Director Susan Seidelman is best known for her effervescent underdog comedies, especially 1985's Desperately Seeking Susan, starring then diva-in-training Madonna. Desperately Seeking Something: A Memoir About Movies, Mothers, and Material Girls is like one of Seidelman's films, in the best way possible: amusing, diverting, and evidence of a creatively restive mind at work.
Born in 1952, Seidelman grew up artsy and rebellious in the Philadelphia, Pa., suburbs. A film appreciation course at Drexel University led her to New York University's graduate film school, where she was one of five women in a class of 35. Seidelman's first student short film concerned a woman who "feels restless, unappreciated, and is desperately seeking something--a reoccurring theme in the films I would go on to make (although I didn't know that at the time)." The theme pervades her first feature, 1982's Smithereens, which was the first independent American movie to officially compete at the Cannes Film Festival.
Like Joyce Chopra's Lady Director, Desperately Seeking Something turns a feminist lens on the male-dominated world of filmmaking in the 20th century's last decades. Seidelman is equally clear-sighted about the business aspect of the industry, whose penchant for throwing cash at high-concept movies in the late 1990s made it harder for her character-driven films to succeed. Nevertheless, Desperately Seeking Something is a rancorless and down-to-earth reminiscence: "After thirty years, I've come to realize that there's no connection between the amount of fun you have while making a movie and a film's success at the box office." --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer