Co-presented by IndieCollect and IFC Center, “Declaration of Independents!” is a 9-day salute to indie filmmakers who asserted their creative freedom during a formative era of American independent cinema. Showcasing 20 films (four in new restorations from IndieCollect) spanning the years 1979-89, from daring narratives to boundary-pushing documentaries, the series spotlights artists who re-shaped cinema, revealing America through an independent lens.
This retrospective, curated by IndieCollect and IFC Center, invites audiences and up-and-coming filmmakers to see some of the best and most enduring movies to emerge during a key decade of the American independent cinema movement — films that remain startling, entrancing, prescient, and great fun to discover/rediscover today.
In this interview, Susan Seidelman discusses her film SMITHEREENS. A vividly punk mise-en-scène — New York City’s gritty East Village peopled by young rockers and wannabes on the make — Seidelman’s first movie was invited to show in competition at the Cannes Film Festival, making it one of America’s trailblazing indies before the movement kicked into even higher gear at the end of the decade.
Wild teen Wren (Susan Berman) trades New Jersey for New York, where she hopes to get famous by littering the city with photocopied pictures of herself, captioned “WHO IS THIS?” She latches onto Eric (played by punk icon Richard Hell) who claims he’s headed to Los Angeles to cut a record. She thinks he’s her ticket, but she’s wrong and she’s left to scrounge again on her own.
Dave Kehr, then a critic at the Chicago Reader wrote, “Wren, in her self-delusion, manipulativeness, and superficiality, easily ranks as one of the most obnoxious characters in film history, and she exerts a strange fascination.” Seidelman went on to direct Desperately Seeking Susan (featuring Madonna), a movie that had an even deeper cultural impact. Her films are important — not to mention entertaining — because they center women who are questing for an understanding of themselves and of their place in the world.
Watch the trailer for the series.
SMITHEREENS screens on July 6 at 9:45 pm and July 7 at 12:45 pm.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
How did this film come together? I read that the screenplay was the debut of the screenwriter Ron Nyswaner.
Susan Seidelman: It started before [Nyswaner], with an idea I had. I had been at NYU Film School in the mid-70s, and when I graduated, each filmmaker had made all these short little films, and mine just kept getting longer and longer. And then when I got out, I had a good relationship with the crew I had worked with – my fellow students – and I thought, why don’t I try to make a feature film? Because back then, people were making features with relatively no money.
So, I originally started making Smithereens in 1979. This was before I met Ron. We started filming maybe about 1980. By that time, it had all kind of come together for about a week when the lead actress [Susan Berman, who plays Wren] broke her leg, and we had to stop filming. She fell off a fire escape in the middle of one of our rehearsals. I thought the whole thing was going to fall apart, but luckily she recovered. She was in a cast for about three or four months, and that gave me the time to look at what I had filmed and what was working and what wasn’t and to adjust the screenplay accordingly. And that’s when I met Ron and brought him in. We worked on the revised script together, and we also recast one of the roles. That’s when we brought in Richard Hell. So that changed everything. We had a character that we liked, and we could kind of write around that character. That’s how it evolved.
How did you find Susan Berman?
She was an aspiring actress and waitress, like a lot of people were back then. She worked in a popular East Village restaurant called Dojo. I don’t know if it still exists, but back then it was quite popular because it was good and it was cheap.
A friend of mine had gone to this off-off-off-Broadway performance piece, literally in somebody’s loft. There were more people in the performance than in the audience. It was one of those things. [My friend] knew I was looking for a special kind of person, and he said, I think you should kind of meet this woman, and he gave me her phone number.
And as soon as I met her, I just thought she was the character I was looking for. There was something kind of man-like about her. And feisty.
What really stands out to me about her is what an unapologetic hustler she is. She doesn’t have any qualms about using people. I think with a lot of female characters, there’s a pressure to kind of have a redemption arc, to make them likable in the traditional sense. But that never really happens with her. I’m curious about your thoughts on that.
Having grown up and been in film school in the ‘70s and watching movies with characters [played by] Jack Nicholson or Ratso Rizzo from Midnight Cowboy, and Jean-Paul Belmondo, those kinds of characters…they were not necessarily nice people. But you didn’t watch them and say, oh, I really like this movie because the guy is so nice. And I wanted to make a female character that I thought was as active and compelling as those anti-heroes that I had liked and that were usually men. I thought, why not make a female version of that? As long as she was interesting and dynamic, being nice was not what I was going after. Even though she [hustles] badly and she’s manipulative, it wasn’t a story about redemption.
