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"Desperately Seeking Susan" 25th Anniversary Thread


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THE EPIPHANY OF CLASSIC MADONNA.

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TRIVIA

A worker on the set of Desperately Seeking Susan said Madonna's dalliances were no secret. "Her trailer would be rocking back and forth like there was an earthquake or something. 'Like A Virgin' had just come out, so we all had a good laugh. But when it came to work, she was a total professional.

At their first meeting, Seidelman said Madonna was "Vulnerable, sweet, even a little bit nervous. There was none of the arrogance for which she was already becoming famous. And she had a sense of humor. Given what I'd been told about her, I wasn't at all sure she'd have one.

When Madonna arrived for the audition, Seidelman recalled, "She got out of the cab, but she didn't have enough money to pay. So here she is meeting with a bunch of movie people for a job, and the first thing she does is hit us up for cab fare. It was exactly what Susan would have done!

Madonna had considerable control over the role: She did her own hair and makeup, supplied her own wardrobe, and injected Susan with her own brand of self confidance.

The alternate ending featured on the DVD of Madonna and Roseanna on camels was the original ending for the film. But when they showed it to test audiences they thought the film ended at the cinema scene. Once that was shown everyone got up to leave so they cut the film to end there.

When director Susan Seidelman heard that the hottest singer in town was interested in the part of Susan, she invited Madonna to come in for a screentest. The heads at Orion Pictures, however, were reluctant to cast an untested actress, but producer Midge Sanford was captivated. Of Madonna, Sanford said, She had this prescence you couldn't get rid of.

When there was a 6 A.M call to film a scene for "Desperately Seeking Susan", Madonna's driver would pick her up at a health club every morning where she'd already done 50 laps by 6 A.M.

Madonna was trying to lose weight or rather not to gain any, so when the script called for her to be eating she'd spit out the food at the end of each take.

200 actresses tried out for the part of Susan including Rebecca De Mornay, Melanie Griffith, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Ellen Barkin, and Kelly McGillis.

Desperately Seeking Susan had been floating around Hollywood for four years before it was optioned by Orion Pictures. The producers decided to go for a modest movie, allowing only a bargain-basement budget of $5 million.

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In 1982 Madonna was 'Desperately Seeking' a film role. She auditioned at Troma studios for a teenage T&A comedy called "The First Turn on!". She even designed her own sexy camping outfit featuring some very short shorts. Troma wasn't impressed, thought she couldn't act and Madonna begged them and said she would do anything for the part. They never did cast her and to this day it has become their claim to fame... "We were the dummies that rejected Madonna!" Madonna went on to take over the world with the release of a hit movie and record; "Desperately Seeking Susan" and Like a Virgin.

Madonna was twenty-six at the time of the movie and there's a scene where she pulls up to a curb driving a car. Madonna actually didn't learn how to drive until the year after this film came out, when she was twenty-seven. Her husband at the time, Sean Penn, bought her her first car which she ended up wrecking.

Anna Levine, who plays Susan's friend Crystal, said that Madonna "had a very clear vision of her character, which other people didn't always have, so they left her as Madonna.

Rosanna Arquette was nominated for a Golden Globe in the Best Actress in a Motion Picture - Comedy/Musical category.

The film that Roberta is watching, while she's finishing off the birthday cake, is the Hitchcock classic "Rebecca".

Although her name is Susan in the film, there is a scene where Madonna wears an orange top with the letters "MC" on it, which in true life are her real initials, "Madonna Ciccone".

Rosanna Arquette was reportedly jealous of all the attention Madonna got from this film since Arquette was supposed to be the main character but Madonna was the more popular one.

Madonna got rave reviews for her role in this film. Time Magazine said "Madonna is a talented comedian. And in the title role of Susan she proves it." And the New York Times called it "The Madonna Movie."

Although there is a scene where Madonna gets high on a joint with Gary, in true life she doesn't care for drugs. She was quoted as saying, "I don't take drugs. I never really did. They don't do anything for me. All the feelings I think drugs are supposed to produce in you, confidence or energy, I can produce naturally in my body."

Originally, the part of Susan had been conceived as sort of an aging hippie to be played by Diane Keaton.

John Turturro (Ray from the Magic Club), Giancarlo Esposito (the street vendor trying to sell the hat to Roberta), and Richard Edson (the man at the newspaper vending machine) all also appeared together in "Do The Right Thing".

Richard Edson was also the original drummer for Sonic Youth.

Director Susan Seidelman knew Madonna from the local club scene before she was famous, dancing at clubs like Danceteria and Paradise Garage.

Allowing Madonna to express the role in her own way turned out to be a very wise move. Desperately Seeking Susan was rush released for the Easter season in 1985 and earned an unexpected $16 million.

Other musicians appearing in this film: The most popular are John Lurie, of The Lounge Lizards, who plays the neighbour saxophonist, Richard Hell, he was the bassplayer of the legendary NY punkband 'Television', Richard Edson, former drummer of Sonic Youth, Ann Magnuson, ex-singer of 'Bongwater', and Annie Golden who was the leadsinger of the 70's New-Wave-Band 'The Shirts'.

Another musican in it was Arto Lindsay, punk band DNA and now a solo artist. He has also collaborated with John Lurie who player the neighbor saxaphonist. Lindsay's band DNA was featured in the movie "New York Beat Movie" (or "Downtown '81") which starred John Lurie and artist Jean-Michel Basquiat.

The taxi driver in "Desperately Seeking Susan", Rockets Redglare, was a bodyguard for Jean-Michel Basquiat. He also appeared in several Jim Jarmusch films, along with John Lurie.

Giancarlo Esposito and Victor Argo, both in "Desperately Seeking Susan", also appeared together in "Smoke", "Blue in the Face", and "King of New York." (John Lurie was also in "Smoke" and "Blue in the Face").

In the begining of her career, some people labeled Madonna as manufactured. Madonna once said, "I was making this movie, Desperately Seeking Susan, one of the drivers that took me to the set every day was this kid, and one day he said to me, "I have this bet going with my friend, he told me that all the music you do was done by someone else and they picked the songs and did it all and all they needed was a girl singer and you auditioned and they picked you. And Madonna isn't your real name and all of it is fabricated." And I said, "WHAAAAAAT?? Are you out of your mind??!" But that's what his friend told him, and it suddenly hit me that's probably what a lot of people think. It hit me."

Versions of this movie that aired on the networks AMC and WE: Women's Entertainment, after the September 11th attacks, edited out shots of the World Trade Center, alongside the usual edits for s*x, drugs and language.

The film has 2 taglines: 1.) "Roberta is desperate to be Susan. Susan is wanted by the mob. The mob finds Roberta instead..." 2.) "A life so outrageous it takes 2 women to live it."

WTF!?

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Guest Pud Whacker

best movie ever. i know everyone loves evita but trust in me when i say, 50 years from now when they go over madonna - DSS is the ONE that represents MADONNA, her bang, her wannabes, her sex, what separated her from her contemporaries, everything. its madonna.

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best movie ever. i know everyone loves evita but trust in me when i say, 50 years from now when they go over madonna - DSS is the ONE that represents MADONNA, her bang, her wannabes, her sex, what separated her from her contemporaries, everything. its madonna.

agreed 100% clap.gif

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THESE ARE MY FAV LINES FROM THE MOVIE.....

" no one's life could be this boring "

"Susan, we all thought you were dead..."

" nah, just in New Jersey "

"good goin' stranger.."

EVERYTIME I WATCH THIS DVD...ITS LIKE A TIMEWARP BACK TO THE 80S

WHEN I WAS A TEENAGER.

I LOVE IT.

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Guest nothingfails0603

DSS is still my favorite of her cinematic ventures. I think it's a movie that needs to be seen by younger people who don't "get" why Madonna is such an icon because they only know her post-Kaballah/baby/marriage things (on UKMix a few of us generally agreed that DSS, Truth Or Dare and the Celebration DVD are mandatory viewing for anyone who doesn't understand why Madonna's considered an icon). It's such a great moment in time that is preserved for eternity on film. I think much like A Hard Days Night truly captures The Beatles right when they were exploding in popularity, DSS does the same thing with Madonna-mania.

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I love watching SUSAN..but not so much the story..I hate cases of 'mistaken identity' in movies..it's so cheesy.

But that doesn't take away from SUSAN's coolness..OMG cheese doodles YES!

'He's not a pimp, HE'S NOT A PIMP..' *turns head*

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YAY SUSAN :clap:

Imma have to pop my DVD in with the commentary on cause I just love hearing those bitches talk about feminism and breaking boundaries whilst obviously rubbing themselves down there everytime Madonna is on screen :wow:

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YAY SUSAN :clap:

Imma have to pop my DVD in with the commentary on cause I just love hearing those bitches talk about feminism and breaking boundaries whilst obviously rubbing themselves down there everytime Madonna is on screen :wow:

Well, it IS 'an important women's film, shot with nice color gels...' :fag:

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ITG is one of my favourite videos by Madonna ever. The editing is superb!

As for Evita, who really loves that film? It's so booooring. DSS is a perfect example of classic 80s cinema.

And when are we going to get that demo!!!

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Guest Pud Whacker

Those boots r made for licking... :dramatic:

Now tell me, has there ever been a better music video just made out of clips of a movie??

http://www.youtube.c...h?v=LgjkBtDoYaQ

never. and i will NEVER forget the day it as released on MTV. it came out of nowhere. we didnt even know there was going to be a video. MTV was always on when i was getting ready for school, it came on before i left, my face crack'd and i told my mom that i wasnt going to school that day. i had to record it. then i did and we went shopping and to lunch!!! :rotfl:

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never. and i will NEVER forget the day it as released on MTV. it came out of nowhere. we didnt even know there was going to be a video. MTV was always on when i was getting ready for school, it came on before i left, my face crack'd and i told my mom that i wasnt going to school that day. i had to record it. then i did and we went shopping and to lunch!!! :rotfl:

how cool!! :wow::wow:

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Is it true that the movie was initially intended to be rated NC-17 but because of Madonna's popularity at that time and because most of her fans were teenagers the movie was edited so it could be viewed by the younger audience? I don't know where I read this, it could've been here, on this forum, but I'm not sure.

So, is that true?

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Guest nothingfails0603

Is it true that the movie was initially intended to be rated NC-17 but because of Madonna's popularity at that time and because most of her fans were teenagers the movie was edited so it could be viewed by the younger audience? I don't know where I read this, it could've been here, on this forum, but I'm not sure.

So, is that true?

Body Of Evidence was originally going to be NC-17 but then edited for R (although the unedited version is the one you see on IFC).

DSS was going to just be R rated and then they cut it down a tad. Although I don't know why it was an issue considering it was barely a year after Purple Rain, which was R rated and Prince was massive to teenagers in the day as well and it didn't stop people from going to see it.

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I wish I could be there to watch my fav movie of all times

Never been to LA, wonder what it is like

I wish there were girls like "Susan" in real life :inlove:

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:thumbsup: Great thread acko!

Gary, got any pot?

recherchesusandesesperef.jpg

ahahahahahhahaha. I love Susan. Susan is still inside Madonna. Don't forget it. I love that she was already in control and getting what she wanted. Imagine how boring this film could have been without her or her input. She's amazing.

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best movie ever. i know everyone loves evita but trust in me when i say, 50 years from now when they go over madonna - DSS is the ONE that represents MADONNA, her bang, her wannabes, her sex, what separated her from her contemporaries, everything. its madonna.

:thumbsup: SPOT ON - suck it non-believers!

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  • 3 months later...

Although not mentioned here, there's a rumour Madge may appear. probably not, but odder stuff has happened.

http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/09/22/once-more-into-the-groove-desperately-seeking-susan-turns-25/?emc=eta1

September 22, 2010, 9:00 am

Once More Into the Groove: ‘Desperately Seeking Susan’ Turns 25

By DAVE ITZKOFF

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. Twenty-five years after the fact, what are you most looking forward to about this particular showing of “Desperately Seeking Susan”?

