Like a cinema virgin: how Madonna went stratospheric making Desperately Seeking Susan
Given that it launched the film careers of the then little known Rosanna Arquette, the entirely unknown Aidan Quinn and some singer called Madonna, 1985’s Desperately Seeking Susan still stakes a good claim to be one of the canniest casting jobs of all time. And that’s before you get to the then even less known supporting actors: Laurie Metcalf as Arquette’s tacky sister-inlaw! John Turturro as the cheesy club MC! John Lurie barely visible as a saxophone-playing neighbour! Giancarlo Esposito in a blink-and-you’llmiss-it role as a street salesman!
It’s an astonishing roll call of future talent from when they were still young and hungry in Manhattan. And that’s because Desperately Seeking Susan isn’t only set in a time when there were at least as many artists as rats living in New York City, it was a product of that time, too. “The city was falling apart and downtown there were aspiring artists because rent was so cheap. So I wanted to populate the film with people who were authentic to that time. I didn’t care whether someone in Kansas would recognise them, but New Yorkers would know they were New Yorkers,” Susan Seidelman, the film’s director, tells me by video chat from her home in the New Jersey countryside, to which she and her husband recently moved after several decades in downtown New York. (“The area had changed,” she explains with the jadedness of a true New Yorker, albeit one now in New Jersey.)
Desperately Seeking Susan tells the story of a bored suburban housewife, Roberta (Arquette), who becomes obsessed with someone called Susan (Madonna), whose boyfriend Jim (Robert Joy) leaves her messages in the personal ads section of the newspaper. Roberta follows Susan around the city and starts dressing like her – an analogue version of someone following an influencer on Instagram. After various screwball plot twists, Roberta is mistaken for Susan by Des (Quinn), a friend of Jim’s, and chaos ensues with the lightest, most romantic of touches.
In retrospect, it looks inevitable that the film would become an enduring classic, a kind of Umbrellas of Cherbourg of 1980s SoHo. But that felt so improbable as to be unimaginable to Seidelman back when she was making the film. It was only her second job after her debut Smithereens, a film about the post-punk New York scene that starred Richard Hell, and she was hailed as part of a new wave of independent film-makers. “I call it no wave, because we had no money,” she says. But Desperately Seeking Susan was a massive success, propelled in no small part by Madonna becoming a superstar just before it opened, after the release of her second album, Like a Virgin.
And here Seidelman is, almost 40 years later, having to spend her afternoon talking to me about a film she made when she was 33 because it’s being released for the first time on Bluray. I tell her I had originally planned to ask if she minds still being defined by a movie she made so long ago, but then I noticed beforehand that her Instagram handle is @desperately_seeking. So presumably not. “Well, I’ve answered a lot of questions about Madonna over the years, that’s true,” she says with a laugh that suggests heavy understatement. “But no, I don’t mind. It’s thrilling when you make something that passes the test of time. Because I didn’t even think in those terms when I was making it. I just wanted to put my finger on the pulse of the time.”
Seidelman’s determination to give the film a slick of authenticity means that the up-and-coming actors she decided not to cast are almost as astonishing as the ones she did: Ellen Barkin, Melanie Griffith, Jennifer Jason Leigh and Jamie Lee Curtis were all rejected for the role of Susan, as they felt too LA. Instead, Seidelman persuaded the producers to let her cast a singer and dancer with no acting experience, who happened to live down the street from her. Madonna had released Borderline but nothing else, and Seidelman thought she had “the right attitude” for the character. It was the equivalent of buying Apple stock the week before Steve Jobs invented the Macintosh. Over the course of the nineweek shoot, Madonna went from an unknown Seidelman could film walking around the East Village without any trouble to, in the last week, requiring security because Rolling Stone magazine had just put her on the cover.
Did that change the dynamic on set, given that one person in the ensemble was suddenly so much more famous than the others? “Uhhh, not so much for me. It might have been more difficult for Rosanna, but that’s her