Another thing that was interesting to me is that Wren doesn’t really seem to have a clear idea of exactly what she wants to do. She just kind of wants to be part of the [downtown NYC music] scene.
She has no particular talent.
Her main talent is her determination to build up a mystique. She’s handing out all these flyers with pictures of herself and the words “WHO IS THIS?” But with my perception of what punk is, this just kind of tracks. She’s just like, I want to be part of the scene. I’m going to do whatever it takes to get noticed. And she’s doing it.
Absolutely. But that’s sort of what it was like back then, especially in that downtown world, in the sense that everyone was part of a band, yet it didn’t matter whether you could play an instrument or sing. Talent in the traditional sense wasn’t an issue, really. It was sort of feeling like you were part of something, almost like a cultural movement or a vibe. That’s what she was; that was her goal. I remember in the early posters the tagline was something like, “She was a legend in her own mind,” as many people were back then. And, quite frankly, it’s circled back around. Because if you look at social media today, at the well-known celebrities…you’re not quite sure what they do or what their talent is.
Like influencer culture.
Absolutely. She was ahead of her time. There were no selfies back then, there was no social media, but there was xeroxing, and she could post flyers of herself all over, in the subway cars and the clubs. And isn’t that sort of what people are doing with social media? Finding a way to say, here I am, I exist!
To me, this is one of the most realistic depictions of punk and the downtown New York of that era that I’ve seen. The grit feels real. I’m assuming you shot all on location. You were shooting in the Peppermint Lounge and other spots that became famous from that era. It reminded me a lot of [the Penelope Spheeris documentary] The Decline of Western Civilization. Smithereens has a documentary feel to it because, like Decline, everybody’s living in dirty spaces and everything seems very grimy.
Well, when you’re doing a low-budget movie, and you don’t have money to art direct, you’re looking for authenticity. The city itself back in 1980 was pretty grungy, but it had such great texture. You couldn’t art direct that. The scenes where Wren is walking down the sidewalk and you see abandoned lots with kids jumping on cars in the background or all the graffiti covered buildings…that was what the East Village or downtown was like back then and in its own way was quite cinematic, so I wanted to use all that.
And that was also the beginning of graffiti and street art. The van [that the character Paul was living in] was spray-painted by an 18-year-old kid who went on to show his stuff years later in museums. He was a Puerto Rican kid. He was quite successful. Twenty years later, museums decided they wanted to do graffiti art exhibits. Oh, I remember what his name was…Lee…
Lee Quiñones! That’s the guy who starred in Wild Style. I just talked about him with [Wild Style director] Charlie Ahearn.
I want to discuss Richard Hell. He had he acted a little before Smithereens. How did he get involved in your film?
People who were making narrative films downtown kind of knew each other, and there was a certain amount of trading of information. It was a small community in a way. And so I knew who Richard Hell was. After Susan Berman got out of her cast and we started to rethink the role of Eric, I met with a couple of people.
Originally, the Eric character was a painter. He wasn’t even a musician because the downtown art scene was kind of interesting and just starting out back then. But I realized once we were filming that Wren would have gone after a rocker before she would have gone after a painter. So, when I started thinking about rock and roll people, there were a couple of names that came up, like David Johansen or Buster Poindexter, as he became known. But when I met Richard Hell, there was something about him, his attitude, that just felt right for this role. He was a little arrogant. He was also a hustler, and he was cinematic-looking.
He had done this movie before, Blank Generation, and I don’t think it was a totally positive experience for him, but I knew he was interested in film. At the time, he worked at a bookstore called Cinemabilia, which was one of the best film bookstores in the city. So I knew he was interested in film, and we clicked. He liked the project and came on board.
When I was watching him in this film, I thought he was channeling Belmondo a lot. His vibe, his attitude, his look…
I think that was part of the style. There was an artsy version of punk. I don’t know whether you’ve seen any of Amos Poe or Eric Mitchell’s films, but there was definitely that French New Wave influence in those films…a bad boy thing that Richard was aware of. And he was very aware of French poets like Rimbaud.
But I’ll tell you the other thing that I was influenced by, which was Italian cinema from the 50s. If you’re familiar with the Fellini movie, Nights of Cabiria…
Oh, I love that. It’s one of my favorites.
Yeah, I kind of borrow bits of Nights of Cabiria. The way Giulietta Masina was this character that you could knock her down and she bounces back up and keeps going. Even the costuming…look at Mesina’s fuzzy little jacket and Wren’s fuzzy little jacket…
Speaking of which, I wanted to ask you about the costuming, especially Wren’s outfits. Was a lot of that [Berman’s] own style, or was it created for the film?