A. I haven’t seen a lot of the actors and crew members in a while, but I haven’t seen it on a big screen in many, many years, so I’m just as curious to see how New York has aged. It was a very different place back then, especially downtown. Young people didn’t have to move out to Brooklyn and Queens to find affordable housing.

Q. How did you first get connected with the movie?

A. This was my second film. I had done a low-budget independent film that was also set downtown, called “Smithereens,” in 1982. And as a result of that, these producers, Midge Sanford and Sarah Pillsbury, sent the script to my agent. And I’m kind of a superstitious person so the “Desperately Seeking Susan” title caught my attention. It had that title already – that wasn’t vanity on my part.

But it had a theme that my first film was about. It’s about finding out who you want to be and who you are inside. The inner Susan — the adventurous creature that’s inside the suburban housewife — really interested me thematically. I wasn’t a housewife but I grew up in suburban Philadelphia and I couldn’t wait to cross the bridge, metaphorically speaking, into Manhattan. I just knew that there was something on the other side, out there, that I needed to get to.

Q. How deep were your roots in the downtown New York scene?

A. I came to New York in the mid-’70s to go to N.Y.U. film school. The grad film school, at that time, was on East Seventh Street and Second Avenue. That was when Second Avenue – after First Avenue, you just didn’t go, but Second Avenue was pretty funky. I’ve always been a downtown person for the last 30 years or so, and I’ve never lived above Ninth Street. So I was familiar with that world. I went to the clubs, I knew some of the musicians. I felt comfortable.

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. How did you find your locations?

A. A lot of them that were places that I knew. I went to Danceteria, I went to the Bleecker Street Cinema and I knew that strip along Second Avenue where Love Saves the Day was. That was home turf. We were trying to find a tone that was sort of hyper-realism. You wanted it to be gritty, but with a slightly romanticized edge. If you look at a location like the Magic Club, it borrows from punk but it also borrows from bad Las Vegas lounge acts.

The other thing that was so crucial was that we filmed it all in New York. We were filming at the end of 1984, and New York was still coming out of the 1970s bankruptcy crisis. Nothing was getting renovated or repaired. There was no money. So it still had that grit. If it was in the ’90s, they would have said: “Go film it in Toronto. Toronto looks just like New York.” It doesn’t. When you look at the background people and the faces, that is New York and you don’t get it in Toronto and you don’t get it in L.A. either.

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.

Q. Did you feel like your experience with “Desperately Seeking Susan,” and the success that it had, prepared you for the ups and downs that awaited you in your filmmaking career?

A. I didn’t have any expectations. If I moved out to L.A. and immersed myself in the world of Los Angeles, my ups and downs would have been different. But I’m really a New York person. New York is bigger than the movie business, and I really like not living in a company town. I got to make some movies that I’m really glad that I got to make. I got to make some that I thought were going to be better, more successful than they were, but I’m still glad I made them.

Another thing that people don’t really talk about, but is really true, because there are so few female directors: the last movie I did for Orion [the company that produced "Desperately Seeking Susan," and went bankrupt in the 1990s] was “She-Devil.” The week that movie came out, I was in the hospital having a baby. Literally, in labor pains watching Siskel & Ebert on the monitor in the room. That’s another component to being a female director: how you juggle a professional career with a family raises its own issues. When you’re making a movie it is nine solid months of your life where you are living, breathing that movie 16 hours a day. It’s not like you can do it and turn it off. That’s another article.

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what street is the magic club i know it was never actually a club there but is it the bowery where they get dropped in the cab??

The Magic club scenes were filmed in my old neighborhood in Washington Heights, and I actually remember them shooting it! The location is actually the old Audubon ballroom, where Malcom X was assasinated, on 165th st. The facade of the building is still there, but it's now owned and operated by Colombia Presbyterian Hospital. :fag:

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