An Introduction to Smithereens by director Susan Seidelman In the 1970s NYC was in the midst of a bankruptcy crisis. The city was falling apart. This made it a great and affordable place for young artists to live and work. The Downtown area (East Village and Alphabet City) with its crumbling tenement buildings and abandoned lots, became the backdrop for many indie films and an outdoor canvas for graffiti artists paint and punk musicians to advertise their bands. It was a rough area back then, especially at night. There were homeless people, crack dens and squatters – but there were also a lot of cool cheap bars, pop-up art galleries and emerging performance spaces that gave the neighborhood a tattered and textured beauty. Against this gritty backdrop a small group of independent NY Filmmakers started to make low budget films. Among that group were Amos Poe, Jim Jarmusch, Scott and Beth B, Bette Gordon. Although we didn’t work together per se, we knew each other, exchanged information and in some cases, shared the same actors and production crews. Back then, being an “indie” filmmaker meant that you are not just the director, but often the producer, editor, screenwriter, casting director, music supervisor and location scout, rolled into one. In some cases this was simply because of a lack of money to pay anyone else – but as a result, these films all had a very specific and personal vision. They were made on the cheap and provided an opportunity for a new generation of filmmakers, (many of whom had been inspired by the French New Wave cinema of Jean Luc Godard), to make their own kind of movies shot cheaply on the streets of Lower Manhattan. I had come to NYC in the mid 1970s to go to film school, -- but also to escape the boring, homogeneous, suburbs of Philadelphia where I had grown up. It seemed like NYC (especially downtown), was a mecca for people from all around the country and all parts of the world, looking for an alternative lifestyle and seeking to reinvent themselves in some way. Downtown was still cheap and full of creative young people doing inventive new things. That sense of personal reinvention became an important theme in both “Smithereens” and “Desperately Seeking Susan”. The fact that the city was grimy and a little dangerous, made it all the more exciting. Downtown NYC, like the people who had moved there, was reinventing itself with a veneer of cheap, funky, badass glamour. That was very much the inspiration for the character of Wren (played by Susan Berman) who fly-posters the walls of the city with Xerox copies of her face and the slogan: “Who Is This?” Back then, someone could move to the city and reinvent themselves as a “legend in their own mind.” Actually, in many ways what Wren was doing is a precursor to todays self-reinvention on Instagram or Facebook. Before I got involved in filmmaking, I thought I wanted to be a fashion designer. As a teenager, clothing was a way of defining yourself and setting yourself apart. When I started making films, I realized that what an actor wears on screen can tell you visually a lot about who that character is, without having to rely on dialogue or unnecessary narrative. I had hoped that the opening shot of Smithereens would define Wren in a very quick and concise way. You see a woman holding a pair of big black and white checkered sunglasses on a subway platform, then suddenly a mysterious set of thin legs, in ripped fishnet stockings and a black and white checkered vinyl mini-skirt, enters the frame, snatches the sunglasses out of the woman’s hands and runs off into a dark subway tunnel. The audience gets a strong first impression about who Wren might be. Making the movie was not easy. In fact, it was made over a two-year period. There were challenges throughout the shoot because I never had all the money at one time. The original 16mm version of the film ended up costing about $40,000, but I probably only had a small part of that money at any given moment. I was racking up laboratory bills, but I wasn’t really thinking about how I was going to pay them. Fortunately, the film was accepted into the Cannes Film festival shortly after it was finished, which enabled me to pay off my production debts. Aside from the financial challenges, the lead actress, Susan Berman, fell off a fire escape and broke her leg during the first week of shooting. There was no getting around that. We had to stop filming while she was in a cast for several months. I was extremely worried that I would not be able to hold the cast and crew together while she recovered. But I also thought, screw it, I’m not going to let this stop me. It actually made me more determined to finish the film. Also I now had time to look at the footage we had already shot, see what was working and what wasn’t, and as a result rewrite the script to make the story and characters stronger. It was during this “break” that we redefined the lead male character of “ERIC”, who was originally not played by Richard Hell. Originally “Eric” had been conceived as a downtown painter/art gallery owner, not a musician — and was played by a European actor. By recasting and redefining the role as a rocker with Richard Hell in mind, it shaped the tone of the movie in a more interesting direction. Richard gave the movie authenticity as well as an edge. And although he was not a professional actor, he had a magnetic persona and a sexy “ bad boy” attitude that helped define the punk world of the East Village in the late 70s, early 80s — the world that “Wren” had run away from suburban New Jersey to desperately be a part of.
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