No, it wasn’t her own style…I had wanted to be a fashion designer because I thought clothes could tell stories. And if you look at the opening scene of Smithereens, the clothes are telling that story. You see the black and white checkered sunglasses, and then you see these legs, right? A white checkered miniskirt. And you know what’s going to happen; it doesn’t need any dialogue. You don’t even need to see Wren’s face in the beginning. [Fashion] is always something that has been important to me as an element of storytelling.
IndieCollect rescued the Smithereens negative from films left in the DuArt Lab vault when the photochemical division shut down. What was your experience of working with IndieCollect in the process of saving this film?
I have so much appreciation because, for many years, the film was sitting in a tin can, melting. It wasn’t protected in a vault with temperature control and all that. And I remember, when doing the restoration, you could kind of smell the vinegary smell of old celluloid. So, it needed some help! I have nothing but appreciation!
Smithereens was the first American indie film to be invited to compete for the Palme d’Or at Cannes. How was it received there? Because those Cannes audiences have a reputation for being tough…
They weren’t tough. I went there with Susan Berman, and I had never even been to a film festival before. This was my first feature film. I literally got it from the lab. It was just the first answer print. I took that print and rushed it over to a screening room in time for the Cannes people to look at it, never expecting anything
So, I was shocked when they originally screened it. I got a call, and they wanted to put it in the Directors’ Fortnight, which is probably where it would logically be… that’s the venue for first- or second-time film directors.
And then a couple of days later I got a call from Gilles Jacob, who at the time was the head of the entire film festival, and he said, I’ve just watched it, and I’d like to take it out of the Directors’ Fortnight and put it in the official competition. So it was all kind of surreal. It ended up being the first indie film in competition for the Palme d’Or and the other American films there at that time, Missing, directed by Costa-Gavras, with Jack Lemmon and Sissy Spacek, and Shoot the Moon with Albert Finney and Diane Keaton. So we felt like Alice in Wonderland…it was all hard to digest. It was thrilling.
How did audiences there react to it?
Well, because it had an underdog thing going on…I think the total budget at the end was $40,000 or something…and because I was this 29-year-old, 5-foot-tall girl with her first film and I was there with Susan Berman and walking the red carpet…we were very different than everything else that was going on in the official competition at that time. And I think audiences appreciated that.
What’s a personal favorite moment from the making of the film? Something funny or unexpected, maybe something that didn’t even make it into the movie, but is a memory that has really stuck with you to this day?
I have two of them. One of them was filming in Times Square. And this was the old Times Square. It was all pretty funky. The city was just coming out of the bankruptcy crisis. Filming the taxi scene where Wren and Eric hold up an out-of-towner [in the back of the cab]. I couldn’t rent a taxi, so what we did was I found a taxi driver, literally hailed a taxi, and I think I might have given the guy two $20 bills or something like that. And he just drove around while the cameraman, myself, and a sound guy, squeezed into the front seat. I had to get one of the bigger cabs! And he just drove around Times Square for, like, a half hour while we were filming. And it was all one take.
And the other thing I remember is filming in the graffiti van. We had a few scenes there, but it was the scene with the hooker who comes and walks into the van. I remember there were hookers back then on the West Side Highway and guys that were watching over them, pimps or whatever. They came to watch some of our filming at times, including that scene.
Who was the actress who played the hooker in the van who interacts with the van’s owner, Paul [Brad Rinn]? That’s such a comical and surreal scene.
Her name was Kathleen Riley, and she was a good actress. That was acting. She was not [a prostitute]. But she got it. She just did it so perfectly. Her voice and her attitude, everything was so perfect. And sadly, she did pass away around the time the film was released, because a lot of the reviews called attention to that scene and her performance, and I don’t know whether she got to read them. But we were literally in the middle of nowhere in this rubble-strewn lot…
And with no permits, I’m assuming. You were just shooting guerrilla-style…
The whole film was done guerrilla-style, including all the subway stuff.
Chirine [el Khadem], the DP, had a big duffel bag that he put the 16-millimeter camera in. We showed up at like 1 o’ clock or 2 o’ clock in the morning and just rode the subways for a couple of hours, getting on and off. There weren’t many subway police because the city was bankrupt. But some of that was my own naïveté. I didn’t know you needed permits back then!
Photos and intro copy courtesy of IndieCollect and IFC Center.
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