by its director, Susan Seidelman; its screenwriter, Leora Barish; and the producers Sarah Pillsbury and Midge Sanford.

ArtsBeat spoke recently to Ms. Seidelman (who went on to direct “She-Devil,” “Gaudi Afternoon” and episodes of “Sex and the City,” among other projects) about the making of “Desperately Seeking Susan,” her memories of New York in the ’80s and, of course, Madonna. These are excerpts from that conversation.

Q.
Who did you cast first, your Roberta (the housewife) or your Susan (the bohemian)?

A.
The producers were from L.A. and had gotten Rosanna Arquette attached before the movie was greenlighted. Then when I got involved, the rest was cast out of New York with up-and-coming actors — obviously, Madonna, who was not known at the time, as well as downtown types that had been in some of these independent, downtown movies. Like Rockets Redglare, Richard Edson, who had been in Jim Jarmusch’s first movie — he hadn’t made any others at that time – and some of them had been in my first movie, “Smithereens,” like Richard Hell and Susan Berman.

Q.
How did you find Madonna for this film?

A.
Madonna lived down the street from me, so she wasn’t “Madonna,” in quotes. I knew her from people who were in the downtown music scene. We started to audition more up-and-coming actresses who had done some films -– people like Ellen Barkin and Melanie Griffith and Jennifer Jason Leigh and Kelly McGillis, who had just made one or two movies and were getting known. But even though the film is a fairy tale, in a sense, it needed to be grounded in some kind of authenticity. We didn’t want actors putting on costumes and playing downtown.

Q.
You wanted someone who genuinely embodied it, rather than an actor who would be playing at it or pretending it?

A.
Right. And she hadn’t really done a movie before. She’d played in a band in the background of “Vision Quest,” whatever. But it wasn’t really an acting role. I hoped that because she is a performer and she had such an interesting persona, I could capture that on film somehow. And that does involve a lot of acting. People sometimes think, “Oh, it’s just being.” But it’s not. When you have to say lines and hit marks and get your lighting and repeat it 20 times from different angles, it’s acting.

Q.
Given her inexperience, did you have to make a case for casting her in the film?

A.
Well, yes. She had to do a bunch of screen tests. But it was the early days of MTV, and she happened to have a video that got a lot of rotation, because there just weren’t a lot of music videos at that time. I think it was for “Lucky Star.” So the the Orion people out in L.A. saw that and liked the way she looked. She was also helpful in auditions for the actor that was going to play her boyfriend. Somewhere, in a carton in my basement, I have Madonna and Bruce Willis doing an early screen test for that.

Q.
Watching the film recently, one thing that struck me was how much more curvaceous Madonna was than I remembered her. Where did that aesthetic go?

A.
I think that starting in the ’90s, and certainly continuing on, people got a little obsessed with skinniness. Certainly she was more full figured, but look at Marilyn Monroe or Jane Russell — they were great, sexy, curvy, voluptuous women. I guess tastes change and I’m hoping it’ll come back a little bit more in the other direction.

Q.
Does Madonna owe you a debt of gratitude for helping to send her career into the stratosphere?

A.
I can’t postulate what kind of response the film would have gotten had Madonna’s star not risen so fantastically in such a short period of time. But sometimes things converge and make a thing that’s even bigger than the two alone. By the time we finished shooting the film, Madonna’s “Like a Virgin” album came out and that’s what catapulted her to the first level of stardom. You never knew how long that was going to last, but certainly that made a huge splash. Simultaneously she had this movie, and had the movie not been well received, it wouldn’t have mattered. But the fact that she’s good in the movie, people seemed to like the movie and she suddenly had this meteoric album — all that converged. So much about what makes something happen or not happen has to do with having the right stuff at the right time.

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